Not true. Lots have tried to beat PayPal at that game, including Google with Google Checkout. They failed miserably because despite Google's efforts to encourage merchants to accept it, merchants didn't bother, and adoption rates were tiny. PayPal succeeded on the back of eBay and has since matured into a very useful wider service.
I love pfSense, it is superb, but that hardware is very overpriced. I guess it includes a support contract, but still, you could build out one of those appliances for less than half the cost.
I've used Rackspace email for about 10 years, since before it was even Rackspace email, and found it to be consistently great. What's the problem?
I also used their manager servers some years ago and also found those very, very good. The company has grown a lot since then so I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of their service and support has reduced somewhat, although their prices hadn't last time I had a quote from them.
Not strictly true, this only happens if a) you sign in to icloud through system preferences or during the mac setup assistant and b) use iPhoto (and possibly iTunes) for your photo management. Apple haven't quite, yet, made it compulsory to use all their crapware if you want to use a mac.
Yeah plugging it in at night and unplugging it in the morning is a real pain huh?
It doesn't last as long as an old Nokia because it consumes more power and battery capacity is restrained by physical density, size, and cost.
C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone. If you'd rather trade off all those features for only having to plug it in once a week then crack on and buy a dumb phone.
It is mostly AOSP with major changes to the settings, themes, some tweaks to stock apps and a lot under-the-hood goodness and performance enhancements, but as far as actual apps that are bundled:
Apollo - a quite decent music player
DSP Manager - an audio equalizer thing
File Manager - a fairly limited file manager
However this is quite irrelevant because all the tools/apps you need can be downloaded from google play quite easily. And why bloat a rom with apps?
Yep Kindle Fire, or my choice the Nook HD which has HDTV HDMI output (via special connector). The Nook is on fire sale at the moment so worth consideration.
you may not like them but they have many benefits. we moved from imap/client setup to gmail for 60+ staff and saw our email support overheads tumble massively. configuring email clients and storing users email locally has many downsides in enterprise.
You're talking (typing) out of your hoop. The UK tax rates on "human activity" are not obscenely high. In fact we have some of the lowest personal and corporate tax rates in the whole of Europe (List of countries by tax rates). There are many reasons why this scheme could/would fail but tax rates are not one of them, unless you consider any form of taxation a problem.
Ignoring your poor grasp of physics, are you for real thinking 54.5MPG is hard to get? Or are you just totally locked inside your American gas easting bubble? Cars in Europe at least have been capable of 60+ MPG at 80MPH (real world figures) for at least a decade if not longer. Just because you choose to drive stupid gas guzzling monster trucks doesn't mean that more economical alternatives don't exist.
I've no idea how it works but I'd imagine that upon installation it can install a service or daemon that runs as root and handles the updates without requiring further passwords?
I wonder if this will also finally allow google apps for business domains to have centrally managed storage? Or will this still be tied to individual user accounts like the current storage facilities? The current scenario of tying storage to individual user accounts is a major oversight by google IMO.
I was a massive fan of Palm and wrote several years ago (around 2005, website now defunct) about the need for Palm to ditch Palm OS and develop their own Linux based OS. As such I was thrilled when WebOS launched - I had a launch day Pre and Pre 2. WebOS was admittedly pretty terrible until WebOS 1.4.5 but that release ironed out a lot of bugs and there was a short period in 2010 where it looked like Palm may crack it - they hired some great talent and partnered with some of the big devs to bring their apps to WebOS; sometimes for free (Monopoly, The Sims, Need for Speed, etc). The card-based system was intuitive and offered true multi-tasking that still isn't matched by any current mobile OS - it was truly groundbreaking stuff. Unfortunately Palm never had the resources to build on that success and it is sad to how subsequently lost their way.
What happened next was a total mess - the biggest downfall was how they alienated developers by changing the SDK from Mojo to Enyo - possibly a required change but the way they handled it was appalling. There was a long period when Enyo was released but it was impossible to even buy a device that ran it and the SDK was not even available to devs without jumping through hoops to sign an NDA. They then made promises to bring Enyo to their first and second generation devices and subsequently changed their mind. They never got round to publishing a roadmap of which hardware would support which SDK or WebOS. Developers had the choice to develop for Mojo and hit the majority of devices, or blindly put their faith in Enyo and hope that someday HP/Palm would put out a decent device capable of running Enyo. But by this time nobody believed a word HP said... they had lost the trust of their own loyal fanbase. Eventually the Pre 3 and Touchpad came but by then the developers had left in droves. I bought a Pre 3 and the hardware was finally decent, but the OS was buggy and there were even fewer apps available for it than for the previous generation Pre and Pre 2. I sold it immediately.
The sell-out to HP could have given Palm the resources they needed to push WebOS but it turned Palm from a nimble company capable of doing some cool stuff into a massive lumbering mess with no clearly defined plans. The signs of the downfall were obvious - the good talent that Palm had hired left almost immediately leaving a skill vacuum at HP/Palm. HP needed to act quickly but they failed to do so. And we all saw the shambolic mess they made of the touchpad launch and subsequent fire sale. Open sourcing WebOS is meaningless because it is a failed project with very little interest except a small (and highly loyal) fan base at WebOS internals. Even those guys must be wondering why they bothered.
The only good thing to come of this is that I got a touchpad for £130 that now runs ICS very nicely. It's a great shame to see the Palm name die in such a catastrophic manner. HP should be ashamed of themselves. And one last thing... throughout all this I have often wondered what happened to Jon Rubinstein? Has he been paid off to keep quiet? I would imagine he is none too happy with the way things turned out but his silence is deafening.
Don't say, XBOX 360 or PS3, or even the Wii already offer most of this: "modern browsing features, control through voice or motion, application support, and even upgradeability".
I just don't see the sense of building these features into a TV.
Personally I've had huge success with pfSense running on either cheap Dell servers for high WAN throughput or embedded devices for lower requirements. The hardware is dirt cheap, the software free, and for me it has a far better feature set than any of the router firmwares you mentioned. It is FreeBSD based and absolutely rock solid in my experience (I've never had to reboot one in over 3 years). The out-of-the-box feature set is incredibly impressive but this can be supplemented by a huge choice of plugins too.
Example hardware: http://linitx.com/product/12647
pfSense: http://www.pfsense.org/
So basically, apple propaganda.
I've been supporting 100's of Macs for over 2 years and I have never ONCE seen a crash caused by Flash. The most common crashes I see are Mail.app and iCal.app - both crash extremely frequently.
Redmine is the correct answer. Can't believe parent isn't modded up more.
We use it for all web/software development projects because of its excellent trackers and repository integration. We are just about to roll it out across the organisation for all types of projects and management tasks. It is extremely flexible and different types of projects can have different features - wiki, forum, file sharing, bug/request tracking, time tracking, gantt charts, code repos, the whole shebang. Loads of addons too and very stable. It is a bit like basecamp, but better, and free/libre.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. Lots have tried to beat PayPal at that game, including Google with Google Checkout. They failed miserably because despite Google's efforts to encourage merchants to accept it, merchants didn't bother, and adoption rates were tiny. PayPal succeeded on the back of eBay and has since matured into a very useful wider service.
I love pfSense, it is superb, but that hardware is very overpriced. I guess it includes a support contract, but still, you could build out one of those appliances for less than half the cost.
I've used Rackspace email for about 10 years, since before it was even Rackspace email, and found it to be consistently great. What's the problem? I also used their manager servers some years ago and also found those very, very good. The company has grown a lot since then so I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of their service and support has reduced somewhat, although their prices hadn't last time I had a quote from them.
Expand please.
Not strictly true, this only happens if a) you sign in to icloud through system preferences or during the mac setup assistant and b) use iPhoto (and possibly iTunes) for your photo management. Apple haven't quite, yet, made it compulsory to use all their crapware if you want to use a mac.
I embraced it ages ago, for technical reasons. I can't even begin to predict how many thousands of hours we've saved as a result.
Yeah plugging it in at night and unplugging it in the morning is a real pain huh? It doesn't last as long as an old Nokia because it consumes more power and battery capacity is restrained by physical density, size, and cost. C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone. If you'd rather trade off all those features for only having to plug it in once a week then crack on and buy a dumb phone.
It is mostly AOSP with major changes to the settings, themes, some tweaks to stock apps and a lot under-the-hood goodness and performance enhancements, but as far as actual apps that are bundled: Apollo - a quite decent music player DSP Manager - an audio equalizer thing File Manager - a fairly limited file manager However this is quite irrelevant because all the tools/apps you need can be downloaded from google play quite easily. And why bloat a rom with apps?
Yep Kindle Fire, or my choice the Nook HD which has HDTV HDMI output (via special connector). The Nook is on fire sale at the moment so worth consideration.
you may not like them but they have many benefits. we moved from imap/client setup to gmail for 60+ staff and saw our email support overheads tumble massively. configuring email clients and storing users email locally has many downsides in enterprise.
One word: imapsync
You're talking (typing) out of your hoop. The UK tax rates on "human activity" are not obscenely high. In fact we have some of the lowest personal and corporate tax rates in the whole of Europe (List of countries by tax rates). There are many reasons why this scheme could/would fail but tax rates are not one of them, unless you consider any form of taxation a problem.
Ignoring your poor grasp of physics, are you for real thinking 54.5MPG is hard to get? Or are you just totally locked inside your American gas easting bubble? Cars in Europe at least have been capable of 60+ MPG at 80MPH (real world figures) for at least a decade if not longer. Just because you choose to drive stupid gas guzzling monster trucks doesn't mean that more economical alternatives don't exist.
Mac Pro != Macbook
I've no idea how it works but I'd imagine that upon installation it can install a service or daemon that runs as root and handles the updates without requiring further passwords?
I wonder if this will also finally allow google apps for business domains to have centrally managed storage? Or will this still be tied to individual user accounts like the current storage facilities? The current scenario of tying storage to individual user accounts is a major oversight by google IMO.
I was a massive fan of Palm and wrote several years ago (around 2005, website now defunct) about the need for Palm to ditch Palm OS and develop their own Linux based OS. As such I was thrilled when WebOS launched - I had a launch day Pre and Pre 2. WebOS was admittedly pretty terrible until WebOS 1.4.5 but that release ironed out a lot of bugs and there was a short period in 2010 where it looked like Palm may crack it - they hired some great talent and partnered with some of the big devs to bring their apps to WebOS; sometimes for free (Monopoly, The Sims, Need for Speed, etc). The card-based system was intuitive and offered true multi-tasking that still isn't matched by any current mobile OS - it was truly groundbreaking stuff. Unfortunately Palm never had the resources to build on that success and it is sad to how subsequently lost their way.
What happened next was a total mess - the biggest downfall was how they alienated developers by changing the SDK from Mojo to Enyo - possibly a required change but the way they handled it was appalling. There was a long period when Enyo was released but it was impossible to even buy a device that ran it and the SDK was not even available to devs without jumping through hoops to sign an NDA. They then made promises to bring Enyo to their first and second generation devices and subsequently changed their mind. They never got round to publishing a roadmap of which hardware would support which SDK or WebOS. Developers had the choice to develop for Mojo and hit the majority of devices, or blindly put their faith in Enyo and hope that someday HP/Palm would put out a decent device capable of running Enyo. But by this time nobody believed a word HP said... they had lost the trust of their own loyal fanbase. Eventually the Pre 3 and Touchpad came but by then the developers had left in droves. I bought a Pre 3 and the hardware was finally decent, but the OS was buggy and there were even fewer apps available for it than for the previous generation Pre and Pre 2. I sold it immediately.
The sell-out to HP could have given Palm the resources they needed to push WebOS but it turned Palm from a nimble company capable of doing some cool stuff into a massive lumbering mess with no clearly defined plans. The signs of the downfall were obvious - the good talent that Palm had hired left almost immediately leaving a skill vacuum at HP/Palm. HP needed to act quickly but they failed to do so. And we all saw the shambolic mess they made of the touchpad launch and subsequent fire sale. Open sourcing WebOS is meaningless because it is a failed project with very little interest except a small (and highly loyal) fan base at WebOS internals. Even those guys must be wondering why they bothered.
The only good thing to come of this is that I got a touchpad for £130 that now runs ICS very nicely. It's a great shame to see the Palm name die in such a catastrophic manner. HP should be ashamed of themselves. And one last thing... throughout all this I have often wondered what happened to Jon Rubinstein? Has he been paid off to keep quiet? I would imagine he is none too happy with the way things turned out but his silence is deafening.
Don't say, XBOX 360 or PS3, or even the Wii already offer most of this: "modern browsing features, control through voice or motion, application support, and even upgradeability". I just don't see the sense of building these features into a TV.
Sure. And a chisel can be used as a screwdriver.
Personally I've had huge success with pfSense running on either cheap Dell servers for high WAN throughput or embedded devices for lower requirements. The hardware is dirt cheap, the software free, and for me it has a far better feature set than any of the router firmwares you mentioned. It is FreeBSD based and absolutely rock solid in my experience (I've never had to reboot one in over 3 years). The out-of-the-box feature set is incredibly impressive but this can be supplemented by a huge choice of plugins too. Example hardware: http://linitx.com/product/12647 pfSense: http://www.pfsense.org/
after having downloaded a new title – whether paid or free – no aftermarket software would run properly
Not true. The software just downloaded would not run properly, but all other aftermarket software previously installed was unaffected.
For those interested in seeing this technology in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mzhvMgrLE Includes a demo of a guy trying to feed his finger into the saw.
So basically, apple propaganda. I've been supporting 100's of Macs for over 2 years and I have never ONCE seen a crash caused by Flash. The most common crashes I see are Mail.app and iCal.app - both crash extremely frequently.
You've just made that up, haven't you? Care to provide a citation?
Redmine is the correct answer. Can't believe parent isn't modded up more. We use it for all web/software development projects because of its excellent trackers and repository integration. We are just about to roll it out across the organisation for all types of projects and management tasks. It is extremely flexible and different types of projects can have different features - wiki, forum, file sharing, bug/request tracking, time tracking, gantt charts, code repos, the whole shebang. Loads of addons too and very stable. It is a bit like basecamp, but better, and free/libre.