I use Skype over Sprint's 3G on a Touch Pro and it works perfectly. The audio quality is comparable to normal phone calls. There's no reason why it wouldn't work.
The operating system required to run the development tools is obvious, and everyone who would buy a smartphone has or has access to a copy of Windows. As for Visual Studio, the trial works perfectly with full functionality and no nagging - I miss Ecipse and the CDT severely, but it's certainly workable, and it's free. If you're desperate, it's certainly easier to afford this setup than the initial outlay for iPhone development, for example, though I would rather work on Android programs.
Perhaps not, but when talking about phones, it is the most open platform short of Android. You can install anything without any restriction and develop applications for it with no initial cost. That's part of the reason I didn't buy an iPhone and went with a Touch Pro instead; some things are very frustrating, but nothing would be more frustrating than not being able to do what I want with my own phone, and Windows Mobile sadly comes closest to that at the moment.
First of all, you don't "patent" software - you patent portions of software. Patenting entire pieces of software would make no sense, as it would do nearly the same darned thing as copyrighting it. Second, what defines complex? All software ideas are complex. Is a BSP tree sufficiently complex? I imagine so, and a patent on that would have decimated the game industry early on.
If the encryption is done using a program rather than hardware in the drive, cyphertext would be going to/from the port and it would be decrypted by the computer, not the drive itself. (If they have enough access to your machine to install a port listening device of some kind, however, you're hosed anyway.)
By the way, USB flash drives, by their nature, are inherently insecure.
It's an external hard drive, but at any rate it's not insecure if you use encryption. If anyone gets my USB drive they'll get the hardware, the decryption program, and a bunch of noise. At any rate, why would security even be an issue? It's not like they can prevent anyone from copying the data after the conference.
1: Let's be able to configure shares easily. Right now its a mess and as a matter of fact, KDE does not seem to have something to represent Microsoft's "Add network places."
This seems to work fine under Ubuntu.
2: Fonts still terrible on Linux. I will jump with joy the day fonts on a Linux machine will look beautiful bey default. Right now, one has to install Microsoft's TT fonts and/or do some compilation. This is a non starter.
I agree fully. Installing msttcorefonts is one of the first things I do before I get a headache trying to read text. This needs serious work. Surely someone in the Linux community can draw fonts?
3: Software installation is still a mess. The other day, I tried to get Adobe's Flash player installed on a Debian system and I was not that successful till I installed from source. I do not see Joe Six Pack going through this.
Software installation works perfectly for me. apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree. I don't know how you installed Flash from source, since it's not Open Source - I assume you mean you had to run their installer.
"Maximize" it? You mean "use more ram than it really needs for no good reason"? Why would a program do that? Why would any program use more resources than it needs, when there are people who don't have 2GB of ram and will suffer due to it?
Do you really think average Joe is going to buy a $500 laptop, notice it's slow, and think "Ah, I know what it needs. It needs more ram. I'll go buy ram, make sure it's notebook memory and be sure to get the right speed and sticks which aren't too large as to hit the limit in my machine, then take this cover off, slide this lever, pull out these cards, and put in these." It isn't going to happen.
As for the "yawn" at the beginning of your post: show a little maturity. If it bored you, why did you respond? Of course, it didn't bore you - it served only as a tool of condescension, and I don't think anyone would deem condescension necessary in a civilized discussion.
Perhaps not "top of the line", but they are certainly more powerful than the average $500 laptop sold at CompUSA - and let's face it, when faced with a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop people will buy the $500 one. If it says it runs Vista, it should run it well - it may not be an excellent machine, but an operating system shouldn't be the most demanding thing people use. Said $500 laptop probably contains 1GB of ram if you're lucky.
I speak from experience, as someone who owns a DV9000. I ordered it with 1GB of ram to max out the CPU specs, knowing I would upgrade the ram later. Vista ran very very slowly. I upped it to 1.5GB and it runs just fine. Ram makes all the difference with Vista, even though it shouldn't. Say all you want about all the ram usage being pre-caching - if it were just pre-caching, it wouldn't have been slow with twice the ram it "needs", and it wouldn't have sped up dramatically just by adding half a gig more space used only for precaching. If that's their idea of speeding up applicaiton loading with pre-caching, I'd rather go back to the XP way of things.
The "Mojave Experiment" method is simple: get a person who says Vista is slow (because it is, on their machine), sit them in front of a computer with twice the ram theirs has, and get them to do a recorded double-take at how fast said machine is running Vista. Then they go home filled with excitement ready to prove themselves wrong on how slow Vista is and realize their copy of Vista isn't as fast as the Vista they used and wonder what the heck the testers did (remember, these are the kinds of people who read "Word for Dummies" - any person with a clue about technology would be filtered out in a screening process or have his response never aired).
I say all this as someone who uses Windows for daily development without much issue. I don't hate Windows. I do, however, hate dishonesty, whether express or implied, as the lawyers would say.
I used it since the first beta I could get my hands on after noticing that it had been released (which, I believe, was Beta 1), and it was always fast. Over the 6 months to a year I used it in beta, it crashed about 10 times total, and never slowed down.
In looks there is no comparison, gnome is and always has been plug ugly.
Personally, I find KDE to be much uglier than Gnome. KDE 3 comes with the ugly oil-shine plastic theme as the default, and it's not easy to find something better (trust me, after scouring kde-look for hours.) Gnome, with a proper theme (for me "proper theme" is ClearLooks-Classic with Tango-Generator icons - perfect looking, in my opinion, and very consistent) is better looking than KDE 3 in my opinion.
Then again, I run Vista in Classic Mode because I hate the inconsistency of the Aero interface, so perhaps I'm not representative of most visual preferences. I favor visual consistency over appearance, and Gnome is nothing if not consistent with a well-rounded icon theme (like said humongous Tango-Generator themes which pull in hundreds of official and unofficial Tango icons from everywhere and use them in the perfect spots).
Yes, they are voluntary. Why should they be mandatory? If you don't want to buy unrated games, don't buy unrated games, any more than you would buy unrated movies. If the parents are concerned, they will only buy rated games for their children.
I run Vista beautifully. It doesn't get in my way, it runs the software I want it to, it just works. So yes, it is possible. Without much effort, either, I might add.
Yes, it is possible... For you. I do programming with C++ and Python. Visual C++ constantly fails to work properly, if at all. Vista is constantly getting in my way, and causing errors which should not exist. Linux has none of this (but brings it's own problems to the table, but that's a different story, and it's a worthwhile tradeoff in my view).
I again emphasize: Not everyone's needs are the same. Just because it works beautifully for what you happen to do, and what you're used to, doesn't mean it will work perfectly for what I do and what I am used to. I realize I am in the minority, and that most of the United States (and perhaps the world) use Windows - whether it is "the best OS" for them or whether they simply haven't tried the alternatives I don't know, and it isn't my place to judge that. I like it, so I use it.
Neither is all that happy, both have been looking forward to a fully usable kubuntu with the 4.1 (because it "seems more like windows"), but maybe I should begin looking into E17 for them?
Or perhaps they can stop expecting it to be something it isn't and get used to Linux as a real operating system, not "that shoddy free Windows clone" they expect it to be.
They wouldn't stop working; they would simply require administrative privileges to run.
That's the entire problem - to avoid inconveniencing people running legacy applications with a "are you sure you want to run this" dialog box, they completely and totally change the behavior of old -and- new programs in an unpredictable way.
I don't advocate entirely getting rid of legacy support. Some operating systems (Linux, OS X) do so in some cases and sometimes the results are less than pleasant. I do, however, advocate not hosing current applications to do it.
If I try to write a file to C:\somesuch, I expect it to either go there or to present the user with a "insufficient permissions" error and have them decide whether they trust my program or do not want to use it any longer. Now that Vista is lying and putting it somewhere I didn't expect, what if I need to read that file in a separate program? Even if Vista has been tested sufficiently to prevent mysterious errors when it trips over its shoelaces forgetting what folder it abstracted C:\ to for this particular program (and I wouldn't put it below it, considering how often other Microsoft tools (Visual Studio comes to mind) trip over their collective shoestrings on anything resembling complexity), it will have no way of knowing to hand this complementary program the same fake folder.
And yes, there are legitimate reasons for doing things like this, particularly in software development tools.
I've been programming for 9 years and have only read about 5 books on the subject. Everything else is gleaned from the Internet and personal experience/experimentation. I rarely even think about needing books to do my work, and the last time I picked up a programming book for reference to something I had forgotten was nearly 2 months ago.
Different people learn in different ways. I often read books for recreation, but nearly never read books on the subject of my work. It doesn't matter much where the knowledge comes from - just that you have it.
If one of those days is a doc from your boss that either looks great on you computer and not on his or good on his and bad on yours. Could cause the question on why you are using that free crap. If Office 2007 works anything like the previous versions, the documents will look completely different on different computers anyway. Document consistency from MSO to OOO is the least of your worries. Citing http://ancaluca.blogspot.com/2007/09/please-dont-send-me-doc-attachments.html , http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html#tth_sEc1.8 , and others.
I agree. I watched a few videos of those systems, and they are toys compared to what Eclipse has for version control (and I suspect it isn't the plugin writers' faults...).
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I use Skype over Sprint's 3G on a Touch Pro and it works perfectly. The audio quality is comparable to normal phone calls. There's no reason why it wouldn't work.
The operating system required to run the development tools is obvious, and everyone who would buy a smartphone has or has access to a copy of Windows. As for Visual Studio, the trial works perfectly with full functionality and no nagging - I miss Ecipse and the CDT severely, but it's certainly workable, and it's free. If you're desperate, it's certainly easier to afford this setup than the initial outlay for iPhone development, for example, though I would rather work on Android programs.
Perhaps not, but when talking about phones, it is the most open platform short of Android. You can install anything without any restriction and develop applications for it with no initial cost. That's part of the reason I didn't buy an iPhone and went with a Touch Pro instead; some things are very frustrating, but nothing would be more frustrating than not being able to do what I want with my own phone, and Windows Mobile sadly comes closest to that at the moment.
First of all, you don't "patent" software - you patent portions of software. Patenting entire pieces of software would make no sense, as it would do nearly the same darned thing as copyrighting it. Second, what defines complex? All software ideas are complex. Is a BSP tree sufficiently complex? I imagine so, and a patent on that would have decimated the game industry early on.
If the encryption is done using a program rather than hardware in the drive, cyphertext would be going to/from the port and it would be decrypted by the computer, not the drive itself. (If they have enough access to your machine to install a port listening device of some kind, however, you're hosed anyway.)
By the way, USB flash drives, by their nature, are inherently insecure.
It's an external hard drive, but at any rate it's not insecure if you use encryption. If anyone gets my USB drive they'll get the hardware, the decryption program, and a bunch of noise. At any rate, why would security even be an issue? It's not like they can prevent anyone from copying the data after the conference.
(hint: flash. Hint2: Flash.) (...) I would *@#$@*# kill for a browser that didn't suck quite as horrifically as firefox.
Firefox isn't responsible for Flash crashing. Put the blame where the blame goes - at Adobe's feet.
1: Let's be able to configure shares easily. Right now its a mess and as a matter of fact, KDE does not seem to have something to represent Microsoft's "Add network places."
This seems to work fine under Ubuntu.
2: Fonts still terrible on Linux. I will jump with joy the day fonts on a Linux machine will look beautiful bey default. Right now, one has to install Microsoft's TT fonts and/or do some compilation. This is a non starter.
I agree fully. Installing msttcorefonts is one of the first things I do before I get a headache trying to read text. This needs serious work. Surely someone in the Linux community can draw fonts?
3: Software installation is still a mess. The other day, I tried to get Adobe's Flash player installed on a Debian system and I was not that successful till I installed from source. I do not see Joe Six Pack going through this.
Software installation works perfectly for me. apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree. I don't know how you installed Flash from source, since it's not Open Source - I assume you mean you had to run their installer.
"Maximize" it? You mean "use more ram than it really needs for no good reason"? Why would a program do that? Why would any program use more resources than it needs, when there are people who don't have 2GB of ram and will suffer due to it?
Do you really think average Joe is going to buy a $500 laptop, notice it's slow, and think "Ah, I know what it needs. It needs more ram. I'll go buy ram, make sure it's notebook memory and be sure to get the right speed and sticks which aren't too large as to hit the limit in my machine, then take this cover off, slide this lever, pull out these cards, and put in these." It isn't going to happen.
As for the "yawn" at the beginning of your post: show a little maturity. If it bored you, why did you respond? Of course, it didn't bore you - it served only as a tool of condescension, and I don't think anyone would deem condescension necessary in a civilized discussion.
Perhaps not "top of the line", but they are certainly more powerful than the average $500 laptop sold at CompUSA - and let's face it, when faced with a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop people will buy the $500 one. If it says it runs Vista, it should run it well - it may not be an excellent machine, but an operating system shouldn't be the most demanding thing people use. Said $500 laptop probably contains 1GB of ram if you're lucky.
I speak from experience, as someone who owns a DV9000. I ordered it with 1GB of ram to max out the CPU specs, knowing I would upgrade the ram later. Vista ran very very slowly. I upped it to 1.5GB and it runs just fine. Ram makes all the difference with Vista, even though it shouldn't. Say all you want about all the ram usage being pre-caching - if it were just pre-caching, it wouldn't have been slow with twice the ram it "needs", and it wouldn't have sped up dramatically just by adding half a gig more space used only for precaching. If that's their idea of speeding up applicaiton loading with pre-caching, I'd rather go back to the XP way of things.
The "Mojave Experiment" method is simple: get a person who says Vista is slow (because it is, on their machine), sit them in front of a computer with twice the ram theirs has, and get them to do a recorded double-take at how fast said machine is running Vista. Then they go home filled with excitement ready to prove themselves wrong on how slow Vista is and realize their copy of Vista isn't as fast as the Vista they used and wonder what the heck the testers did (remember, these are the kinds of people who read "Word for Dummies" - any person with a clue about technology would be filtered out in a screening process or have his response never aired).
I say all this as someone who uses Windows for daily development without much issue. I don't hate Windows. I do, however, hate dishonesty, whether express or implied, as the lawyers would say.
I used it since the first beta I could get my hands on after noticing that it had been released (which, I believe, was Beta 1), and it was always fast. Over the 6 months to a year I used it in beta, it crashed about 10 times total, and never slowed down.
In looks there is no comparison, gnome is and always has been plug ugly.
Personally, I find KDE to be much uglier than Gnome. KDE 3 comes with the ugly oil-shine plastic theme as the default, and it's not easy to find something better (trust me, after scouring kde-look for hours.) Gnome, with a proper theme (for me "proper theme" is ClearLooks-Classic with Tango-Generator icons - perfect looking, in my opinion, and very consistent) is better looking than KDE 3 in my opinion.
Then again, I run Vista in Classic Mode because I hate the inconsistency of the Aero interface, so perhaps I'm not representative of most visual preferences. I favor visual consistency over appearance, and Gnome is nothing if not consistent with a well-rounded icon theme (like said humongous Tango-Generator themes which pull in hundreds of official and unofficial Tango icons from everywhere and use them in the perfect spots).
It does contain license information. Try installing a package like sun-java6-jre...
Yes, they are voluntary. Why should they be mandatory? If you don't want to buy unrated games, don't buy unrated games, any more than you would buy unrated movies. If the parents are concerned, they will only buy rated games for their children.
I do not see a problem with the current system.
I again point out the existing voluntary system. That is what the text next to said rating is for. http://www.mercuryrapids.co.uk/tombraider8/Logos/ESRB_T.jpg
This has nothing to do with a broken rating system and everything to do with broken parenting.
You mean like having a little sticker on them saying "Rated M for Mature"? ...Like the ones we have now, under a completely voluntary system?
You're right. I'm sorry; I didn't see the GP post, as it was marked troll. I read your comment in the wrong context.
I run Vista beautifully. It doesn't get in my way, it runs the software I want it to, it just works. So yes, it is possible. Without much effort, either, I might add.
Yes, it is possible... For you. I do programming with C++ and Python. Visual C++ constantly fails to work properly, if at all. Vista is constantly getting in my way, and causing errors which should not exist. Linux has none of this (but brings it's own problems to the table, but that's a different story, and it's a worthwhile tradeoff in my view).
I again emphasize: Not everyone's needs are the same. Just because it works beautifully for what you happen to do, and what you're used to, doesn't mean it will work perfectly for what I do and what I am used to. I realize I am in the minority, and that most of the United States (and perhaps the world) use Windows - whether it is "the best OS" for them or whether they simply haven't tried the alternatives I don't know, and it isn't my place to judge that. I like it, so I use it.
SCO comes to mind. :) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_/ai_n11445696
Neither is all that happy, both have been looking forward to a fully usable kubuntu with the 4.1 (because it "seems more like windows"), but maybe I should begin looking into E17 for them?
Or perhaps they can stop expecting it to be something it isn't and get used to Linux as a real operating system, not "that shoddy free Windows clone" they expect it to be.
They wouldn't stop working; they would simply require administrative privileges to run.
That's the entire problem - to avoid inconveniencing people running legacy applications with a "are you sure you want to run this" dialog box, they completely and totally change the behavior of old -and- new programs in an unpredictable way.
I don't advocate entirely getting rid of legacy support. Some operating systems (Linux, OS X) do so in some cases and sometimes the results are less than pleasant. I do, however, advocate not hosing current applications to do it.
If I try to write a file to C:\somesuch, I expect it to either go there or to present the user with a "insufficient permissions" error and have them decide whether they trust my program or do not want to use it any longer. Now that Vista is lying and putting it somewhere I didn't expect, what if I need to read that file in a separate program? Even if Vista has been tested sufficiently to prevent mysterious errors when it trips over its shoelaces forgetting what folder it abstracted C:\ to for this particular program (and I wouldn't put it below it, considering how often other Microsoft tools (Visual Studio comes to mind) trip over their collective shoestrings on anything resembling complexity), it will have no way of knowing to hand this complementary program the same fake folder.
And yes, there are legitimate reasons for doing things like this, particularly in software development tools.
I've been programming for 9 years and have only read about 5 books on the subject. Everything else is gleaned from the Internet and personal experience/experimentation. I rarely even think about needing books to do my work, and the last time I picked up a programming book for reference to something I had forgotten was nearly 2 months ago.
Different people learn in different ways. I often read books for recreation, but nearly never read books on the subject of my work. It doesn't matter much where the knowledge comes from - just that you have it.
I agree. I watched a few videos of those systems, and they are toys compared to what Eclipse has for version control (and I suspect it isn't the plugin writers' faults...).