Why do you think what you want people do to with their cars is any of your business, as long as it doesn't involve hurting you or someone else?
Punish them if they do something stupid and cause a traffic accident... let them work out what they're allowed to do with their insurance company that may have to pay for the consequences, but how did we get to the point where joe anonymous may get a say via the police over what software people are allowed to run?
Because frequently it *does* involve hurting someone else: it's called a fatal car accident, where the person who wasn't playing Angry Birds dies. The person wrecklessly driving will of course face all kinds of consequences from the police/courts/insurance company for the accident (and quite possibly manslaughter charges on top of it), but that doesn't bring the victim back to life.
According to Ke$ha, the backdoor is already cracked, you don't need a key, and they get in for free with no VIP sleaze...which in this case seems hypocritical.
You say that like the darling little tykes have not ever forged their parents signature on a school document.
The difference is that, at least for elementary school children (and all but the most industrious middle school students), a forged signature looks like an eight year old trying to copy their parents' signature. There's a decisive difference between a signature drawn by someone who is just learning cursive this week, and someone who has been writing the same signature since they were 18.
A child writing a name in Times New Roman looks exactly the same as an adult typing the same phrase in Times New Roman.
For broadcast grade HDCam/XDCam, I feel ya. For consumer grade stuff, I def miss MiniDV...
MiniDV was inherently class compliant. Every camcorder ever released that used a MiniDV tape and a FireWire port was properly detected by literally every operating system with a firewire port. You can get a Canon XH-A1 and plug it into a computer running Windows 98SE and have it capture properly (hardware withstanding, of course). Having tapes that were an hour long was a good thing, IMO. People who were shooting knew how long they were shooting, which led to in-camera editing, which saved capture time, while also allowing the convenient carrying of a spare tape in a back pocket. Every frame was shot with the exact same compression of every other frame. Now, capturing all that video was certainly no picnic, although the appreciation for the inclusion of "Scene Detect" in Adobe Premiere was met with the same level of enthusiasm as the first time spellcheck was added to WordPerfect. Even if we forego the chore-like nature of capturing, early MiniDV cameras were destined to capture video on machines that couldn't always handle sustained write speeds at real-time capture rates. Conversely, there was no means of accelerating capture for people with RAID-0 arrays or similar - it was real-time or bust.
Now, because of all the caveats mentioned above, tape fell out of favor. Units went to either on board hard disks or some form of flash memory. This was all well and good for consumers, who were thrilled at not having to drop $4-8 a pop on miniDV tapes, and 'capturing' was a chore that could go away. However, few realized the inherent issues with going away from tape. First, there was no archive of the video. While this mattered little for most people, it was similarly more conventional to use the tape as a manual backup in the first place, whereas one or two SD cards would rotate and that would be it...which was of course a bit more susceptible to a 'format' command, which was now necessary to do from time to time. Next, the formats were a LOT less standardized. MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MOV, and AVCHD, all in different resolutions and compression rates, all with different audio codecs. Camcorders came with software, which was now frequently necessary, because even if an editing platform supported AVCHD, camcorder manufacturers for a while all tried their own version of "embrace, extend, extinguish", which involved using their bundled software for batch transcoding into something that is more useful for editing. Admittedly that problem got a bit more standardized over time, but it still hasn't mitigated the issue that, believe it or not, there are STILL people who have problems with navigating a file and folder structure, which became the standard means of pulling videos off a camcorder storage device once tape went away. Again, most software can generally deal with this now and pull stuff off the drives natively, but while tape wasn't a fix for stupidity, it raised the the level of competence enough that either you learned as a result of wanting to do it, or you didn't edit video.
If there was an HD version of DVCam that camcorders could standardize to, I'd be super happy. Also, I do realize that a lot of the above matters less to the professional arena than the consumer arena, but there is a degree of overlap that is worth exploring as both used tape for their video storage.
1.) rig a secondary/tertiary monitor output on a nearby desktop and wire it to the TV's camera/audio input. 2.) set the computer output to a nonstop 24/7 loop of "Friday" by Rebecca Black, along with a slide show that alternates between Goatse, 2 girls 1 cup, and horse porn. 3.) bask in the fact that somwhere, someone is regretting the release of this technology. 4.) Don't EVER cross the wires from step 1. 5.) Profit.
Windows Mobile 6.5 still has one of the most handy features ever implemented in any mobile OS (at least for me, anyway). If you are synced with an Exchange 2010 server via Activesync and have Outlook 2010 (yes, I realize how stringent those requirements are), it's possible to sent text messages through Outlook just like an e-mail, with full access to your contacts and mass sending. Also, Jeyo made two third party applications that were handy in this regard as well: MobileExtender allowed texting through outlook over USB, and Mobile Companion was essentially what Microsoft should have released if they wanted to compete with Nokia PC Suite - it's ActiveSync on a metric ton of steroids, and contains its own database for calendar entries, contacts, and the like.
There was, and the issue was the fact that it was about the worst implementation of a mobile app store I've ever used (and I've used Apple's, Google's, Amazon's, and the WP7 implementation).
The first issue was the inherent problems of getting software for Windows Mobile in general. Windows Mobile 5/6 came at a time of some ludicrously awkward and diverse-in-a-bad-way hardware. Some devices had a resistive touch screen. Some had a keyboard. Some had both. Some only had hardware dialpads. Some had 2 hardware softkeys, others had four. Some had 240x320 displays, some had 240x320 displays, some had 480x640, some had 480x800. Some had barcode scanners. Some had IR ports. Some had Bluetooth. Some had Wi-Fi. Some had GPS. Some had a CompactFlash slot. Some had 200MHz CPUs and 64MBytes of RAM, others had 1GHz CPUs and 512MB of RAM. Try - just TRY - developing for a platform where you can't make a single assumption about input *or* output. There were essentially two ways that developers overcame this hardware diversity. The first was to develop for a handful of specific models. While this streamlined support and produced a standard of compatibility, it was problematic for the developer (whose market was limited by the phones available) and the customer (who either couldn't get a piece of software, or had to choose a particular phone/PDA based on the necessity of an application). The second route that could be taken was to have a developer extensively test as many handsets as possible, and develop the UI to compensate. While this made applications mostly consistent, I'm sure I don't have to describe the nightmare of testing (and debugging) dozens of handsets, and implicitly the fact that programs of this nature were typically much larger as the installation CAB file had to include all the different permutations. Even this second route led to the first to some extent. Some developers (notably SPB and Jeyo) sidestepped this a bit by making extensions to the OS itself and leaving the input/output/display to WinMo to figure out, but others like DeLorme had applications that would technically function (street maps for all of the USA for my laptop, and an export function for my phone so I can GPS for free without a data plan? yes please!), but in the most arcane way possible no matter what hardware you threw at it.
So now that the nightmare of developing for WinMo has been established, consider the pathetic history of selling software for WinMo. I remember working at Staples, having a revolving rack of PDA software, priced from $9.99 to $49.99, that shipped on SD cards. Back then, the PDA software market used the retail model that PCs used, because back then, smartphones were considered portable desktops that did the core subset of PC functionality. The concept of buying apps on the fly made little sense when data was transferred over a serial cable, and later USB, from Outlook. On the flip side, the developers of mobile OS software were following the PC model as well; many listed their stuff on Download.com/Tucows/Softpedia, each of which had a mobile section. Other companies like Handango and PocketPCFreeware.net catered to the mobile crowd exclusively. This was, of course, in addition to developers hosting their own websites, taking care of their own transactions, and providing their own e-mail support.
When Apple came out with the App Store for the iPhone, it wasn't entirely breaking new ground. Apps had been sold for mobile devices forever, Steam modeled a successful software distribution channel, Apple had plenty of success with selling songs and movies in their media store, and Installer.app and Cydia had been enabling the installation of software on the iPhone for nearly a year before. The iPhone and the App Store did help make a critical change in the way that the smartphone was thought of: no longer was a mobile phone the extension of a desktop that facilitated the sending and receiving of e-mail and integrating one's Outlook contacts with their phone. The Smartphone started to be looked at as its own pla
Opera is where I went after I stopped feelin' Firefox. Tab groups, notes, mail/irc/bittorrent/rss clients built in, Opera Turbo for those times you're tethering and need to conserve on your wireless cap, gestures, widgets and extensions (including AdBlock and NoScript), speed dial, session preservation, private browsing, reasonable memory usage, skins and themes, configurable download behavior, configurable keyboard shortcuts, a sane release schedule, and performance that frequently rivals Chrome. Also, it runs on basically anything - Windows (as early as 2000 with the current version, I believe), OSX, virtually every flavor of Linux, and Solaris (and basically every mobile operating system ever developed), and the Windows installer for Opera is nearly 33% smaller than the most recent edition of Firefox. While it's not Richard-Stallman-Free, it is freeware now.
To be fair, the only issues I've had were with some IE specific sites. The most prominent example is...basically every version of Outlook Web Access Microsoft ever released, even though the more recent versions have worked correctly on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The Sharepoint at work does work correctly, however lists aren't rendered in database view the way they are in IE. Opera tends to take standard compliance to the point where it seems as if the browser says, "if I don't render it right, the site is wrong". While technologically correct, in practice Firefox handles these kinds of sites with much more practical grace, in no small part because FF is almost invariably a part of website design testing, while Opera is less frequently tested. Still, it's the rare exception for websites to not display correctly in Opera, at least to the point of getting the content you need, but even these discrepancies are relatively infrequent.
The comic for 2/20/2012 started with the boss saying, "we're going to start charging customers for features they already get for free". When I hit the 'previous' button to go back to 2/19, there was a pop-up for Netflix.
To be honest, I too questioned that a smidge, given that the UBCD4Win project distributes a builder that requires a Windows CD to work, whereas Hiren distributes an ISO. While common sense says "if you have an XP disc for the purpose you've fulfilled the legal requirements", especially if you also have a hosed hard disk that carries a licensed copy of Windows requiring disinfecting, it'd be down to a group of lawyers to determine whether it's entirely legal or not.
What I was referring to was the fact that the older editions included a laundry list of commercial software, such as Norton Ghost, PowerQuest Drive Image, Acronis Disk Director, and plenty more. The project has more recently opted to contain exclusively freeware/shareware/FOSS titles instead.
You could always get a life, realize that operating systems are not the end all of existence, and use a Windows machine to scan the hard drive.
This.
If you're that averse to installing Windows on something, check out some of the bootable diagnostic tools like the UBCD4Win project, the newer releases of Hiren's Boot CD (That are now pirated-software free), or HawkPE. They run right off the disc and have HijackThis - along with a plethora of other cleanup tools - pre-configured.
I'm not employed by them, but I am fiercely loyal to the brand and they pretty much have me as a customer for life...because of the very thing that HP is trying to sell here.
When I first got Tiny, my 11.5lb beast of a laptop that plays Crysis maxed out without flinching, it was having an issue where it would randomly BSOD. "ZoMg ItS wInDoEs!!!!111"...no it's not - my Dell XPS M1730 BSOD'd once in two years of running Win7. Having Tiny BSOD several times in a single sitting...not the same thing. So I called Origin's tech support. They had me test my RAM and my hard disk, which both came out clean. They had me try an excellent utility called WhoCrashed and run Furmark overnight. They FTP'd a complete set of drivers to my FTP server for me to try. When we finally decided that it wasn't a software error, they replaced virtually every piece of hardware available: they offered me a new hard disk (which I declined since the OEM drive checked out and I tried a spare I had lying around which yielded the same results), and new RAM, which I didn't need. They swapped out the CPU (which they later let me trade up for the newer model at the cost of the difference a new customer would pay), and they swapped out the laptop chassis, all the while being perfectly okay with sending me parts and letting me do my own warranty work so I wouldn't have any downtime. It finally ended up being the wireless chipset, which the promptly overnighted me (and again, let me upgrade later at a price differential). Two months later, the GPU died. A new one was on my desk the next morning after a phone call that lasted less than five minutes, WITH hold and transfer times.
My support rep Alvaro has even helped me through the simple things. I was at an event, getting ready to DJ in four hours...and all of my MP3s were missing. While in a calmer state of mind I would have been alright, starting Serato, having none of your audio files on the drive (but your folder structure still intact), and being 150 miles away from the FreeNAS containing your backup is what I'd call the textbook definition of "a situation that'll put basically anyone in panic mode". Perhaps y'allz are better under stress than I am, but in that state, my brain basically turned into the product of a box of Fig Newtons and a Cuisinart. Alvaro was calm, understanding, and even though I 100% admitted that it was a PEBKAC/ID10T error, he did everything he could to help me find stuff, suggested a few data recovery tools, and helped get me back into focus to the point where I realized that it was, in fact, all there, but on the wrong hard disk.
How much was this beast of a machine (3.2GHz Core i7, 6GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM, 1x500GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD, 2xWestern Digital Scorpio 7200RPM 320GB HDDs, nVidia Geforce 460M, Intel 6300abgn wifi, bluetooth, webcam, DVD-RW, custom painted lid, spare battery, spare power adapter, 2 year parts/labor warranty) along with personal tech support like that? $3,400USD. And it was worth every single cent.
You will never understand the peace of mind that comes with being able to call a phone number and say "hey Alvaro, it's Joey", and have him know exactly what to expect, and know that he's not going anywhere until the problem is resolved. I've never read the man a serial number in my life. I assume it's on the bottom somwhere, but I've never been asked for it.
Have at it, HP. Origin set the standard. I'd love to see it happen. However, I personally don't think they've got the corporate culture for that to happen.
To be fair, the blog post seems to indicate that they're extolling their progress on the reverse. They're saying their best-in-industry as far as delivering the least amount of spam to hotmail inboxes, not whether hotmail addresses are the source of spam elsewhere.
That said, I have an e-mail address at basically every major mail service (gmail, yahoo, aim/aol, mail.com, a hosted exchange account, and hotmail). The only spam I get in Hotmail actually lands in my spam box, and there really isn't much of it to speak of.
I know that this is gonna be a smidge off-topic and paint me as a Microsoft shill, but I'm really not...Hotmail's notoriety was deserved in the 1990's, but unfortunately Microsoft has attached the poisoned name to a good product (which is why I opt to use live.com instead). MS really did well with integrating Hotmail, Skydrive, and Office Web Apps. Get a Word document as an attachment? open it on the spot without downloading, edit, and reply. Save to Skydrive to access it from basically anything. All three work as well in Chrome and Firefox as they do in IE (Opera support is a bit stubborn, admittedly), and doesn't require silverlight. The UI looks a lot like Outlook, sharing files via a link is piss simple (and gives options to share via Facebook and gives different links for read only and r/w access), and the ads aren't terribly intrusive. Yes, I fully credit Gmail and Google Docs for pushing Microsoft to the point where they've made a suite of web apps that are worth using. However, if you haven't visited a Windows Live account in the past year to see how genuinely nice it is to use...it's worth an objective look.
Just putting it out there...if you're going to call it civil disobedience, then make sure that you're down with the road you're choosing to travel. Civil disobedience means that if they decide to sue you that you plead guilty to the crime, take the sentence they give you, and forego appeals. Civil disobedience means that you believe in your cause enough to take the punishment they dish out in order to make an example as to how harmful the rules are with the hope that your sacrifice will influence positive change.
Using the principle famously exemplified by Gandhi and Rosa Parks is admirable, as long as you're willing to go to the lengths that they're willing to go in order to do it. If that's genuinely your goal, and you're okay with it, then I applaud you and support you. However, if you're going at this with even the slightest intent to settle out of court, plead 'not guilty', or appeal a verdict, then you're not following a cause, you're justifying copyright infringement.
1.) few people upload sensitive data to a web hosting service. 2.) it requires less CPU overhead. 3.) FTP transfers, while better with a client like Filezilla/Cyberduck/xFTP, don't *require* a client since both Windows and OSX support it natively.
I'm an HTC customer myself for the very reasons you specify. However, I wonder if pervasiveness has something to do with it as well. When a device is plentiful, a lot more people with time on their hands can poke it and prod it, and make custom ROMs. Overall, most of the people I know with the Droid Razr have little interest in rooting it themselves. If these tablets become popular enough (citation: iPhone), or Motorola does something particularly egregious with some well-circulated hardware (citation: Sony with PS3), the exploit will be more likely to be found.
Okay fellow Slashdotters, please indulge me and consider the following scenario...
My personal phone is an HTC HD2 that originally shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5, but I installed MagLDR and one of the CyanogenMod derivatives. My work phone is a Verizon Droid Incredible 2 that is running VirtuousUnity, a modded ROM with HTC Sense 3.5. My dad's phone is a T-Mobile G2 that has not been modified in any way. While it does have a few T-Mobile specific applications on it, it's still a mostly-stock build and doesn't have HTC Sense on it.
My dad used to be pretty tech savvy back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, but his tech knowledge hasn't progressed much since then. He very frequently asks relatively simple questions about his phone.
While all three phones technically run Android, they're still very different to him. He can mostly figure out my HD2, but dialing looks a bit different since I use a third party dialing application. The SenseUI phone looks extremely different and he has to ask how to do things all over again.
Many of the responses here have been something to the effect of "...so why doesn't Samsung just ditch Touchwiz?" The answer to that is simple: to most people, the UI matters a LOT more than the underlying code. The overwhelming majority of apps I've used run on Android 2.1 or later, which is basically every phone still in active use among the friends, family, and clients that I'm aware of, so app compatibility issues are rather trivial. The real issue is that most people would be more confused going from TouchWiz 2.3 to a plain 4.0 UI than they would if they simply left well enough alone. While the Slashdot crowd is generally more comfortable rooting and modding, I'd assume that the millions of Samsung Galaxy S owners are probably NOT slashdotters, do NOT have their phones' xda-devs subforum on their RSS feeds to watch for new releases on their ROMs. They didn't learn how to use *Android*, they learned how to use *their phone*, which runs Touchwiz.
As an analogy, most of the people who own Android phones would notice a bigger difference by going from Ubuntu to Xubuntu than they would by going between Ubuntu running GNOME 2.32 and PC-BSD running GNOME 2.32.
I've run some of the early builds of ICS on my HD2, and I personally don't like it. I like having the "endless vertical scrolling wall of apps", instead of this page-by-page multiple walls of apps nonsense. The soft buttons are understandable except that most phones have some sort of soft button alternative, which makes that space redundant. The menus are in different places, fonts can be hard to read in some screens, and some of the settings have been rearranged. Now once these builds get more mature (and get camera drivers, since strangely none of my HTC phones have working cameras) I'll probably migrate over, but the average user "just figured out how to use their phone" and will be worse off with a 4.0 build than they will by sticking with their meticulously customized home screens.
tl; didn't read past claim 4 or somesuch. However, of what I read, not a single thing listed was described in such a way that it didn't also apply to my friends' Palm Treo 700W that was released in 2006.
Their coverage might not be all that great in the middle of the desert like Verizon is, but I've got Verizon in one pocket (courtesy of work), and T-Mo in the other. In the New York suburb where I live, coverage is mostly comparable; places where T-Mo drops the call, my Verizon phone is showing less than -100dbm coverage itself. Also, while I've found Verizon to have a bit better latency numbers, my download speed on T-Mo 3G is sometimes double Verizon's numbers, likely due to the fact that there are relatively fewer people saturating the backhaul.
As for phones, fine, they don't have the iPhone officially. They do, however, unofficially support unlocked iPhone models on their network. T-Mobile has the Blackberry Torch now, though using a Blackberry as an example did cause a slight lol. They have more Android phones than anyone else, in more form factors, and if memory serves more WP7 phones as well.
While I unfortunately agree that T-Mo's future is questionable, I think that making it well known that they're officially not becoming AT&T will likely help spur sales. I knew a lot of people who were considering going to T-Mo, but didn't want to become AT&T customers. This may restore enough confidence to make the growth start happening for them.
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Why do you think what you want people do to with their cars is any of your business, as long as it doesn't involve hurting you or someone else?
Punish them if they do something stupid and cause a traffic accident... let them work out what they're allowed to do with their insurance company that may have to pay for the consequences, but how did we get to the point where joe anonymous may get a say via the police over what software people are allowed to run?
Because frequently it *does* involve hurting someone else: it's called a fatal car accident, where the person who wasn't playing Angry Birds dies. The person wrecklessly driving will of course face all kinds of consequences from the police/courts/insurance company for the accident (and quite possibly manslaughter charges on top of it), but that doesn't bring the victim back to life.
According to Ke$ha, the backdoor is already cracked, you don't need a key, and they get in for free with no VIP sleaze...which in this case seems hypocritical.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL2txMU50CI
This, I believe. (Parental Advisory...)
You say that like the darling little tykes have not ever forged their parents signature on a school document.
The difference is that, at least for elementary school children (and all but the most industrious middle school students), a forged signature looks like an eight year old trying to copy their parents' signature. There's a decisive difference between a signature drawn by someone who is just learning cursive this week, and someone who has been writing the same signature since they were 18.
A child writing a name in Times New Roman looks exactly the same as an adult typing the same phrase in Times New Roman.
For broadcast grade HDCam/XDCam, I feel ya. For consumer grade stuff, I def miss MiniDV...
MiniDV was inherently class compliant. Every camcorder ever released that used a MiniDV tape and a FireWire port was properly detected by literally every operating system with a firewire port. You can get a Canon XH-A1 and plug it into a computer running Windows 98SE and have it capture properly (hardware withstanding, of course). Having tapes that were an hour long was a good thing, IMO. People who were shooting knew how long they were shooting, which led to in-camera editing, which saved capture time, while also allowing the convenient carrying of a spare tape in a back pocket. Every frame was shot with the exact same compression of every other frame. Now, capturing all that video was certainly no picnic, although the appreciation for the inclusion of "Scene Detect" in Adobe Premiere was met with the same level of enthusiasm as the first time spellcheck was added to WordPerfect. Even if we forego the chore-like nature of capturing, early MiniDV cameras were destined to capture video on machines that couldn't always handle sustained write speeds at real-time capture rates. Conversely, there was no means of accelerating capture for people with RAID-0 arrays or similar - it was real-time or bust.
Now, because of all the caveats mentioned above, tape fell out of favor. Units went to either on board hard disks or some form of flash memory. This was all well and good for consumers, who were thrilled at not having to drop $4-8 a pop on miniDV tapes, and 'capturing' was a chore that could go away. However, few realized the inherent issues with going away from tape. First, there was no archive of the video. While this mattered little for most people, it was similarly more conventional to use the tape as a manual backup in the first place, whereas one or two SD cards would rotate and that would be it...which was of course a bit more susceptible to a 'format' command, which was now necessary to do from time to time. Next, the formats were a LOT less standardized. MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MOV, and AVCHD, all in different resolutions and compression rates, all with different audio codecs. Camcorders came with software, which was now frequently necessary, because even if an editing platform supported AVCHD, camcorder manufacturers for a while all tried their own version of "embrace, extend, extinguish", which involved using their bundled software for batch transcoding into something that is more useful for editing. Admittedly that problem got a bit more standardized over time, but it still hasn't mitigated the issue that, believe it or not, there are STILL people who have problems with navigating a file and folder structure, which became the standard means of pulling videos off a camcorder storage device once tape went away. Again, most software can generally deal with this now and pull stuff off the drives natively, but while tape wasn't a fix for stupidity, it raised the the level of competence enough that either you learned as a result of wanting to do it, or you didn't edit video.
If there was an HD version of DVCam that camcorders could standardize to, I'd be super happy. Also, I do realize that a lot of the above matters less to the professional arena than the consumer arena, but there is a degree of overlap that is worth exploring as both used tape for their video storage.
1.) rig a secondary/tertiary monitor output on a nearby desktop and wire it to the TV's camera/audio input.
2.) set the computer output to a nonstop 24/7 loop of "Friday" by Rebecca Black, along with a slide show that alternates between Goatse, 2 girls 1 cup, and horse porn.
3.) bask in the fact that somwhere, someone is regretting the release of this technology.
4.) Don't EVER cross the wires from step 1.
5.) Profit.
Windows Mobile 6.5 still has one of the most handy features ever implemented in any mobile OS (at least for me, anyway). If you are synced with an Exchange 2010 server via Activesync and have Outlook 2010 (yes, I realize how stringent those requirements are), it's possible to sent text messages through Outlook just like an e-mail, with full access to your contacts and mass sending. Also, Jeyo made two third party applications that were handy in this regard as well: MobileExtender allowed texting through outlook over USB, and Mobile Companion was essentially what Microsoft should have released if they wanted to compete with Nokia PC Suite - it's ActiveSync on a metric ton of steroids, and contains its own database for calendar entries, contacts, and the like.
There was, and the issue was the fact that it was about the worst implementation of a mobile app store I've ever used (and I've used Apple's, Google's, Amazon's, and the WP7 implementation).
The first issue was the inherent problems of getting software for Windows Mobile in general. Windows Mobile 5/6 came at a time of some ludicrously awkward and diverse-in-a-bad-way hardware. Some devices had a resistive touch screen. Some had a keyboard. Some had both. Some only had hardware dialpads. Some had 2 hardware softkeys, others had four. Some had 240x320 displays, some had 240x320 displays, some had 480x640, some had 480x800. Some had barcode scanners. Some had IR ports. Some had Bluetooth. Some had Wi-Fi. Some had GPS. Some had a CompactFlash slot. Some had 200MHz CPUs and 64MBytes of RAM, others had 1GHz CPUs and 512MB of RAM. Try - just TRY - developing for a platform where you can't make a single assumption about input *or* output. There were essentially two ways that developers overcame this hardware diversity. The first was to develop for a handful of specific models. While this streamlined support and produced a standard of compatibility, it was problematic for the developer (whose market was limited by the phones available) and the customer (who either couldn't get a piece of software, or had to choose a particular phone/PDA based on the necessity of an application). The second route that could be taken was to have a developer extensively test as many handsets as possible, and develop the UI to compensate. While this made applications mostly consistent, I'm sure I don't have to describe the nightmare of testing (and debugging) dozens of handsets, and implicitly the fact that programs of this nature were typically much larger as the installation CAB file had to include all the different permutations. Even this second route led to the first to some extent. Some developers (notably SPB and Jeyo) sidestepped this a bit by making extensions to the OS itself and leaving the input/output/display to WinMo to figure out, but others like DeLorme had applications that would technically function (street maps for all of the USA for my laptop, and an export function for my phone so I can GPS for free without a data plan? yes please!), but in the most arcane way possible no matter what hardware you threw at it.
So now that the nightmare of developing for WinMo has been established, consider the pathetic history of selling software for WinMo. I remember working at Staples, having a revolving rack of PDA software, priced from $9.99 to $49.99, that shipped on SD cards. Back then, the PDA software market used the retail model that PCs used, because back then, smartphones were considered portable desktops that did the core subset of PC functionality. The concept of buying apps on the fly made little sense when data was transferred over a serial cable, and later USB, from Outlook. On the flip side, the developers of mobile OS software were following the PC model as well; many listed their stuff on Download.com/Tucows/Softpedia, each of which had a mobile section. Other companies like Handango and PocketPCFreeware.net catered to the mobile crowd exclusively. This was, of course, in addition to developers hosting their own websites, taking care of their own transactions, and providing their own e-mail support.
When Apple came out with the App Store for the iPhone, it wasn't entirely breaking new ground. Apps had been sold for mobile devices forever, Steam modeled a successful software distribution channel, Apple had plenty of success with selling songs and movies in their media store, and Installer.app and Cydia had been enabling the installation of software on the iPhone for nearly a year before. The iPhone and the App Store did help make a critical change in the way that the smartphone was thought of: no longer was a mobile phone the extension of a desktop that facilitated the sending and receiving of e-mail and integrating one's Outlook contacts with their phone. The Smartphone started to be looked at as its own pla
testing to see if firewall lets me post.
Thanks for linking to a complete useless, pointless and content-free Twitter post.
I thought redundancy was picked up by the lameness filter.
Opera is where I went after I stopped feelin' Firefox. Tab groups, notes, mail/irc/bittorrent/rss clients built in, Opera Turbo for those times you're tethering and need to conserve on your wireless cap, gestures, widgets and extensions (including AdBlock and NoScript), speed dial, session preservation, private browsing, reasonable memory usage, skins and themes, configurable download behavior, configurable keyboard shortcuts, a sane release schedule, and performance that frequently rivals Chrome. Also, it runs on basically anything - Windows (as early as 2000 with the current version, I believe), OSX, virtually every flavor of Linux, and Solaris (and basically every mobile operating system ever developed), and the Windows installer for Opera is nearly 33% smaller than the most recent edition of Firefox. While it's not Richard-Stallman-Free, it is freeware now.
To be fair, the only issues I've had were with some IE specific sites. The most prominent example is...basically every version of Outlook Web Access Microsoft ever released, even though the more recent versions have worked correctly on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The Sharepoint at work does work correctly, however lists aren't rendered in database view the way they are in IE. Opera tends to take standard compliance to the point where it seems as if the browser says, "if I don't render it right, the site is wrong". While technologically correct, in practice Firefox handles these kinds of sites with much more practical grace, in no small part because FF is almost invariably a part of website design testing, while Opera is less frequently tested. Still, it's the rare exception for websites to not display correctly in Opera, at least to the point of getting the content you need, but even these discrepancies are relatively infrequent.
I literally lol'd at the irony...
The comic for 2/20/2012 started with the boss saying, "we're going to start charging customers for features they already get for free". When I hit the 'previous' button to go back to 2/19, there was a pop-up for Netflix.
To be honest, I too questioned that a smidge, given that the UBCD4Win project distributes a builder that requires a Windows CD to work, whereas Hiren distributes an ISO. While common sense says "if you have an XP disc for the purpose you've fulfilled the legal requirements", especially if you also have a hosed hard disk that carries a licensed copy of Windows requiring disinfecting, it'd be down to a group of lawyers to determine whether it's entirely legal or not.
What I was referring to was the fact that the older editions included a laundry list of commercial software, such as Norton Ghost, PowerQuest Drive Image, Acronis Disk Director, and plenty more. The project has more recently opted to contain exclusively freeware/shareware/FOSS titles instead.
You could always get a life, realize that operating systems are not the end all of existence, and use a Windows machine to scan the hard drive.
This.
If you're that averse to installing Windows on something, check out some of the bootable diagnostic tools like the UBCD4Win project, the newer releases of Hiren's Boot CD (That are now pirated-software free), or HawkPE. They run right off the disc and have HijackThis - along with a plethora of other cleanup tools - pre-configured.
I'm not employed by them, but I am fiercely loyal to the brand and they pretty much have me as a customer for life...because of the very thing that HP is trying to sell here.
When I first got Tiny, my 11.5lb beast of a laptop that plays Crysis maxed out without flinching, it was having an issue where it would randomly BSOD. "ZoMg ItS wInDoEs!!!!111"...no it's not - my Dell XPS M1730 BSOD'd once in two years of running Win7. Having Tiny BSOD several times in a single sitting...not the same thing. So I called Origin's tech support. They had me test my RAM and my hard disk, which both came out clean. They had me try an excellent utility called WhoCrashed and run Furmark overnight. They FTP'd a complete set of drivers to my FTP server for me to try. When we finally decided that it wasn't a software error, they replaced virtually every piece of hardware available: they offered me a new hard disk (which I declined since the OEM drive checked out and I tried a spare I had lying around which yielded the same results), and new RAM, which I didn't need. They swapped out the CPU (which they later let me trade up for the newer model at the cost of the difference a new customer would pay), and they swapped out the laptop chassis, all the while being perfectly okay with sending me parts and letting me do my own warranty work so I wouldn't have any downtime. It finally ended up being the wireless chipset, which the promptly overnighted me (and again, let me upgrade later at a price differential). Two months later, the GPU died. A new one was on my desk the next morning after a phone call that lasted less than five minutes, WITH hold and transfer times.
My support rep Alvaro has even helped me through the simple things. I was at an event, getting ready to DJ in four hours...and all of my MP3s were missing. While in a calmer state of mind I would have been alright, starting Serato, having none of your audio files on the drive (but your folder structure still intact), and being 150 miles away from the FreeNAS containing your backup is what I'd call the textbook definition of "a situation that'll put basically anyone in panic mode". Perhaps y'allz are better under stress than I am, but in that state, my brain basically turned into the product of a box of Fig Newtons and a Cuisinart. Alvaro was calm, understanding, and even though I 100% admitted that it was a PEBKAC/ID10T error, he did everything he could to help me find stuff, suggested a few data recovery tools, and helped get me back into focus to the point where I realized that it was, in fact, all there, but on the wrong hard disk.
How much was this beast of a machine (3.2GHz Core i7, 6GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM, 1x500GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD, 2xWestern Digital Scorpio 7200RPM 320GB HDDs, nVidia Geforce 460M, Intel 6300abgn wifi, bluetooth, webcam, DVD-RW, custom painted lid, spare battery, spare power adapter, 2 year parts/labor warranty) along with personal tech support like that? $3,400USD. And it was worth every single cent.
You will never understand the peace of mind that comes with being able to call a phone number and say "hey Alvaro, it's Joey", and have him know exactly what to expect, and know that he's not going anywhere until the problem is resolved. I've never read the man a serial number in my life. I assume it's on the bottom somwhere, but I've never been asked for it.
Have at it, HP. Origin set the standard. I'd love to see it happen. However, I personally don't think they've got the corporate culture for that to happen.
Don't forget that Alienware was also fanatically priced.
...something tells me that you won't find an HP Elite notebook selling for $699 on Black Friday, either.
To be fair, the blog post seems to indicate that they're extolling their progress on the reverse. They're saying their best-in-industry as far as delivering the least amount of spam to hotmail inboxes, not whether hotmail addresses are the source of spam elsewhere.
That said, I have an e-mail address at basically every major mail service (gmail, yahoo, aim/aol, mail.com, a hosted exchange account, and hotmail). The only spam I get in Hotmail actually lands in my spam box, and there really isn't much of it to speak of.
I know that this is gonna be a smidge off-topic and paint me as a Microsoft shill, but I'm really not...Hotmail's notoriety was deserved in the 1990's, but unfortunately Microsoft has attached the poisoned name to a good product (which is why I opt to use live.com instead). MS really did well with integrating Hotmail, Skydrive, and Office Web Apps. Get a Word document as an attachment? open it on the spot without downloading, edit, and reply. Save to Skydrive to access it from basically anything. All three work as well in Chrome and Firefox as they do in IE (Opera support is a bit stubborn, admittedly), and doesn't require silverlight. The UI looks a lot like Outlook, sharing files via a link is piss simple (and gives options to share via Facebook and gives different links for read only and r/w access), and the ads aren't terribly intrusive. Yes, I fully credit Gmail and Google Docs for pushing Microsoft to the point where they've made a suite of web apps that are worth using. However, if you haven't visited a Windows Live account in the past year to see how genuinely nice it is to use...it's worth an objective look.
Just putting it out there...if you're going to call it civil disobedience, then make sure that you're down with the road you're choosing to travel. Civil disobedience means that if they decide to sue you that you plead guilty to the crime, take the sentence they give you, and forego appeals. Civil disobedience means that you believe in your cause enough to take the punishment they dish out in order to make an example as to how harmful the rules are with the hope that your sacrifice will influence positive change.
Using the principle famously exemplified by Gandhi and Rosa Parks is admirable, as long as you're willing to go to the lengths that they're willing to go in order to do it. If that's genuinely your goal, and you're okay with it, then I applaud you and support you. However, if you're going at this with even the slightest intent to settle out of court, plead 'not guilty', or appeal a verdict, then you're not following a cause, you're justifying copyright infringement.
Personally, I'll settle for using Spotify.
To be fair, only a subset sport a baseband.
FTP is still a useful protocol because:
1.) few people upload sensitive data to a web hosting service.
2.) it requires less CPU overhead.
3.) FTP transfers, while better with a client like Filezilla/Cyberduck/xFTP, don't *require* a client since both Windows and OSX support it natively.
I'm an HTC customer myself for the very reasons you specify. However, I wonder if pervasiveness has something to do with it as well. When a device is plentiful, a lot more people with time on their hands can poke it and prod it, and make custom ROMs. Overall, most of the people I know with the Droid Razr have little interest in rooting it themselves. If these tablets become popular enough (citation: iPhone), or Motorola does something particularly egregious with some well-circulated hardware (citation: Sony with PS3), the exploit will be more likely to be found.
something that's actually legitimate for Netcraft to confirm!
Okay fellow Slashdotters, please indulge me and consider the following scenario...
My personal phone is an HTC HD2 that originally shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5, but I installed MagLDR and one of the CyanogenMod derivatives.
My work phone is a Verizon Droid Incredible 2 that is running VirtuousUnity, a modded ROM with HTC Sense 3.5.
My dad's phone is a T-Mobile G2 that has not been modified in any way. While it does have a few T-Mobile specific applications on it, it's still a mostly-stock build and doesn't have HTC Sense on it.
My dad used to be pretty tech savvy back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, but his tech knowledge hasn't progressed much since then. He very frequently asks relatively simple questions about his phone.
While all three phones technically run Android, they're still very different to him. He can mostly figure out my HD2, but dialing looks a bit different since I use a third party dialing application. The SenseUI phone looks extremely different and he has to ask how to do things all over again.
Many of the responses here have been something to the effect of "...so why doesn't Samsung just ditch Touchwiz?" The answer to that is simple: to most people, the UI matters a LOT more than the underlying code. The overwhelming majority of apps I've used run on Android 2.1 or later, which is basically every phone still in active use among the friends, family, and clients that I'm aware of, so app compatibility issues are rather trivial. The real issue is that most people would be more confused going from TouchWiz 2.3 to a plain 4.0 UI than they would if they simply left well enough alone. While the Slashdot crowd is generally more comfortable rooting and modding, I'd assume that the millions of Samsung Galaxy S owners are probably NOT slashdotters, do NOT have their phones' xda-devs subforum on their RSS feeds to watch for new releases on their ROMs. They didn't learn how to use *Android*, they learned how to use *their phone*, which runs Touchwiz.
As an analogy, most of the people who own Android phones would notice a bigger difference by going from Ubuntu to Xubuntu than they would by going between Ubuntu running GNOME 2.32 and PC-BSD running GNOME 2.32.
I've run some of the early builds of ICS on my HD2, and I personally don't like it. I like having the "endless vertical scrolling wall of apps", instead of this page-by-page multiple walls of apps nonsense. The soft buttons are understandable except that most phones have some sort of soft button alternative, which makes that space redundant. The menus are in different places, fonts can be hard to read in some screens, and some of the settings have been rearranged. Now once these builds get more mature (and get camera drivers, since strangely none of my HTC phones have working cameras) I'll probably migrate over, but the average user "just figured out how to use their phone" and will be worse off with a 4.0 build than they will by sticking with their meticulously customized home screens.
tl; didn't read past claim 4 or somesuch. However, of what I read, not a single thing listed was described in such a way that it didn't also apply to my friends' Palm Treo 700W that was released in 2006.
Their coverage might not be all that great in the middle of the desert like Verizon is, but I've got Verizon in one pocket (courtesy of work), and T-Mo in the other. In the New York suburb where I live, coverage is mostly comparable; places where T-Mo drops the call, my Verizon phone is showing less than -100dbm coverage itself. Also, while I've found Verizon to have a bit better latency numbers, my download speed on T-Mo 3G is sometimes double Verizon's numbers, likely due to the fact that there are relatively fewer people saturating the backhaul.
As for phones, fine, they don't have the iPhone officially. They do, however, unofficially support unlocked iPhone models on their network. T-Mobile has the Blackberry Torch now, though using a Blackberry as an example did cause a slight lol. They have more Android phones than anyone else, in more form factors, and if memory serves more WP7 phones as well.
While I unfortunately agree that T-Mo's future is questionable, I think that making it well known that they're officially not becoming AT&T will likely help spur sales. I knew a lot of people who were considering going to T-Mo, but didn't want to become AT&T customers. This may restore enough confidence to make the growth start happening for them.