Do you have a problem with caching rendered pages and other things? If so, turn them off. Firefox is nowhere near as full of leaks as it's memory usage would suggest - it really is using almost all of that memory.
I, and most of the rest of the internet users, find tabbed browsing to be very helpful. A decent implementation, such as the ones in the mozilla based browsers, is invariably a more efficient way to manage multiple web pages than any general purpose window manager provides. The tab bar takes up screen space equivalent to between one and two lines of text, but allows users to see with one glance how many pages are open, whether they are still loading, and what the titles are.
The problem of unexpected tabs loading in the background cannot be as bad as you make it out to be. First, it usually only shows up after users have configured popups to be redirected to new tabs. Second, if you are closing the window with the mouse, you must move the cursor across the tab bar to reach the close button and you must look at that area of the screen. You should have no problem noticing that the tab bar is still showing and therefore there are multiple tabs open. Also, the confirmation dialog can be easily disabled on all browsers I have used. If you are closing the window with a keyboard shortcut, you should consider using ^W, which closes the current tab and and will close the window when the last tab is visible.
Following the spirit of your post: Is your desktop environment so cluttered that you have to fight for every line of usable space? Presumably you have condensed or disabled all your toolbars and hidden the menu bar and status bar. If you are not multitasking, you should consider pressing F11 to maximize your browser to full screen. That way, only the address bar (and optionally the tab bar) will be taking up space that could be used for your web viewing pleasure.
The biggest reason that tabbed browsing has caught on is that its benefits are so compelling that a very large number of people have taken the time to learn how to use it effectively. I encourage you to do the same.
I'm saying that slashdot is not for people who cannot stand the thought that other people have the option to chose differently. That seems to be one of your problems.
I'd much rather kids have 40-year old textbooks, except perhaps in science. Modern textbooks are too full of pointless or unexplained pictures, and silly things like how to program you TI graphing calculator to do simple things. With the exception of science, no textbook should use more than 2 colors of ink. Most science books can stay within the 2 color limit too.
Look at things like the Feynman Lectures and high level college math books to see what I mean. Books with a serious attitude about presenting the information invariably do a better job of getting the point across.
Word processing is about the only justifiable use of computers for primary schools, and even then, classroom time is better spent on learning rather than typing.
In my experience, elementary and middle schools put such tight restrictions on the computers that you can barely tell that it is windows and not something like os/2. That leaves no room for young kids to develop a brand loyalty in school. By high school, kids these days probably already have well-formed opinions about computers. Also, if a high school blocks myspace or facebook, the students will be too pissed to notice it is vista.
He had no experience with servers, Windows or Linux, and in fact no Linux experience at all. But when he tried to set up a simple server, it turned out that it was much easier to do with Linux. Windows servers should be easy to use. Combine that with LAMP's reputation for being more powerful and more secure than any Microsoft platforms, and you have to wonder who in their right mind would chose to use a Windows server. Windows servers should be easy to use.
Apache has the majority of the web server market. It is very popular amongst large corporations, and apparently it is not that hard for newbies to use. That leaves Microsoft with a tenuous middle ground, if anything.
I really doubt the iPhone will be unhackable. Apple would not have called the phone's software "OS X" if they didn't plan on offering cocoa apis and tools to somebody outside of Apple. Once the iPhone hits the market, the processor will be identified and people will start working on cross-compiling. Apple cannot have changed the nib format much for the iPhone, so it will probably not be hard to modify Gorm to work with the iPhone.
I would not be surprised if it turns out to be trivial to make a widget that loads a custom binary. If you are right that the restrictions are from Cingular and not Apple, it should be even easier to hack.
I think one of your underlying assumptions it flawed: if it isn't the primary feature, it will suck and be hard to use. I expect the iPhone to be good at being an mp3 player, and to be good at being a phone. Talk of the device being "a phone first" is probably unwarranted. If Apple succeeds in creating a multifunction device that is good all around, you can count on it selling very well, even at $600.
Like every other distro, Gentoo comes with sensible defaults. Gentoo just gives you more flexibility in overriding those defaults. But then, you shouldn't bother with Gentoo unless you are going to take the time to customize some things.
There really is no reason to complain about having options. If you don't like having options, get a mac and get off slashdot.
The only claim that deadspin is a non-profit comes from paypal. The original blog post did not claim that they are a non-profit, and even said that the deadspin people would spend the money to buy goods to send over to Iraq. They even labeled their fund as "slapdash." Anybody reading the original blog post should understand that deadspin's integrity is the only thing that will get the money all the way to the soldiers.
If there are any laws prohibiting informal charities, paypal is responsible for pointing them out. Otherwise, paypal needs to allow the transactions to be completed.
The deadspin folks claim that paypal wrongly flagged the account as a charity account, and that they (deadspin) did not ask for the acount to be flagged as a charity account. If that is true, paypal has no right to be witholding the money, and they are also obliged to correct their classification error.
It strikes me that they have already proven their innocence beyond the point that paypal has a right to know about. The fund in question was set up (possibly improperly) with an explicit, legitimate purpose that all donors can be expected to know about. That means that it is not phishing. Furthermore, there is no evidence that potential phishing is any part of the dispute. The only issue is that paypal is treating the account as belonging to an official, regulated charity, whereas the deadspin folks were doing an impromptu fundraiser.
I don't think there is any such thing as a friendly lawsuit, whether or not they must defend the trademark. But if there is, we can be sure that Apple is only getting a license and not ownership.
That is probably what gives Cisco their confidence. IANAL, but the situation may be different if Cisco abandoned the iPhone trademark for a few years, and during that time, iPhone became colloquially associated with Apple.
I'm not assuming Apple is in the right. I'm just assuming that Apple tried really hard to secure the iPhone name. Something is fishy when Cisco says they are pretty much one fax away from a deal, and the next day they sue Apple. Given that Cisco really did file a lawsuit, they are probably pretty confident that they can hold onto the trademark. But they could be wrong.
The lawsuit from today (Jan 10) says:
Fully aware that Cisco owned the rights to the iPhone mark, Apple first approached Cisco in 2001 about the possibility of acquiring or licensing the rights to iPhone. Apple has continued making such requests to Cisco through the present, including several times in 2006. Each time, Apple was told that Cisco was not interested in ceding the mark to Apple. But the press release from yesterday (Jan 9) says:
...it is our belief that with their announcement today, Apple intends to agree to the final document and public statement that were distributed to them last night and that addressed a few remaining items. We expect to receive a signed agreement today. Obviously there is a disconnect here. It seems that, contrary to what the lawsuit says, Cisco was indeed interested in selling or licensing the trademark to Apple. They were interested enough to offer Apple a specific set of terms, and were only waiting on a signed document from Apple.
I don't think that Apple would have stalled signing the agreement if they actually had a chance to guarantee that they were safe from Cisco. Whatever happened, Cisco must have had high expectations of Apple.
According to Cisco, they started selling linksys iPhone products "early last year." I wonder if Apple would be able to show that iPhone rumors were already generating buzz by that time. That would probably kill the trademark, since the linksys products only started getting press once the iPhone rumors were ubiquitous.
If Cisco decided, at the last minute, to break off negotiations and just sue Apple, they (Cisco) are in trouble. Cisco may have breached an interim agreement with Apple, and the negotiations definitely would not qualify as having been in "good faith." Even if Apple loses/doesn't get the right to the name iPhone, Cisco stands to lose big.
Obviously the substance of the negotiations are not public, but if Apple tried to close the deal and Cisco sued them anyways, wouldn't that mean that Cisco was not negotiating in good faith, as they have claimed?
10:32--Cisco calls CNET News.com reporter with a statement about Apple's use of the term "iPhone" for its new product. "Given Apple's numerous requests for permission to use Cisco's iPhone trademark over the past several years and our extensive discussions with them recently, it is our belief that with their announcement today, Apple intends to agree to the final document and public statements that were distributed to them last night and that address a few remaining items we expect to receive a signed agreement today."
Is this suit just a reflexive response from Cisco's legal team, or did Apple break off negotiations? Cisco might even get in trouble for negotiating with Apple in bad faith. The lawsuit definitely seems to say Apple is willfully infringing. I find it interesting that nowhere in the suit does it say that Cisco ever told Apple anything other than "no." If Apple and Cisco were indeed in negotiations, Cisco should have disclosed that by now.
From what he posted, you can infer that he lives in a reasonably large market (due to the number and variety of stores), and that the demand is significantly lower than the supply in that area. Assuming that Sony is somewhat competent in allocating where the PS3s get shipped, it follows that the demand for PS3s cannot be much greater than, and is probably much less than the supply, nationally. Hence, PS3s are not selling out widely anymore. From this point, even the most basic knowledge of economics will tell you that Sony is in an untenable situation. (Without even taking into account that Sony sells PS3s at a loss.)
Part of my point is that even something as old and obsolete as glide can be installed and used in conjuction with very new software such as cairo and glitz. Gentoo made it very easy to take advantage of the fact that the software is open source, and made a computer go from worthless to suitable for daily use. Doing this on a distribution like Fedora would have pretty much required circumventing the entire package management system, or repackaging a huge number of packages. (Though it has undoubtedly gotten easier with modular X.)
My point is that too many of those dependencies are imposed by the packagers in order to support all possible combinations of software. Even something like mozilla has fairly simple minimum requirements. By giving you access to compile time options, gentoo lets you strip your software down to just the pieces you need. It is possible to have a usable desktop environment and still know what each package does.
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Do you have a problem with caching rendered pages and other things? If so, turn them off. Firefox is nowhere near as full of leaks as it's memory usage would suggest - it really is using almost all of that memory.
I, and most of the rest of the internet users, find tabbed browsing to be very helpful. A decent implementation, such as the ones in the mozilla based browsers, is invariably a more efficient way to manage multiple web pages than any general purpose window manager provides. The tab bar takes up screen space equivalent to between one and two lines of text, but allows users to see with one glance how many pages are open, whether they are still loading, and what the titles are.
The problem of unexpected tabs loading in the background cannot be as bad as you make it out to be. First, it usually only shows up after users have configured popups to be redirected to new tabs. Second, if you are closing the window with the mouse, you must move the cursor across the tab bar to reach the close button and you must look at that area of the screen. You should have no problem noticing that the tab bar is still showing and therefore there are multiple tabs open. Also, the confirmation dialog can be easily disabled on all browsers I have used. If you are closing the window with a keyboard shortcut, you should consider using ^W, which closes the current tab and and will close the window when the last tab is visible.
Following the spirit of your post: Is your desktop environment so cluttered that you have to fight for every line of usable space? Presumably you have condensed or disabled all your toolbars and hidden the menu bar and status bar. If you are not multitasking, you should consider pressing F11 to maximize your browser to full screen. That way, only the address bar (and optionally the tab bar) will be taking up space that could be used for your web viewing pleasure.
The biggest reason that tabbed browsing has caught on is that its benefits are so compelling that a very large number of people have taken the time to learn how to use it effectively. I encourage you to do the same.
I'm saying that slashdot is not for people who cannot stand the thought that other people have the option to chose differently. That seems to be one of your problems.
I'd much rather kids have 40-year old textbooks, except perhaps in science. Modern textbooks are too full of pointless or unexplained pictures, and silly things like how to program you TI graphing calculator to do simple things. With the exception of science, no textbook should use more than 2 colors of ink. Most science books can stay within the 2 color limit too.
Look at things like the Feynman Lectures and high level college math books to see what I mean. Books with a serious attitude about presenting the information invariably do a better job of getting the point across.
Word processing is about the only justifiable use of computers for primary schools, and even then, classroom time is better spent on learning rather than typing.
In my experience, elementary and middle schools put such tight restrictions on the computers that you can barely tell that it is windows and not something like os/2. That leaves no room for young kids to develop a brand loyalty in school. By high school, kids these days probably already have well-formed opinions about computers. Also, if a high school blocks myspace or facebook, the students will be too pissed to notice it is vista.
He had no experience with servers, Windows or Linux, and in fact no Linux experience at all. But when he tried to set up a simple server, it turned out that it was much easier to do with Linux. Windows servers should be easy to use. Combine that with LAMP's reputation for being more powerful and more secure than any Microsoft platforms, and you have to wonder who in their right mind would chose to use a Windows server. Windows servers should be easy to use.
Apache has the majority of the web server market. It is very popular amongst large corporations, and apparently it is not that hard for newbies to use. That leaves Microsoft with a tenuous middle ground, if anything.
I really doubt the iPhone will be unhackable. Apple would not have called the phone's software "OS X" if they didn't plan on offering cocoa apis and tools to somebody outside of Apple. Once the iPhone hits the market, the processor will be identified and people will start working on cross-compiling. Apple cannot have changed the nib format much for the iPhone, so it will probably not be hard to modify Gorm to work with the iPhone.
I would not be surprised if it turns out to be trivial to make a widget that loads a custom binary. If you are right that the restrictions are from Cingular and not Apple, it should be even easier to hack.
I think one of your underlying assumptions it flawed: if it isn't the primary feature, it will suck and be hard to use. I expect the iPhone to be good at being an mp3 player, and to be good at being a phone. Talk of the device being "a phone first" is probably unwarranted. If Apple succeeds in creating a multifunction device that is good all around, you can count on it selling very well, even at $600.
Like every other distro, Gentoo comes with sensible defaults. Gentoo just gives you more flexibility in overriding those defaults. But then, you shouldn't bother with Gentoo unless you are going to take the time to customize some things.
There really is no reason to complain about having options. If you don't like having options, get a mac and get off slashdot.
The only claim that deadspin is a non-profit comes from paypal. The original blog post did not claim that they are a non-profit, and even said that the deadspin people would spend the money to buy goods to send over to Iraq. They even labeled their fund as "slapdash." Anybody reading the original blog post should understand that deadspin's integrity is the only thing that will get the money all the way to the soldiers.
If there are any laws prohibiting informal charities, paypal is responsible for pointing them out. Otherwise, paypal needs to allow the transactions to be completed.
The deadspin folks claim that paypal wrongly flagged the account as a charity account, and that they (deadspin) did not ask for the acount to be flagged as a charity account. If that is true, paypal has no right to be witholding the money, and they are also obliged to correct their classification error.
It strikes me that they have already proven their innocence beyond the point that paypal has a right to know about. The fund in question was set up (possibly improperly) with an explicit, legitimate purpose that all donors can be expected to know about. That means that it is not phishing. Furthermore, there is no evidence that potential phishing is any part of the dispute. The only issue is that paypal is treating the account as belonging to an official, regulated charity, whereas the deadspin folks were doing an impromptu fundraiser.
I don't think there is any such thing as a friendly lawsuit, whether or not they must defend the trademark. But if there is, we can be sure that Apple is only getting a license and not ownership.
Apple had more than enough buzz three months ago.
That is probably what gives Cisco their confidence. IANAL, but the situation may be different if Cisco abandoned the iPhone trademark for a few years, and during that time, iPhone became colloquially associated with Apple.
The lawsuit from today (Jan 10) says: Fully aware that Cisco owned the rights to the iPhone mark, Apple first approached Cisco in 2001 about the possibility of acquiring or licensing the rights to iPhone. Apple has continued making such requests to Cisco through the present, including several times in 2006. Each time, Apple was told that Cisco was not interested in ceding the mark to Apple. But the press release from yesterday (Jan 9) says:
...it is our belief that with their announcement today, Apple intends to agree to the final document and public statement that were distributed to them last night and that addressed a few remaining items. We expect to receive a signed agreement today. Obviously there is a disconnect here. It seems that, contrary to what the lawsuit says, Cisco was indeed interested in selling or licensing the trademark to Apple. They were interested enough to offer Apple a specific set of terms, and were only waiting on a signed document from Apple.I don't think that Apple would have stalled signing the agreement if they actually had a chance to guarantee that they were safe from Cisco. Whatever happened, Cisco must have had high expectations of Apple.
According to Cisco, they started selling linksys iPhone products "early last year." I wonder if Apple would be able to show that iPhone rumors were already generating buzz by that time. That would probably kill the trademark, since the linksys products only started getting press once the iPhone rumors were ubiquitous.
If Cisco decided, at the last minute, to break off negotiations and just sue Apple, they (Cisco) are in trouble. Cisco may have breached an interim agreement with Apple, and the negotiations definitely would not qualify as having been in "good faith." Even if Apple loses/doesn't get the right to the name iPhone, Cisco stands to lose big.
Obviously the substance of the negotiations are not public, but if Apple tried to close the deal and Cisco sued them anyways, wouldn't that mean that Cisco was not negotiating in good faith, as they have claimed?
Is this suit just a reflexive response from Cisco's legal team, or did Apple break off negotiations? Cisco might even get in trouble for negotiating with Apple in bad faith. The lawsuit definitely seems to say Apple is willfully infringing. I find it interesting that nowhere in the suit does it say that Cisco ever told Apple anything other than "no." If Apple and Cisco were indeed in negotiations, Cisco should have disclosed that by now.
You are misrepresenting the anecdotal evidence. All recent anecdotal evidence I have seen says "every store around has several PS3s in stock."
From what he posted, you can infer that he lives in a reasonably large market (due to the number and variety of stores), and that the demand is significantly lower than the supply in that area. Assuming that Sony is somewhat competent in allocating where the PS3s get shipped, it follows that the demand for PS3s cannot be much greater than, and is probably much less than the supply, nationally. Hence, PS3s are not selling out widely anymore. From this point, even the most basic knowledge of economics will tell you that Sony is in an untenable situation. (Without even taking into account that Sony sells PS3s at a loss.)
Part of my point is that even something as old and obsolete as glide can be installed and used in conjuction with very new software such as cairo and glitz. Gentoo made it very easy to take advantage of the fact that the software is open source, and made a computer go from worthless to suitable for daily use. Doing this on a distribution like Fedora would have pretty much required circumventing the entire package management system, or repackaging a huge number of packages. (Though it has undoubtedly gotten easier with modular X.)
My point is that too many of those dependencies are imposed by the packagers in order to support all possible combinations of software. Even something like mozilla has fairly simple minimum requirements. By giving you access to compile time options, gentoo lets you strip your software down to just the pieces you need. It is possible to have a usable desktop environment and still know what each package does.