One would have thought it would have some kind of firmware that could be updated in a similar fashion to the PSP - either you download the patch through the online service, or you buy a new game and it installs the patch for you before starting the first time.
Of course that assumes the problems being reported are fixable in such a manner. If quality control flew out the window to rush these things out for Christmas and there is something physically wrong with the box then there is not a patch in the world that would fix them. Replacement or a refund would be the only answer.
...who are discovering all the bugs and flaws in this new console. I don't know about others but I really appreciate your services - your willingness to queue up for the box; to pay a premium rate for a revision 1.0A piece of hardware; to choose from a paltry selection of mostly mediocre full-price games; and to gripe that the reality of your purchase might not meet up with your expectations or indeed what the hype lead you to believe.
I do get it. The XBox 360 requires an expensive PC (or PC / TV) running Microsoft software to stream content to it when it is more than capable of doing for itself from its own harddrive. The media playing functionality of XBox is crippleware, pure and simple. There is no logical reason for such a convoluted setup except to drive sales of two Microsoft product lines and to require consumers to buy both in order to use the functionality that one could do in its sleep.
Sorry, but that's the most stupid analogy I've ever heard. The XBox 360 is more than capable of acting as a media jukebox without changing a single resistor in the console. As it is capable of storing MP3s, it makes no sense whatsoever that it cannot store movies as well. It has the capacity and has ample CPU to do it. Neither does it make sense that it couldn't rip DVDs either come to that. No mods are required for any of these things.
So why restrict movie support on the device? Why can it play movies from DVD but not its own harddrive? Why must movies be streamed from another machine running Microsoft software? It makes no technical sense whatsoever. The only sense it makes is from a marketing perspective - a full-featured XBox 360 would have killed Windows Media Centre stone dead. After all, who is going to buy some crappy TV / PC hybrid to do what they can do with a regular TV and Xbox costing less? Thus the XBox 360 has been deliberately crippled with these artificial dependencies to ensure that both products have a future.
It is crippled, pure and simple. It could be a fully fledged media player, but Microsoft have chosen not to make it so for reasons that have nothing to do with what is best for the XBox.
Shipping something which is essentially a dumb client to Windows XP Media Edition and is incapable of storing video doesn't sound like supporting entertainment of all forms to me. Even the the original XBox could be hacked into such a system, suggesting that MS deliberately crippled their new console.
I'm sure the radio spectrum will be rationalised which you can read as selling chunks off. But even so, there will still be more space available for more channels and the main channels such as BBC1 & 2 will almost certainly be broadcast in HD. As for the remainder, I think the debacle over 3G where networks paid BILLIONS to own a chunk of airspace that customers are barely interested in will give future sales pause for thought.
The UK is shutting down analogue by region too. Some regions will have analogue for years longer than other places. I suppose it all depends on how much congestion / interference / population there is from one region to the other.
Let's see - the UK used to have 5 terrestrial analogue channels. Now it has 30 or so digital channels. When analogue gets switched off, the bandwidth will increase and the number of channels will go up.
especially when it's coupled with a Media Center PC and MP3 players to give you a digital entertainment center
But the sick thing is that you shouldn't need a Media Center PC or an MP3 player. It is already plenty powerful enough to be both of those things in its own right. It could be turned into a TIVO like device with a few add-ons and there is nothing to stop it from being a DVD / CD jukebox right now. Even the original XBox can be hacked to be powerful media center. It's doubly stupid since the XBox 360 is far more likely to be sat beside the TV and the TV tuner than some PC is. It leaves the very strong impression that Microsoft deliberately crippled its capabilities to make the lackluster XP Media PCs look more compelling.
What Sony does with theirs remains to be seen. They're not exactly known for making bright decisions either when it comes to empowering their users. Look at the XCP debacle or them foisting ATRAC3 on people over MP3 which effectively lost them the personal music device market. If they had an ounce of brains they'll produce something which truly fullfills the promise of a media center rather than being a dumb client for a PC running elsewhere. Hell, if they were thinking straight the PS3 would even offer to download the movies / music straight from the PS3 to the PSP for mobile viewing.
And the article says "it's probably worth waiting a bit." Why? Will prices drop after the holiday season from $300/$400?
Perhaps there will be better bundles. There will certainly be more games. There will absolutely be more considered reviews of the system from people who've played it for a while. Any bugs or problems will hopefully be common knowledge allowing you to make an informed decision rather than one based on hype.
So buy one from a poor kid next year. I'm sure they'd rather have money for food than a laptop.
I don't see why it should be necessary. I expect that consumer versions of these laptops will appear in time, selling for $150 or so to cover packaging & markup. This is more or less what happened with the Bayliss Freeplay clockwork radio. The consumer model even subsidizes the other one.
I'd be happy to pay a bit more for something which is the perfect tinker toy. I reckon even without the attraction of Linux to hack, it would still make a superb emergency / travel / casual PC for times when you don't want to drag a laptop and all the paraphenalia around. I truly expect if they went on sale that you would see them being used all over the place. I know I'd love to be able to shove one in an overnight bag for times when I'm away, or to haul out when I quickly want to do something.
I just bought my PowerBook G4. But then again, it runs all my current software/games flawlessly. As much as I love my Macs, any time I've bought first gen products they've been sub-par. I think I'll wait a year or two so that there's a good enough collection of native software available.
The old adage being never buy version 1 of anything. Even more so if the anything is a very expensive something that is going to be around in improved versions for a long time to come. I'm just waiting to see what wonderful faults the XBox 360 has in store (aside from barely any games) for the suckers unquestioningly buying it in the first few weeks.
Probably "nothing" to consumers if you're already signed up to their respective premium services. See also AOL's virus checker etc. To software suppliers I expect it will cost $$$$ for what is essentially a useless service.
What do I as the user care if AOL "certifies" a programme is easy to install? If software followed the Windows XP guidelines (sufficient to qualify to show the logo), it would already be easy to install. Therefore, the good guys already have an incentive to seek certification - from Microsoft. They don't need AOL or Yahoo! to do the same. In fact, if AOL were that concerned about spyware they would have dumped the IE a long time ago since that is the primary vector for such things. Who knows, it might even lower their support calls having to deal with stupid users who've installed malware and are now complaining about all the porn popups they see online.
I don't know what someone tagged you as flamebait for responding, but you're right. A single menu was designed first and foremost for single tasking applications.
The rationale for a single menu in a proper multitasking desktop flies out the window. It does simplify learning for beginners since they're trained to look to the top for the actions, but it can be impediment for moderate to power users since it increases the amount of mouse travel and clicks you need to perform for the same action. Your window might be the bottom of the desktop, but the menu that controls its actions are at the top, requiring a journey with the pointer which isn't necessary with multiple windows. The window may even be in the background, requiring a click to activate it, a mental gear shift as the menu changes and a journey up with the mouse to do the action. With multiple menus a single click could activate and pull down the menu you are after. This scenario is painfully common on a desktop with many open folders.
I don't believe single menus are justified anymore. I can see why Apple might choose to keep them, but for any new OS, it would be madness. Context menus help, but Apple does its best to hide those too by shipping single button mice.
Who says its the end users doing the tinkering? I'd suggest it was the project developers who want to do the tinkering, such as modifying what apps are on the box as shipped, writing drivers, changing the default settings, the artwork, the remote administration settings and anything else which must be locked down or modified to suit the requirements.
An analogy would be someone like Netgear who choose Linux to power their ADSL model. I expect they want to tinker with it quite a bit too but it doesn't mean they expect their customers to.
It won't run on any old X86. You don't see V12 engines in Hyundais either. You don't see marble floors in Section 8 housing. You don't see big, soft seats in coach class.
Out of interest why do you compare an Apple branded x86 PC as a having a v12 when all other PCs are deemed as "Hyundais"? The straight fact is that any modern "Hyundai" could quite easily run any x86 operating system from Windows, Solaris, Linux, BSD and OS X with absolutely no performance issue whatsoever. If Apple wants to cripple their OS so it only operates on a subset of hardware that is their own business, but it doesn't mean it's somehow superior or intrinsically more demanding to run than any other OS out there.
I can understand why they don't want any common garden variety PC to run their OS - opening it up to any OEM PC system would seriously impinge on their hardware sales. Still, if that was their big concern, perhaps they should have stuck to the PowerPC platform where it would be the non-issue it is now. It's quite obvious that within six months of OS X x86 coming out that there is going to be some kind of emulator for it, possible running as close to full speed that it would be viable to use it from a generic PC.
I take it then that SAP software always works first time, doesn't require an army of consultants to install, correctly and no one has a bad word of any kind to say about it?
Sounds like a chance to take the OpenSUSE ball and run with it. But seriously, I think the reason KDE got dumped is simply because it's totally unsuited to the enterprise environment. It's easier to lock GNOME down, and GNOME is simpler and more usable to begin with. KDE has some great apps, but the platform would be support hell in any managed desktop situation.
Novell know this, Red Hat know this, Sun know this. That's why they've ultimately all gone with GNOME. It's not that KDE is intrinsically bad, but it's favoured features over usability which was great for a while but it's seriously hurting the platform now.
You say that, but Sony is making vast gobs of money. Why? If you look at their products, they're the usual high quality (and somewhat expensive) kit they've always been. So what's putting people off? I suggest that its DRM and proprietary formats.
I'll illustrate with a couple of examples from my own experience. I own a widescreen Sony TV and I want to get a DVD player. Do I:
Buy a Sony DVD player where region coding is extremely hard if not possible to remove? If it is possible to remove it might involve cutting circuits or soldering.
Buy a Philips DVD player where I can enter a code from the remote control and it will play anything? Oh and the DVD player plays DIVX discs too.
Oops. Sony lost a sale there. Okay. I want to buy a digital camera, and competing brands all have models that I would like to buy. The decision boils down to memory storage format. Do I:
Buy Sony, where there are at least 4 different versions of "memory stick" and each seems conspicuously more expensive than the equivalent storage in other formats? Oh and memory stick is used virtually exclusively in Sony products. Oh and some memory sticks are different from other ones and have DRM built-in. Oh and since they're barely used by anyone else don't expect to be able to reused them in other ways.
Buy any other model. Memory formats are still confusing, but XD, SD, & CF cards are significantly cheaper, are not used exclusively by one vendor, there are more brands of each kind and there seems to be a better chance that I can share the card with my PDA, music player or whatever.
Hmmm.
I want to buy a personal music player. Do I:
Buy a Sony player which looks nice, but is so fucked up that I must run their software and convert MP3 songs first to ATRAC3 before downloading them on the player.
Buy a more modern Sony player which doesn't have this requirement but is still so fucked up that it takes an age to transfer files and the software is so shit that it is next to useless.
Buy an iPod or virtually any other device. The iPod even offers easy software for managing collections, burning, transfer and access to an online store where I can buy music.
Why I'd buy the Sony of course! Just as soon as a piece of my brain had been removed.
I want to buy a music CD which installs spyware onto my machine which is impossible to remove and might seriously damage my OS or require a reinstall if I try. Do I:
Buy the CD, knowing that Sony is doing god knows what everytime I'm running my computer and there is a good possibility that my computer might fall and never get up if I so much as touch the internals, such as by installing a service pack, or Norton Utilities, or any other software that might want to poke around down there.
Boycott Sony (and the band) and buy another CD.
Boycott Sony and pirate the CD.
Boy, that's a tough one.
Sony is losing money hand over fist and I attribute most of this to their insistence on proprietary formats and DRM when it makes no sense. People aren't stupid and if they're faced with two comparable products, one costing a premium and laced with crippleware and one which isn't, it isn't hard to figure out which one they'll choose.
That's DVB-H, not DVB-T. It's related to but not the same nor a superset of DVB-T. I'm talking about something which picks up regular terrestrial digital broadcasts. There is no rocket science about this - Archos sells a USB sized device for up DVB-T signal from any PC. Most modern phones can probably decode MPEG2 anyway. The challenge would be in coping with the roaming and reception aspects. But there is nothing insurmountable about this. Even if you had to be stationary to watch TV, a phone equipped with a memory card could still allow you to record the news before setting out for work and watch it on the train or whatever.
The problem for Nokia, is that even if they do produce a device which did DVB-T, the likes of Vodafone, O2 etc. are highly unlikely to subsidize it or offer it to consumers. After all, who's going to bother with crappy and expensive video clips from their telco, when their phone lets you watch 30 channels for nothing?
Not just a lousy theory, but not a theory at all. The dimwits of the ID (creationist) movement don't have a theory of any kind. Their entire explanation for everything is - "God did it". Don't try to explain, don't investigate, just accept that God did it and that's that. Their god exists in the gaps in our understanding - the more science strips away the mysteries of the universe, the smaller their god of gaps becomes and the more threatened they feel. And evolution is the worst of all as far as they're concerned since it pulls the rug from any literal interpretation of the Bible. Even worse is that evolution is a demonstrable fact as well as a theory and is supported by an insurmountable pile of evidence spanning across multiple fields of science.
A more level headed person might start to think that the Bible shouldn't be taken literally (especially since it can't be). The fundies aren't rational so they feebly wrap their own non-theory up and call it ID. Worse is the total hypocrisy that accompanies this, since the creationist movement spouts outright lies and distortions to further their cause. Talkorigins.org maintains an extensive list of the lies and quote mining creationists do to push their agenda. So in addition to being irrational, creationists are bald faced liars too.
I wonder what the Bible says about lies and dishonesty.
It's just that the current 3G offerings are a total ripoff. It's a wonder that anyone would bother with the pissy service offered by the likes of 3, Vodfone, O2 etc. For a small fortune your 3G subscription lets you watch miniscule clips such as movie trailers and other crap that you can get for free from the Internet.
Considering that the UK has DVB coverage in virtually every populated area (and it's unencrypted), it is a wonder that there is no phone that can tap into it. There might be issues with roaming around from area to area & reception, but even so a phone that offered unimpeded access to DVB would still kick 3Gs arse all over the shop. Later models would probably even be DVRs as well, either to a memory card or hard drive.
But such a device is unlikely to ever happen - at least as a subsidized offering. The telcos have spent billions on the lame duck called 3G and they're certainly not going to let their customers get something better for free.
No it hasn't. It's supposedly simplicity makes it suck at usability.
That must mean OS X really sucks right?
You could have used "I" instead of "most people", because you are obviously only talking about your own feelings.
No. Most people. Stick any random 100 people in a usability lab and make them do tasks in well tuned GNOME or KDE and GNOME would win everytime. KDE is a dogs dinner of buttons, menus, tabs, options with all the common stuff mixed in with the uncommon stuff. There is no way anyone who knows the slightest thing about UI design or usability would think different. The one thing KDE has going for it from a usability standpoint is consistency - apps do resemble each other in terms of menu structure and shortcuts but nothing has been done to address the complexity.
I'm sure that KDE is just fine for some power users, but it certainly isn't fine for anyone else. And I say some power users - as a power user I find it a bore to have to spend 10 minutes to figure out how to turn off the stupid single-click-to-launch-apps behaviour that KDE inflicts on people by default. That single click thing stands as a massive red flag that KDE doesn't pay enough attention usability or it would have been changed a long time ago.
There you go, it's your feelings you're discussing, not those of the entire community, not even a large portion of the community.
So tell us which idiot in this community had the great idea of inserting 6 menu items in a row starting with "Configure" and each leading to their own dialogs, some of which are extremely complicated. Which idiot thought it a great idea for Konq to ask if I want to accept cookies when I start it the first time, but doesn't even offer to explain what a cookie is? Which idiot designed the main Konq prefs dialog to have 17 sections, comprising of 26 tabs with many options per tab, where a good half of those options are extremely esoteric / advanced.
It's funny, but every other browser is configurable from a couple of menu items at most. No other browser, be it Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari, Mozilla or even the AOL-buggered NS8 even remotely approaches the complexity of Konqueror. The comparison to Safari which shares a similar engine is particularly damning.
And that's just one app. The whole desktop is like that. In many ways KDE is far superior to GNOME, but anyone who thinks it has the edge on usability or simplicity is wrong. Start by reading some human interface guidelines from various operating systems and note the rationale for doing things in a certain way. Then count the number of ways KDE screws up. Aside from what the complexity means to the user, it means as much again to a sysadmin who might have to maintain hundreds of desktops and answer dumb user questions.
BTW, in case you think that I believe GNOME is perfect, I don't. But at least it's trying, and its efforts at usability and strict adherence to its HIG are paying off in spades. If it was a feature contest, KDE might win, but IBM, Red Hat, Sun, and Novell realise that its much more than that.
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Of course that assumes the problems being reported are fixable in such a manner. If quality control flew out the window to rush these things out for Christmas and there is something physically wrong with the box then there is not a patch in the world that would fix them. Replacement or a refund would be the only answer.
We salute you!
I do get it. The XBox 360 requires an expensive PC (or PC / TV) running Microsoft software to stream content to it when it is more than capable of doing for itself from its own harddrive. The media playing functionality of XBox is crippleware, pure and simple. There is no logical reason for such a convoluted setup except to drive sales of two Microsoft product lines and to require consumers to buy both in order to use the functionality that one could do in its sleep.
So why restrict movie support on the device? Why can it play movies from DVD but not its own harddrive? Why must movies be streamed from another machine running Microsoft software? It makes no technical sense whatsoever. The only sense it makes is from a marketing perspective - a full-featured XBox 360 would have killed Windows Media Centre stone dead. After all, who is going to buy some crappy TV / PC hybrid to do what they can do with a regular TV and Xbox costing less? Thus the XBox 360 has been deliberately crippled with these artificial dependencies to ensure that both products have a future.
It is crippled, pure and simple. It could be a fully fledged media player, but Microsoft have chosen not to make it so for reasons that have nothing to do with what is best for the XBox.
Shipping something which is essentially a dumb client to Windows XP Media Edition and is incapable of storing video doesn't sound like supporting entertainment of all forms to me. Even the the original XBox could be hacked into such a system, suggesting that MS deliberately crippled their new console.
I'm sure the radio spectrum will be rationalised which you can read as selling chunks off. But even so, there will still be more space available for more channels and the main channels such as BBC1 & 2 will almost certainly be broadcast in HD. As for the remainder, I think the debacle over 3G where networks paid BILLIONS to own a chunk of airspace that customers are barely interested in will give future sales pause for thought.
The UK is shutting down analogue by region too. Some regions will have analogue for years longer than other places. I suppose it all depends on how much congestion / interference / population there is from one region to the other.
The same for satellite & cable.
But the sick thing is that you shouldn't need a Media Center PC or an MP3 player. It is already plenty powerful enough to be both of those things in its own right. It could be turned into a TIVO like device with a few add-ons and there is nothing to stop it from being a DVD / CD jukebox right now. Even the original XBox can be hacked to be powerful media center. It's doubly stupid since the XBox 360 is far more likely to be sat beside the TV and the TV tuner than some PC is. It leaves the very strong impression that Microsoft deliberately crippled its capabilities to make the lackluster XP Media PCs look more compelling.
What Sony does with theirs remains to be seen. They're not exactly known for making bright decisions either when it comes to empowering their users. Look at the XCP debacle or them foisting ATRAC3 on people over MP3 which effectively lost them the personal music device market. If they had an ounce of brains they'll produce something which truly fullfills the promise of a media center rather than being a dumb client for a PC running elsewhere. Hell, if they were thinking straight the PS3 would even offer to download the movies / music straight from the PS3 to the PSP for mobile viewing.
We'll see soon enough.
Perhaps there will be better bundles. There will certainly be more games. There will absolutely be more considered reviews of the system from people who've played it for a while. Any bugs or problems will hopefully be common knowledge allowing you to make an informed decision rather than one based on hype.
I don't see why it should be necessary. I expect that consumer versions of these laptops will appear in time, selling for $150 or so to cover packaging & markup. This is more or less what happened with the Bayliss Freeplay clockwork radio. The consumer model even subsidizes the other one.
I'd be happy to pay a bit more for something which is the perfect tinker toy. I reckon even without the attraction of Linux to hack, it would still make a superb emergency / travel / casual PC for times when you don't want to drag a laptop and all the paraphenalia around. I truly expect if they went on sale that you would see them being used all over the place. I know I'd love to be able to shove one in an overnight bag for times when I'm away, or to haul out when I quickly want to do something.
The old adage being never buy version 1 of anything. Even more so if the anything is a very expensive something that is going to be around in improved versions for a long time to come. I'm just waiting to see what wonderful faults the XBox 360 has in store (aside from barely any games) for the suckers unquestioningly buying it in the first few weeks.
The sad part is everyone here including myself is slavering at the thought of these crank handled laptops. I'd buy one in an instant.
What do I as the user care if AOL "certifies" a programme is easy to install? If software followed the Windows XP guidelines (sufficient to qualify to show the logo), it would already be easy to install. Therefore, the good guys already have an incentive to seek certification - from Microsoft. They don't need AOL or Yahoo! to do the same. In fact, if AOL were that concerned about spyware they would have dumped the IE a long time ago since that is the primary vector for such things. Who knows, it might even lower their support calls having to deal with stupid users who've installed malware and are now complaining about all the porn popups they see online.
The rationale for a single menu in a proper multitasking desktop flies out the window. It does simplify learning for beginners since they're trained to look to the top for the actions, but it can be impediment for moderate to power users since it increases the amount of mouse travel and clicks you need to perform for the same action. Your window might be the bottom of the desktop, but the menu that controls its actions are at the top, requiring a journey with the pointer which isn't necessary with multiple windows. The window may even be in the background, requiring a click to activate it, a mental gear shift as the menu changes and a journey up with the mouse to do the action. With multiple menus a single click could activate and pull down the menu you are after. This scenario is painfully common on a desktop with many open folders.
I don't believe single menus are justified anymore. I can see why Apple might choose to keep them, but for any new OS, it would be madness. Context menus help, but Apple does its best to hide those too by shipping single button mice.
An analogy would be someone like Netgear who choose Linux to power their ADSL model. I expect they want to tinker with it quite a bit too but it doesn't mean they expect their customers to.
Out of interest why do you compare an Apple branded x86 PC as a having a v12 when all other PCs are deemed as "Hyundais"? The straight fact is that any modern "Hyundai" could quite easily run any x86 operating system from Windows, Solaris, Linux, BSD and OS X with absolutely no performance issue whatsoever. If Apple wants to cripple their OS so it only operates on a subset of hardware that is their own business, but it doesn't mean it's somehow superior or intrinsically more demanding to run than any other OS out there.
I can understand why they don't want any common garden variety PC to run their OS - opening it up to any OEM PC system would seriously impinge on their hardware sales. Still, if that was their big concern, perhaps they should have stuck to the PowerPC platform where it would be the non-issue it is now. It's quite obvious that within six months of OS X x86 coming out that there is going to be some kind of emulator for it, possible running as close to full speed that it would be viable to use it from a generic PC.
I take it then that SAP software always works first time, doesn't require an army of consultants to install, correctly and no one has a bad word of any kind to say about it?
Novell know this, Red Hat know this, Sun know this. That's why they've ultimately all gone with GNOME. It's not that KDE is intrinsically bad, but it's favoured features over usability which was great for a while but it's seriously hurting the platform now.
I'll illustrate with a couple of examples from my own experience. I own a widescreen Sony TV and I want to get a DVD player. Do I:
Oops. Sony lost a sale there. Okay. I want to buy a digital camera, and competing brands all have models that I would like to buy. The decision boils down to memory storage format. Do I:
- Buy Sony, where there are at least 4 different versions of "memory stick" and each seems conspicuously more expensive than the equivalent storage in other formats? Oh and memory stick is used virtually exclusively in Sony products. Oh and some memory sticks are different from other ones and have DRM built-in. Oh and since they're barely used by anyone else don't expect to be able to reused them in other ways.
- Buy any other model. Memory formats are still confusing, but XD, SD, & CF cards are significantly cheaper, are not used exclusively by one vendor, there are more brands of each kind and there seems to be a better chance that I can share the card with my PDA, music player or whatever.
Hmmm.I want to buy a personal music player. Do I:
Why I'd buy the Sony of course! Just as soon as a piece of my brain had been removed.
I want to buy a music CD which installs spyware onto my machine which is impossible to remove and might seriously damage my OS or require a reinstall if I try. Do I:
Boy, that's a tough one.
Sony is losing money hand over fist and I attribute most of this to their insistence on proprietary formats and DRM when it makes no sense. People aren't stupid and if they're faced with two comparable products, one costing a premium and laced with crippleware and one which isn't, it isn't hard to figure out which one they'll choose.
What a stupid thing to say. Do you know what falsifiability means and how it applies to science?
The problem for Nokia, is that even if they do produce a device which did DVB-T, the likes of Vodafone, O2 etc. are highly unlikely to subsidize it or offer it to consumers. After all, who's going to bother with crappy and expensive video clips from their telco, when their phone lets you watch 30 channels for nothing?
A more level headed person might start to think that the Bible shouldn't be taken literally (especially since it can't be). The fundies aren't rational so they feebly wrap their own non-theory up and call it ID. Worse is the total hypocrisy that accompanies this, since the creationist movement spouts outright lies and distortions to further their cause. Talkorigins.org maintains an extensive list of the lies and quote mining creationists do to push their agenda. So in addition to being irrational, creationists are bald faced liars too.
I wonder what the Bible says about lies and dishonesty.
Considering that the UK has DVB coverage in virtually every populated area (and it's unencrypted), it is a wonder that there is no phone that can tap into it. There might be issues with roaming around from area to area & reception, but even so a phone that offered unimpeded access to DVB would still kick 3Gs arse all over the shop. Later models would probably even be DVRs as well, either to a memory card or hard drive.
But such a device is unlikely to ever happen - at least as a subsidized offering. The telcos have spent billions on the lame duck called 3G and they're certainly not going to let their customers get something better for free.
That must mean OS X really sucks right?
You could have used "I" instead of "most people", because you are obviously only talking about your own feelings.
No. Most people. Stick any random 100 people in a usability lab and make them do tasks in well tuned GNOME or KDE and GNOME would win everytime. KDE is a dogs dinner of buttons, menus, tabs, options with all the common stuff mixed in with the uncommon stuff. There is no way anyone who knows the slightest thing about UI design or usability would think different. The one thing KDE has going for it from a usability standpoint is consistency - apps do resemble each other in terms of menu structure and shortcuts but nothing has been done to address the complexity.
I'm sure that KDE is just fine for some power users, but it certainly isn't fine for anyone else. And I say some power users - as a power user I find it a bore to have to spend 10 minutes to figure out how to turn off the stupid single-click-to-launch-apps behaviour that KDE inflicts on people by default. That single click thing stands as a massive red flag that KDE doesn't pay enough attention usability or it would have been changed a long time ago.
There you go, it's your feelings you're discussing, not those of the entire community, not even a large portion of the community.
So tell us which idiot in this community had the great idea of inserting 6 menu items in a row starting with "Configure" and each leading to their own dialogs, some of which are extremely complicated. Which idiot thought it a great idea for Konq to ask if I want to accept cookies when I start it the first time, but doesn't even offer to explain what a cookie is? Which idiot designed the main Konq prefs dialog to have 17 sections, comprising of 26 tabs with many options per tab, where a good half of those options are extremely esoteric / advanced.
It's funny, but every other browser is configurable from a couple of menu items at most. No other browser, be it Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari, Mozilla or even the AOL-buggered NS8 even remotely approaches the complexity of Konqueror. The comparison to Safari which shares a similar engine is particularly damning.
And that's just one app. The whole desktop is like that. In many ways KDE is far superior to GNOME, but anyone who thinks it has the edge on usability or simplicity is wrong. Start by reading some human interface guidelines from various operating systems and note the rationale for doing things in a certain way. Then count the number of ways KDE screws up. Aside from what the complexity means to the user, it means as much again to a sysadmin who might have to maintain hundreds of desktops and answer dumb user questions.
BTW, in case you think that I believe GNOME is perfect, I don't. But at least it's trying, and its efforts at usability and strict adherence to its HIG are paying off in spades. If it was a feature contest, KDE might win, but IBM, Red Hat, Sun, and Novell realise that its much more than that.