Android: Open "Contacts", select the contact, press Menu button and select "Edit contact", edit "Name" and "Surname" fields, press Done button.
My Android phone has no "surname" field.
Android: Open "Gallery" (or press Gallery key shortcut on phone), all the photos in your phone will appear, with the latest photos first. Press the Share button, and select "Picasa", followed by pressing the Upload button. Visit the Picasa website on your PC and download your photo.
You'll admit it's not the same thing. Why do I need a Picasa account, Internet access, and to go through a web browser, when both my phone and my computer are equipped with Bluetooth? I'd say the usb cable option was more "usable".
Android: Open "Music" by selecting it from the applications menu (or use key shortcut), select "artists", select "YourFavouriteArtist" (just pressing Y will usually do), long-press to play all tracks, and press back button to change artist, etc.
We definitely do not have the same music player. I guess I was unlucky with my phone.
I am using an HTC Tattoo. Perhaps it ships with a different version of the music player because it has a smaller screen size (still, its screen is bigger than the one of my previous phone I was comparing it to).
I am not entirely sure what you are trying to accomplish here,
Trying to stop the ongoing mantra "nokia devices are not usable".
Now, I want to change someone's name, so I can go with one of two options:
1. I can open gmail in my browser, open contacts, click the name I want to change, select edit, and update the actual field, before clicking done.
No, you can't change "name" and "surname". You can only change something called "name", and Gmail will try to split it into "name" and "surname", and will get things wrong if you happen to know people called "Mario / Di Bella" or "Pier Luigi / Rossi".
The fact that you can find a more complex way to do it does not mean that it is the only way of getting the job done.
Since my primary phone runs Android, I'll be very pleased if you can tell me a faster way to do that job - that is, changing a contact's name *and* surname on my phone.
For your Phone->PC example, I will admit to cheating a bit. I have no idea whether any sort bluetooth storage mode is available, nor do I particularly care. Instead, when I want to transfer something, I'll open up my FTP client, and upload the files I want to my computer. There is even an app that is supposed to support samba drives, but I have never felt a need to install it. Now granted, this requires you to do a bit more work to set up these apps, but of course you conveniently omitted the step necessary to install the Nokia app that your PC would likely need, so I consider us even.
1) Android does not ship with a native ftp client / server. Of course you can install one, but we're talking about the usability of the *platform* here, so I described the only option that was available without installing extra software. I installed a nice ftp server app on my Android phone, but that doesn't count, as I could install some equivalent software on my Nokia phone too.
2) Bluetooth does not require any "nokia app" to transfer files, so I'm not "conveniently ignoring" anything. If a PC is equipped with a bluetooth stack, it will be able to transfer files without installing any extra application, using the OBEX push profile. If I really installed the official nokia suite, then my experience would have been even smoother, because it would automatically sync the photos between the PC and the phone in the background, as soon as the phone entered the PC's bluetooth range. I hear that Android 2.0 finally implemented the push profile, unfortunately my phone runs 1.6.
Finally, I do not use my phone to listen to music, so you may have a point about the problems there. That said, when I opened the Music app just now, the first screen was a simple selection (Artist, Album, Song, or Playlist), which does not appear to reflect what you are trying to describe. Selecting any of these options, then using the back button also works without issues.
It is possible that HTC crippled the music player on my phone by replacing the original Android player with another one which has the exact behaviour I described. What can I say? I can post a video of my phone if you doubt of my honesty. Of course I'd be saddened if this was necessary.
Now I am not sure whether you are confused about some of the features Android has, are trying to troll, have some sort of really old and crippled version of the platform, or are simply misinformed. In fact, the Android has plenty of shortcomings that you could have offered valid complaints about, but given the subjects you chose to mention, I get the impression that you are not interested in even giving it a chance.
I am using a phone that was released in October 2009 (HTC Tattoo), and I'm comparing it to my previous phone that was released in 2006 (Nokia N73). If I had something against Android, I wouldn't have bought an Android as my next phone. Android is a nice platform, I just don't find it more usabl
Usability test: how to change a contact's Name and Surname.
Nokia S60: Open "phonebook", select the contact, select "edit", edit "Name" and "Surname" fields, select "end".
Android: Connect to the internet, sync your contacts with gmail, open gmail with your PC, select "contacts", download the contacts as a CSV file on your PC, edit it via openoffice.org, reupload the edited CSV file to gmail, sync your phone again, disconnect it from the internet.
Usability test: how to send to your PC some photos you've taken with your phone.
Nokia S60: Open "gallery" (with a dedicated button on many phones), all the photos in your phone will appear, with the latest photos first. Select the photos you need to send (1 keystroke if your phone has hardware buttons, 3 taps if it doesn't and you have to open the menu), select "send", select "bluetooth", select your PC (already selected if you've used it before).
Android: Open your desk's drawer, take out the usb cable, connect your phone to the PC, select "mass storage mode", turn to the PC, search the phone filesystem for the photos (they're intuitively located in a "100MEDIA" subfolder in a "DCIM" folder, and called "IMAG%04d.jpg" - you'll have to figure out what files contain the photos you need), copy them to the PC, safely remove the usb device from the PC, put the usb cable back in the drawer.
Usability test: how to listen to some random music from YourFavouriteArtist.
Nokia S60: Open "music" (again, with a dedicated button on many phones), select "artists", select "YourFavouriteArtist" (just pressing Y will usually do), select "all tracks" because you're not looking for a particular album, select the first track.
If later you want to change artist, press "back" (you're, well, back in "all tracks from YourFavouriteArtist"), press "back" (you're back to the artist list).
Android: Open "music" by selecting it from the applications menu. A fancy but unuseful cover flow display appears. Press the "three horizontal lines" glyph. Another menu appears. Press the "person with a microphone" glyph. The menu changes. Find YourFavouriteArtist by scrolling the whole list or pressing the "search" button and then tapping "Y", and select him. Press the "musical note glyph", then select the first track.
If later you want to change artist, DON'T press the "back" button (it would take you back to the "home screen" for some reason), you have to tap the "three horizontal lines" glyph.
Every piece of hardware I've owned crashes once in a while. "Smart" hardware tends to crash more often, but I've seen a Motorola "dumb" phone crash when hanging up a call, an Alcatel monochrome phone crash while composing a SMS (in a reproducible way and in a very common use case), and at least two Nokia smartphones crash while listening to music. Even my ipod shuffle, a device so simple that it does not even have a display, sometimes crashes and starts emitting stuttering music - I once even needed to "reset" it via iTunes to be able again to upload songs on it.
That said, I find my HTC Android phone crashing particularly often, and the annoying thing is, that when it does, it resets the sim card - this means you won't receive incoming phone calls until you take your phone out of your pocket and realize that it is stuck at the "insert PIN..." prompt. Every other phone manufacturer I've tried - Siemens, Alcatel, Motorola, Nokia, does this thing right by not asking for the PIN number when the phone is reset by some watchdog. Android doesn't, and it's a pity, because at least my HTC phone is the most crash-prone one I've ever owned (and it wasn't exactly cheap).
I'm sorry, I absolutely do not think that RMS is the father of free software, that GPL is the only truly free licence and so on.
I regret that my post gave that impression, as I can see from yours and other replies - please understand that I am not a native english speaker so I possibly chose the wrong words. All I wanted to say is:
1) The world was really worse before free software came in, I do remember it, and I would like those who don't remember how it was, or have never seen how it was, to know it.
2) Perhaps RMS does not deserve all the bashing he regularly gets, because with all defects he might have, his work both as a developer and as a "free software evangelist" did help me, and I'm sure it helped others.
3) Writing some software and releasing it freely for other people to use it, *is* a political gesture: the only "pragmatical" thing to do with one's own work is to keep it for oneself, or sell it to others for a fee. So every free software project is "political" somehow, free software would not exist at all in a perspective of pure "pragmatism".
4) Free software won't achieve its full potential without some kind of strategy about its interaction with the world of commercial software. Commercial software companies tend to have some obvious conflicts of interest with free software products, so giving them any degree of power over the future development of some free software project, either directly or indirectly, is not likely to help for that project's success.
As an avid consumer of free software, I thank you for all the free software you have written.
Oh come on, it has already been explained in a variety of ways by a lot of people. Yes, I acknowledge that it's FUD in the strict sense of the term, but it has some motivation behind it. Isn't GTK a key component of GNOME? Don't you see any risk in replacing it with Silverlight 4? Perhaps it will make me look like a tin-foil wearer, but I do.
Sorry if I forgot to mention BSD, my post didn't mean to be exhaustive about free software projects. I don't care about licenses, really, as long as they give you a reasonable amount of freedom.
If I can't talk about BSD, that's because I don't know anything about it, because in the place where I live its existence is virtually unknown. I only knew about the *BSD community after I got connected to the Internet, and when I did, I already had Linux installed.
So perhaps if the BSD folks had some weird guy, a BSD extremist, who spent his time traveling the world to spread the BSD word, I wouldn't be using Linux now...
Well, in reality thanks to capitalism and competition we have these things at an affordable level with OSX and Windows. I think people dont remember the 1980s where dozens of OS's fought for dominance and each generation proved better than the rest. Market capitalism in a nutshell, when it works.
While OSS is important lets not pretend that its everything.
I think OSS had a major role in this (and by OSS I mean sw licensed under GPL, BSD, *insert-your-favourite-license-here* - I don't care). In my admittedly limited experience, I've seen that companies have extended the range of features they give away without requiring a fee, only *after* some open source software started offering the same features for free. Would Visual Studio be free now if we hadn't GCC+Eclipse/Netbeans? Would Solaris be free now if we hadn't Linux/BSD? Would web browsers be free now if we hadn't Firefox/KHTML?
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't even have those poor coding skills that I have, if I hadn't access to the tools (and source code: you can learn a lot by looking at the source code of production-quality software, and before OSS, this was unthinkable) that open source projects made available to me.
When I was a kid I pirated Turbo Pascal by copying it from the school computers to my own one; today's kids can freely copy all the OSS software they want, and I deem the difference to be important.
About "capitalism", I'm not very qualified to talk about economy, but what I see is that it brought a single company to basically own the whole desktop software market. I'm no economy professor, but I seem to remember that monopolists are the worst enemies of free market and thus capitalism.
Currently the only real competitor on the desktop market is Apple, and if I remember correctly, they are now using an operating system with heavy open source roots, because their precedent closed-source attempt, "Copland", failed. I think this says a lot about how OSS helps competition: companies can shift their focus on innovation, instead of rewriting code that somebody else has already written.
Or they are tired of being hamstrung by extremists. I mean, look at Linus compared to RMS. He's much, much more flexible. And guess what OS you are using. The HURD? No. Linux.
And still, what license did Linus put his own kernel under?
Moreover, the world is full of people that think that Linus is an "extremist", too, for the flames he starts on the LKML. And I've also heard similar things, for different reasons, about Drepper, Cox, Schily and who remembers how many others. It's quite possible that someone among them eats things that came from his toes, but who cares? I still have to see a single case in which their "extremism" harmed the open source community, while I've seen plenty of cases where commercial software companies tried to.
Every little revolution ages. The founders did their job and it becomes more practical. If the people who created GNOME want to go somewhere then they should have the freedom to do so. Pardon me, but if OSS means "NEVER EVER LEAVE" then you have no rights at all. Instead its all negative comments and MS conspiracy theories like yours.
They have the freedom to do, they are doing it, and I have the freedom to think that they're possibly doing wrong.
As for the conspiracy theories, so far they're taking shape pretty well. We have a standard that has been extended, patents that have been used to threat commercial adoption of OSS, and free implementations of the extended standard which are lagging 2 versions behind the reference one. And, developers that are proposing to replace in-house developed core components (namely, user interface) with commercially-controlled ones.
What can I say? We'll see, I'll be happy to be proven wrong, because I really care about free software.
The community promise only applies to core.NET though.
Even less than that: it only coves the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 specifications (the most recent revisions of which, by the way, currently date back to 2006); the.NET framework, which is effectively the target for users' applications (even free software ones), is a much richer superset of those specifications, and is completely MS-proprietary. There's no mention of.NET in the standards, nor in MS' promise.
As for proprietary crap - I use proprietary video drivers almost exclusively.
But that means that within one year and a half, when you go to your card manufacturer's web site to download the drivers, you'll see your card put in a separate "legacy products" box, and that will mean that you're not getting any more driver updates. Also, at the next big operating system version bump, you'll be likely in danger of being left with no drivers at all.
Moreover, since the manufacturers of your card won't probably be enthusiastic about the highly dynamic nature of the open source stack your drivers are running in, they will not be the first ones to support the new features offered by innovations on the open source side.
What I want to say is, that using open source drivers is not necessarily a philosophical/political/religious matter. It can be a very pragmatic way to use the card you paid for as long as you like, and not until its manufacturers decide it's time for you to buy a new one.
There is not a single chance that a secondary platform, which is struggling to to catch up with some primary platform were development is being done behind closed doors, will become the best environment to run applications written for the primary platform. Just like wine will never be a better environment to run Windows applications than Windows is.
If the only goal we want to achieve blindly is perfect interoperability with Windows, then the only optimal result will be a world where people only use Windows.
I think the newest generations of free software developers take free software for granted.
They do not know how things went before GNU and Linux were there, when to have an usable development environment you had to pay for an operating system (more expensive if it was a developer-oriented version), a windowing system, a file manager, an office application, a web browser, an email client, a compiler, a debugger, a zip program, a picture viewer, access to the official developer's documentation, and a full set of "Undocumented %s" books. Not to mention any library you might want to use.
Now they are growing tired of the "free software fundamentalists" because they do not see that what they've accomplished is inseparable from the ideology in which they believed. They just think that for some reason, charitable organizations such as Microsoft, Oracle, Sony and all the hardware manufacturers have an interest in providing them with software free of charge, and with unlimited freedom to use it in whatever way they see fit - and that they will keep doing so forever, even when that harms the sales of their commercial products.
GNOME will turn away from the FSF, this is obvious, and has been obvious since the first day the Mono affaire began. What will happen after Microsoft will be in control of key components of GNOME, is obvious too.
An then, hopefully before long, some new RMSes will appear, inspiring a free software movement again.
So has anybody benchmarked it to see how it compares to FAT?
I've done a poor man's benchmark by untarring the gnu glibc 2.11 tarball onto a newly formatted 2 GB usb stick under Windows.
The stick was formatted with the default options for each filesystem, and was "safely removed" and reinserted between each step.
Speed: time it took to extract the tarball on the newly formatted device.
1) UDF 2m 33.171s, 2) NTFS 25m 29.718s, 3) exFAT 42m 30.390s, 4) FAT32 47m 31.640s.
Speed: time it took to delete the whole tree created at the previous step.
1) UDF 0m 34.875s, 2) NTFS 6m 28.156s, 3) FAT32 16m 10.578s, 4) exFAT 28m 18.000s
Disk usage overhead: space that was nominally reported as free just after formatting.
1) exFAT 2,047,410,176 bytes, 2) UDF 2,047,056,384 bytes, 3) FAT32 2,043,637,760 bytes, 4) NTFS 2,008,457,216 bytes
Disk usage overhead: space that was nominally reported as free ater extracting the tarball.
1) UDF 1,941,765,632 bytes, 2) FAT32 1,915,809,792 bytes, 3) NTFS 1,877,790,720 bytes, 4) exFAT 1,616,379,904 bytes.
People can do without NTFS on a portable disk, because the only reason to use it is to interoperate with Windows. Which supports other file systems, so there is choice.
People won't be able to do without exFAT, because (if, and when, the standard gets adopted) it will be the file system used by consumer electronics devices. Which won't likely support more than one file system, so there will be no choice.
The beauty of digital storage for media is the freedom for the user to access his data in every way he sees fit. Closed standards for *personal* media storage are a step in the opposite direction.
Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it, if they buy any consumer electronic device containing an SD slot. They can't choose not to use it. It's a hardware standard.
So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.
And for those in Linux that want exFAT support according to the wiki an opensource experimental driver is in the works, or you can purchase a proprietary driver derived from licensed MSFT source code from Tuxera.
The sad thing is, that exFAT is being patented. That means that Linux users will either have to be lucky enough to live in that shrinking part of the world where software patents are not allowed, or consult their lawyer before connecting their camera to their computer.
Oh well, at least the patent submission appears to contains a copy of the exFAT specification, so reverse engineering the format won't be that hard.
Of course! But starting from Vista, it's supported on all other media, too. So what's the need for exFat? I think UDF might cover all of exFat's use cases, with no patents pending and secret specifications involved.
Microsoft realeased an updated SDHCI driver for windows XP which is supposed to support SDHC cards. But since it has not been distributed with Windows Update, I suppose it could have some problem. I've never tested it.
What about UDF? It's already supported out of the box on removable media by Windows Vista and higher.
Open standard, tons of features, fast on flash media, broad adoption by existing operating systems and devices.
They should use it instead of inventing yet another file system with less features. And closed, too (so much for Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards).
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Android: Open "Contacts", select the contact, press Menu button and select "Edit contact", edit "Name" and "Surname" fields, press Done button.
My Android phone has no "surname" field.
Android: Open "Gallery" (or press Gallery key shortcut on phone), all the photos in your phone will appear, with the latest photos first. Press the Share button, and select "Picasa", followed by pressing the Upload button. Visit the Picasa website on your PC and download your photo.
You'll admit it's not the same thing. Why do I need a Picasa account, Internet access, and to go through a web browser, when both my phone and my computer are equipped with Bluetooth? I'd say the usb cable option was more "usable".
Android: Open "Music" by selecting it from the applications menu (or use key shortcut), select "artists", select "YourFavouriteArtist" (just pressing Y will usually do), long-press to play all tracks, and press back button to change artist, etc.
We definitely do not have the same music player. I guess I was unlucky with my phone.
I am using an HTC Tattoo. Perhaps it ships with a different version of the music player because it has a smaller screen size (still, its screen is bigger than the one of my previous phone I was comparing it to).
I am not entirely sure what you are trying to accomplish here,
Trying to stop the ongoing mantra "nokia devices are not usable".
Now, I want to change someone's name, so I can go with one of two options:
1. I can open gmail in my browser, open contacts, click the name I want to change, select edit, and update the actual field, before clicking done.
No, you can't change "name" and "surname". You can only change something called "name", and Gmail will try to split it into "name" and "surname", and will get things wrong if you happen to know people called "Mario / Di Bella" or "Pier Luigi / Rossi".
The fact that you can find a more complex way to do it does not mean that it is the only way of getting the job done.
Since my primary phone runs Android, I'll be very pleased if you can tell me a faster way to do that job - that is, changing a contact's name *and* surname on my phone.
For your Phone->PC example, I will admit to cheating a bit. I have no idea whether any sort bluetooth storage mode is available, nor do I particularly care. Instead, when I want to transfer something, I'll open up my FTP client, and upload the files I want to my computer. There is even an app that is supposed to support samba drives, but I have never felt a need to install it. Now granted, this requires you to do a bit more work to set up these apps, but of course you conveniently omitted the step necessary to install the Nokia app that your PC would likely need, so I consider us even.
1) Android does not ship with a native ftp client / server. Of course you can install one, but we're talking about the usability of the *platform* here, so I described the only option that was available without installing extra software. I installed a nice ftp server app on my Android phone, but that doesn't count, as I could install some equivalent software on my Nokia phone too. 2) Bluetooth does not require any "nokia app" to transfer files, so I'm not "conveniently ignoring" anything. If a PC is equipped with a bluetooth stack, it will be able to transfer files without installing any extra application, using the OBEX push profile. If I really installed the official nokia suite, then my experience would have been even smoother, because it would automatically sync the photos between the PC and the phone in the background, as soon as the phone entered the PC's bluetooth range. I hear that Android 2.0 finally implemented the push profile, unfortunately my phone runs 1.6.
Finally, I do not use my phone to listen to music, so you may have a point about the problems there. That said, when I opened the Music app just now, the first screen was a simple selection (Artist, Album, Song, or Playlist), which does not appear to reflect what you are trying to describe. Selecting any of these options, then using the back button also works without issues.
It is possible that HTC crippled the music player on my phone by replacing the original Android player with another one which has the exact behaviour I described. What can I say? I can post a video of my phone if you doubt of my honesty. Of course I'd be saddened if this was necessary.
Now I am not sure whether you are confused about some of the features Android has, are trying to troll, have some sort of really old and crippled version of the platform, or are simply misinformed. In fact, the Android has plenty of shortcomings that you could have offered valid complaints about, but given the subjects you chose to mention, I get the impression that you are not interested in even giving it a chance.
I am using a phone that was released in October 2009 (HTC Tattoo), and I'm comparing it to my previous phone that was released in 2006 (Nokia N73). If I had something against Android, I wouldn't have bought an Android as my next phone. Android is a nice platform, I just don't find it more usabl
Usability wise, Symbian also pretty much sucks.
Usability test: how to change a contact's Name and Surname.
Nokia S60: Open "phonebook", select the contact, select "edit", edit "Name" and "Surname" fields, select "end".
Android: Connect to the internet, sync your contacts with gmail, open gmail with your PC, select "contacts", download the contacts as a CSV file on your PC, edit it via openoffice.org, reupload the edited CSV file to gmail, sync your phone again, disconnect it from the internet.
Usability test: how to send to your PC some photos you've taken with your phone.
Nokia S60: Open "gallery" (with a dedicated button on many phones), all the photos in your phone will appear, with the latest photos first. Select the photos you need to send (1 keystroke if your phone has hardware buttons, 3 taps if it doesn't and you have to open the menu), select "send", select "bluetooth", select your PC (already selected if you've used it before).
Android: Open your desk's drawer, take out the usb cable, connect your phone to the PC, select "mass storage mode", turn to the PC, search the phone filesystem for the photos (they're intuitively located in a "100MEDIA" subfolder in a "DCIM" folder, and called "IMAG%04d.jpg" - you'll have to figure out what files contain the photos you need), copy them to the PC, safely remove the usb device from the PC, put the usb cable back in the drawer.
Usability test: how to listen to some random music from YourFavouriteArtist.
Nokia S60: Open "music" (again, with a dedicated button on many phones), select "artists", select "YourFavouriteArtist" (just pressing Y will usually do), select "all tracks" because you're not looking for a particular album, select the first track.
If later you want to change artist, press "back" (you're, well, back in "all tracks from YourFavouriteArtist"), press "back" (you're back to the artist list).
Android: Open "music" by selecting it from the applications menu. A fancy but unuseful cover flow display appears. Press the "three horizontal lines" glyph. Another menu appears. Press the "person with a microphone" glyph. The menu changes. Find YourFavouriteArtist by scrolling the whole list or pressing the "search" button and then tapping "Y", and select him. Press the "musical note glyph", then select the first track.
If later you want to change artist, DON'T press the "back" button (it would take you back to the "home screen" for some reason), you have to tap the "three horizontal lines" glyph.
That said, I find my HTC Android phone crashing particularly often, and the annoying thing is, that when it does, it resets the sim card - this means you won't receive incoming phone calls until you take your phone out of your pocket and realize that it is stuck at the "insert PIN..." prompt. Every other phone manufacturer I've tried - Siemens, Alcatel, Motorola, Nokia, does this thing right by not asking for the PIN number when the phone is reset by some watchdog. Android doesn't, and it's a pity, because at least my HTC phone is the most crash-prone one I've ever owned (and it wasn't exactly cheap).
No. Berlusconi is the "president of the council of ministers". Italy has no "prime minister", for historical reasons. The GP is perfectly right.
I regret that my post gave that impression, as I can see from yours and other replies - please understand that I am not a native english speaker so I possibly chose the wrong words. All I wanted to say is:
1) The world was really worse before free software came in, I do remember it, and I would like those who don't remember how it was, or have never seen how it was, to know it.
2) Perhaps RMS does not deserve all the bashing he regularly gets, because with all defects he might have, his work both as a developer and as a "free software evangelist" did help me, and I'm sure it helped others.
3) Writing some software and releasing it freely for other people to use it, *is* a political gesture: the only "pragmatical" thing to do with one's own work is to keep it for oneself, or sell it to others for a fee. So every free software project is "political" somehow, free software would not exist at all in a perspective of pure "pragmatism".
4) Free software won't achieve its full potential without some kind of strategy about its interaction with the world of commercial software. Commercial software companies tend to have some obvious conflicts of interest with free software products, so giving them any degree of power over the future development of some free software project, either directly or indirectly, is not likely to help for that project's success.
As an avid consumer of free software, I thank you for all the free software you have written.
Oh come on, it has already been explained in a variety of ways by a lot of people. Yes, I acknowledge that it's FUD in the strict sense of the term, but it has some motivation behind it. Isn't GTK a key component of GNOME? Don't you see any risk in replacing it with Silverlight 4? Perhaps it will make me look like a tin-foil wearer, but I do.
If I can't talk about BSD, that's because I don't know anything about it, because in the place where I live its existence is virtually unknown. I only knew about the *BSD community after I got connected to the Internet, and when I did, I already had Linux installed.
So perhaps if the BSD folks had some weird guy, a BSD extremist, who spent his time traveling the world to spread the BSD word, I wouldn't be using Linux now...
Well, in reality thanks to capitalism and competition we have these things at an affordable level with OSX and Windows. I think people dont remember the 1980s where dozens of OS's fought for dominance and each generation proved better than the rest. Market capitalism in a nutshell, when it works.
While OSS is important lets not pretend that its everything.
I think OSS had a major role in this (and by OSS I mean sw licensed under GPL, BSD, *insert-your-favourite-license-here* - I don't care). In my admittedly limited experience, I've seen that companies have extended the range of features they give away without requiring a fee, only *after* some open source software started offering the same features for free. Would Visual Studio be free now if we hadn't GCC+Eclipse/Netbeans? Would Solaris be free now if we hadn't Linux/BSD? Would web browsers be free now if we hadn't Firefox/KHTML?
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't even have those poor coding skills that I have, if I hadn't access to the tools (and source code: you can learn a lot by looking at the source code of production-quality software, and before OSS, this was unthinkable) that open source projects made available to me.
When I was a kid I pirated Turbo Pascal by copying it from the school computers to my own one; today's kids can freely copy all the OSS software they want, and I deem the difference to be important.
About "capitalism", I'm not very qualified to talk about economy, but what I see is that it brought a single company to basically own the whole desktop software market. I'm no economy professor, but I seem to remember that monopolists are the worst enemies of free market and thus capitalism.
Currently the only real competitor on the desktop market is Apple, and if I remember correctly, they are now using an operating system with heavy open source roots, because their precedent closed-source attempt, "Copland", failed. I think this says a lot about how OSS helps competition: companies can shift their focus on innovation, instead of rewriting code that somebody else has already written.
Or they are tired of being hamstrung by extremists. I mean, look at Linus compared to RMS. He's much, much more flexible. And guess what OS you are using. The HURD? No. Linux.
And still, what license did Linus put his own kernel under?
Moreover, the world is full of people that think that Linus is an "extremist", too, for the flames he starts on the LKML. And I've also heard similar things, for different reasons, about Drepper, Cox, Schily and who remembers how many others. It's quite possible that someone among them eats things that came from his toes, but who cares? I still have to see a single case in which their "extremism" harmed the open source community, while I've seen plenty of cases where commercial software companies tried to.
Every little revolution ages. The founders did their job and it becomes more practical. If the people who created GNOME want to go somewhere then they should have the freedom to do so. Pardon me, but if OSS means "NEVER EVER LEAVE" then you have no rights at all. Instead its all negative comments and MS conspiracy theories like yours.
They have the freedom to do, they are doing it, and I have the freedom to think that they're possibly doing wrong.
As for the conspiracy theories, so far they're taking shape pretty well. We have a standard that has been extended, patents that have been used to threat commercial adoption of OSS, and free implementations of the extended standard which are lagging 2 versions behind the reference one. And, developers that are proposing to replace in-house developed core components (namely, user interface) with commercially-controlled ones.
What can I say? We'll see, I'll be happy to be proven wrong, because I really care about free software.
The community promise only applies to core .NET though.
Even less than that: it only coves the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 specifications (the most recent revisions of which, by the way, currently date back to 2006); the .NET framework, which is effectively the target for users' applications (even free software ones), is a much richer superset of those specifications, and is completely MS-proprietary. There's no mention of .NET in the standards, nor in MS' promise.
What about OpenJDK or Scala?
Patents on OOXML, 1
Patents on OOXML, 2
Patents on the C# language
Patents on the Common Language Infrastructure
As for proprietary crap - I use proprietary video drivers almost exclusively.
But that means that within one year and a half, when you go to your card manufacturer's web site to download the drivers, you'll see your card put in a separate "legacy products" box, and that will mean that you're not getting any more driver updates. Also, at the next big operating system version bump, you'll be likely in danger of being left with no drivers at all.
Moreover, since the manufacturers of your card won't probably be enthusiastic about the highly dynamic nature of the open source stack your drivers are running in, they will not be the first ones to support the new features offered by innovations on the open source side.
What I want to say is, that using open source drivers is not necessarily a philosophical/political/religious matter. It can be a very pragmatic way to use the card you paid for as long as you like, and not until its manufacturers decide it's time for you to buy a new one.
So far KDE still provides it, GNOME doesn't, so I use KDE. I think I'm in the crowd that uses KDE because it sucks less than GNOME.
If the only goal we want to achieve blindly is perfect interoperability with Windows, then the only optimal result will be a world where people only use Windows.
They do not know how things went before GNU and Linux were there, when to have an usable development environment you had to pay for an operating system (more expensive if it was a developer-oriented version), a windowing system, a file manager, an office application, a web browser, an email client, a compiler, a debugger, a zip program, a picture viewer, access to the official developer's documentation, and a full set of "Undocumented %s" books. Not to mention any library you might want to use.
Now they are growing tired of the "free software fundamentalists" because they do not see that what they've accomplished is inseparable from the ideology in which they believed. They just think that for some reason, charitable organizations such as Microsoft, Oracle, Sony and all the hardware manufacturers have an interest in providing them with software free of charge, and with unlimited freedom to use it in whatever way they see fit - and that they will keep doing so forever, even when that harms the sales of their commercial products.
GNOME will turn away from the FSF, this is obvious, and has been obvious since the first day the Mono affaire began. What will happen after Microsoft will be in control of key components of GNOME, is obvious too.
An then, hopefully before long, some new RMSes will appear, inspiring a free software movement again.
So has anybody benchmarked it to see how it compares to FAT?
I've done a poor man's benchmark by untarring the gnu glibc 2.11 tarball onto a newly formatted 2 GB usb stick under Windows. The stick was formatted with the default options for each filesystem, and was "safely removed" and reinserted between each step.
Speed: time it took to extract the tarball on the newly formatted device.
1) UDF 2m 33.171s, 2) NTFS 25m 29.718s, 3) exFAT 42m 30.390s, 4) FAT32 47m 31.640s.
Speed: time it took to delete the whole tree created at the previous step.
1) UDF 0m 34.875s, 2) NTFS 6m 28.156s, 3) FAT32 16m 10.578s, 4) exFAT 28m 18.000s
Disk usage overhead: space that was nominally reported as free just after formatting.
1) exFAT 2,047,410,176 bytes, 2) UDF 2,047,056,384 bytes, 3) FAT32 2,043,637,760 bytes, 4) NTFS 2,008,457,216 bytes
Disk usage overhead: space that was nominally reported as free ater extracting the tarball.
1) UDF 1,941,765,632 bytes, 2) FAT32 1,915,809,792 bytes, 3) NTFS 1,877,790,720 bytes, 4) exFAT 1,616,379,904 bytes.
UDF can be used on every media.
For my flash media, under Windows, it performs better than FAT and exFAT.
People won't be able to do without exFAT, because (if, and when, the standard gets adopted) it will be the file system used by consumer electronics devices. Which won't likely support more than one file system, so there will be no choice.
The beauty of digital storage for media is the freedom for the user to access his data in every way he sees fit. Closed standards for *personal* media storage are a step in the opposite direction.
So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.
And for those in Linux that want exFAT support according to the wiki an opensource experimental driver is in the works, or you can purchase a proprietary driver derived from licensed MSFT source code from Tuxera.
The sad thing is, that exFAT is being patented. That means that Linux users will either have to be lucky enough to live in that shrinking part of the world where software patents are not allowed, or consult their lawyer before connecting their camera to their computer.
Oh well, at least the patent submission appears to contains a copy of the exFAT specification, so reverse engineering the format won't be that hard.
Of course! But starting from Vista, it's supported on all other media, too. So what's the need for exFat? I think UDF might cover all of exFat's use cases, with no patents pending and secret specifications involved.
Microsoft realeased an updated SDHCI driver for windows XP which is supposed to support SDHC cards. But since it has not been distributed with Windows Update, I suppose it could have some problem. I've never tested it.
Open standard, tons of features, fast on flash media, broad adoption by existing operating systems and devices.
They should use it instead of inventing yet another file system with less features. And closed, too (so much for Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards).