A little off-topic, but check out media jukebox. I have tried out zinf and any other music player for Linux I could find and have yet to find another program that equals media jukebox in overall functionality but especially in terms of how it organizes your music (you can set up custom views of your music, such as by Genre / Artist / Album, etc...). It supports ripping and encoding to pretty much any format. It also has a great plugin system for transferring files to MP3 devices as well as having CD Burning functionality. If I had any coding skills I would love to bring something like this to Linux. I believe the next version will fully incorporate TV viewing, scheduled recording, etc... If there are any coders looking for a good program to emulate I highly suggest this one. (Std disclaimer; I don't work for j river, I just really dig their program)
I would normally agree that switching distributions just to get an app (or class of apps) to work is a little nutty, but if you *REALLY* want to play videos, the plf rpms for Mandrake make installing quite a bit of video software for linux super easy (though I imagine there are apt-get repositories that do the same). All you need to do is go here to configure and add a urpmi source from one of the plf mirror sites, and it is literally as easy as "urpmi.update -a && urpmi mplayer".
Side note on what a kick ass program mplayer is: plays DVDs, mpg, wmv, mov (sorenson!), divx, xvid, on and on and on. Moreover, the low CPU usage is really quite incredible and makes it possible to watch DivX movies on my laptop that absolutely crawl on winders. Good stuff.
It seems like the UI annoyances Jamie Zawinski complains about with Mplayer are really quite trivial when you consider the immense benefits. I'm sure that there is a skin out there that would conform to the UI principles he wants (if not, how hard could it be to roll your own mplayer skin, especially for someone with his skills?). Find it. Use it. Stop complaining.
(OT: can we please cut the "JWZ" crap? Though I admire the things he has done for Linux, I think he seems to take himself a little too seriously, so when I see "JWZ" I'll think shortcut for "gee wiz", not that whining diva)
Now, I have very little love for the **AA, and I think that the stranglehold over the music industry that they have is wrong, as is their notion of "media consumers" as helpless fetuses plugged into the (ir) matrix, as is their desire to infringe upon our fair use rights, etc... I also believe that the music industry should try and find a way to make file trading / downloading legal and reasonably priced (I really got what I feel is good value for my money from emusic).
However, while stealing^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h swapping songs may be seen as some sort of protest against their injustices, it is still stealing. So if some entity is in some way facilitating stealing, they have every right to shut it down. "Proprietary" seems to have little to do with it. I think the notion of "free" software is hurt tremendously if it tries to align itself with stealing. There are so many other positive virtues about free software that pitting it as a "robin hood" for people that really only care about getting free music does it a disservice.
I just get so tired of this viewpoint; it saddens me to think that all people really care about is free beer, not free speech. I certainly appreciate all of the great software I have been able to receive at no cost (although I contribute here and there both in $$$ and bug reports when I can), but the notion of being part of a community is much more valuable to me. That is why I don't want this community to become, or at least to be seen as, a bunch of whining freeloaders.
At least for evolution, you can go to File -> New -> Evolution Window. Open your contacts, calendar, whatever and you can alt-tab to your heart's delight.
Regarding #2, although it doesn't sound like there is much you can do, here's what I do: at one office where I work I have recently been booting to a Knoppix CD (prompted from the slashdot story some weeks back) and retrieve my prefs and mount my winders network shares (so I can get to my data) from the configuration floppy. I am in the fortunate position where I can ssh into a *nix box to do much of my work, and as long as I have access to email, my data and a console, I am set. The IT dep't (which would never allow linux on a desktop) is none the wiser and when I leave I boot up into windows just in time to walk out the door.
As it stands now, I can spend about 80% of my work day in front of Linux, and 20% for the times when I have to use MS Office to make sure that the documents I made in OpenOffice look correct. Why go to the trouble? Just 'cause I feel much more productive using linux v. windows. Hell, even when I'm in Windows I use cygwin most of the time.
Spam Assassin in combination with procmail has worked well on the server side for me. You can tune the sensitivity to how much spam it catches, but my informal assessment is that it catches about 95% of the spam, with only 1 false positive in about 3 weeks of use (the false positive's and any other email address can be put in a whitelist of email addresses that are let through automatically). Great stuff. Saves me from having to constantly update my ~/.procmailrc for new spammers.
Actually HIPAA is a real pain for the growing number of medical researchers who use EMR (Electronic Medical Records) for academic research (like me). Many useful study designs in which patients are still completely anonymous will suddenly be in murky legal waters after April. For example, one of the (many) "identifiers" that must be removed to use EMR's without explicit consent is the date of any procedure. This restriction alone makes many otherwise useful datasets extremely limited and not worth spending resources on.
So it is good to protect EMR's from (e.g.) Pharmaceuticals trying to use sensitive information for marketing, but some of the shackles that HIPAA will put on researchers are not a good thing (TM). There are already many measures in place within academic research to protect the privacy of patients.
You mention something like Matlab as an alternative if it did not have poor performance. There is a very high quality free (beer, speech) program for Windows/Linux/OSX called R that is a matrix oriented language based on the S language, whose commercial analog is S-Plus. One of the really nice features is that you can write iteration or computation heavy routines in C or Fortran and dynamically load them into your R program/script.. The benefits are that you can take advantage of the high-level nature and easy scriptability of R (not to mention publication quality graphing capabilities), while taking advantage of the speed of Fortran/C.
I am always shocked at how little attention R gets considering how good it is.
I dunno, for those of us who don't shell out $300-$500 on a regular basis for MP3 players, having 64 kpbs mono copies of my music lets me use my 32MB Rio (reliable, can use with Linux) for an hour - perfect for a workout, or a jog, where sound quality is not necessarily at a premium. It is at least reassuring to know that you can get reasonable sound quality at such a low bitrate.
"'Pocket PC' is a generic term used throughout the industry," company representative Marianne Peterson said to a judge in a near-empty court. "Microsoft is simply not infringing this trademark...and asks the court to dismiss the case." Cnet
"The evidence relied on by Lindows is insufficient for two reasons," said Microsoft. "First, it shows use of 'windows' as the name of a feature, not as the name of a genus of products. Such feature references may show that 'windows' is descriptive of the goods, but not generic. Second, Lindows' evidence shows repeated uses of Windows as Microsoft's trademark. Thus, it offers no support for a finding of genericness." zdnet
Maybe not a complete contradiction, but amusing nonetheless.
One thing you can do is to create your own search boxes on top - if you look at the bookmarks.xbel file in the ~/.galeon directory you should be able to easily snoop out how to do it. I have added a search bar for a company directory that I use multiple times per day and it is incredibly useful.
I'm as much of a screenshot hound as the next guy, but being able to compete on "eye candy" is not, IMHO, a positive virtue. I want the GUI to compete on ease of use and innovations that makes people more productive; whether that results in more "eye candy" or not.
While the shots are nice, and KDE3 is indeed looking great, I would be really happy if the following (at a minimum) were addressed (esp. if this could be done in a standard way between GNOME and KDE):
Common Keyboard Shortcuts A Modern Clipboard Good Drag & Drop A Very Simple and Functional Menu System Good Keyboard Navigation (ironically, one of the best things about MS Windows Explorer)
If Linux is to be adopted on the desktop, I think these are the issues that ought to be trumpeted (if they are worth trumpeting).
Hmmm... it was my impression that Blockbuster (and other movie rental outfits) went to the movie houses and said that paying big $$$ up front for each movie was an inferior solution to what I believe is their current practice:
They are able to buy DVDs ( and VHS tapes) at a very low price, and they send back some of the profits from each rental to the movies houses. Notice how when you go into Blockbuster now, they have hundreds of the new releases and can "guarantee" that the movie is in stock? From what I understand, this is a direct result of the new arrangement - they can buy many more copies of new releases at near wholesale prices, they just have to give up a part of each rental to the movie houses.
Incidentally, this arrangement makes late fees for places like Blockbuster an even more important source of revenue, since they are making less per returned-on-time rental, so I can't see their being all too enthused with the disposable DVD idea.
My (probably non-unique, BTW) take on it is that AOL holds the browser ace in the hole over MS to protect AOL/Time Warner's marketshare in content and content delivery against an onrushing MS. Imagine the drop in IE market share if AOL decided to move its subscribers away from IE and towards Netscape / Gecko. So much of MS's strategy depends on the omnipresence of IE that losing the AOL base could severely hurt their overall strategy.
As MS makes more and more overtures into the content / content delivery area (Windows Media, anyone?) which directly infringes on AOL/TW turf, AOL can use the browser issue to keep MS in check to a certain degree.
Agreed. I was a math major in college but many of the upper division math classes were populated by CS students who were fulfilling requirements. Those classes were not easy. The critical thinking and problem solving skills devloped by writing mathematical proofs are very much applicable to real-life problems one will face as a programmer. I also agree with the posts people have made about how a broad curriculum fosters communication skills - if you are looking to advance in your company, writing skills and good verbal communication skills are a must.
I went to Japan last spring to visit my family, and I watched the Masters golf tournament with my grandfather on his HDTV. WOW! When they did the tight shots of the ball on the green you could actually see the texture in the individual blades of glass. When they did shots of Rae's creek the detail in the water and reflections was absolutely amazing. I can't wait for HDTV to come down in price so that us average joes can get one.
I would also imagine that Linux users are probably more likely to turn use cookie blocking features as I, for one, block any *.advertising.com, *.hitbox.com, *.doubleclick.net, etc... by using Mozilla/Galeon's cookie management features. I don't know if this would skew their numbers away from Linux, but if their numbers depend on on cookies, then there would be a good reason to be skeptical about their results.
Have you seen the Samsung I300? It is a color palm pilot that is much smaller than the kyocera model (saw a demo model in Circuit City). Go to samsung and check it out. Doesn't have the video & such, but you can browse, do email, even use the other palm functions while you talk as it has a speakerphone. Pretty cool if you ask me...
You might want to check out samsung's palm phone. Yeah, grafitti entry sucks, but having a true pda (not like the handspring one) act as a phone is awesome, and its available in the US now (for those interested). I saw one the other day at Circuit City and it is quite compact - much smaller and thinner than those Kyocera bricks.
Your point is well taken about the beauty of the UNIX philosophy. The beauty of it, I think, is best expressed in relation to the piping textual output from one command to another.
I use my Palm pilot alot. Before, I would use J-Pilot (an excellent application, btw) + Netscape/Mozilla mail application. Both applications did their job admirably, but there was no advantage whatsoever to having the email functionality separated from the calendar/contact functionality.
Aside from "attracting windows users" evolution actually fills a void - the integration of these disparate information sources is very useful (and if they maintain the rate of improvement - it should be quite a reliable program, it is already gained leaps and bounds in stability). If, in the future, server hooks could be put in there, that would be even better. For various reasons (competitive, moral, security, etc..., but NOT b/c I didn't like the features) I stopped using Outlook over 2 years ago. Now that I have the integration of Palm Info + Email again, I'm hooked.
I hope that Sharp can make a significant entry into the market; my brother works in the embedded industry and he said that the talk is all about the iPaq and Pocket PC 2002 (or whatever it is called). All the new add-ons and the new software are being geared towards these devices. Palm simply lost the mindshare battle and the "sexy" contest to Pocket PC and are now starting to pay for it. He also did say, however, that QT/Embedded and Java (J2ME) are gaining some serious traction among manufacturers. It seems like that the net result of it is that Palm is screwed, unless they come out with something magical from their acquisition of Be's IP. The Linux/Qt/Java combination may be the most promising non-Microsoft handheld solution for the future.
He was our last hope - Obi-wan
No - there is another - Yoda
Tbe way that I see it, there are two kinds of newbies: those who know they know nothing and are comfortable with it, and those who know knothing but nonetheless pretend they are power users. The first group are no problem - I could have just as easily gotten my mother (in the former category) using linux+kde2 as I did using Windows 98. (She, and most types like her, are not going to want to change the default font of the title bar once it has been set up for her; she just wants basic functionality) Also, trust me, it would be far easier explaining the subtleties of a Linux Desktop Environment to her than it has been trying to explain the numerous bugs she has encountered in win98.
Unfortunately folks in the latter category abound (posing power users), and the only reason for their proficiency w/ Windows is sheer repitition and reading the "Windows Tips" in the back of PC magazines. Not once do they have to think their way out of a problem, as there are many aspects of Windows that frankly defy logic. Once they are confronted with a situation which is a little bit different than Windows that requires a little bit of thought, it is very easy for them to throw up their hands and call it difficult to use and too UNIX-y.
I use both Win2k and Linux, and honestly Win2k is fine for what I need it for (it is not bulletproof, tho, in my experience), but I made a (not too time-consuming, btw) commitment to learning how to use Linux, and I'll never go back. However, I think that I am not in the majority, as most people don't want to give up what is familiar.
(BTW, for people that use the argument that "abc is too hard, as I don't want to know how xyz works, I just need it to get my work done!" I say, if you are working on a computer 80% of your working time, doesn't it behoove you to seriously consider alternatives that may (or may not, certainly) allow you to get your work done in a more efficient way? Ever heard of the concept one step backward, 10 steps forward?)
So does the RIAA's recent legal successes put them in the position of being able to bully a company as big as HP/Compaq? Why in god's good name should the RIAA have a say in how the MP3's are stored?
I would have to respectfully disagree with you about the quality of Mozilla - I am quite pleased, to be honest.
However, I still use NS 4.7x because of the roaming user feature (as well as doing my small part to keep webpages non-IE centric, which doesn't seem to be working, BTW). If there are any mozilla developers listening - PLEASE IMPLEMENT THIS. For those of us who dual boot and/or have multiple computers (desktop, laptop, home/work computers, etc..) this is truly the only reasonable way to keep things sane. I would have put up with mozilla's instability long ago if this feature were available. I know that someone on mozdev.org is making a bookmark manager, but having things like preferences, addressbook and bookmarks centrally managed is something that I would have an extremely hard time giving up.
Slashdot Mirror
A little off-topic, but check out media jukebox. I have tried out zinf and any other music player for Linux I could find and have yet to find another program that equals media jukebox in overall functionality but especially in terms of how it organizes your music (you can set up custom views of your music, such as by Genre / Artist / Album, etc...). It supports ripping and encoding to pretty much any format. It also has a great plugin system for transferring files to MP3 devices as well as having CD Burning functionality. If I had any coding skills I would love to bring something like this to Linux. I believe the next version will fully incorporate TV viewing, scheduled recording, etc... If there are any coders looking for a good program to emulate I highly suggest this one. (Std disclaimer; I don't work for j river, I just really dig their program)
I would normally agree that switching distributions just to get an app (or class of apps) to work is a little nutty, but if you *REALLY* want to play videos, the plf rpms for Mandrake make installing quite a bit of video software for linux super easy (though I imagine there are apt-get repositories that do the same). All you need to do is go here to configure and add a urpmi source from one of the plf mirror sites, and it is literally as easy as "urpmi.update -a && urpmi mplayer".
Side note on what a kick ass program mplayer is: plays DVDs, mpg, wmv, mov (sorenson!), divx, xvid, on and on and on. Moreover, the low CPU usage is really quite incredible and makes it possible to watch DivX movies on my laptop that absolutely crawl on winders. Good stuff.
It seems like the UI annoyances Jamie Zawinski complains about with Mplayer are really quite trivial when you consider the immense benefits. I'm sure that there is a skin out there that would conform to the UI principles he wants (if not, how hard could it be to roll your own mplayer skin, especially for someone with his skills?). Find it. Use it. Stop complaining.
(OT: can we please cut the "JWZ" crap? Though I admire the things he has done for Linux, I think he seems to take himself a little too seriously, so when I see "JWZ" I'll think shortcut for "gee wiz", not that whining diva)
Now, I have very little love for the **AA, and I think that the stranglehold over the music industry that they have is wrong, as is their notion of "media consumers" as helpless fetuses plugged into the (ir) matrix, as is their desire to infringe upon our fair use rights, etc... I also believe that the music industry should try and find a way to make file trading / downloading legal and reasonably priced (I really got what I feel is good value for my money from emusic).
However, while stealing^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h swapping songs may be seen as some sort of protest against their injustices, it is still stealing. So if some entity is in some way facilitating stealing, they have every right to shut it down. "Proprietary" seems to have little to do with it. I think the notion of "free" software is hurt tremendously if it tries to align itself with stealing. There are so many other positive virtues about free software that pitting it as a "robin hood" for people that really only care about getting free music does it a disservice.
I just get so tired of this viewpoint; it saddens me to think that all people really care about is free beer, not free speech. I certainly appreciate all of the great software I have been able to receive at no cost (although I contribute here and there both in $$$ and bug reports when I can), but the notion of being part of a community is much more valuable to me. That is why I don't want this community to become, or at least to be seen as, a bunch of whining freeloaders.
At least for evolution, you can go to File -> New -> Evolution Window. Open your contacts, calendar, whatever and you can alt-tab to your heart's delight.
Regarding #2, although it doesn't sound like there is much you can do, here's what I do: at one office where I work I have recently been booting to a Knoppix CD (prompted from the slashdot story some weeks back) and retrieve my prefs and mount my winders network shares (so I can get to my data) from the configuration floppy. I am in the fortunate position where I can ssh into a *nix box to do much of my work, and as long as I have access to email, my data and a console, I am set. The IT dep't (which would never allow linux on a desktop) is none the wiser and when I leave I boot up into windows just in time to walk out the door.
As it stands now, I can spend about 80% of my work day in front of Linux, and 20% for the times when I have to use MS Office to make sure that the documents I made in OpenOffice look correct. Why go to the trouble? Just 'cause I feel much more productive using linux v. windows. Hell, even when I'm in Windows I use cygwin most of the time.
Spam Assassin in combination with procmail has worked well on the server side for me. You can tune the sensitivity to how much spam it catches, but my informal assessment is that it catches about 95% of the spam, with only 1 false positive in about 3 weeks of use (the false positive's and any other email address can be put in a whitelist of email addresses that are let through automatically). Great stuff. Saves me from having to constantly update my ~/.procmailrc for new spammers.
Actually HIPAA is a real pain for the growing number of medical researchers who use EMR (Electronic Medical Records) for academic research (like me). Many useful study designs in which patients are still completely anonymous will suddenly be in murky legal waters after April. For example, one of the (many) "identifiers" that must be removed to use EMR's without explicit consent is the date of any procedure. This restriction alone makes many otherwise useful datasets extremely limited and not worth spending resources on.
So it is good to protect EMR's from (e.g.) Pharmaceuticals trying to use sensitive information for marketing, but some of the shackles that HIPAA will put on researchers are not a good thing (TM). There are already many measures in place within academic research to protect the privacy of patients.
You mention something like Matlab as an alternative if it did not have poor performance. There is a very high quality free (beer, speech) program for Windows/Linux/OSX called R that is a matrix oriented language based on the S language, whose commercial analog is S-Plus. One of the really nice features is that you can write iteration or computation heavy routines in C or Fortran and dynamically load them into your R program/script.. The benefits are that you can take advantage of the high-level nature and easy scriptability of R (not to mention publication quality graphing capabilities), while taking advantage of the speed of Fortran/C.
I am always shocked at how little attention R gets considering how good it is.
I dunno, for those of us who don't shell out $300-$500 on a regular basis for MP3 players, having 64 kpbs mono copies of my music lets me use my 32MB Rio (reliable, can use with Linux) for an hour - perfect for a workout, or a jog, where sound quality is not necessarily at a premium. It is at least reassuring to know that you can get reasonable sound quality at such a low bitrate.
"'Pocket PC' is a generic term used throughout the industry," company representative Marianne Peterson said to a judge in a near-empty court. "Microsoft is simply not infringing this trademark...and asks the court to dismiss the case." Cnet
"The evidence relied on by Lindows is insufficient for two reasons," said Microsoft. "First, it shows use of 'windows' as the name of a feature, not as the name of a genus of products. Such feature references may show that 'windows' is descriptive of the goods, but not generic. Second, Lindows' evidence shows repeated uses of Windows as Microsoft's trademark. Thus, it offers no support for a finding of genericness." zdnet
Maybe not a complete contradiction, but amusing nonetheless.
One thing you can do is to create your own search boxes on top - if you look at the bookmarks.xbel file in the ~/.galeon directory you should be able to easily snoop out how to do it. I have added a search bar for a company directory that I use multiple times per day and it is incredibly useful.
I'm as much of a screenshot hound as the next guy, but being able to compete on "eye candy" is not, IMHO, a positive virtue. I want the GUI to compete on ease of use and innovations that makes people more productive; whether that results in more "eye candy" or not.
While the shots are nice, and KDE3 is indeed looking great, I would be really happy if the following (at a minimum) were addressed (esp. if this could be done in a standard way between GNOME and KDE):
Common Keyboard Shortcuts
A Modern Clipboard
Good Drag & Drop
A Very Simple and Functional Menu System
Good Keyboard Navigation (ironically, one of the best things about MS Windows Explorer)
If Linux is to be adopted on the desktop, I think these are the issues that ought to be trumpeted (if they are worth trumpeting).
Same here - not exactly the reaction I was expecting.
Hmmm... it was my impression that Blockbuster (and other movie rental outfits) went to the movie houses and said that paying big $$$ up front for each movie was an inferior solution to what I believe is their current practice:
They are able to buy DVDs ( and VHS tapes) at a very low price, and they send back some of the profits from each rental to the movies houses. Notice how when you go into Blockbuster now, they have hundreds of the new releases and can "guarantee" that the movie is in stock? From what I understand, this is a direct result of the new arrangement - they can buy many more copies of new releases at near wholesale prices, they just have to give up a part of each rental to the movie houses.
Incidentally, this arrangement makes late fees for places like Blockbuster an even more important source of revenue, since they are making less per returned-on-time rental, so I can't see their being all too enthused with the disposable DVD idea.
My (probably non-unique, BTW) take on it is that AOL holds the browser ace in the hole over MS to protect AOL/Time Warner's marketshare in content and content delivery against an onrushing MS. Imagine the drop in IE market share if AOL decided to move its subscribers away from IE and towards Netscape / Gecko. So much of MS's strategy depends on the omnipresence of IE that losing the AOL base could severely hurt their overall strategy.
As MS makes more and more overtures into the content / content delivery area (Windows Media, anyone?) which directly infringes on AOL/TW turf, AOL can use the browser issue to keep MS in check to a certain degree.
Agreed. I was a math major in college but many of the upper division math classes were populated by CS students who were fulfilling requirements. Those classes were not easy. The critical thinking and problem solving skills devloped by writing mathematical proofs are very much applicable to real-life problems one will face as a programmer. I also agree with the posts people have made about how a broad curriculum fosters communication skills - if you are looking to advance in your company, writing skills and good verbal communication skills are a must.
I went to Japan last spring to visit my family, and I watched the Masters golf tournament with my grandfather on his HDTV. WOW! When they did the tight shots of the ball on the green you could actually see the texture in the individual blades of glass. When they did shots of Rae's creek the detail in the water and reflections was absolutely amazing. I can't wait for HDTV to come down in price so that us average joes can get one.
I would also imagine that Linux users are probably more likely to turn use cookie blocking features as I, for one, block any *.advertising.com, *.hitbox.com, *.doubleclick.net, etc... by using Mozilla/Galeon's cookie management features. I don't know if this would skew their numbers away from Linux, but if their numbers depend on on cookies, then there would be a good reason to be skeptical about their results.
Have you seen the Samsung I300? It is a color palm pilot that is much smaller than the kyocera model (saw a demo model in Circuit City). Go to samsung and check it out. Doesn't have the video & such, but you can browse, do email, even use the other palm functions while you talk as it has a speakerphone. Pretty cool if you ask me...
You might want to check out
samsung's palm phone. Yeah, grafitti entry sucks, but having a true pda (not like the handspring one) act as a phone is awesome, and its available in the US now (for those interested). I saw one the other day at Circuit City and it is quite compact - much smaller and thinner than those Kyocera bricks.
Your point is well taken about the beauty of the UNIX philosophy. The beauty of it, I think, is best expressed in relation to the piping textual output from one command to another.
I use my Palm pilot alot. Before, I would use J-Pilot (an excellent application, btw) + Netscape/Mozilla mail application. Both applications did their job admirably, but there was no advantage whatsoever to having the email functionality separated from the calendar/contact functionality.
Aside from "attracting windows users" evolution actually fills a void - the integration of these disparate information sources is very useful (and if they maintain the rate of improvement - it should be quite a reliable program, it is already gained leaps and bounds in stability). If, in the future, server hooks could be put in there, that would be even better. For various reasons (competitive, moral, security, etc..., but NOT b/c I didn't like the features) I stopped using Outlook over 2 years ago. Now that I have the integration of Palm Info + Email again, I'm hooked.
I hope that Sharp can make a significant entry into the market; my brother works in the embedded industry and he said that the talk is all about the iPaq and Pocket PC 2002 (or whatever it is called). All the new add-ons and the new software are being geared towards these devices. Palm simply lost the mindshare battle and the "sexy" contest to Pocket PC and are now starting to pay for it. He also did say, however, that QT/Embedded and Java (J2ME) are gaining some serious traction among manufacturers. It seems like that the net result of it is that Palm is screwed, unless they come out with something magical from their acquisition of Be's IP. The Linux/Qt/Java combination may be the most promising non-Microsoft handheld solution for the future.
He was our last hope - Obi-wan
No - there is another - Yoda
Tbe way that I see it, there are two kinds of newbies: those who know they know nothing and are comfortable with it, and those who know knothing but nonetheless pretend they are power users. The first group are no problem - I could have just as easily gotten my mother (in the former category) using linux+kde2 as I did using Windows 98. (She, and most types like her, are not going to want to change the default font of the title bar once it has been set up for her; she just wants basic functionality) Also, trust me, it would be far easier explaining the subtleties of a Linux Desktop Environment to her than it has been trying to explain the numerous bugs she has encountered in win98.
Unfortunately folks in the latter category abound (posing power users), and the only reason for their proficiency w/ Windows is sheer repitition and reading the "Windows Tips" in the back of PC magazines. Not once do they have to think their way out of a problem, as there are many aspects of Windows that frankly defy logic. Once they are confronted with a situation which is a little bit different than Windows that requires a little bit of thought, it is very easy for them to throw up their hands and call it difficult to use and too UNIX-y.
I use both Win2k and Linux, and honestly Win2k is fine for what I need it for (it is not bulletproof, tho, in my experience), but I made a (not too time-consuming, btw) commitment to learning how to use Linux, and I'll never go back. However, I think that I am not in the majority, as most people don't want to give up what is familiar.
(BTW, for people that use the argument that "abc is too hard, as I don't want to know how xyz works, I just need it to get my work done!" I say, if you are working on a computer 80% of your working time, doesn't it behoove you to seriously consider alternatives that may (or may not, certainly) allow you to get your work done in a more efficient way? Ever heard of the concept one step backward, 10 steps forward?)
So does the RIAA's recent legal successes put them in the position of being able to bully a company as big as HP/Compaq? Why in god's good name should the RIAA have a say in how the MP3's are stored?
I would have to respectfully disagree with you about the quality of Mozilla - I am quite pleased, to be honest.
However, I still use NS 4.7x because of the roaming user feature (as well as doing my small part to keep webpages non-IE centric, which doesn't seem to be working, BTW). If there are any mozilla developers listening - PLEASE IMPLEMENT THIS. For those of us who dual boot and/or have multiple computers (desktop, laptop, home/work computers, etc..) this is truly the only reasonable way to keep things sane. I would have put up with mozilla's instability long ago if this feature were available. I know that someone on mozdev.org is making a bookmark manager, but having things like preferences, addressbook and bookmarks centrally managed is something that I would have an extremely hard time giving up.