Before you bomb us Europeans, can we please have back:
also, Harry Potter, Ferrari&Lamborghini, the names for pizza, mozzarella, etc. (they keep the stuff they sell by those names though:-)... what else? Uhmmm... the Linux kernel?
By return of post, we will send back:
Wait! You forgot to send back Eminem, Snoop Dog & co. - (I'd hold on to some jazz though)
According to La Repubblica online (try the fish if necessary), Sun, Nokia, Yahoo and Oracle are asking the EU Antitrust to intervene about Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Messanger and Windows Movie Maker 2 as well.
The current ruling could set a useful precedent... with someone finally having the guts to intervene against illegal abuse of monopolies, Microsoft may finally have to pay for the damage it has done to the software industry and users
As on La Repubblica.it (use the fish if necessary) today, the EU Parliament approved a proposal for regulating P2P stating that acts committed in good faith by consumers - such as downloading music from Internet for personal use - won't be prosecuted. It still has to go through the EU Council, but it's a good start...
How convenient of you to cut out this half of his post
I recently bought a laptop with a a 60 gig disk, 512 MB ram, Athlon 2400+, 54g wireless, and other goodies... but also WinXP... for $1k.
there was nothing convenient or inconvenient about it. I referred to something clearly unreal claimed by the poster, namely "there's no choice in the matter for anyone when it comes to laptops" which is clearly a false statement. You can buy an iBook for example, and you don't have to put a single piece of Microsoft software on it, certainly not Windows. This is choice, and freeedom of choice is better than no choice. I'm surprised how even people who claim to be pro-free-market, pro-capitalism, etc. fail to see that.
But if you want to talk cost, then let's talk cost: MTBF, TCO, etc... FYI, both my PBG4 and the Dell I was referring to were top-of-the-line models in late 2001, and both came to about $3000. My machine has more RAM, is much lighter and portable (batteries just won't last much on that Dell...), and has several features which the Dell lacks (HD target mode, instant-on, etc.), while the Dell has higher resolution and more expansion space, being much bulkier
Next: before you ask, obviously, today's cheapest iBook (about $1000.-) has similar features to what I had to pay $3000 for, almost 3 years ago. I suppose today's cheapest Dell does too, for about the same price.
Ultimately, when it comes to laptops, Apple machines have always been very price-competitive (offering features which other brands had to copy... starting from the first PB100); and still remain very price-competitive for any professional use (with the possible exception of the sub-$1000 market or the extra-heavy market).
there's no choice in the matter for anyone when it comes to laptops. Sure, there are a few Windows-less brands out there, but even with Windows they're cheaper (presumably due to economies of scale) than the alternative.
Funny, I thought the PowerBook G4 on which I'm typing this is Windows-less. And the laptops I used to have, the Pismo, the Wallstreet, the PB2400, the PB190, the PB145, the PB100... were those Windows machines?
Why, someone must have lied to me!
PS: my PBG4 was actually cheaper and better equipped than the Dell which my colleague bought at the same time...
regardless of the reasons behind Microsoft worms, if more people avoided the Borg's software, everybody would have less problems with such petty issues.
I've been using GSM phones since 900MHz-only years around the world, and when I finally got a GSM phone for using it in the States as well, I didn't realize that I needed to be careful about reception issues. Apparently, 1900MHz (the main -and until recently only- frequency for GSM phones in North America) is not as good as 900MHz for rural areas. That means that, while it's probably great in big cities, it's no good elsewhere around the States.
Moral of the story: I got burned badly with an Ericsson T68i, which I had replaced 4 times before finally giving up on it ever working well as a phone. Sure, it was one of the first phones with color, bluetooth, PDA-like capabilities, it could even iSync with my PBG4 and my Palm, but I expect a phone first of all to work fine - as a phone! Is that so unusual?
So I looked and looked, and finally found a good independent source of information about phone's reception qualities (since no phone company nor cellphone provider will tell you anything about which phone works better in terms of reception: I've tried asking a lot of them).
I ended up with a Motorola P280. It does what I need, in order of importance:
great reception on all 3 main bands (1900,1800,900MHz)
SMS with enough characters on the screen at once
it can sync phone numbers (even calendar entries?) with iSync (despite the fact that no documentation admits it, its icon appears happily on iSync's panel when connecting it with a USB cable).
if necessary, it can be used as a GPRS modem (again, through USB)
It has no color, no pictures, no camera, no bluetooth, its games really suck... but it's an excellent phone in case you need to actually use it as a phone:-)
Apparently, Nokia's 3650 is a good phone despite the built-in gadgets. But the keypad... that's what I would not want to have when typing SMSs...
TCO(Mac) < TCO(MS-Win PC) big time (even MS-Windows people admit it).
And of course, it is not Cost is how MS won its foothold in operating systems
but marketing, E&E, FUD against anything else and illegal monopoly exploits - that's what won MS its marketshare.
How is the service up north in Finland and Sweden in the less populated areas?
I haven't been very much north there, but my personal experience even around the smaller islands in Sweden (archipelagos) 900MHz GSM was quite fine, using old Moto flip-fones. According to official coverage listings it's quite decent, especially for the top 2 providers.
However, I was not trying to imply that Sweden's or Finland's coverage is better or worse than elsewhere - I was simply considering the fact that the parent post's opinion:
I don't see how any comparision can be made.
Hong Kong is tiny and densely populated. How many cell towers are there in the entire city/colony? 30 or 40, maybe?
The United States is a huge diverse place. The Cellphone business in the US can't be operated the same way.
... i.e. the usual poster trying to justify why "worse is better" or "well yeah, but you just can't do that here because of XYZ..."
In this case, the poster's excuse would have been density. Which is obviously not a good excuse. IMHO, it'd be better to admit that even elsewhere in the world things could sometimes work better than here...
I've seen the "population density" excuse many times... even if Finland and Swedens' population density is quite low; nossir, uhm, er, wait - how could they possibly do fine with cellphones? Ah! Of course, they're socialists. To have their GSM networks working well and cheap, they probably have to eat their own children...
PS: OK, this is offtopic, but I find it hilarious when someone uses the words socialist and communist as an insult...
My plan (in the US) has free long distance so it doesn't matter what the number is. I get 1000 minutes to call whatever number whenever I want.
[sarcasm ON] free long distance? Great! Could you tell me where you got such a great deal? I would not mind avoiding paying my monthly service fee for the minutes which I may or may not use... [sarcasm OFF]
Seriously: the U.S.of A. cellphone market is slowly getting better, but I still don't get two major obstacles to real free market for cellphone users in North America (how do things work in Mexico?) :
no real pay-per-use option: all existing plans' minutes expire within one-two months, so unless you want a one-time deal, it's still more convenient to be locked in a monthly plan where you must pay your monthly fees ($30/months for 300 whenever min. + unlimited weekends for example with T-Mobile, one of the cheapest around here) whether you use those minutes or not.
minutes get used to receive a call! Very few other places on earth allow such a rip-off... you have to pay for some one else to call you!
so much for "free" long distance...
AFAIK, the aboves 2 obstacles won't go away once number-portability starts here.
And one more thing: what if I don't want to pay for that "free" phone which locks me for another year with a carrier? WHat if my phone works just fine, thank you very much (actually, very few currently sold GSM phones have a better reception on the 1900MHz than the Moto P280/Timeport 280 - whcih is not in production anymore: so I really don't want to switch unless I find one which has better reception.
But to me MacOS is fucking bloated and expensive.
Uhm... to an average user, it may be. For me (being myself an average Linux user) Red Hat 8 & co. are bloated and expensive: yes, my time (just like for most of IT professionals) is more expensive than what it costs to purchase Mac OS X 10.3. That of course by taking into account the time I need to spend every time I have to figure out how to do something sysadmin-like in Linux - time which I don't need to waste if I develop on Mac OS X (which for a lot of SW development, is quite similar to Linux). And my PBG4 is less expensive than my colleagues' Dells, at similar specs
If I need to make it less-bloated, well, I can do that with Mac OS X just as well as (I hope) you can do with Linux.
I want an os to be configurable, stable and resource friendly.
OK, so do I - again, that's why I prefer to use Mac OS X. I don't mind Linux, if I have a sysadmin when I get stuck.
Linux has it's own goals and ideals and definately isn't a substitute for MacOS. It would be really stupid just to copy an existing OS.
IMHO, Linux's user interface (be it KDE or Gnome) tries to be a substitute for Windows. Which in itself is not such a great GUI to begin with.
Ok, how else would you shorten the term "Cafe Latte"?
Well... my reply would be "why do you need to shorten it?" but that's probably not the right answer.
Also, the fact that the word latte is NOT used in normal conversation to be "milk" also makes it unique in almost any context, not just ordering a drink.
In English, it is obviously not used that way. But lattemeansmilk in Italian. I think however that it may be strange for non-English speakers to hear words misused in such a way.
BTW, by no means I am trying to single out American ways of using foreign words. To give you a counterexample, probably just as bad, in Italy people often use the word mail to refer to email - I honestly do not understand why - and to make matters worse (or funnier, if you are so inclined), it's usually la mail i.e. with a feminine article!
why people think that reference books (even Internet ones) are up to date and provide indebatable evidence or proof
Sorry - I was just trying to find an online dictionary to show that in Italian (i.e. the origin of the word) latte means milk - that's all.
Uhm... so you say that in these (mostly English speaking countries) people use latte for caffelatte nowadays?
My small personal statistic of 30-something countries in Europe, Asia and Africa so far was the opposite, admittedly mostly non-English speaking people (e.g. Japan, Sweden, Senegal, Croatia, Germany, Ukraine, France, Hungary, Belgium, etc.). But maybe in the recent years things have changed.
It's really sad though, that a fine product of Italian cousine gets McDonaldsized both in name and in preparation.
Obviously, it happened before - one only has to remember what happened to pizza in the U S of A... really sad. Starbucks (just as McDonalds) keeps decreasing the overall expected quality of food, and unfortunately it succeeds (unlike McDonalds) in maintaining the appearance of 'high quality' to many customers.
PS: Latte is certainly not a normal means of asking for milk, it simply meansmilk (in Italian, of course: it's an Italian word after all).
We refer to ourselves as such, because our official name is the United States of America. Shouldn't you know this already, oh so enlightened non-American?
Sori for mai pur Inglis:-)
What I was referring to in " it's the only country so far where I've heard such an abbreviation " was the fact that , from what I've heard so far, this is the only country where caffelatte is abbreviated to latte which is milk, not coffee+milk (= caffelatte)...
but yes, it still quite off-topic, and the picture to which the original post was referring looks like milk anyway...
I know I risk being offtopic, but why would it look like milk:-)?
I still can't understand why so many people in the U S of A (yes, it's the only country so far where I've heard such an abbreviation) keep calling milk what in fact is caffelatte...
I've been using Minidiscs since 1997 and I am quite happy with them. Until iPods (or other portable hard-disk players) have good quality stereo recording with both line and optical inputs, I can't see how I could replace portable MD recorders.
That said, here's how I transfer digital audio from the PBG4 to the Sharp MD mt-877 portable (using this one now after a Sharp 722 and a Sharp 702):
PBG4 USB out -> USB cable -> Edirol -> optical cable -> Sharp MD in
This Edirol UA3 has been working fine for me the past couple of years, no drivers needed on Mac OS X! All you have to do is to choose the right output device in the Sound System Preference.
Of course, the drawback is that everything gets transfered in real time - no such thing as iPod's thousands of songs per minute;-)
Hope this helps, and here's the URL for newer Edirol's gear (the UA3 is no longer in production): the UA-1D for example.
Slashdot Mirror
More such information at Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org
and incidentally, it's one of the excuses the one who's been greased by the Lord uses to keep his stronghold over analog TV, against EU rulings, running.
PowerBook G5? Hell yeah!
Mac OS X is, ahem, Unix-based, unlike that other thing you mentioned.
QuickTime is the API which started affordable desktop video (nor all-software video editing like Premiere, FCP, etc., incidentally).
QuickTime came out a couple of years before Mplayer, I think...
While we're at it, please return the English, Spanish, etc. since they're European... and start speaking your own languages instead - thanks!
also, Harry Potter, Ferrari&Lamborghini, the names for pizza, mozzarella, etc. (they keep the stuff they sell by those names though :-) ... what else? Uhmmm... the Linux kernel?
By return of post, we will send back:
Wait! You forgot to send back Eminem, Snoop Dog & co. - (I'd hold on to some jazz though)
The current ruling could set a useful precedent... with someone finally having the guts to intervene against illegal abuse of monopolies, Microsoft may finally have to pay for the damage it has done to the software industry and users
As on La Repubblica.it (use the fish if necessary) today, the EU Parliament approved a proposal for regulating P2P stating that acts committed in good faith by consumers - such as downloading music from Internet for personal use - won't be prosecuted. It still has to go through the EU Council, but it's a good start...
that's interesting... do you happen to have some reference to the 25 countries, and how those taxes are applied? (just curious)
I recently bought a laptop with a a 60 gig disk, 512 MB ram, Athlon 2400+, 54g wireless, and other goodies... but also WinXP... for $1k.
there was nothing convenient or inconvenient about it. I referred to something clearly unreal claimed by the poster, namely "there's no choice in the matter for anyone when it comes to laptops" which is clearly a false statement. You can buy an iBook for example, and you don't have to put a single piece of Microsoft software on it, certainly not Windows. This is choice, and freeedom of choice is better than no choice. I'm surprised how even people who claim to be pro-free-market, pro-capitalism, etc. fail to see that.
But if you want to talk cost, then let's talk cost: MTBF, TCO, etc...
FYI, both my PBG4 and the Dell I was referring to were top-of-the-line models in late 2001, and both came to about $3000. My machine has more RAM, is much lighter and portable (batteries just won't last much on that Dell...), and has several features which the Dell lacks (HD target mode, instant-on, etc.), while the Dell has higher resolution and more expansion space, being much bulkier
Next: before you ask, obviously, today's cheapest iBook (about $1000.-) has similar features to what I had to pay $3000 for, almost 3 years ago. I suppose today's cheapest Dell does too, for about the same price.
Ultimately, when it comes to laptops, Apple machines have always been very price-competitive (offering features which other brands had to copy... starting from the first PB100); and still remain very price-competitive for any professional use (with the possible exception of the sub-$1000 market or the extra-heavy market).
Funny, I thought the PowerBook G4 on which I'm typing this is Windows-less. And the laptops I used to have, the Pismo, the Wallstreet, the PB2400, the PB190, the PB145, the PB100... were those Windows machines?
Why, someone must have lied to me!
PS: my PBG4 was actually cheaper and better equipped than the Dell which my colleague bought at the same time...
Friends don't let friends use Microsoft products.
I've been using GSM phones since 900MHz-only years around the world, and when I finally got a GSM phone for using it in the States as well, I didn't realize that I needed to be careful about reception issues. Apparently, 1900MHz (the main -and until recently only- frequency for GSM phones in North America) is not as good as 900MHz for rural areas. That means that, while it's probably great in big cities, it's no good elsewhere around the States.
Moral of the story: I got burned badly with an Ericsson T68i, which I had replaced 4 times before finally giving up on it ever working well as a phone. Sure, it was one of the first phones with color, bluetooth, PDA-like capabilities, it could even iSync with my PBG4 and my Palm, but I expect a phone first of all to work fine - as a phone! Is that so unusual?
So I looked and looked, and finally found a good independent source of information about phone's reception qualities (since no phone company nor cellphone provider will tell you anything about which phone works better in terms of reception: I've tried asking a lot of them).
I ended up with a Motorola P280. It does what I need, in order of importance:
- great reception on all 3 main bands (1900,1800,900MHz)
- SMS with enough characters on the screen at once
- it can sync phone numbers (even calendar entries?) with iSync (despite the fact that no documentation admits it, its icon appears happily on iSync's panel when connecting it with a USB cable).
- if necessary, it can be used as a GPRS modem (again, through USB)
It has no color, no pictures, no camera, no bluetooth, its games really suck... but it's an excellent phone in case you need to actually use it as a phoneApparently, Nokia's 3650 is a good phone despite the built-in gadgets. But the keypad... that's what I would not want to have when typing SMSs...
TCO(Mac) < TCO(MS-Win PC) big time (even MS-Windows people admit it).
And of course, it is not
Cost is how MS won its foothold in operating systems
but marketing, E&E, FUD against anything else and illegal monopoly exploits - that's what won MS its marketshare.
I haven't been very much north there, but my personal experience even around the smaller islands in Sweden (archipelagos) 900MHz GSM was quite fine, using old Moto flip-fones. According to official coverage listings it's quite decent, especially for the top 2 providers.
However, I was not trying to imply that Sweden's or Finland's coverage is better or worse than elsewhere - I was simply considering the fact that the parent post's opinion:
I don't see how any comparision can be made.
Hong Kong is tiny and densely populated. How many cell towers are there in the entire city/colony? 30 or 40, maybe?
The United States is a huge diverse place. The Cellphone business in the US can't be operated the same way.
In this case, the poster's excuse would have been density. Which is obviously not a good excuse. IMHO, it'd be better to admit that even elsewhere in the world things could sometimes work better than here...
I've seen the "population density" excuse many times ... even if Finland and Swedens' population density is quite low; nossir, uhm, er, wait - how could they possibly do fine with cellphones? Ah! Of course, they're socialists. To have their GSM networks working well and cheap, they probably have to eat their own children ...
PS: OK, this is offtopic, but I find it hilarious when someone uses the words socialist and communist as an insult...
[sarcasm ON] free long distance? Great! Could you tell me where you got such a great deal? I would not mind avoiding paying my monthly service fee for the minutes which I may or may not use... [sarcasm OFF]
Seriously: the U.S.of A. cellphone market is slowly getting better, but I still don't get two major obstacles to real free market for cellphone users in North America (how do things work in Mexico?) :
so much for "free" long distance...
AFAIK, the aboves 2 obstacles won't go away once number-portability starts here.
And one more thing: what if I don't want to pay for that "free" phone which locks me for another year with a carrier? WHat if my phone works just fine, thank you very much (actually, very few currently sold GSM phones have a better reception on the 1900MHz than the Moto P280/Timeport 280 - whcih is not in production anymore: so I really don't want to switch unless I find one which has better reception.
Uhm... to an average user, it may be. For me (being myself an average Linux user) Red Hat 8 & co. are bloated and expensive: yes, my time (just like for most of IT professionals) is more expensive than what it costs to purchase Mac OS X 10.3.
That of course by taking into account the time I need to spend every time I have to figure out how to do something sysadmin-like in Linux - time which I don't need to waste if I develop on Mac OS X (which for a lot of SW development, is quite similar to Linux). And my PBG4 is less expensive than my colleagues' Dells, at similar specs
If I need to make it less-bloated, well, I can do that with Mac OS X just as well as (I hope) you can do with Linux.
I want an os to be configurable, stable and resource friendly.
OK, so do I - again, that's why I prefer to use Mac OS X. I don't mind Linux, if I have a sysadmin when I get stuck.
Linux has it's own goals and ideals and definately isn't a substitute for MacOS. It would be really stupid just to copy an existing OS.
IMHO, Linux's user interface (be it KDE or Gnome) tries to be a substitute for Windows. Which in itself is not such a great GUI to begin with.
Well... my reply would be "why do you need to shorten it?" but that's probably not the right answer.
Also, the fact that the word latte is NOT used in normal conversation to be "milk" also makes it unique in almost any context, not just ordering a drink.
In English, it is obviously not used that way. But latte means milk in Italian. I think however that it may be strange for non-English speakers to hear words misused in such a way.
BTW, by no means I am trying to single out American ways of using foreign words. To give you a counterexample, probably just as bad, in Italy people often use the word mail to refer to email - I honestly do not understand why - and to make matters worse (or funnier, if you are so inclined), it's usually la mail i.e. with a feminine article!
why people think that reference books (even Internet ones) are up to date and provide indebatable evidence or proof
Sorry - I was just trying to find an online dictionary to show that in Italian (i.e. the origin of the word) latte means milk - that's all.
You may or may not like it.
Thanks. Indeed...
My small personal statistic of 30-something countries in Europe, Asia and Africa so far was the opposite, admittedly mostly non-English speaking people (e.g. Japan, Sweden, Senegal, Croatia, Germany, Ukraine, France, Hungary, Belgium, etc.). But maybe in the recent years things have changed.
It's really sad though, that a fine product of Italian cousine gets McDonaldsized both in name and in preparation. Obviously, it happened before - one only has to remember what happened to pizza in the U S of A ... really sad. Starbucks (just as McDonalds) keeps decreasing the overall expected quality of food, and unfortunately it succeeds (unlike McDonalds) in maintaining the appearance of 'high quality' to many customers.
PS: Latte is certainly not a normal means of asking for milk, it simply means milk (in Italian, of course: it's an Italian word after all).
Sori for mai pur Inglis :-)
What I was referring to in " it's the only country so far where I've heard such an abbreviation " was the fact that , from what I've heard so far, this is the only country where caffelatte is abbreviated to latte which is milk, not coffee+milk (= caffelatte) ...
but yes, it still quite off-topic, and the picture to which the original post was referring looks like milk anyway...
I still can't understand why so many people in the U S of A (yes, it's the only country so far where I've heard such an abbreviation) keep calling milk what in fact is caffelatte...
That said, here's how I transfer digital audio from the PBG4 to the Sharp MD mt-877 portable (using this one now after a Sharp 722 and a Sharp 702):
PBG4 USB out -> USB cable -> Edirol -> optical cable -> Sharp MD in
This Edirol UA3 has been working fine for me the past couple of years, no drivers needed on Mac OS X! All you have to do is to choose the right output device in the Sound System Preference.
Of course, the drawback is that everything gets transfered in real time - no such thing as iPod's thousands of songs per minute ;-)
Hope this helps, and here's the URL for newer Edirol's gear (the UA3 is no longer in production): the UA-1D for example.