It's not because it's intrinsically "better" (it isn't), it's not because it's got better apps (some are, some aren't). But what it has in spades is simplicity and usability. KDE is a kitchen sink and it's a mess of options, buttons and menus that most people couldn't care less about. Anyone trying to appeal to enterprises (or just people who don't want a million options) would choose GNOME.
As it happens I just installed SUSE 10 and I quite like it. I'm using KDE right now but even the integration efforts of SUSE can't paper over the cracks. Just seeing 6 menu items in a row in Konq that say "Configure" just makes me shudder. If I had a choice I would use GNOME, but the GNOME integration in SUSE is terrible (where is the input from Ximian?). Therefore it's a surprise to hear they're now going to favour GNOME. I guess they've decided its better to go with Ximian than with SUSE.
Who on earth is stupid enought to buy anything on its first day of release? Whether MS deluge the market or artificially restrict the flow, the simple fact is that the prices will be sky high in the first few weeks and probably until Christmas. That and owners will be able to choose from miniscule selection of games which seems to be shrinking ever further with announced delays from one maker after another. If early adopters are really lucky, they'll get a system which is broken or flawed in some way just like the dead pixel issue with the PSP, or the scratchy screens of the iPod Nano.
Every hyped gadget release is like this. Why do people buy into the hype? It's better to wait and gauge the reaction, especially after the hysteria has died down and been replaced by more level headed reviews and the number of game titles has increased.
BBC News has allowed you to watch the news and various events live or archived on their site for some time now. Unlike CNN (via shitty Real OnePass) it's free too.
Games games are extremely timer & controller sensitive and requiuse high end functionality. It would be fairly straightforward to put various barriers into a homebrew API which would make it impossible for it to be used to play cracked games.
Why doesn't Nintendo create an amateur game development kit? Clearly there is a market, perhaps small but there none the less. It's money they'd probably enjoy having that they don't now.
The same charge could be levelled at Sony and the PSP. The only legitimate reason people have for breaking Sony's copy protection is to produce homebrew stuff. So why not release some APIs that allow people to produce homebrew legally? Hell, they could even release a Linux UMD and let people develop apps to run from their memory sticks. Given a legal outlet, most of the issues with firmware cracks (and people returning PSPs bricked by the process), would go away.
I programme Java and C#. To be honest, the differences between the two languages (especially since Java 1.5 &.NET 2.0) are so slight that it makes no damned difference which one I'm writing for. What makes a massive difference is the tools you use to write for these languages.
Eclipse is an absolutely awesome development platform. It is packed with so many useful things, that it's hard to imagine what developing without would be like. Being able to rename a class and every call to it, or turn a bunch of methods into an interface or seeing all compiler errors in real time etc., is so mind bogglingly useful that I don't think I could ever go back to a plain text editor unless it was forced on me. I'd say without a shadow of doubt that using something like Eclipse halves the amount of time it takes to develop code over a text editor.
DevStudio 2003 is not so great in this regard (although editing forms is easier) but I expect that the 2005 edition is a hell of a lot better. I'll have to grab the "express" version and get a taste of how far it's advanced.
So in an ideal world one of the two would not exist?
Not at all. They'd still be there, but there would be not a single indication that from the user's perspective that they were running something called KDE or GNOME. They'd just be using their desktop. It is a complete irrelevance from the user's perspective what the name of the component is.
I don't care what the Win32 desktop is called, or the Mac one. It's just the desktop. In the real world, I don't care who makes my car's steering wheel or pedals either. I could find out but to most people it is of supreme unimportance.
It doesn't stop someone knowledgable from swapping out KDE for GNOME or XFCE using a command but this is an irrelevance from a user's perspective. Secretaries, operators, receptionists, home users etc do not need and should not have to know any of the inner workings of their operating system unless they themselves choose to find out more. That is the default position for XP & Mac for good reason.
Basically, you can make it look like GTK, but you can't make it GTK
True, but that's the same for Firefox, OpenOffice and Java too. Firefox and OpenOffice look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not. Java Swing apps only look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not.
But at the end of the day, the look is the most distinctive cue. The differences in the "feel" of XP and GTK are minimal. In fact, I can't think of a substantial difference between the two. They have similar widgets, similar mousing behaviour, similar keyboard navigation. You might have to ensure the double-click speed was the same, and some of the metrics for scroll bars and such like but nothing major I can think of.
WINE does help with porting. The winelib and various tools mean it's possible to port a lot of Win32 code, compiling it with gcc, linking to winelib and run it natively on Linux. The (large) flies in the ointment is that a lot of code uses ATL or MFC which may or may not compile on Linux or may or may not be legal to compile on non-MS platforms.
It would be a useful companion project to WINE & MingW to see open source versions of ATL & MFC. I would guess that this would be a fraught process since the source for both is easy to come by.
Using GTK for painting is not opposite to its goals at all. In fact Windows XP ships with a theme engine called uxtheme.dll which is called by Win32, the new common controls, and of course apps like Java and Firefox. It has methods such as DrawThemeBackground, DrawThemeEdge and so on. Why shouldn't it be hooked up to GTK and its own engine? If the WINE implementation called the GTK (or QT) theme engine, it would mean that any app using uxtheme.dll to draw a button would immediately gain a native appearance without any modifications.
Now obviously uxtheme.dll is XP specific, so to disable it you set WINE up to mimic Windows 98 or whatever. Then the native look and feel goes away completely. Perhaps internally WINE could still call uxtheme.dll but the calls would be handled in a legacy or "classic" style rather than passing through to GTK.
I hate KDE because the K stands for Kitchen sink. I don't believe a desktop needs a zillion configurable options (all mixed in with the common ones) to be usable. On top of that, I don't believe the KDE team is making half the effort towards usability that GNOME is. I want my desktop to be simple, and minimalist - to sink into the background while I get on with other stuff. Now GNOME has it's faults (e.g. the spatial navigation and the umpteen file pickers with each release), but at least usability is driving their development.
A major example of bad usability in KDE is the godawful ande default single-click-launches-apps behaviour. Microsoft got tarred and feathered when they (briefly) tried it with IE4. The reason is that it is all too easy to inadvertantly click on an icon and find yourself waiting 30 seconds for app to launch and shutdown again when all you wanted to was move the lousy icon over a bit. Microsoft soon reverted back to the old model.
Yet SUSE and probably KDE still use single-click it as the default behaviour. I hunted for the setting to switch to double-click behaviour for ten minutes. As KDE has a Desktop settings icon (under which are more than half a dozen more icons) I thought it would be there. Perhaps under Behavior ("You can configure how the desktop behaves here")? Nope. Eventually after trawling through all these settings with all their tabs, I resorted to Google and I discovered it was actually under the Peripherals | Mouse.
I'm sure that someone will riposte that it's "obvious" to look under the Mouse settings, but no it isn't, especially when Desktop | Behaviour is presumably there for the reason its name and description implies. It also contains other mouse settings, but not ones for app launching.
This is just one example but there are plenty. What the fuck are "OBEX Devices" when they're at home? Why not say "Bluetooth and Infrared Devices"? Why is "Bluetooth Services" in a different place and what's this daemon it is complaining about? What does the "KDE Resources" panel do? etc.
It's not just control centre it's just like this all over the place. Other KDE apps has menus, toolbars and dialogs that are full of noise. Konq has six menu items starting with "Configure" under one drop down. Many core apps contain advanced options and infrequently used features mixed in with the common ones, often with tabs and subdialogs to confuse things even further. Apps also exhibit poor default behaviour. The first thing Konq did when I went to Google to search for help about the single-click issue was ask me if I wanted to accept cookies from Google. As a power user this is an annoying question. As a novice this is mind boggling question especially since no help explaining what a cookie even is.
This sort of thing is what gets me about KDE. Now as I mentioned with SUSE, the choice is practically made for me since the level of effort they've made with GNOME can be best described as token. Perhaps I will grow to love KDE, but somehow I doubt it. More likely I'll learn to live with it, "training" myself to workaround the noise and crud it flings at me as I try to work.
Of course in an ideal world (a world Linux will have to get to), there should be no distinction between KDE or GNOME. Ultimately users shouldn't have to give a crap what the desktop is running with. They're running SUSE Linux, so what the hell is this KDE / GNOME stuff anyway? Why do they have to choose and how are they even meant to choose without knowing what they are?
Installation is a no brainer. For some bizarre reason it showed me a winter scene with penguins. Weird. One oddity is that during bootup there is an option to "Press ESC for more details" fine, except once you press ESC no way to switch back to the less details mode.
SUSE offers GNOME or KDE. GNOME is 2.12, it works great but integration with SUSE is horrible. The menus are cluttered with crap (e.g. do I really need the choice of 4 console apps in a default GNOME install?), Beagle isn't enabled by default and other niggles pervade. It almost feels like an afterthought. The SUSE crew might not like GNOME, but Novell owns Ximian so its hard to fathom why it looks so sloppy. Novell really has to start cracking a whip and get its teams working in the same direction.
YaST is a very powerful configuration tool. It's not exactly task sensitive or user friendly but it does a good job. It had no problem detecting my hardware although configuring a monitor was considerably more difficult than it should have been. To get a decent refresh rate I had to manually change the vertical and horizontal refresh rates of the settings. How many people are going to bother with that?
YaST is an ugly, ugly application. It doesn't look like a GNOME app. It doesn't even look like a KDE app. I think it's been statically linked to QT a default an ugly theme. I can understand that static linking removes dependency hell but the least they could do is make it resemble the default theme.
SUSE looks a lot better in KDE. I hate KDE to be honest, but I think I'm going to have to get used to it.
I finally got a chance to play with MonoDevelop. I just couldn't get it to work on FC4 but it works fine here. To be honest it's got a long, long way to go. I wonder if Mono shouldn't be looking at #Develop which is miles better but needs porting first.
I have an NVidia card. "For legal reasons" I discovered the software installer downloads the driver manually. This process could be improved, such as offering to restart X after installing your new driver.
FreeNX - yippee! Requires manual configuration including new firewall rules - boo!
OpenOffice 2.0 - I like. Ximian seem to have had their hands in here since it is the "Novell Edition" with different icons.
SUSE 10 contains a lot of Java stuff (including my favourite editor JEdit) but Eclipse is strangely not included. Also weird is that it ships Java 1.4 rather than 1.5.
The software update system works a lot better than FC4. It could be my imagination, but is it really using incremental patches? If so well done.
By default SUSE is set to boot straight into my normal user account without prompting for a password. I don't like this. I switched it off manually. Perhaps it was an option in the installer, but it wasn't something I noticed or would expect to look for. Perhaps the first time you start it should ask you if you want to continue with that behaviour or use a password from now on.
In common with most dists, multimedia is a complete disaster zone. If certain codecs can't be supported for "legal reasons", at least put in a dummy codec for the format which says this and tells you a link that you can go to. In other words make it a no brainer to get codecs. After all, SUSE do something similar with NVidia and other drivers.
Over all I like SUSE 10. It works fine, but I still don't think it is ready for a novice user. GNOME is a mess and there are rough / jagged edges around configuration and multimedia which would easily catch out a novice. As a power desktop it seems to be a very nice environment.
I grant you that it sucked during the days of QNX 2. I used to have to program it and while it was very fast, and very modular the code for it was godawful, the tools were obscure and the UI was modelled on OpenLook of all things. The per seat licencing was a joke too, being more expensive that Windows or OS/2. It was horrible yet for all that there was absolutely nothing to touch it. Linux was still at 1.0x and Windows was non-preemptive.
With QNX 4 up, they dumped the proprietary APIs and tools and made the thing POSIX compliant. At that point, it's hard to fault it. It's just another Unix clone from a programming perspective. While I wouldn't say for a second that it's comparable to Linux for its desktop experience (though neither is BSD), it is very, very compact and stable. I know there was a live CD at one point but at present it seems to be a 30 day trial version. I guess that's as close as you'll get. At one point, they had a version which booted from a single floppy disk and offered networking, a GUI and webbrowser. That's a stunningly compact OS, no matter how you look at it.
It still doesn't answer the debate about micro vs monolithic kernels, but it does dispell the idea that you can't produce a decent OS around a micro-kernel. Personally I think monolithic is just fine except for niches but given the right requirements, micro can work out to be a lot better. I certainly don't believe GNU Hurd is a good example of a microkernel even without the politics and lethargy that have caused it to become a running joke over its grossly extended life.
It's considerably easier to produce a bootable DOS system from scratch and in less space than it is Linux or something else. Therefore, I expect there's a whole range of applications where it has its place. Basically anywhere a PC is expected to do one thing and one thing only would be a candidate for FreeDOS.
QNX Neutrino is an example of a microkernel which doesn't suck. In fact QNX sees heavy use in realtime environments, where both space and performance matter a great deal. Some applications of QNX put considerable importance on the thing not collapsing in a heap after a failure of some part.
The fact is that if any console supports one of these formats (including video playback) then that format is almost certain to win. Why? Because if the PS3 sells 5 million consoles in the US next year, then the market is already seeded with players and the sales will follow.
If that happens, the other format doesn't stand a chance. If Sony follows through with Blu-Ray support and Microsoft dithers (as it has been) about supporting HD-DVD, then the latter format is effectively dead in the water.
I'm not talking about a converter which works on the command line. I'm talking about a converter that lives in MS Word, Excel etc and makes MSO support OpenDocument just as it supports WordPerfect, RTF etc. If you've ever used MSO you know that it offers various converters during installation. I don't know what the story is with Excel, Powerpoint or Acces, but in Word, these appear (or did appear last I looked) as.cnv files which are DLLs with certain entry points.
What I'm suggesting is creating a new converter dll that parses / writes OpenDocument files from doc files. As far as MSO is concerned, it will be just another file format. It even would appear in the Load / Save dialog as a format you could save as. When you chose to save in that format, Word would invoke the converter to convert from the native to the foreign format and vice versa for loading. I don't know what the status is with the API for converters, but a google for wordcnv shows at least one LGPL project which uses it.
How this converter could be written is up for grabs. I suppose it could be a dumb DLL that executes AbiWord / OO to do it, but equally, someone could split out the conversion routines from OO and package them in the converter. This could then be packaged as an installer for anyone who wants to use OpenDocument with MS Word. Refactoring the conversion code in OO is more daunting than a short paragraph would imply but it seems like a feasible project.
When you print from an application you essentially open a device context and send it a bunch of instructions to draw text here, a line there and so on. This can be captured PDF but is totally unsuitable to printing out an.odt file for instance. In the process of conversion you'd lose all meta info, any revision history, digital signatures, styles, hidden text, rulers, margins, links to other documents / graphics and basically anything else which goes to producing a document but doesn't appear in the end result. In short, a "Print to OpenDocument" would be worse than useless.
On the other hand, an import / export filter for MS Word to Open Document would be very useful. I assume that such a thing is quite possible, but how far along anyone is with producing such a thing (as open source), I have no idea.
Perhaps it can't afford its own space programme, but there is nothing to stop ESA (for example) sending men up into space. After all, perhaps one reason they haven't before now is because the UK or another member country has had these kind of objections.
I doubt they'd manage it without bumping their budget, but who knows, it could happen.
Let me guess - i.e. the memory + harddrive pagefile survive a hibernate and therefore don't need to be restored. Therefore the "improved load times" come about because if the thing was loaded into memory before the hibernation, the data including any cached DLLs will still be there afterwards.
I once thought like this. That is until I saw the video quality of a UMD movie being played on the PSP screen.
Which is still inferior to a DVD, not to mention bereft of many of the features that a DVD contains. Or that most of the UMDs on sale are half the price on DVD, because the titles are so old they live in the bargain bin. I'd go as far to say UMDs should be selling for $10, not $20, or even the ludicrous 24 euros seen around where I am. Why? Because:
They are lower quality
They have less features
They are harder to pirate (= more profit for Sony)
They weigh less and take up less space (= more profit for stores, less shipping costs)
The format is extremely inconvenient
The conclusion is that they should be priced cheaper than DVD. That doesn't factor in pure greed by Sony and others. You'd think Sony would want to drop the price anyway simply because it would drive the format and sales of PSPs. I reckon they don't because they're trying to enforce a new high price point whether the format deserves it or not.
The current situation is laughable - who is stupid enough to buy UMD movies at full retail price which is what they're selling at? If I want to watch movies on my PSP, I would rip a DVD rather than buy it in UMD format. Even if I didn't own the movie, I could walk into a store, and buy it from the bargain bin for half the price. It's annoying that Sony deliberately crippled the resolution for ripped films, but its still adequate for the situations you're likely to be watching a movie on it.
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As it happens I just installed SUSE 10 and I quite like it. I'm using KDE right now but even the integration efforts of SUSE can't paper over the cracks. Just seeing 6 menu items in a row in Konq that say "Configure" just makes me shudder. If I had a choice I would use GNOME, but the GNOME integration in SUSE is terrible (where is the input from Ximian?). Therefore it's a surprise to hear they're now going to favour GNOME. I guess they've decided its better to go with Ximian than with SUSE.
Every hyped gadget release is like this. Why do people buy into the hype? It's better to wait and gauge the reaction, especially after the hysteria has died down and been replaced by more level headed reviews and the number of game titles has increased.
You're right. I haven't even bothered trying to watch a video for a while now because of the OnePass thing. Glad to see they've gotten a clue.
BBC News has allowed you to watch the news and various events live or archived on their site for some time now. Unlike CNN (via shitty Real OnePass) it's free too.
Games games are extremely timer & controller sensitive and requiuse high end functionality. It would be fairly straightforward to put various barriers into a homebrew API which would make it impossible for it to be used to play cracked games.
The same charge could be levelled at Sony and the PSP. The only legitimate reason people have for breaking Sony's copy protection is to produce homebrew stuff. So why not release some APIs that allow people to produce homebrew legally? Hell, they could even release a Linux UMD and let people develop apps to run from their memory sticks. Given a legal outlet, most of the issues with firmware cracks (and people returning PSPs bricked by the process), would go away.
Eclipse is an absolutely awesome development platform. It is packed with so many useful things, that it's hard to imagine what developing without would be like. Being able to rename a class and every call to it, or turn a bunch of methods into an interface or seeing all compiler errors in real time etc., is so mind bogglingly useful that I don't think I could ever go back to a plain text editor unless it was forced on me. I'd say without a shadow of doubt that using something like Eclipse halves the amount of time it takes to develop code over a text editor.
DevStudio 2003 is not so great in this regard (although editing forms is easier) but I expect that the 2005 edition is a hell of a lot better. I'll have to grab the "express" version and get a taste of how far it's advanced.
Not at all. They'd still be there, but there would be not a single indication that from the user's perspective that they were running something called KDE or GNOME. They'd just be using their desktop. It is a complete irrelevance from the user's perspective what the name of the component is.
I don't care what the Win32 desktop is called, or the Mac one. It's just the desktop. In the real world, I don't care who makes my car's steering wheel or pedals either. I could find out but to most people it is of supreme unimportance.
It doesn't stop someone knowledgable from swapping out KDE for GNOME or XFCE using a command but this is an irrelevance from a user's perspective. Secretaries, operators, receptionists, home users etc do not need and should not have to know any of the inner workings of their operating system unless they themselves choose to find out more. That is the default position for XP & Mac for good reason.
True, but that's the same for Firefox, OpenOffice and Java too. Firefox and OpenOffice look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not. Java Swing apps only look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not.
But at the end of the day, the look is the most distinctive cue. The differences in the "feel" of XP and GTK are minimal. In fact, I can't think of a substantial difference between the two. They have similar widgets, similar mousing behaviour, similar keyboard navigation. You might have to ensure the double-click speed was the same, and some of the metrics for scroll bars and such like but nothing major I can think of.
It would be a useful companion project to WINE & MingW to see open source versions of ATL & MFC. I would guess that this would be a fraught process since the source for both is easy to come by.
Now obviously uxtheme.dll is XP specific, so to disable it you set WINE up to mimic Windows 98 or whatever. Then the native look and feel goes away completely. Perhaps internally WINE could still call uxtheme.dll but the calls would be handled in a legacy or "classic" style rather than passing through to GTK.
A major example of bad usability in KDE is the godawful ande default single-click-launches-apps behaviour. Microsoft got tarred and feathered when they (briefly) tried it with IE4. The reason is that it is all too easy to inadvertantly click on an icon and find yourself waiting 30 seconds for app to launch and shutdown again when all you wanted to was move the lousy icon over a bit. Microsoft soon reverted back to the old model.
Yet SUSE and probably KDE still use single-click it as the default behaviour. I hunted for the setting to switch to double-click behaviour for ten minutes. As KDE has a Desktop settings icon (under which are more than half a dozen more icons) I thought it would be there. Perhaps under Behavior ("You can configure how the desktop behaves here")? Nope. Eventually after trawling through all these settings with all their tabs, I resorted to Google and I discovered it was actually under the Peripherals | Mouse.
I'm sure that someone will riposte that it's "obvious" to look under the Mouse settings, but no it isn't, especially when Desktop | Behaviour is presumably there for the reason its name and description implies. It also contains other mouse settings, but not ones for app launching.
This is just one example but there are plenty. What the fuck are "OBEX Devices" when they're at home? Why not say "Bluetooth and Infrared Devices"? Why is "Bluetooth Services" in a different place and what's this daemon it is complaining about? What does the "KDE Resources" panel do? etc.
It's not just control centre it's just like this all over the place. Other KDE apps has menus, toolbars and dialogs that are full of noise. Konq has six menu items starting with "Configure" under one drop down. Many core apps contain advanced options and infrequently used features mixed in with the common ones, often with tabs and subdialogs to confuse things even further. Apps also exhibit poor default behaviour. The first thing Konq did when I went to Google to search for help about the single-click issue was ask me if I wanted to accept cookies from Google. As a power user this is an annoying question. As a novice this is mind boggling question especially since no help explaining what a cookie even is.
This sort of thing is what gets me about KDE. Now as I mentioned with SUSE, the choice is practically made for me since the level of effort they've made with GNOME can be best described as token. Perhaps I will grow to love KDE, but somehow I doubt it. More likely I'll learn to live with it, "training" myself to workaround the noise and crud it flings at me as I try to work.
Of course in an ideal world (a world Linux will have to get to), there should be no distinction between KDE or GNOME. Ultimately users shouldn't have to give a crap what the desktop is running with. They're running SUSE Linux, so what the hell is this KDE / GNOME stuff anyway? Why do they have to choose and how are they even meant to choose without knowing what they are?
Over all I like SUSE 10. It works fine, but I still don't think it is ready for a novice user. GNOME is a mess and there are rough / jagged edges around configuration and multimedia which would easily catch out a novice. As a power desktop it seems to be a very nice environment.
With QNX 4 up, they dumped the proprietary APIs and tools and made the thing POSIX compliant. At that point, it's hard to fault it. It's just another Unix clone from a programming perspective. While I wouldn't say for a second that it's comparable to Linux for its desktop experience (though neither is BSD), it is very, very compact and stable. I know there was a live CD at one point but at present it seems to be a 30 day trial version. I guess that's as close as you'll get. At one point, they had a version which booted from a single floppy disk and offered networking, a GUI and webbrowser. That's a stunningly compact OS, no matter how you look at it.
It still doesn't answer the debate about micro vs monolithic kernels, but it does dispell the idea that you can't produce a decent OS around a micro-kernel. Personally I think monolithic is just fine except for niches but given the right requirements, micro can work out to be a lot better. I certainly don't believe GNU Hurd is a good example of a microkernel even without the politics and lethargy that have caused it to become a running joke over its grossly extended life.
It's considerably easier to produce a bootable DOS system from scratch and in less space than it is Linux or something else. Therefore, I expect there's a whole range of applications where it has its place. Basically anywhere a PC is expected to do one thing and one thing only would be a candidate for FreeDOS.
QNX Neutrino is an example of a microkernel which doesn't suck. In fact QNX sees heavy use in realtime environments, where both space and performance matter a great deal. Some applications of QNX put considerable importance on the thing not collapsing in a heap after a failure of some part.
Ensure that every member is a complete slut.
If that happens, the other format doesn't stand a chance. If Sony follows through with Blu-Ray support and Microsoft dithers (as it has been) about supporting HD-DVD, then the latter format is effectively dead in the water.
Ex-mental patients start genital shaving business. Please form an orderly queue to use their services.
What I'm suggesting is creating a new converter dll that parses / writes OpenDocument files from doc files. As far as MSO is concerned, it will be just another file format. It even would appear in the Load / Save dialog as a format you could save as. When you chose to save in that format, Word would invoke the converter to convert from the native to the foreign format and vice versa for loading. I don't know what the status is with the API for converters, but a google for wordcnv shows at least one LGPL project which uses it.
How this converter could be written is up for grabs. I suppose it could be a dumb DLL that executes AbiWord / OO to do it, but equally, someone could split out the conversion routines from OO and package them in the converter. This could then be packaged as an installer for anyone who wants to use OpenDocument with MS Word. Refactoring the conversion code in OO is more daunting than a short paragraph would imply but it seems like a feasible project.
On the other hand, an import / export filter for MS Word to Open Document would be very useful. I assume that such a thing is quite possible, but how far along anyone is with producing such a thing (as open source), I have no idea.
I doubt they'd manage it without bumping their budget, but who knows, it could happen.
Or is this sufficient to allow you to download extra content from nintendo.com + partners with all other domains being offlimits?
Let me guess - i.e. the memory + harddrive pagefile survive a hibernate and therefore don't need to be restored. Therefore the "improved load times" come about because if the thing was loaded into memory before the hibernation, the data including any cached DLLs will still be there afterwards.
Which is still inferior to a DVD, not to mention bereft of many of the features that a DVD contains. Or that most of the UMDs on sale are half the price on DVD, because the titles are so old they live in the bargain bin. I'd go as far to say UMDs should be selling for $10, not $20, or even the ludicrous 24 euros seen around where I am. Why? Because:
The conclusion is that they should be priced cheaper than DVD. That doesn't factor in pure greed by Sony and others. You'd think Sony would want to drop the price anyway simply because it would drive the format and sales of PSPs. I reckon they don't because they're trying to enforce a new high price point whether the format deserves it or not.
The current situation is laughable - who is stupid enough to buy UMD movies at full retail price which is what they're selling at? If I want to watch movies on my PSP, I would rip a DVD rather than buy it in UMD format. Even if I didn't own the movie, I could walk into a store, and buy it from the bargain bin for half the price. It's annoying that Sony deliberately crippled the resolution for ripped films, but its still adequate for the situations you're likely to be watching a movie on it.