Slightly (or very) off topic about Eclipse.exe
on
Eclipse in Action
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· Score: 1
As I understand it Eclipse is a Java application. But on my Windows installation, Eclipse is started by double clicking a small exe file on my computer. I reckon this is a small stub file of some sort.
Does anyone here know how to create exe files that'll start a Java application? Starting an application with an exe file is slightly more sexy than with a bat file (this may be a personal preference of mine, but still...).
Some Java apps I've used, such as LimeWire, seems to be a binary exe file and perhaps a few DLL's, but not very much more. How are those created? From a distribution point of view it has to be great to not have to rely on the end user having installed the JRE.
Well, perhaps this wasn't the best analogy in the world. But still:
I don't think cost has anything to do with the choise of software. If money had anything to do with software choices, why don't everyone switch from MS Office to OpenOffice? Why don't everyone switch from Windows to Linux?
and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"
When you buy a car, the car is often delivered with a simple stereo system and a couple of speakers. Yet very few people decides to replace the stereo system with a CD changer and a six way speaker system. Why is that?
I don't think it has anything to do with ignorance or laziness. Apart from cost, guess it is because the built in system does the job adequately.
My version of the same thing: You publish a newspaper, giving it out for free to anyone who comes to you asking for a copy. Every morning, I go and get my copy, and stick it in my warehouse. Anyone who comes to me can look at the old versions. This is exactly the case with libraries and newspaper archives right now.
Yes, but the main difference is that in your warehouse you're providing the original of the content. The newspaper I published. Google reprints the newspaper, instead of sending the reader to the original NY Times article (which, in this case, has gone from a free to a payment only state).
What Google does is not archiving, it's republishing. In the case of New York Times, Google caches content from a free period, and makes it accessible even when this content has gone from a free to a paid state at NY Times.
I'm not really debating whether Google's archive is useful or not (it is useful), it's just that I think Google should get permission to provide cached pages, instead of the opposite. That's common courtesy.
I can see your idealistic point here, but let me try to move some of what you're saying into the world of physical products:
You decide to publish a free newspaper that is to be handed out on the streets of your home town. You hire editorial staff and a few people to sell ad space in your paper, so that your business will go break even or maybe even have a little profit.
But every morning a new edition of your paper comes out, I pick up a copy and drives home to my hometown. There I print additional copies [and maybe even attach an ad insert in the paper], go out on the streets and hand out my newspaper - based entirely on your content - for free.
I'm quite sure that you'd cry "theft" before long, and that you'd sue me if I refused to stop publishing my pirated version. And the thing is that the courts would give you right.
The same applies with TV: Fox pays for the production of the tv series 24. They also air the show for free, so that you and I can enjoy it (or not, that depends). Does free broadcasts give me the right to record the show on my computer and rebroadcast it or publish it on my web site as streaming video?
Why should web copyrights be any different? I maintain that if copyright holders want to spread their content - even old versions - via Google, then fine: Let them opt in to Google's cache program.
But Google's opt out program is more akin to telling burglars "Hey, I didn't want you to steal my TV, please return it." The difference between Google and a real burglar is of course that Google "returns the tv" if you ask them to do it, but returning stolen goods doesn't make theft legal.
As the poster mentioned, Google already has a way to opt out of caching
Yes, Google has this. But for a couple of years I've had the opinion that it actually should be reverse: Sites should be able to opt in, not out. The default should be no cache versions.
Lately there's been discussions here on Slashdot about fair use. about 30 second clips of music on the net, and thumbnails of images being fair use. I can agree that that's fair use of content.
But think about Google's cache: A page in Google's cache isn't a part of - or a summary of content - but it is the entire content of a page. If this isn't breach of copyright, I don't know what is.
Google's cache gives more food for thought as well: Let's say I wrote something about someone on my web site, and this person sued me. A jugde decides against me and gives me a fine, and orders me to remove the content. But even if I do so, the inflammatory words would still be accessible trough Google's cache.
Now, some of you may argue that I could just write Google and ask them to remove the page. But the point is that if this is legal, just about anyone can cache my site. If enough search engines caches content, I most probably would never be able to find every site that provided cached versions of my site.
I'm not sure as to what constitutes fair use of content in the US, but in my country at least (Norway) I'm almost certain that Googles cache mechanism would be judged a breach of copyright laws.
OK, so what you really say is that this functionality in XFree isn't obvious for normal people, and isn't particularily easy to set up.
Does this affect Apple's patent application?
In Panther all this will be set up for you from the start, and active users ("sessions") will be available from a menu on the upper right corner of the screen. Two clicks (one to open the menu and one to select the user you want to switch to) and you're done.
This is even easier than XP, which requires you to click START, click LOG OUT, click SWITCH USER, click the user you want to switch to.
Can ease of use and accessibility be patented? It seems to me that that's the main difference between X and even XP and OS X Panther.
(And I don't know that I'd call Perl 6 particularly innovative, either.)
Actually, I don't know if anyone knows if Perl 6's innovative yet. To me, at least, Perl 6 at the point seems to be the VM (Parrot) and a lot of different proposals. What'll end up in Perl 6 eventually I don't think even Larry Wall's sure of yet. [Those of you that attendeded the Open Source Conference i Portland this summer, and attended Larry's State of the Onion speech, may know things about Perl 6 I don't.]
One off topic thing, though: The proposals for Perl 6 sure as hell looks alien and scary to me, a long time user of Perl 5. But then again, when I first started dabbling in Perl the whole thing lookes alien and scary. It still does, but now I love it. So I guess Perl 6'll turn out alright, even if it ends up not being innovative at all.
Well, perhaps you would be patching your machine if OS X were open source, but let's face it: 99,9% of Linux users never patches their OS manually (i.e. edit source code and recompile). They're waiting for binary upgrades trough something like RedHat's update program.
So in that respect I don't think the vast majority of OS X users are worse off then most Linux users.
Your points are good, except I wasn't talking about Bowling for Columbine but his book "Stupid White Men".
You don't answer an important question, though: Why didn't Swift choose the bulldozer tactics of Michael Moore in his days, if Moores bulldozer style is easier to write?
Swift chose what you call the intrinsically more difficult genre of metaphorical fiction, just not because he wanted to do so, but because he had to: In Swifts England there were no first amendment or equivalent, and the idea of free speech weren't very evolved.
Therefore, as a critic of a regime or a system, you had to choose more subtle ways of expressing them than the bulldozer tacticts of a Michael Moore. This wasn't a English problem per se, this was a problem troughout Europe.
The bonus, of course, were the great books of Swift and others. But if the people of those days could choose, I think they'd appreciate it if the system allowed the more bullish styles of a Michael Moore.
I think Michael Moore has already written a book like that. It's called "Stupid White Men", and more or less is about everything Michael finds wrong with the US today.
I have to admit that I believe Michael jumps to conclusions a little too fast sometimes, and also that he's a little too liberal with his usage of facts, but still: "Stupid White Men" is a good, thought provoking and, most importantly, a very funny book.
Whether you agree with his opinions or not, the book's good - and you'll chuckle with him and agree that he makes a few good points, while managing to be funny at the same time.
I'm not sure if it's the same thing. This breaks down a list of alternatives while you type; the more specific you are, the fewer alternatives are presented. Kind of the way the Address bar in Internet Explorer shows several urls and narrows the list when you type.
I got a Smartphone last week (seems to be based on a scaled down version of Windows CE).
For several years I've used different Palm PDA's with Nokia cell phones. But the Smartphone actually does both things well enough (i.e. being a PDA and being a phone), and it is small and stylish enough not to be a nuisance.
I know, I know, a lot of you will rush in to tell me how Microsoft Smartphones suck and so on, but I think that the UI of the Smartphone is really good and in some ways innovative and simplified when compared to a Palm. Specifically I like the search-while-typing feature (I don't know what this is called). Let's say I know I've called a number, but only remember parts of it, then I can enter the part I remember, and the phone simoultaneously searches tro my call history and shows matching numbers. It does the same thing in my Contact list. It's great, and lets me be as unstructured as I want, because it helps me look up the information later anyway.
After a week the Smartphone has two issues that makes it less than optimal:
- All the features and the great screen drains a lot of power, standy time is maximum two days. I'm used to 30 days between charges on my Palm.
- Entering data with the phone keyboard is tedious. The SonyEricsson P800 has a little pen you can use, and I wish that the Smartphone had the same thing.
If somebody manages to solve those two problems, I guess Smartphones - whether they're based on a MS OS or another OS - have a great future. At least in my pocket.
Because people in purchasing and management are stupid. There hasn't been a Sun worth the premium since the SS20.
Actually, I don't know if I agree with you about Sun not being worth the premium.
We run a very large web site that mainly consists of cheap Intel based hardware. But at the core of it all we've always used Sun servers with Solaris. Sure, the Sun servers have always cost us 10 times the price of comparable Intel hardware, but the Sun hardware comes with two things the Intel hardware does not:
1) The hardware (and the OS) is remarkably stable. One server ran for five years under heavy load the entire time without needing any maintenance. In the same time period we had to replace a lot of the Intel hardware.
2) In the unlikely event that something actually breaks, even if it's at 2AM in the morning, a guy comes rushing in and repairs the machine. The most amazing thing is that he always seems to have the right spare parts stored away, just in case. It's a fantastic service, and when you run a large scale, business critical operation, that kind of service is _extremely_ valuable.
And although this has nothing to do with hardware, there's (for me) an important point that concerns the OS too:
3) Even when upgrading the OS from 2.6 to 9, old software and strange old Apache modules (which we have to continue using, even though it's developer has stopped supporting them a long time ago) keeps working. I can't think of many Linux binaries from 1997 that would work for me out-of-the-box on a modern distribution today.
I'm not saying Intel hardware or Linux is bad, but I say that there are a few cases where the safety that overpriced Sun hardware can give you, gets more or less priceless.
Well, even if it isn't astroturfing, realize that he/she had the phone only 24 hours. It often takes a few days or even a few weeks before the novelty-aspect of a new toy wears off and reality, good or bad, sets in.
Even though I don't know what astro turfing is (English is a second language for me), I agree with you that it takes longer time than 24 hours to give an honest review.
But I never intented my original post to be conceived as a review; it was only meant to be a report of my first impression, and that first impression was entirely positive except for the ActiveSync problems.
What amazes me though, is that my positive attitude seems to have annoyed some people here. If the annoyance comes from the fact that the OS is delivered by Microsoft, I'm astonished. Shouldn't quality, innovation and plain old ease of use be hailed no matter who delivers it?
mobile phones nowadays (at least here in Europe) must o a variety of tasks, voice and SMS are not enough.
That comment alone gives me the feeling that you don't know much about what kind of product the Smartphone is. It's not only about SMS and voice, but rather it's about your "variety of tasks".
I never tried to give the impression that I wrote a thorough review. I was just giving my impression based on my first 24 hours with the telephone. But I did sleep, and were still able to understand, use _and_ enjoy using the phone as a phone, using the phone for SMS, using the phone for taking pictures, reading and sending email, add and remove contacts and set up my meeting schedule. For me that says a lot about how intuitive the Smartphone OS really is.
As you, my job _is_ mobile phones. As you, I live in Europe. Maybe I'm an idiot but I never became that productive (i.e. unproductive) so fast with the competing PDA/cell phone hybrids on the European market today. I know I go out on a limb here, but that's my experience - and I like to call myself a professional.
As for the quality and stability I know little, just as I said in my original comment. After all, I've only been using it for 24 hours.
Here where I live the Smartphone was officially introduced yesterday, and I've been using one for 24 hours now.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but this time I feel that their 1.0 product is very polished. I've not expirienced any instability, but perhaps I haven't used it enough yet.
Anyway, the user interface is much simpler, more to the point and more usable than competing Smartphone-ish operating systems, as the ones found on Ericsson P800 and Nokia 7650.
It's difficult to describe, really, but it's simpleness - with natural but (in this context) innovative functions as a home button and a back button on the keyboard - really makes it stand out. The browser "home" and "back" metaphor is uses throughout the OS.
I can't say I've often had this experience with a mobile phone (and I'm not sure that it's a good thing, money wise), but this made me _want_ to use it! *Much*. For mail (the Inbox is surprisingly good), for messaging (it has both SMS and MSN Messenger, as well as MMS), for contacts, for appointments, etc.
For years I've carried around both a Palm and a Nokia cell phone, but this is the first hybrid product that's a serious contender to the Palm.
The major gripe is Microsoft's ActiveSync software. I've never been able to make ActiveSync sync successfully with anything. It works the first few times, then it stops wanting to sync altogether. This happened with my HP Jornada 720, later happened with the original Compaq IPaq and now it happens with this phone.
It's a major let down. But the phone in itself is a joy to use.
I find in hard to believe that MacBidouille actually have been able to benchmark a computer not announced by Apple, based on a chip that's not available before the end of the year according to it's manufacturer IBM.
(Of course, IBM may have been willing to enter Steve Jobs' reality distortion field this time, and have been misleading us all this time - but personally I find that unlikely)
... is how long will it be before someone wants to unlock their legally purchased AAC music and writes "unfuckAAC"?
Well, this isn't exactly the unfuckAAC program you're talking about, but it's close: On Windows I use a program called TotalRecorder. This program records the sound that other programs plays. I use it to record DRM protected WMA files I buy from online music stores.
TotalRecorder quite good, and _very_ reasonably priced (around $11). You've got to do a little manual work, though. If you want to encode the music in MP3 you've got to download BladeEnc or LameEnc separately. And for each song you play, you manually have to save the file and add ID3 tags yourself.
I don't buy too much DRM protected music, though, so I can live with the somewhat manual process.
If you take out Harrison Ford from the original movies you get, in all honesty, a pretty dull 6 hours of movies. Try to imagine it--he's really the only one with any charisma or humor whatsoever.
You know what's even stranger? After Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford has become an actor totally _without_ charisma or humour. Just look at "Six Days Seven Nights" and you'll see what I mean.
The irony of that is that the de-charismation of Harrison Ford makes him the perfect actor for any of the films in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Microsofts wants the Virtual PC technology as a means for customers to run older operating systems such as Windows NT 4.0 on newer versions of Windows.
As strange as this may seem at first, it makes sense: Microsoft is now in the process of stopping support for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. But some customers still have to run applications that requires these operating systems, and VPC will allow them to do just that:
Part of Microsoft's attraction to Connectix's technology may be because it adds depth to its forthcoming Windows Server 2003 family by allowing existing NT 4 customers to keep their NT 4 applications running as virtual machines. This makes the technology a ready-made ramp to migrate customers from NT 4 to the new Windows platform.
I agree! I've never understood why the compiler didn't do this behind the scenes, if concatenation is such a performance dog.
Recently I've looked into.Net and C# a little bit. I know that C# is inspired by Java, but that they've cloned this String (slow appending) vs. StringBuffer (fast appending) rubbish is a little too inspired if you ask me.
During WWII, Charles Lindburg went over to germany, looked at their massive numbers of factories and aircraft, and concluded that the USA could never win the war.
A little off topic: I understand what you're trying to say with this analogy, but it's a little bit flawed.
Charles Lindbergh was probably right, in the sense that the US couldn't beat the Germans alone. Without the British, plus the enourmous effort and losses of the Soviets on the eastern front, the chance is that the US would never have beaten the Germans.
To bring this analogy back on topic: If your analogy tells us anything at all it is that Linux can't win as it is now, but with a little help and focus _perhaps_ it can.
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As I understand it Eclipse is a Java application. But on my Windows installation, Eclipse is started by double clicking a small exe file on my computer. I reckon this is a small stub file of some sort.
Does anyone here know how to create exe files that'll start a Java application? Starting an application with an exe file is slightly more sexy than with a bat file (this may be a personal preference of mine, but still...).
Some Java apps I've used, such as LimeWire, seems to be a binary exe file and perhaps a few DLL's, but not very much more. How are those created? From a distribution point of view it has to be great to not have to rely on the end user having installed the JRE.
Well, perhaps this wasn't the best analogy in the world. But still:
I don't think cost has anything to do with the choise of software. If money had anything to do with software choices, why don't everyone switch from MS Office to OpenOffice? Why don't everyone switch from Windows to Linux?
I don't think it has anything to do with ignorance or laziness. Apart from cost, guess it is because the built in system does the job adequately.
This is the only time I've wished that I could moderate the parent up to 6, Insightful.
(Yeah, I though the poster hit the nail on the head 100 percent).
Yes, but the main difference is that in your warehouse you're providing the original of the content. The newspaper I published. Google reprints the newspaper, instead of sending the reader to the original NY Times article (which, in this case, has gone from a free to a payment only state).
What Google does is not archiving, it's republishing. In the case of New York Times, Google caches content from a free period, and makes it accessible even when this content has gone from a free to a paid state at NY Times.
I'm not really debating whether Google's archive is useful or not (it is useful), it's just that I think Google should get permission to provide cached pages, instead of the opposite. That's common courtesy.
I can see your idealistic point here, but let me try to move some of what you're saying into the world of physical products:
You decide to publish a free newspaper that is to be handed out on the streets of your home town. You hire editorial staff and a few people to sell ad space in your paper, so that your business will go break even or maybe even have a little profit.
But every morning a new edition of your paper comes out, I pick up a copy and drives home to my hometown. There I print additional copies [and maybe even attach an ad insert in the paper], go out on the streets and hand out my newspaper - based entirely on your content - for free.
I'm quite sure that you'd cry "theft" before long, and that you'd sue me if I refused to stop publishing my pirated version. And the thing is that the courts would give you right.
The same applies with TV: Fox pays for the production of the tv series 24. They also air the show for free, so that you and I can enjoy it (or not, that depends). Does free broadcasts give me the right to record the show on my computer and rebroadcast it or publish it on my web site as streaming video?
Why should web copyrights be any different? I maintain that if copyright holders want to spread their content - even old versions - via Google, then fine: Let them opt in to Google's cache program.
But Google's opt out program is more akin to telling burglars "Hey, I didn't want you to steal my TV, please return it." The difference between Google and a real burglar is of course that Google "returns the tv" if you ask them to do it, but returning stolen goods doesn't make theft legal.
Lately there's been discussions here on Slashdot about fair use. about 30 second clips of music on the net, and thumbnails of images being fair use. I can agree that that's fair use of content.
But think about Google's cache: A page in Google's cache isn't a part of - or a summary of content - but it is the entire content of a page. If this isn't breach of copyright, I don't know what is.
Google's cache gives more food for thought as well: Let's say I wrote something about someone on my web site, and this person sued me. A jugde decides against me and gives me a fine, and orders me to remove the content. But even if I do so, the inflammatory words would still be accessible trough Google's cache.
Now, some of you may argue that I could just write Google and ask them to remove the page. But the point is that if this is legal, just about anyone can cache my site. If enough search engines caches content, I most probably would never be able to find every site that provided cached versions of my site.
I'm not sure as to what constitutes fair use of content in the US, but in my country at least (Norway) I'm almost certain that Googles cache mechanism would be judged a breach of copyright laws.
OK, so what you really say is that this functionality in XFree isn't obvious for normal people, and isn't particularily easy to set up.
Does this affect Apple's patent application?
In Panther all this will be set up for you from the start, and active users ("sessions") will be available from a menu on the upper right corner of the screen. Two clicks (one to open the menu and one to select the user you want to switch to) and you're done.
This is even easier than XP, which requires you to click START, click LOG OUT, click SWITCH USER, click the user you want to switch to.
Can ease of use and accessibility be patented? It seems to me that that's the main difference between X and even XP and OS X Panther.
Actually, I don't know if anyone knows if Perl 6's innovative yet. To me, at least, Perl 6 at the point seems to be the VM (Parrot) and a lot of different proposals. What'll end up in Perl 6 eventually I don't think even Larry Wall's sure of yet. [Those of you that attendeded the Open Source Conference i Portland this summer, and attended Larry's State of the Onion speech, may know things about Perl 6 I don't.]
One off topic thing, though: The proposals for Perl 6 sure as hell looks alien and scary to me, a long time user of Perl 5. But then again, when I first started dabbling in Perl the whole thing lookes alien and scary. It still does, but now I love it. So I guess Perl 6'll turn out alright, even if it ends up not being innovative at all.
Well, perhaps you would be patching your machine if OS X were open source, but let's face it: 99,9% of Linux users never patches their OS manually (i.e. edit source code and recompile). They're waiting for binary upgrades trough something like RedHat's update program.
So in that respect I don't think the vast majority of OS X users are worse off then most Linux users.
Your points are good, except I wasn't talking about Bowling for Columbine but his book "Stupid White Men".
You don't answer an important question, though: Why didn't Swift choose the bulldozer tactics of Michael Moore in his days, if Moores bulldozer style is easier to write?
Swift chose what you call the intrinsically more difficult genre of metaphorical fiction, just not because he wanted to do so, but because he had to: In Swifts England there were no first amendment or equivalent, and the idea of free speech weren't very evolved.
Therefore, as a critic of a regime or a system, you had to choose more subtle ways of expressing them than the bulldozer tacticts of a Michael Moore. This wasn't a English problem per se, this was a problem troughout Europe.
The bonus, of course, were the great books of Swift and others. But if the people of those days could choose, I think they'd appreciate it if the system allowed the more bullish styles of a Michael Moore.
Still, "Gulliver's travels" is a joy to read!
I think Michael Moore has already written a book like that. It's called "Stupid White Men", and more or less is about everything Michael finds wrong with the US today.
I have to admit that I believe Michael jumps to conclusions a little too fast sometimes, and also that he's a little too liberal with his usage of facts, but still: "Stupid White Men" is a good, thought provoking and, most importantly, a very funny book.
Whether you agree with his opinions or not, the book's good - and you'll chuckle with him and agree that he makes a few good points, while managing to be funny at the same time.
I'm not sure if it's the same thing. This breaks down a list of alternatives while you type; the more specific you are, the fewer alternatives are presented. Kind of the way the Address bar in Internet Explorer shows several urls and narrows the list when you type.
I got a Smartphone last week (seems to be based on a scaled down version of Windows CE).
For several years I've used different Palm PDA's with Nokia cell phones. But the Smartphone actually does both things well enough (i.e. being a PDA and being a phone), and it is small and stylish enough not to be a nuisance.
I know, I know, a lot of you will rush in to tell me how Microsoft Smartphones suck and so on, but I think that the UI of the Smartphone is really good and in some ways innovative and simplified when compared to a Palm. Specifically I like the search-while-typing feature (I don't know what this is called). Let's say I know I've called a number, but only remember parts of it, then I can enter the part I remember, and the phone simoultaneously searches tro my call history and shows matching numbers. It does the same thing in my Contact list. It's great, and lets me be as unstructured as I want, because it helps me look up the information later anyway.
After a week the Smartphone has two issues that makes it less than optimal:
- All the features and the great screen drains a lot of power, standy time is maximum two days. I'm used to 30 days between charges on my Palm.
- Entering data with the phone keyboard is tedious. The SonyEricsson P800 has a little pen you can use, and I wish that the Smartphone had the same thing.
If somebody manages to solve those two problems, I guess Smartphones - whether they're based on a MS OS or another OS - have a great future. At least in my pocket.
Actually, I don't know if I agree with you about Sun not being worth the premium.
We run a very large web site that mainly consists of cheap Intel based hardware. But at the core of it all we've always used Sun servers with Solaris. Sure, the Sun servers have always cost us 10 times the price of comparable Intel hardware, but the Sun hardware comes with two things the Intel hardware does not:
1) The hardware (and the OS) is remarkably stable. One server ran for five years under heavy load the entire time without needing any maintenance. In the same time period we had to replace a lot of the Intel hardware.
2) In the unlikely event that something actually breaks, even if it's at 2AM in the morning, a guy comes rushing in and repairs the machine. The most amazing thing is that he always seems to have the right spare parts stored away, just in case. It's a fantastic service, and when you run a large scale, business critical operation, that kind of service is _extremely_ valuable.
And although this has nothing to do with hardware, there's (for me) an important point that concerns the OS too:
3) Even when upgrading the OS from 2.6 to 9, old software and strange old Apache modules (which we have to continue using, even though it's developer has stopped supporting them a long time ago) keeps working. I can't think of many Linux binaries from 1997 that would work for me out-of-the-box on a modern distribution today.
I'm not saying Intel hardware or Linux is bad, but I say that there are a few cases where the safety that overpriced Sun hardware can give you, gets more or less priceless.
Even though I don't know what astro turfing is (English is a second language for me), I agree with you that it takes longer time than 24 hours to give an honest review.
But I never intented my original post to be conceived as a review; it was only meant to be a report of my first impression, and that first impression was entirely positive except for the ActiveSync problems.
What amazes me though, is that my positive attitude seems to have annoyed some people here. If the annoyance comes from the fact that the OS is delivered by Microsoft, I'm astonished. Shouldn't quality, innovation and plain old ease of use be hailed no matter who delivers it?
Even on Slashdot?
That comment alone gives me the feeling that you don't know much about what kind of product the Smartphone is. It's not only about SMS and voice, but rather it's about your "variety of tasks".
I never tried to give the impression that I wrote a thorough review. I was just giving my impression based on my first 24 hours with the telephone. But I did sleep, and were still able to understand, use _and_ enjoy using the phone as a phone, using the phone for SMS, using the phone for taking pictures, reading and sending email, add and remove contacts and set up my meeting schedule. For me that says a lot about how intuitive the Smartphone OS really is.
As you, my job _is_ mobile phones. As you, I live in Europe. Maybe I'm an idiot but I never became that productive (i.e. unproductive) so fast with the competing PDA/cell phone hybrids on the European market today. I know I go out on a limb here, but that's my experience - and I like to call myself a professional.
As for the quality and stability I know little, just as I said in my original comment. After all, I've only been using it for 24 hours.
Here where I live the Smartphone was officially introduced yesterday, and I've been using one for 24 hours now.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but this time I feel that their 1.0 product is very polished. I've not expirienced any instability, but perhaps I haven't used it enough yet.
Anyway, the user interface is much simpler, more to the point and more usable than competing Smartphone-ish operating systems, as the ones found on Ericsson P800 and Nokia 7650.
It's difficult to describe, really, but it's simpleness - with natural but (in this context) innovative functions as a home button and a back button on the keyboard - really makes it stand out. The browser "home" and "back" metaphor is uses throughout the OS.
I can't say I've often had this experience with a mobile phone (and I'm not sure that it's a good thing, money wise), but this made me _want_ to use it! *Much*. For mail (the Inbox is surprisingly good), for messaging (it has both SMS and MSN Messenger, as well as MMS), for contacts, for appointments, etc.
For years I've carried around both a Palm and a Nokia cell phone, but this is the first hybrid product that's a serious contender to the Palm.
The major gripe is Microsoft's ActiveSync software. I've never been able to make ActiveSync sync successfully with anything. It works the first few times, then it stops wanting to sync altogether. This happened with my HP Jornada 720, later happened with the original Compaq IPaq and now it happens with this phone.
It's a major let down. But the phone in itself is a joy to use.
I find in hard to believe that MacBidouille actually have been able to benchmark a computer not announced by Apple, based on a chip that's not available before the end of the year according to it's manufacturer IBM.
(Of course, IBM may have been willing to enter Steve Jobs' reality distortion field this time, and have been misleading us all this time - but personally I find that unlikely)
Well, this isn't exactly the unfuckAAC program you're talking about, but it's close: On Windows I use a program called TotalRecorder. This program records the sound that other programs plays. I use it to record DRM protected WMA files I buy from online music stores.
TotalRecorder quite good, and _very_ reasonably priced (around $11). You've got to do a little manual work, though. If you want to encode the music in MP3 you've got to download BladeEnc or LameEnc separately. And for each song you play, you manually have to save the file and add ID3 tags yourself.
I don't buy too much DRM protected music, though, so I can live with the somewhat manual process.
You know what's even stranger? After Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford has become an actor totally _without_ charisma or humour. Just look at "Six Days Seven Nights" and you'll see what I mean.
The irony of that is that the de-charismation of Harrison Ford makes him the perfect actor for any of the films in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
As strange as this may seem at first, it makes sense: Microsoft is now in the process of stopping support for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. But some customers still have to run applications that requires these operating systems, and VPC will allow them to do just that:
Quote from an article in Server Watch:
I agree! I've never understood why the compiler didn't do this behind the scenes, if concatenation is such a performance dog.
.Net and C# a little bit. I know that C# is inspired by Java, but that they've cloned this String (slow appending) vs. StringBuffer (fast appending) rubbish is a little too inspired if you ask me.
Recently I've looked into
A little off topic: I understand what you're trying to say with this analogy, but it's a little bit flawed.
Charles Lindbergh was probably right, in the sense that the US couldn't beat the Germans alone. Without the British, plus the enourmous effort and losses of the Soviets on the eastern front, the chance is that the US would never have beaten the Germans.
To bring this analogy back on topic: If your analogy tells us anything at all it is that Linux can't win as it is now, but with a little help and focus _perhaps_ it can.
"All is forgiven and forgotten!"