The kernel really doesn't matter. I could write a security app or build a security module into any kind of PDA. I've even seen SSH for Palm & CE devices.
And PalmOS uses a single password for convenience, but it's no trouble to write apps that don't use this mechanism, implementing their own instead.
The problem with people doing PDAs around Linux is they're too tied up with bash, etc. It really doesn't matter what Unix tools you put on the thing if it's going to sit on shelves because the PDA software stinks. Get the basics right and THEN think of porting Apache and whatnot over to it.
Don't worry, the Mac is my backup computer:) It's just convenient to leave a browser/mail open on it while my Win32 or Linux machines are used for real work.
IE on the Mac is alright, but it has some incredibly annoying behaviour, such as the hardcoded limit on the number of bookmarks it will show in the drop down menu, or the download manager that forgets the location its told to put files, or the broken multi-column selection, or lack of keyboard shortcuts for selecting text fields.
I am writing this from a nightly build which I have had running all day without a crash. Considering that its running on a Mac where ever MS IE crashes every couple of hours I think that speaks volumes for its stability.
Certainly there are a few bugs, but this really is a becoming an extremely solid browser.
What's this big hangup Linux PDA people have about being able to run Apache, ssh, bash etc.?
In order of importance stuff like that is way lower than other PDA requirements such as:
Handwriting recognition & pen support
Battery life
Form factor
Organizer apps
Usability & convenience
Speed
Durability and build quality
Price
Peripherals
3rd party support
If the substantially lacking in some of these areas, then you'll be the proud owner of a piece of shit. Whether it's running a Linux kernel or not is irrelevant.
Don't forget that the MPL allows AOL to take the Mozilla code, modify it, package it up as a proprietary closed-source browser (or include parts of it in another proprietary closed-source app) and either give it away or sell it.
No it doesn't, it says no such thing. The NPL might, but not the MPL which gives practically the same rights as the GPL. Most of the code is under the MPL except for a very few specific bits under the NPL.
And even where the the NPL or MPL is used, it normally says in the boilplate on the top of the code that you can use the GPL instead if you want.
How the hell can you claim AOL "is not friend of open source" when the very reason Mozilla exists is because of them?
Mozilla is an epic 3 years in the making and conservatively must have cost AOL hundreds of millions of dollars to fund and promote. And yet despite this enormous cost to them, they're giving the thing away!
And they're not doing so under the terms of some weasel-worded crappy Apple/Sun style licence, you can distribute the thing under the MPL or the GPL.
Europe has always been stronger when it comes to telecoms. Not necessarily cheaper but definitely more advanced and with more sense of purpose.
Take mobile phones as an example. Europe got behind the GSM standard years ago which is why my phone works in practically every populated centre in the world (except the US). Meanwhile US customers are languishing under competing standards that mightn't cover even other US cities let alone anywhere else.
It seems like the US is playing catch up with Europe. Not only has BT got Internet phones, but ESAT has here in Irelands. What's more they are starting to crop up all over the place including pubs.
This kind of argument is pretty weak. Yes camping might mean you can socialise, but that's because there's precious else to do while you're waiting for spawn. Not to mention the fact that some camps are solo affairs where there is no one to talk to. If I want to speak to someone I can do it in real life down the pub or on IRC for free.
No, the real reason for camping is because of poor game design by Verant. EQ relies far too heavily on making items rare by putting them on infrequent spawns where you could wait hours or days and not see them. Spawn rates should be increased significantly or there should be alternative ways to obtain most items such as via quests. Unfortunately Verant doesn't want to work for its money - it's easy to edit the spawn rate field on some monster than develop a quest.
I play EQ a lot but I can understand how it could be termed boring especially if you only played a few hours.
The biggest turnoff has to be the UI. It must be one of the suckiest user interfaces ever built. Awkward and ugly would describe it well with non-standard behaviour in just about every UI element. Even two years on is it still getting stuff it should have since the beginning (e.g. ability to buy stacks of goods) and unless you've got the Velious expansion your doomed to spend most of your life in the 640x480 "inventory" screen. That just stinks.
EQ also suffers from being "newbie" unfriendliness, where certain race/class combinations are almost impossible to start from fresh unless you're extremely determined. And I'm not talking about their EQ-rated difficulty but due to bad zone design. For example, certain classes have guilds 2 zones away from the newbie area (try finding them from the crummy maps in the manual), while others require walking through pitch black tunnels to zone such as Surefall Glade and Halas, or hunting in the perpetual gloom of Nektolus, Innothule, Feerott or Faydark. How a newbie equipped with a weak torch or naked is expected to put up this I don't know. I know I've created human rangers in the past and given up in frustration trying to get through that stupid tunnel.
Once you get past the "startup" frustration it does become a lot more fun. Personally I find the first 1-18 levels to be the most fun which is why I don't play much higher. There are enough zones and things to do to keep you busy in this time. In the higher levels you spend more time "camping" which has to be one of the biggest problems for higher level players. How anyone can be sad enough to "camp" for 6 hours to get some stupid item I don't know.
Mozilla (and therefore NS6.x) has the ability to supress popups as well. I don't think there is a UI to set this option, but you can edit the prefs.js to enable it.
I suspect the bottom has fallen out of the advertising business because people have conditioned themselves to see everthing on the page except the adverts. I know I have. I look above, below and either side of but the not *at* the advert.
That could be why an increasing (and increasingly desperate) number of sites have taken to displaying popup windows instead. Unluckily for them people will ignore these too and become alienated from the site in the process. I already unconciously close popups before they've even finished loading.
This is the main problem with expecting open source developers to develop code without owning the hardware.
If Nokia wants to pique the interest of the open source crowd it has to release a kickass product (hardware & software) first and open up the source at that point. It's no good dumping some buggy code on ostdev.org and expecting people to do much with it.
No one is likely to buy their hardware if the word gets out that the software is a piece of shit and the Nokia are using the open source community as little more than unpaid slaves to fix it. This is why the Agenda was so negatively received.
Therefore it is important that Nokia produce something decent in its initial release. Not only will this drum up enough sales to assure the life of the product but it will motivate people hack around with it.
You're joking I hope. The unfiltered "face" looks like a rocky mound. It's only when it's "processed" by distorting and shading it in that it looks anything like face.
Watch the animation (it's one of the other links) that morphs between these three pictures to see the "advanced image processing techniques" techniques in action. Dubious image processing techniques would be a more fitting term. It looks like some kook pulled and tweaked the image until it resembled with what they wanted to see.
Introduction to the crew and their quirks. Crisis requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation.
More character development. Crisis requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation.
Precocious child prodigy episode. Crisis (caused by precocious child prodigy) requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation.
Introduction to hostile and recurring alien species. Crisis requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation.
Lesser character exposition. Shore leave give the ship's librarian a chance to discover love and recover two overdue books.
True mettle. Recurring enemy reappears again to threaten crew during which time one of the crew discovers courage they never knew they had. Crisis requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation.
Sparks of romance as two diametically opposed crew members grudgingly become attracted to one another. Crisis requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation.
Moral crisis as the crew wonder if they should intervene in an alien civil war, especially as one of crew is attracted to one of the rebel leaders. Crisis requires clever use of technology to get out of a tricky situation. Moral crisis neatly sidestepped.
Q episode. Q causes some crisis which requires clever use of technology to get out of a wacky situation while being mocked continuously by Q.
Cliffhanger. Hostile, recurrent alien species return and threaten to destroy the ship. Series ends with enemy firing a photon torpedo and the ominous utterance "Brace for impact!".
In addition to packaging, Ximian also smooths over a lot of rough edges in the raw GNOME to give it the all-round polish and sexiness it desperately needs. Think of them as the equivalent of Pininfarina, Bertone, Zagato, or Ghia.
Arguably though there should be no need for them. KDE manages to get by without needing someone to add polish later on. Perhaps GNOME should ask themselves why they can't do the same. I suspect the reason is that the KDE folks have never had some company to clean up after them so they're a lot more careful about the overall usability and style of the thing.
A lot of stuff can be used for murder. The difference in this instance is that would have been very, very unlikely that so many schoolkids would have been killed if one of these wacko losers had run amok with a knife. At best they might have injured half a dozen pupils (some fatally or seriously) before being overpowered.
Slashdot Mirror
And PalmOS uses a single password for convenience, but it's no trouble to write apps that don't use this mechanism, implementing their own instead.
The problem with people doing PDAs around Linux is they're too tied up with bash, etc. It really doesn't matter what Unix tools you put on the thing if it's going to sit on shelves because the PDA software stinks. Get the basics right and THEN think of porting Apache and whatnot over to it.
That would be true if all things were equal, but the iPaq costs twice as much as most PalmOS models.
Don't worry, the Mac is my backup computer :) It's just convenient to leave a browser/mail open on it while my Win32 or Linux machines are used for real work.
IE on the Mac is alright, but it has some incredibly annoying behaviour, such as the hardcoded limit on the number of bookmarks it will show in the drop down menu, or the download manager that forgets the location its told to put files, or the broken multi-column selection, or lack of keyboard shortcuts for selecting text fields.
Certainly there are a few bugs, but this really is a becoming an extremely solid browser.
In order of importance stuff like that is way lower than other PDA requirements such as:
If the substantially lacking in some of these areas, then you'll be the proud owner of a piece of shit. Whether it's running a Linux kernel or not is irrelevant.
Wasn't someone compiling a list of valid uses for P2P? This certainly sounds like one to me.
No it doesn't, it says no such thing. The NPL might, but not the MPL which gives practically the same rights as the GPL. Most of the code is under the MPL except for a very few specific bits under the NPL.
And even where the the NPL or MPL is used, it normally says in the boilplate on the top of the code that you can use the GPL instead if you want.
Mozilla is an epic 3 years in the making and conservatively must have cost AOL hundreds of millions of dollars to fund and promote. And yet despite this enormous cost to them, they're giving the thing away!
And they're not doing so under the terms of some weasel-worded crappy Apple/Sun style licence, you can distribute the thing under the MPL or the GPL.
Take mobile phones as an example. Europe got behind the GSM standard years ago which is why my phone works in practically every populated centre in the world (except the US). Meanwhile US customers are languishing under competing standards that mightn't cover even other US cities let alone anywhere else.
It seems like the US is playing catch up with Europe. Not only has BT got Internet phones, but ESAT has here in Irelands. What's more they are starting to crop up all over the place including pubs.
And an ethernet terminal is a just the right size put used chewing gum too!
No, the real reason for camping is because of poor game design by Verant. EQ relies far too heavily on making items rare by putting them on infrequent spawns where you could wait hours or days and not see them. Spawn rates should be increased significantly or there should be alternative ways to obtain most items such as via quests. Unfortunately Verant doesn't want to work for its money - it's easy to edit the spawn rate field on some monster than develop a quest.
The biggest turnoff has to be the UI. It must be one of the suckiest user interfaces ever built. Awkward and ugly would describe it well with non-standard behaviour in just about every UI element. Even two years on is it still getting stuff it should have since the beginning (e.g. ability to buy stacks of goods) and unless you've got the Velious expansion your doomed to spend most of your life in the 640x480 "inventory" screen. That just stinks.
EQ also suffers from being "newbie" unfriendliness, where certain race/class combinations are almost impossible to start from fresh unless you're extremely determined. And I'm not talking about their EQ-rated difficulty but due to bad zone design. For example, certain classes have guilds 2 zones away from the newbie area (try finding them from the crummy maps in the manual), while others require walking through pitch black tunnels to zone such as Surefall Glade and Halas, or hunting in the perpetual gloom of Nektolus, Innothule, Feerott or Faydark. How a newbie equipped with a weak torch or naked is expected to put up this I don't know. I know I've created human rangers in the past and given up in frustration trying to get through that stupid tunnel.
Once you get past the "startup" frustration it does become a lot more fun. Personally I find the first 1-18 levels to be the most fun which is why I don't play much higher. There are enough zones and things to do to keep you busy in this time. In the higher levels you spend more time "camping" which has to be one of the biggest problems for higher level players. How anyone can be sad enough to "camp" for 6 hours to get some stupid item I don't know.
Sometimes it takes days for the story to appear here.
Mozilla (and therefore NS6.x) has the ability to supress popups as well. I don't think there is a UI to set this option, but you can edit the prefs.js to enable it.
That could be why an increasing (and increasingly desperate) number of sites have taken to displaying popup windows instead. Unluckily for them people will ignore these too and become alienated from the site in the process. I already unconciously close popups before they've even finished loading.
This is the main problem with expecting open source developers to develop code without owning the hardware.
If Nokia wants to pique the interest of the open source crowd it has to release a kickass product (hardware & software) first and open up the source at that point. It's no good dumping some buggy code on ostdev.org and expecting people to do much with it.
Therefore it is important that Nokia produce something decent in its initial release. Not only will this drum up enough sales to assure the life of the product but it will motivate people hack around with it.
Watch the animation (it's one of the other links) that morphs between these three pictures to see the "advanced image processing techniques" techniques in action. Dubious image processing techniques would be a more fitting term. It looks like some kook pulled and tweaked the image until it resembled with what they wanted to see.
However, I bet that won't stop the nuts from interpretting them as being the results of alien civilizations etc.
Arguably though there should be no need for them. KDE manages to get by without needing someone to add polish later on. Perhaps GNOME should ask themselves why they can't do the same. I suspect the reason is that the KDE folks have never had some company to clean up after them so they're a lot more careful about the overall usability and style of the thing.
Lossy implies decompression will *not* return it to its original form.
A lot of stuff can be used for murder. The difference in this instance is that would have been very, very unlikely that so many schoolkids would have been killed if one of these wacko losers had run amok with a knife. At best they might have injured half a dozen pupils (some fatally or seriously) before being overpowered.