The reg, yes, the forums used to be anti-MS, anti-Apple, and now are pro-Apple and pro-MS and anti-Google in an amazing way. Immediately after an article involving any of these three is posted, the comments (and votes on comments) following these lines show up almost immediately, and in a big quantity. Differing viewpoints take a lot more to show up, and are downvoted a lot.
It isn't only infoworld. The Register (URL:http://theregister.co.uk/) forums and articles have taken a extremely anti-google slant. At the same time, pro-apple and pro-msft comments and votes on comments have raised like crazy. All this after some stories on companies specializing on "reputation management", selling astroturfers and astroturfing campaigns.
Here on/., some have been identified and shamed, but new accounts pop up all the time.
Enough to make even a non-conspiracy adept suspicious...
Compared to a netbook, I can see following negatives at once:
- A BOM that is twice (at least) of the one of a netbook;
- Components soldered in place, so no upgrades and if one fries, you have to buy a whole new system; with the higher BOM, you're doubly screwed;
- Fiberglass casing, so it breaks easily, and releases shards that ruin lungs;
Positives:
- Possible decent screen (11/12") in a small form factor;
- Thinner.
So, the only way I see to get this to sell is to discontinue netbooks... Not that it has almost happened, with the disappearance of Linux netbooks, and of SSD based ones; but now AMD is also in the game, and can sell netbook plaforms, so how can intel push this platform and discontinue Atom/netbooks?
I'm not sure how you can tell a down-vote is from an employee as you claim (sounds a bit like sour grapes), but I suspect most technical companies do have employees who post here. And of course they'll be predisposed to supporting the company that pays their rent. I think it's great -- if you find one that's replied to you, and reply back -- you've just bypassed the whole "contact us" page and have expressed your view to someone who has (technical) weight in the organisation. Tech company people taking part in the community here is good news, not bad. I had an interaction with someone from Google on here the other week. He disagreed with me about some things, but that's fine.
BTW, I am all for having employees from the different companies posting here and defending their employer. I agree with your arguments - unfortunately these people are the first to disappear under the noise from the marketeers. Either because a marketeer for a competitor attacks/downvotes them, or because their posts get lost in the middle of the marketeers for their employer.
I'm not speaking about company employees posting on their own time. I was referring to some sleazeball companies that specialize in "social network image" and similar, whose work is just spamming and manipulating forums to make it look like their clients' product is well received. Like the msft astro-turfing of old, but now done professionally.
There were some adverts for these "professionals" some time ago, and their first big appearance here on/. was after the WP7 release and the first upgrade disasters for WP7 phones. There were easy to identify then, as there were quite a few posters repeating exactly the same speech, word for word, with a second group upvoting this first group posts and downvoting every critic. After that, we've seen it a lot for every WP7 review/criticism out there (or any criticism of Nokia's elopside), and more recently they seem to have a new contract attacking google and defending facebook. The biggest problem is that in some sites they managed to drown out every dissenting comment, the second problem is that they are getting good at looking like regular humans for a while, before they start spewing the corporate drivel.
In some aspects, it feels like when those assholes Canter & Siegel started spamming usenet.
This post will possibly get you downvoted very quickly by the fb trolls/"relationship managers", like the guy who posted this "news" or the first poster. They are getting less obvious (well, after the idiot RMs for wp7 they only could improve), but are quite easy to spot as drones working for a RM agency. And they are trying to do the same to slashdot as they did to techcrunch or betanews, were you can't find a decent comment in the middle of all the astroturfers. So you (and everyone who calls their game) will get downvoted in a second. As I will be, no doubt.
Wow... So much hatred towards google+, despite it starting to shape up as a great product!
Have you even used it, or are you just a facebook "relationship manager"?
If you'd use it, you'd see it is very polished, circles are thousand times better than anything fb has, hangouts are cool... And above all, google seems to care about its users, unlike fb.
Anyway, for a beta, it is surely very stable and fast. I didn't see any of those "constant problems" you speak of (did anyone see them, or only zuck?), and stating it has "even bigger privacy problems" than fb - can you say that with a straight face?
3 Italy (tre) has now added to its pre-paid data plans that they are only for use on the phone. As that doesn't seem to be enforceable with many of the phones, they now start limiting the available traffic on a daily basis. If you have the 3 GB plan, you can't exceed 100MB/day or you'll be charged extra. That is why I have now switched to Wind for my data plan...
Intel has already messed up the drivers situation for one of its product families - GMA500 aka Poulsbo. They've released 3 driver families for it, PSB, IEGD and EMGD, progressively doing a worst job. PSB is stil working in Xorg 1.9 thanks to some users who have been patching and hacking the source parts, without any Intel support. It has some unfinished parts that would take a xorg developer a couple of days to fix, but Intel has refused to even listen to the users who have been patching it, never mind helping. It has a closed source 3D driver, but the kernel and 2D drivers are open source. IEGD seems abandoned and was mostly binary, compiled for a couple of distributions. EMGD is 99% binaries including libGL, libva, and others, as some luminary at Intel decided to release the closed binaries linked to specific versions. This last crap is the currently "supported" by Intel, the other two are obsolete. EMGD only supports a very old Fedora release, and a old MeeGo release, but was made to work with Ubuntu 10.10 by downgrading Xorg to 1.8.
After all this, did anyone still expect Intel to release decent drivers? I for sure didn't.
I still expect Oracle to sue. Maybe not in Europe, for now, but surely in the USA, where Software Patents and their ilk are considered valid and used by trolls to extort money or to quash innovation. We'll see, but after Oracle's attack on Google over a bunch of idiotic software patents, we can expect anything. And we know it is cheaper even to large corporations like HTC to pay the trolls than to fight them.
On the other hand, Steve Jobs was right. This is a bigger problem for Adobe. Let them admit thet they need some help wit Flash...maybe Linus hackers can help out.
Bottom line: Flash sucks on Android big time.
Actually, flash doesn't suck on android - at least on my N1 running cyanogen's CM6. Even in the article you link they admit "When Flash 10.1 for Android is good, it’s great, but when it’s bad,...". Then they go on claiming that only videos optimised for mobile phones are smooth on the android, but that hasn't been my experience. I didn't set out to test exactly the same sites as on that article, but on regular usage (Portuguese, Italian and UK news sites, youtube [directly with the browser claiming it is a desktop pc], atdhe, etc.) I never had any of the symptoms described in that article. Some jerkiness from time to time, yes, but that was mostly due to slow net connections or overloaded sources. The games I didn't try - I was never a fan of flash games - but I assume most games make assumptions that won't work on touch screens. I don't see exactly how that is a failure with flash, though.
All in all, I never got the bugs and inconveniences reported in that article. And judging from the comments section there, I wasn't the only one. I know flash bashing is fashionable here at slashdot, but the article you quote is too much against mine and other users real life experience to be trusted. And don't take just my work for it, check this article, for another example of flash working on android, or this one for a take from a iphone user on the same "problem".
Bottom line: Flash doesn't suck on my android phone, or of any of my friends; and I'd rather have it available than having a "benevolent dictator" deciding I can't use it on my phone just because.
In Europe you now have this kind of system on many countries. For instance, in Italy you have to give your "codice fiscale" (fiscal id code) to buy a prepaid SIM. But since you can generate a seemingly valid code from a few web sites, this is a hindrance only for foreign visitors who don't want to pay roaming charges.
I can't write with pen or pencil at a decent speed, if I want to be able to read it afterwards. My handwriting is awful, always was, and no matter how much I tried to improve it always remained awful and slow. On the other hand, I am a decent, fast typist. That is why I bring my notebook to all meetings, or to any course I attend (did you think you'd stop studying after leaving college?). I can imagine what would be if I was suddenly forced to use a inferior solution just because someone abused the efficient one.
First, my firefox 3.5.7 isn't supported for their web client 3d option. Why, is it because I am running linux?
Second, the "updated" maps or that worldwide telescope both need some ms proprietary crap called firelight. Sorry, but I won't install mono or moonlight or whatever is called the Icaza clone of ms tech just to find if it does fail to support some non-documented or too recent api needed for this ms site.
Third, I set the language to English in the preferences. But since the idiotic bing maps site sees I am connecting from Italy, I get everything in Italian.Thanks, but no thanks. If I wanted to get the site in Italian, I'd have selected it. Ok, after some time I noticed there is a link at the bottom right that lets me see the maps in English, but that is it. Any language choice I make in the options is ignored.
So, triple fail - most of the content is tied to windows, and what I get is not what I asked for, but what some programmer decided is best for me. In what is this exciting, or even new for microsoft?
You can choose mandriva (great hardware detection, nice support, with rpm instead of deb as the biggest con), or Arch Linux (rolling upgrades, fast, less clutter, but harder to install), or Debian, or SuSE, or Fedora... Just go to distrowatch and take your pick.
I'm setting a Mandriva partition on my netbook straight away. Would switch to arch, but my GMA500 takes too much work to support there, as Arch is already on a more recent X server,
How do you think I feel, having a N96? A "flagship" phone that crashes like crazy, which is always the last getting Nokia's new software? And I even bought a yearly GPS license from Nokia...
I thought things would change and it would be better than my previous phone, a K850.
Anyone wants to know which phone I am thinking of buying next, just so you can avoid it?
Anyone knows how is the support for GMA500 netbooks? I've tried googling for it, but didn't understand if it is included by default or one needs to do the same kind of jumps through hoops as in kubuntu.
I used to be a subscriber. Not for a few years now. The quality of their writing has gone way downhill, even back when Gaines was still alive. Without him it's gone straight down the drain. When the moved the magazine to color and started accepting advertisers it just seemed to lose its soul.
And that was when I stopped subscribing and buying mad. Gaines died, and mad seems to have died with him. The ads were just like flies buzzing around a dead corpse. Made me sick enough to stop looking at it.
Or maybe he is Portuguese? I am, and fully agree with blind biker's views. We have full scale, widely known corruption here. We have a soccer club that is known to have bought referees, politicians, police, jugdes and newspaper writers for over 25 years, and when convicted everyone in charge just lied so that it wouldn't be punished by UEFA; we have a justice system that punishes the poor and protects the rich - companies can even bill you for breaching of contract expenses for a contract you never signed, and it will cost you more to go to court than to pay; politicians and VIPs are involved in a pedofilia scandal, and after more than five years nobody was convicted yet and proof has been destroyed; we have "mayors" that are known to be corrupt, have fled justice, just to be pardoned and re-elected the day she returned to Portugal; we have seen murderers be released on a technicality just to fly away when justice went looking for them; we have a justice system that survived from the fascist regime without being changed in any way. We have a region where there are more Ferraris than in Modena, but where factories close every day and most people are below poverty level.
People here are proud of avoiding to pay taxes!
So, why do you think that people won't abuse the system and do every scam they can think of to buy these cheap laptops even cheaper?
Slashdot Mirror
The reg, yes, the forums used to be anti-MS, anti-Apple, and now are pro-Apple and pro-MS and anti-Google in an amazing way. Immediately after an article involving any of these three is posted, the comments (and votes on comments) following these lines show up almost immediately, and in a big quantity. Differing viewpoints take a lot more to show up, and are downvoted a lot.
It isn't only infoworld. The Register (URL:http://theregister.co.uk/) forums and articles have taken a extremely anti-google slant. At the same time, pro-apple and pro-msft comments and votes on comments have raised like crazy. All this after some stories on companies specializing on "reputation management", selling astroturfers and astroturfing campaigns. Here on /., some have been identified and shamed, but new accounts pop up all the time.
Enough to make even a non-conspiracy adept suspicious...
Compared to a netbook, I can see following negatives at once: - A BOM that is twice (at least) of the one of a netbook; - Components soldered in place, so no upgrades and if one fries, you have to buy a whole new system; with the higher BOM, you're doubly screwed; - Fiberglass casing, so it breaks easily, and releases shards that ruin lungs; Positives: - Possible decent screen (11/12") in a small form factor; - Thinner. So, the only way I see to get this to sell is to discontinue netbooks... Not that it has almost happened, with the disappearance of Linux netbooks, and of SSD based ones; but now AMD is also in the game, and can sell netbook plaforms, so how can intel push this platform and discontinue Atom/netbooks?
BTW, I am all for having employees from the different companies posting here and defending their employer. I agree with your arguments - unfortunately these people are the first to disappear under the noise from the marketeers. Either because a marketeer for a competitor attacks/downvotes them, or because their posts get lost in the middle of the marketeers for their employer.
I'm not speaking about company employees posting on their own time. I was referring to some sleazeball companies that specialize in "social network image" and similar, whose work is just spamming and manipulating forums to make it look like their clients' product is well received. Like the msft astro-turfing of old, but now done professionally. There were some adverts for these "professionals" some time ago, and their first big appearance here on /. was after the WP7 release and the first upgrade disasters for WP7 phones. There were easy to identify then, as there were quite a few posters repeating exactly the same speech, word for word, with a second group upvoting this first group posts and downvoting every critic. After that, we've seen it a lot for every WP7 review/criticism out there (or any criticism of Nokia's elopside), and more recently they seem to have a new contract attacking google and defending facebook. The biggest problem is that in some sites they managed to drown out every dissenting comment, the second problem is that they are getting good at looking like regular humans for a while, before they start spewing the corporate drivel.
In some aspects, it feels like when those assholes Canter & Siegel started spamming usenet.
This post will possibly get you downvoted very quickly by the fb trolls/"relationship managers", like the guy who posted this "news" or the first poster. They are getting less obvious (well, after the idiot RMs for wp7 they only could improve), but are quite easy to spot as drones working for a RM agency. And they are trying to do the same to slashdot as they did to techcrunch or betanews, were you can't find a decent comment in the middle of all the astroturfers. So you (and everyone who calls their game) will get downvoted in a second. As I will be, no doubt.
Wow... So much hatred towards google+, despite it starting to shape up as a great product! Have you even used it, or are you just a facebook "relationship manager"? If you'd use it, you'd see it is very polished, circles are thousand times better than anything fb has, hangouts are cool... And above all, google seems to care about its users, unlike fb. Anyway, for a beta, it is surely very stable and fast. I didn't see any of those "constant problems" you speak of (did anyone see them, or only zuck?), and stating it has "even bigger privacy problems" than fb - can you say that with a straight face?
3 Italy (tre) has now added to its pre-paid data plans that they are only for use on the phone. As that doesn't seem to be enforceable with many of the phones, they now start limiting the available traffic on a daily basis. If you have the 3 GB plan, you can't exceed 100MB/day or you'll be charged extra. That is why I have now switched to Wind for my data plan...
Isn't he busy with Peewee Reisfeld?
If you were trying to maintain a binary blob (like intel's infamous psb drivers) you surely noticed.
Intel has already messed up the drivers situation for one of its product families - GMA500 aka Poulsbo. They've released 3 driver families for it, PSB, IEGD and EMGD, progressively doing a worst job. PSB is stil working in Xorg 1.9 thanks to some users who have been patching and hacking the source parts, without any Intel support. It has some unfinished parts that would take a xorg developer a couple of days to fix, but Intel has refused to even listen to the users who have been patching it, never mind helping. It has a closed source 3D driver, but the kernel and 2D drivers are open source. IEGD seems abandoned and was mostly binary, compiled for a couple of distributions. EMGD is 99% binaries including libGL, libva, and others, as some luminary at Intel decided to release the closed binaries linked to specific versions. This last crap is the currently "supported" by Intel, the other two are obsolete. EMGD only supports a very old Fedora release, and a old MeeGo release, but was made to work with Ubuntu 10.10 by downgrading Xorg to 1.8.
After all this, did anyone still expect Intel to release decent drivers? I for sure didn't.
I still expect Oracle to sue. Maybe not in Europe, for now, but surely in the USA, where Software Patents and their ilk are considered valid and used by trolls to extort money or to quash innovation. We'll see, but after Oracle's attack on Google over a bunch of idiotic software patents, we can expect anything. And we know it is cheaper even to large corporations like HTC to pay the trolls than to fight them.
On the other hand, Steve Jobs was right. This is a bigger problem for Adobe. Let them admit thet they need some help wit Flash...maybe Linus hackers can help out.
Bottom line: Flash sucks on Android big time.
Actually, flash doesn't suck on android - at least on my N1 running cyanogen's CM6. Even in the article you link they admit "When Flash 10.1 for Android is good, it’s great, but when it’s bad, ...". Then they go on claiming that only videos optimised for mobile phones are smooth on the android, but that hasn't been my experience. I didn't set out to test exactly the same sites as on that article, but on regular usage (Portuguese, Italian and UK news sites, youtube [directly with the browser claiming it is a desktop pc], atdhe, etc.) I never had any of the symptoms described in that article. Some jerkiness from time to time, yes, but that was mostly due to slow net connections or overloaded sources. The games I didn't try - I was never a fan of flash games - but I assume most games make assumptions that won't work on touch screens. I don't see exactly how that is a failure with flash, though.
All in all, I never got the bugs and inconveniences reported in that article. And judging from the comments section there, I wasn't the only one. I know flash bashing is fashionable here at slashdot, but the article you quote is too much against mine and other users real life experience to be trusted. And don't take just my work for it, check this article, for another example of flash working on android, or this one for a take from a iphone user on the same "problem".
Bottom line: Flash doesn't suck on my android phone, or of any of my friends; and I'd rather have it available than having a "benevolent dictator" deciding I can't use it on my phone just because.
In Europe you now have this kind of system on many countries. For instance, in Italy you have to give your "codice fiscale" (fiscal id code) to buy a prepaid SIM. But since you can generate a seemingly valid code from a few web sites, this is a hindrance only for foreign visitors who don't want to pay roaming charges.
I can't write with pen or pencil at a decent speed, if I want to be able to read it afterwards. My handwriting is awful, always was, and no matter how much I tried to improve it always remained awful and slow. On the other hand, I am a decent, fast typist. That is why I bring my notebook to all meetings, or to any course I attend (did you think you'd stop studying after leaving college?). I can imagine what would be if I was suddenly forced to use a inferior solution just because someone abused the efficient one.
In which century are these teachers living, btw?
Kill yourself.
Just the enlightened answer I'd expect here on ./
And I'm the one who gets modded troll... :D
First, my firefox 3.5.7 isn't supported for their web client 3d option. Why, is it because I am running linux? Second, the "updated" maps or that worldwide telescope both need some ms proprietary crap called firelight. Sorry, but I won't install mono or moonlight or whatever is called the Icaza clone of ms tech just to find if it does fail to support some non-documented or too recent api needed for this ms site. Third, I set the language to English in the preferences. But since the idiotic bing maps site sees I am connecting from Italy, I get everything in Italian.Thanks, but no thanks. If I wanted to get the site in Italian, I'd have selected it. Ok, after some time I noticed there is a link at the bottom right that lets me see the maps in English, but that is it. Any language choice I make in the options is ignored. So, triple fail - most of the content is tied to windows, and what I get is not what I asked for, but what some programmer decided is best for me. In what is this exciting, or even new for microsoft?
You can choose mandriva (great hardware detection, nice support, with rpm instead of deb as the biggest con), or Arch Linux (rolling upgrades, fast, less clutter, but harder to install), or Debian, or SuSE, or Fedora... Just go to distrowatch and take your pick. I'm setting a Mandriva partition on my netbook straight away. Would switch to arch, but my GMA500 takes too much work to support there, as Arch is already on a more recent X server,
How do you think I feel, having a N96? A "flagship" phone that crashes like crazy, which is always the last getting Nokia's new software? And I even bought a yearly GPS license from Nokia... I thought things would change and it would be better than my previous phone, a K850. Anyone wants to know which phone I am thinking of buying next, just so you can avoid it?
Thanks, time to download and test a image.
Anyone knows how is the support for GMA500 netbooks? I've tried googling for it, but didn't understand if it is included by default or one needs to do the same kind of jumps through hoops as in kubuntu.
When everyone you disagree with is "bought", you should pause for a moment and think why it start resembling a classic conspiracy theory.
So, following your argument, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and even Eliot Ness were only conspiracy theorists?
I used to be a subscriber. Not for a few years now. The quality of their writing has gone way downhill, even back when Gaines was still alive. Without him it's gone straight down the drain. When the moved the magazine to color and started accepting advertisers it just seemed to lose its soul.
And that was when I stopped subscribing and buying mad. Gaines died, and mad seems to have died with him. The ads were just like flies buzzing around a dead corpse. Made me sick enough to stop looking at it.
And Portuguese for free as in speech...
Or maybe he is Portuguese? I am, and fully agree with blind biker's views. We have full scale, widely known corruption here. We have a soccer club that is known to have bought referees, politicians, police, jugdes and newspaper writers for over 25 years, and when convicted everyone in charge just lied so that it wouldn't be punished by UEFA; we have a justice system that punishes the poor and protects the rich - companies can even bill you for breaching of contract expenses for a contract you never signed, and it will cost you more to go to court than to pay; politicians and VIPs are involved in a pedofilia scandal, and after more than five years nobody was convicted yet and proof has been destroyed; we have "mayors" that are known to be corrupt, have fled justice, just to be pardoned and re-elected the day she returned to Portugal; we have seen murderers be released on a technicality just to fly away when justice went looking for them; we have a justice system that survived from the fascist regime without being changed in any way. We have a region where there are more Ferraris than in Modena, but where factories close every day and most people are below poverty level. People here are proud of avoiding to pay taxes! So, why do you think that people won't abuse the system and do every scam they can think of to buy these cheap laptops even cheaper?