I made the mistake of moving here a couple of years ago. I'm ready to move out. The people here are a bunch of tools. They readily and happily bend over for authority.
This information may have changed since early last year, so caveat emptor. I researched both for a project for our company. The project involved using one in an app that we would resell. We ended up scrapping the project, but we would have went with Microsoft Live for the simple reason that they were working towards offering an enterprise license that allowed us to resell. Google, on the other hand, never had an interest in talking to us about licensing and never deviated from the party line of "your service must be free for all blah blah blah."
From a technical standpoint, both were easy to use once you spent a few hours looking at the docs and examples. That was pretty much a wash, we thought. Other things to consider was that Google offered geocoding, while Live didn't (we setup a server using Tiger census data for that), and I think one of the two offered better directional services (can't remember exactly). If you are looking for features beyond just pushpins on a map, take a good look at the features, too.
I've always believed a big problem for desktop, mainstream linux adoption was the naming of popular applications.
Imagine using Linux for the first time.
Noob: What do I use to play CDs and MP3's? Linux Teacher: XMMS Noob: What do I use to edit photos? Linux Teacher: Gimp Noob: What do I use to play movies? Linux Teacher: There's xine and VLC. Noob: How about for IMs? Linux Teacher: GAIM Noob: Email? Linux Teacher: Evolution
What the hell's an XMMS, Gimp, xine, VLC, or Gaim? Those names are awful, and they're often acronyms. If you ask any average Joe what a Gimp was, they'll tell you it's a guy who walks funny. How the hell are you supposed to know that that's an image editing application? Evolution's for email and not something to do with biology?
Photoshop. You have an idea what that's for. Internet Explorer. Same thing - I probably use it to explore the internet. Those are good names. If you're new to Windows, and you want to do something but can't remember the name of the program you're supposed to use, just look around in your Start menu or Programs directory. The names will probably clue you in.
Marketing and branding can definitely help - more and more people are hearing about Firefox, but that gained popularity first in Windows. Access and Excel aren't that descriptive, but they became household names because of marketing and bundling with Word, which is descriptive.
If people want to make Linux more "user friendly" developers should think a lot about the name they give their programs.
And they recently stopped putting the newest versions of MySQL on the website community download page, too. (5.0.27 on the DL page versus 5.0.30 on the FTP server) Time to fork?
The people who disagree with you assume that consumers are smart, savy, and will carefully research products before buying. They're not. They're sheep who revel in impulse purchases and go with name recognition as the leading reason to buy a product. Sorry, but I have no faith in people. Of course, this is ultimately not a bad thing because MS deserves a few failures.
Look at the auctions out on eBay. The majority of stuff, especially electronic gadgets, are from professional sellers who jack up the minimum bid so high that it's basically the same prices as wholesalers like buy.com. Given the ame price between some dude in Hong Kong on eBay and a well known ecommerce store, why do I want eBay? Other auctions may have a lower miminum bid, but they're charging a ridiculous amount for shipping. Screw that.
It's much harder to find a bargain on eBay these days. Long gone are the garage sale days. eBay may have made the tools for sellers to ruin the place, but its definitely the sellers that drove eBay into the direction that it's at.
Linux has a better chance of winning the Desktop Wars on the Corporate Battlegrounds, and for that, it doesn't need integration with MP3 players, camcorders, etc. For that, it needs to keep coming out with better and well-marketed administrator management tools. There are a huge number of users who use Windows just because it's what they're used to at work. Put a Linux workstation in every cubicle first. A lot of home users will follow.
People are confusing emulation and virtualization.
VirtualPC is an x86 *emulator.* Why would you need to emulate Intel on an Intel chip? What Macs need is virtualization, and that's what they're getting with Parallel and VMWare.
As far as VB goes, it never worked well on the Mac version of Office for a while.
Has anyone ever used this thing longer than it takes to write some shallow review?
I have. I do mobile device development. I think, and *all* of my coworkers will agree with me, the Q sucks.
First off, the buttons are too small if you have fingers larger than a four year old's. The BlackBerry 8700 is pretty good, and the Palm with it's raised bubbly buttons, provide great control and feedback.
Second, they just did *stupid* stuff to the interface. Stuff that makes me think the thing is under-powered. For example, if you have a long list of items, the Q will paginate the list instead of making one long list. That is obnoxious with a capital O. It just constantly breaks down elements into small chunks, adding unnecessary clicks and scrolls.
The core problem, IMHO, is that Windows Mobile is not designed to work without a touch screen. However, in their attempts to make a BlackBerry-like clone, they've forced the OS to operate without a point-and-click interface. And they failed miserably.
Quartz is actually a marriage of several different technologies from Apple itself, Adobe PDF, and stuff from NeXT (which had a license for PDF). I'm not sure of the legal details, but as MacKido calls it, Quartz is actually an "uber PDF," and not just PDF itself. Think of it as an implementation of PDF. This allows them to get around PDF licensing, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some money paid to Adobe to keep them at bay.
For a lot of heavy detail, see MacKido's explanation and history of Apple's imaging technologies.
I'm kind of not surprised. I was in line on the first day and had front row (er, "line," rather) seats. A work crew was fiddling with the elevator all day - up to maybe about 2 hours before opening. It raised some eyebrows with us. We joked about how it would be funny if Steve Jobs got stuck in it.
How can they forget Boo.com? The way that management team burned money epitomized the dotcom era. It wasn't surprising at all that their site was an obnoxious, pretentious, bloated piece of junk. The good thing about the bust was that it shook out and humbled all these artsy "we know what's best for the user" types that ran Boo.com.
Less than three, to be exact. Is your memory that bad that you can't remember something that happened 3 years ago?
Unisys' actions drove up the cost of software by demanding payments from developers who made GIF creation software. In the open source world, because of the patent issue, the GD library could not legally create GIFs until a year later in 2004. GIMP would not open or save GIFs also because of Unisys' actions.
So, our commerical software was more expensive, and our open source software was crippled because of this company. Unisys has given nothing back or made ammends. Yet, you're willing to let by gones be by gones so easily?
Tell me something, are you going to go out and buy a SCO license a couple of months after they get asses handed to them?
They did nothing in 2004 to celebrate the 20th Anniversay of the Macintosh. What makes people think they'll do something for the 30th Anniversary of Apple? Sure, 10 years ago they had the 20th Anniversary Mac, but that was Apple under Amelio. This is Apple under Steve Jobs, who is pretty fuddy-duddy when it comes to Apple fan boys.
My prediction: They'll do jack shit and columnist will be called a puss for not jumping.
The first half of the article is the AT&T CEO saying that they'll never block access and doing that is business suicide. The second half is this from Martin:
In a question-and-answer period in front of the keynote audience, Martin said that "I do think the commission has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations, noting that the FCC had in fact done so in the case last year involving Madison River's blocking of Vonage's VoIP service.
"We've already demonstrated we'll take action if necessary," Martin said.
However, Martin also added that he supports network operators' desires to offer different levels of broadband service at different speeds, and at different pricing -- a so-called "tiered" Internet service structure that opponents say could give a market advantage to deep-pocket companies who can afford to pay service providers for preferential treatment.
While Martin said that consumers who don't pay for higher levels of Internet service shouldn't expect to get higher levels of performance, he did say in a following press conference that "the commission needs to make sure" that there are fair-trade ways to ensure that consumers "get what they are purchasing." When asked how consumers could measure service performance levels, Martin said that public Web sites already exist that let users measure their connection speeds.
That's got nothing to do with site extortion. Shame on the submitter.
I don't use Opera now, but I used it very briefly. Opera rose at a very dark time. IE had just won the browser war with Netscape 4 being a bloated, happy, piece of crap. Opera gave us hope when us anti-IEers were most down. Although I use Firefox now, the conditions for Firefox's success should be creditted to Opera.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the mistake of moving here a couple of years ago. I'm ready to move out. The people here are a bunch of tools. They readily and happily bend over for authority.
This information may have changed since early last year, so caveat emptor. I researched both for a project for our company. The project involved using one in an app that we would resell. We ended up scrapping the project, but we would have went with Microsoft Live for the simple reason that they were working towards offering an enterprise license that allowed us to resell. Google, on the other hand, never had an interest in talking to us about licensing and never deviated from the party line of "your service must be free for all blah blah blah."
From a technical standpoint, both were easy to use once you spent a few hours looking at the docs and examples. That was pretty much a wash, we thought. Other things to consider was that Google offered geocoding, while Live didn't (we setup a server using Tiger census data for that), and I think one of the two offered better directional services (can't remember exactly). If you are looking for features beyond just pushpins on a map, take a good look at the features, too.
I've always believed a big problem for desktop, mainstream linux adoption was the naming of popular applications.
Imagine using Linux for the first time.
Noob: What do I use to play CDs and MP3's?
Linux Teacher: XMMS
Noob: What do I use to edit photos?
Linux Teacher: Gimp
Noob: What do I use to play movies?
Linux Teacher: There's xine and VLC.
Noob: How about for IMs?
Linux Teacher: GAIM
Noob: Email?
Linux Teacher: Evolution
What the hell's an XMMS, Gimp, xine, VLC, or Gaim? Those names are awful, and they're often acronyms. If you ask any average Joe what a Gimp was, they'll tell you it's a guy who walks funny. How the hell are you supposed to know that that's an image editing application? Evolution's for email and not something to do with biology?
Photoshop. You have an idea what that's for. Internet Explorer. Same thing - I probably use it to explore the internet. Those are good names. If you're new to Windows, and you want to do something but can't remember the name of the program you're supposed to use, just look around in your Start menu or Programs directory. The names will probably clue you in.
Marketing and branding can definitely help - more and more people are hearing about Firefox, but that gained popularity first in Windows. Access and Excel aren't that descriptive, but they became household names because of marketing and bundling with Word, which is descriptive.
If people want to make Linux more "user friendly" developers should think a lot about the name they give their programs.
Maybe it's because a lot of people knew that the iMac, mini, and Mac Pros were due for a refresh.
And they recently stopped putting the newest versions of MySQL on the website community download page, too. (5.0.27 on the DL page versus 5.0.30 on the FTP server) Time to fork?
I agree.
The people who disagree with you assume that consumers are smart, savy, and will carefully research products before buying. They're not. They're sheep who revel in impulse purchases and go with name recognition as the leading reason to buy a product. Sorry, but I have no faith in people. Of course, this is ultimately not a bad thing because MS deserves a few failures.
Wait, wait, wait. Netcraft didn't confirm anything.
NetBSD confirms it: NetBSD is dying!
Agreed.
Look at the auctions out on eBay. The majority of stuff, especially electronic gadgets, are from professional sellers who jack up the minimum bid so high that it's basically the same prices as wholesalers like buy.com. Given the ame price between some dude in Hong Kong on eBay and a well known ecommerce store, why do I want eBay? Other auctions may have a lower miminum bid, but they're charging a ridiculous amount for shipping. Screw that.
It's much harder to find a bargain on eBay these days. Long gone are the garage sale days. eBay may have made the tools for sellers to ruin the place, but its definitely the sellers that drove eBay into the direction that it's at.
Linux has a better chance of winning the Desktop Wars on the Corporate Battlegrounds, and for that, it doesn't need integration with MP3 players, camcorders, etc. For that, it needs to keep coming out with better and well-marketed administrator management tools. There are a huge number of users who use Windows just because it's what they're used to at work. Put a Linux workstation in every cubicle first. A lot of home users will follow.
People are confusing emulation and virtualization.
e -day/
VirtualPC is an x86 *emulator.* Why would you need to emulate Intel on an Intel chip? What Macs need is virtualization, and that's what they're getting with Parallel and VMWare.
As far as VB goes, it never worked well on the Mac version of Office for a while.
http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/07/news-of-th
Has anyone ever used this thing longer than it takes to write some shallow review?
I have. I do mobile device development. I think, and *all* of my coworkers will agree with me, the Q sucks.
First off, the buttons are too small if you have fingers larger than a four year old's. The BlackBerry 8700 is pretty good, and the Palm with it's raised bubbly buttons, provide great control and feedback.
Second, they just did *stupid* stuff to the interface. Stuff that makes me think the thing is under-powered. For example, if you have a long list of items, the Q will paginate the list instead of making one long list. That is obnoxious with a capital O. It just constantly breaks down elements into small chunks, adding unnecessary clicks and scrolls.
The core problem, IMHO, is that Windows Mobile is not designed to work without a touch screen. However, in their attempts to make a BlackBerry-like clone, they've forced the OS to operate without a point-and-click interface. And they failed miserably.
They don't seriously believe this, do they? It just sound like thespin to me. They're trying to make any excuse they can to deflect criticism.
Quartz is actually a marriage of several different technologies from Apple itself, Adobe PDF, and stuff from NeXT (which had a license for PDF). I'm not sure of the legal details, but as MacKido calls it, Quartz is actually an "uber PDF," and not just PDF itself. Think of it as an implementation of PDF. This allows them to get around PDF licensing, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some money paid to Adobe to keep them at bay.
For a lot of heavy detail, see MacKido's explanation and history of Apple's imaging technologies.
http://www.mackido.com/Software/Quartz.html
I'm kind of not surprised. I was in line on the first day and had front row (er, "line," rather) seats. A work crew was fiddling with the elevator all day - up to maybe about 2 hours before opening. It raised some eyebrows with us. We joked about how it would be funny if Steve Jobs got stuck in it.
How can they forget Boo.com? The way that management team burned money epitomized the dotcom era. It wasn't surprising at all that their site was an obnoxious, pretentious, bloated piece of junk. The good thing about the bust was that it shook out and humbled all these artsy "we know what's best for the user" types that ran Boo.com.
Heh. Because if they do, I'll bet Apache and CentOS gets listed as spyware.
Less than three, to be exact. Is your memory that bad that you can't remember something that happened 3 years ago?
Unisys' actions drove up the cost of software by demanding payments from developers who made GIF creation software. In the open source world, because of the patent issue, the GD library could not legally create GIFs until a year later in 2004. GIMP would not open or save GIFs also because of Unisys' actions.
So, our commerical software was more expensive, and our open source software was crippled because of this company. Unisys has given nothing back or made ammends. Yet, you're willing to let by gones be by gones so easily?
Tell me something, are you going to go out and buy a SCO license a couple of months after they get asses handed to them?
I hope they're embarrassed. I hope they look bad. I hope they lose business. We still remember the shit you pulled with the GIF patent, Unisys.
In the article you linked to, where does it make that quote?
They did nothing in 2004 to celebrate the 20th Anniversay of the Macintosh. What makes people think they'll do something for the 30th Anniversary of Apple? Sure, 10 years ago they had the 20th Anniversary Mac, but that was Apple under Amelio. This is Apple under Steve Jobs, who is pretty fuddy-duddy when it comes to Apple fan boys.
My prediction: They'll do jack shit and columnist will be called a puss for not jumping.
http://www.supergeekblog.com/?p=198
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/news/183701554
The first half of the article is the AT&T CEO saying that they'll never block access and doing that is business suicide. The second half is this from Martin:
In a question-and-answer period in front of the keynote audience, Martin said that "I do think the commission has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations, noting that the FCC had in fact done so in the case last year involving Madison River's blocking of Vonage's VoIP service.
That's got nothing to do with site extortion. Shame on the submitter.
I don't use Opera now, but I used it very briefly. Opera rose at a very dark time. IE had just won the browser war with Netscape 4 being a bloated, happy, piece of crap. Opera gave us hope when us anti-IEers were most down. Although I use Firefox now, the conditions for Firefox's success should be creditted to Opera.
And if they replace the PHP package with Tcl, they can call it SCAT.
hehe. It wasn't near Grand Central Station was it? 'Cause if it was, we gotta talk and you gotta tell me some stories :)