I'm a huge Apple fan, but I'm with you on this one.
How is my Moto Q better than an iPhone?
1. EVDO versus EDGE. No contest. EVDO (or WCDMA, or any 3G mobile broadband technology) means (two way) streaming video, and a high-speed, interactive Web 2.0 experience, unlike crap-ass EDGE. No one will be willing to use OWA, or any other "rich" website, over EDGE. EDGE is horrible. Trust me, I relied on it for over a year. 2. Huge library of installable software. 3. Excellent, no-training-required voice control. 4. Google Maps for Mobile (with GPS and traffic support). Skype for Mobile. Did I mention Apps?:-) 5. Replaceable battery. Outside carrying two batteries, this allows me to get an extended life after-market battery, or to replace my battery when it starts to run down after 2 years of heavy use (this _will_ happen to your $500 iPhone).
Quite frankly, anyone talks about using rich web apps on Safari on an iPhone is speaking rubbish. Wifi sucks in comparison to true mobile broadband, and EDGE is unworkable for anyone without a great deal of patience.
The iPhone will be a combination voice phone and iPod, with the occasional ability to check e-mail. It will suck as a PDA. It will suck for browsing the web. It will not support "rich" applications the way a Windows Mobile, Palm, or Symbian device does now. It will be painful to download 500k+ PDFs on. It will not stream music, video, movies, or anything else.
It will not support mobile TV. It will not be an always-connected-to-iTunes video ipod.
For me, as a _huge_ Apple fan, buying an iPhone would be a giant step backwards. I watch video now, wherever I want. My Q handles 99% of all the e-mail activity I could want. As a PDA, my Q eliminates all the "light work" tasks I used to do on my laptop. An iPhone could never do this.
Although its initial public response to the Statement of Objections disputed such findings and warned the EU may be overstepping its bounds by assuming it can determine royalty rates that are in place in many countries outside Europe, Microsoft's response Monday was far more measured.
"We continue to seek to resolve these recent issues. We need greater clarity on what prices the Commission wants us to charge," Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Microsoft, said in a statement.
Hyuk Hyuk
Me thinks they are getting nervous. 'bout time someone put fear into Microsoft the way Microsoft puts fear into most other IT corps.
100k? As in 100kb? That's a good 30 seconds with EDGE. And the long latencies will make interacting a major pain in the ass. I know this, because I've tried to use an EDGE PDA.
Now, EVDO works. EVDO is most places, now. The vast majority of Sprint's markets are now EVDO enabled. Every phone Verizon and Sprint sell today easily do 1+ Mbps, with latencies near 100 ms. If you're think AJAX style apps on the iPhone, the experience will really suck; as in suck enough that most people will not bother. E-mail will work, but that's cause your email can leisurely transfer in the background while your wandering around.
And cost? Cingular's EDGE service is the same cost as both Sprint's and Verizon's EVDO service.
Here's a quote: NOTES Linux supports io scheduling priorities and classes since 2.6.13 with the CFQ io scheduler.
The support is there in the kernel. There's a basic set of userspace utilities to handle it. There are some issues to be worked out (you have to be root or have the setuid on to change priorities), and there isn't an automatic daemon to do it for you, and these isn't a top kind of utility, but the kernel level support is there for it.
" I think that for libraries and other software that can be used in various different applications, "public domain" is the way to go."
Why?
What's wrong with the GPL?
Consider; we're talking about a legal case in which one company, whose primary business is GPL software (Linux) is being sued, and countersuing, another company who raised a fortune on GPL software (Caldera), and then bought a dying closed source business.
Now, I'm not saying all software should be mandated GPL. However, for libraries and software used in various different applications, I definitely think that the LGPL is the way to go. This helps maintain compatability, and what we need, as a economic society, is for software to become less proprietary and more commodity. Like every other aspect of modern industry, software should adhere to standards, and packages with similar functionality should be compatible with each other. LGPL libraries for the majority of software functions will get us there.
Japan, the land of highspeed mobile broadband is going to go gaga over a phone that can't stream video, can't do video calls, and has abysmal bandwidth capabilities?
Not to mention that the iPhone is a Cingular exclusive for a year or two (can't remember).
IMHO, no device with EDGE makes email and file transfers easy. 3G is the only way to go. Apple's introducing a last generation device as 3.5G and 4G networks come online.
You can get a PDA from Sprint today that does 3 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. You can stream video from device to device. You can throw around multimegabyte documents, today.
Do you know how painful it is to e-mail an 8 meg file on EDGE? Or how it is impossible if in a car or train?
The iPhone's internet access is a gimick, simply because its connectivity is antiquated.
I love Apple, and hate Microsoft, but IMHO, the iPhone has two big failings.
1. No unsigned apps is a big one. This is really a damn shame, and limits the iPhone to a certain crowd (fashion-conscious blackberry users and Apple devotees). 2. EDGE?! EDGE sucks. The latency is beyond terrible. Now that Cingular has UMTS, Sprint/Verizion have EVDO, and even T-mobile is going 3G, why would ANYONE consider a "nextgen" phone to be an EDGE-only phone. This is a *terrible* decision. As much as I love Apple, I would *never* trade in an EVDO capable PDA for an EDGE one; even if you paid me to take the EDGE one. EVDO (or any low-lataency 3G) changes the way you access the internet while mobile. With EDGE, you putter around slowly, and you don't use an EDGE device while driving about 50 mph, or riding the train. With EVDO, you're always online.
As far as I'm concerned, #2 is damning. Especially now that Sprints super-cheapo SERO plans are avaliable to anyone in the know, there is no reason whatsoever to go with some crappy overpriced EDGE device, even if the UI is Nirvana (and given that its a first generation product, I'm skeptical). Don't look at the bandwidth numbers and think that your EDGE device is similar to a dialup; its not. It's more like a low bandwidth satellite connection, with roundtrip latencies approaching 2-3 seconds while the connection is maxed out (and given that its 128 kbps, thats not hard). EVDO, UMTS, and other 3G technologies blow the doors off this; both Sprint and Verizon sell PDAs and Phones that give you live streaming video, even from things like ORB and Slingbox.
Don't go with EDGE. It sucks. I worked with an EDGE phone for a long time, and now that I've got EVDO (particularly Rev A) I would never, ever go back. Even at twice the price.
Queue the legion of Microsoft apologists, saying things like: a) It's only because MS Office has the largest market share, this could of happened to any office suite! b) It's not a big deal, obviously the state department's IT department is incompetent. c) Damn Hackers, always trying to ruin a good thing! d) Macs run on Intel processors now, so they're vulnerable too! e) This is probably because the NSA sponsors SELinux. f) In Soviet Russia, MS Office hacks YOU!
I'm not talking about wedging Debian into your homebuilt monster. I'm talking about random professionals I know, who currently buy whatever machines from Dell, with XP (now Vista). Instead, go buy a fully supported machine from a Vendor running Linux. They're are out there; or, buy a commercial Linux, with support.
I'm *definitely* not talking about saving dollars. I'm talking about taking your budgetary allocation for computers, and spending on something that *isn't* MS.
MS = bad business. Don't spend money on them. Buy a system preloaded with Linux, or buy a Mac. Either way, don't pay money to MS; because you should vote with your dollars, and refuse to contribute to a corrupt company well known for its bad business.
MS has shady practices. They do uncool things in the realm of politics and business. You should make a decision not to give them your dollars. It's not so much that I care what OS you use; it's that I care that you're giving MS your $$$s.
They're bad business. They're bad corporate citizens. Don't buy their products on *principle*.
Make a conscious decision to move away from Microsoft technologies, at whatever levels of personal cost you can accept.
Buy Linux. Buy a Mac.
Getting on Slashdot and whining about this crap is goofy if you're posting from IE, running XP or Vista, running MS Office; and especially stupid if your a corporate decision maker that hasn't at least spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can migrate from MS.
MS's business practices are bad. They're rotten to the core, and that's been proven over and over again. Don't do business with them; take it elsewhere.
It's really not impossible; major corporations have made the jump before, and we're building a first class IT infrastructure that will be MS-free end-to-end.
Stop whinning. Make a decision. Vote with your $$$, and whenever you have a choice don't buy MS.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
I feel the same way he does.
Try openSuSE, even though Novell has that pack with MS. I suggest using the KDE desktop.
I feel vastly more in control when I'm using KDE than either OS X (ho-hum) or Windows (ick).
Sorry, I didn't mean to compare the Linux Kernel vs Vista.
I meant to compare the Nvidia Vista drivers vs Vista, the Linux Kernel, and everything else.
Vista took 5+ years to develop with 50 million SLOCs, while the Nvidia Vista drivers were developed in 1 year, with approximately 20 million SLOCs. That's the comparison I was aiming at, even though I know that SLOCs are a poor metric.
A)Is incredibly difficult to get to install, and B)Results in repeatable on-boot BSODs, and C)Is incredibly difficult to get to uninstall, *and* D)Leaves packages on your HD after uninstall that cause repeatable on-boot BSODs.
Either the Vista (display) driver development process is as much of an after-thought as Linux driver development, or Vista's "NEW AND INNOVATIVE" hardware environment is so incredibly buggy that wrestling with all the necessary work arounds is a very difficult task.
My guess? The new Vista driver model is so overly complex that developers will have a hard time working with it indefinitely. Either development budgets will have to go up (unlikely, for ATI and Nvidia, at least), or hardware release cycles will have to slow. Given that Vista has been in *public* development for such a long time (Betas & Release candidates), I'm guessing there is a systematic problem to driver development that most hardware companies cannot adapt to.
Take a look at this: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=357 "Finally, the complexity of these drivers is simply astounding. Diercks claimed that each of the six drivers that NVIDIA has to develop for Windows Vista is roughly 20 million lines of code long; about as much code as Windows NT 4! While I am sure there is some significant driver overlap between the six separate modules and the 20 million lines on each, projects of that magnitude are something most normal people couldnt even begin to wrap their heads around. "
Consider that Vista contains approximately 50 million lines of code, and took 5+ years to develop. Consider that Linux Kernel 2.6.0 was 6 million lines of code, and contains *thousands* of drivers.
Now, does this mean that Vista driver programmers are simply going to give up, Vista will collapse, and we'll all switch to another OS? Of course not; these companies *will* manage to overcome the overly complex development environment, and will create working drivers. In Time.
What we may see, however, is that Linux drivers will start improving faster than Windows drivers; and I can even potentially forsee a day when the Linux binary video drivers beat Vista drivers to the punch, in terms of properly supporting newer hardware. Architectural problems don't necessarily cause development to fail, but serious organizational difficulties impact release cycle, and result in more annoyance and security bugs.
Often, I'll buy bleeding edge parts, and just assume I can get them to work. The unfortunate part about using Linux is that you really should evaluate the parts you are buying before you install them.
It's not *that* big of a problem, since 50-60% of all parts sold will work properly. It's just a minor PITA.
Well, when(if; it's becoming rarer these days) I need to do a new install, I install SuSE off an SLP SMB mount, and I keep my repository 100% up to date. I get a fresh, fully "patched" system on each install.
Of course, the only time I've done a fresh install (not an upgrade) in the last 4 years is when I switched my girlfriend to openSuSE from Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Just one comment:
""will it be fast enough.""
Picture something for me.
Picture the clouds opening up, and a booming voice from heaven:
"NO"
EDGE PDAs are disastrously bad. Anyone paying $500 for an EDGE pda with intent to use its internet functionality should get their head examined.
I'm a huge Apple fan, but I'm with you on this one.
:-)
How is my Moto Q better than an iPhone?
1. EVDO versus EDGE. No contest. EVDO (or WCDMA, or any 3G mobile broadband technology) means (two way) streaming video, and a high-speed, interactive Web 2.0 experience, unlike crap-ass EDGE. No one will be willing to use OWA, or any other "rich" website, over EDGE. EDGE is horrible. Trust me, I relied on it for over a year.
2. Huge library of installable software.
3. Excellent, no-training-required voice control.
4. Google Maps for Mobile (with GPS and traffic support). Skype for Mobile. Did I mention Apps?
5. Replaceable battery. Outside carrying two batteries, this allows me to get an extended life after-market battery, or to replace my battery when it starts to run down after 2 years of heavy use (this _will_ happen to your $500 iPhone).
Quite frankly, anyone talks about using rich web apps on Safari on an iPhone is speaking rubbish. Wifi sucks in comparison to true mobile broadband, and EDGE is unworkable for anyone without a great deal of patience.
The iPhone will be a combination voice phone and iPod, with the occasional ability to check e-mail. It will suck as a PDA. It will suck for browsing the web. It will not support "rich" applications the way a Windows Mobile, Palm, or Symbian device does now. It will be painful to download 500k+ PDFs on. It will not stream music, video, movies, or anything else.
It will not support mobile TV. It will not be an always-connected-to-iTunes video ipod.
For me, as a _huge_ Apple fan, buying an iPhone would be a giant step backwards. I watch video now, wherever I want. My Q handles 99% of all the e-mail activity I could want. As a PDA, my Q eliminates all the "light work" tasks I used to do on my laptop. An iPhone could never do this.
Although its initial public response to the Statement of Objections disputed such findings and warned the EU may be overstepping its bounds by assuming it can determine royalty rates that are in place in many countries outside Europe, Microsoft's response Monday was far more measured.
"We continue to seek to resolve these recent issues. We need greater clarity on what prices the Commission wants us to charge," Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Microsoft, said in a statement.
Hyuk Hyuk
Me thinks they are getting nervous. 'bout time someone put fear into Microsoft the way Microsoft puts fear into most other IT corps.
*shrug*...
Have you used EDGE?
100k? As in 100kb? That's a good 30 seconds with EDGE. And the long latencies will make interacting a major pain in the ass. I know this, because I've tried to use an EDGE PDA.
Now, EVDO works. EVDO is most places, now. The vast majority of Sprint's markets are now EVDO enabled. Every phone Verizon and Sprint sell today easily do 1+ Mbps, with latencies near 100 ms. If you're think AJAX style apps on the iPhone, the experience will really suck; as in suck enough that most people will not bother. E-mail will work, but that's cause your email can leisurely transfer in the background while your wandering around.
And cost? Cingular's EDGE service is the same cost as both Sprint's and Verizon's EVDO service.
Hmmm?
The man page for ionice
Here's a quote:
NOTES
Linux supports io scheduling priorities and classes since 2.6.13 with the CFQ io scheduler.
The support is there in the kernel. There's a basic set of userspace utilities to handle it. There are some issues to be worked out (you have to be root or have the setuid on to change priorities), and there isn't an automatic daemon to do it for you, and these isn't a top kind of utility, but the kernel level support is there for it.
And the iPhone, on which you _cannot_ install software, and which has limited data connectivity options is equivalent to a full blow Tablet PC how?
I'm an Apple fan, but come on.
My point is you can't install your own rich-clients (issue 1), and Web 2.0 type experiences will suck because of limited connectivity (issue 2).
Why Apple would implement a phone with both of these limitations, I don't know.
"
I think that for libraries and other software that can be used in various different applications, "public domain" is the way to go."
Why?
What's wrong with the GPL?
Consider; we're talking about a legal case in which one company, whose primary business is GPL software (Linux) is being sued, and countersuing, another company who raised a fortune on GPL software (Caldera), and then bought a dying closed source business.
Now, I'm not saying all software should be mandated GPL. However, for libraries and software used in various different applications, I definitely think that the LGPL is the way to go. This helps maintain compatability, and what we need, as a economic society, is for software to become less proprietary and more commodity. Like every other aspect of modern industry, software should adhere to standards, and packages with similar functionality should be compatible with each other. LGPL libraries for the majority of software functions will get us there.
Err... Full Web 2.0, with 2 second round trip latencies.
Internet access on EDGE is a joke. It'll only be useful around Wifi hotspots.
Are you kidding?
Japan, the land of highspeed mobile broadband is going to go gaga over a phone that can't stream video, can't do video calls, and has abysmal bandwidth capabilities?
Not to mention that the iPhone is a Cingular exclusive for a year or two (can't remember).
*shrug*
IMHO, no device with EDGE makes email and file transfers easy. 3G is the only way to go. Apple's introducing a last generation device as 3.5G and 4G networks come online.
You can get a PDA from Sprint today that does 3 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. You can stream video from device to device. You can throw around multimegabyte documents, today.
Do you know how painful it is to e-mail an 8 meg file on EDGE? Or how it is impossible if in a car or train?
The iPhone's internet access is a gimick, simply because its connectivity is antiquated.
I love Apple, and hate Microsoft, but IMHO, the iPhone has two big failings.
1. No unsigned apps is a big one. This is really a damn shame, and limits the iPhone to a certain crowd (fashion-conscious blackberry users and Apple devotees).
2. EDGE?! EDGE sucks. The latency is beyond terrible. Now that Cingular has UMTS, Sprint/Verizion have EVDO, and even T-mobile is going 3G, why would ANYONE consider a "nextgen" phone to be an EDGE-only phone. This is a *terrible* decision. As much as I love Apple, I would *never* trade in an EVDO capable PDA for an EDGE one; even if you paid me to take the EDGE one. EVDO (or any low-lataency 3G) changes the way you access the internet while mobile. With EDGE, you putter around slowly, and you don't use an EDGE device while driving about 50 mph, or riding the train. With EVDO, you're always online.
As far as I'm concerned, #2 is damning. Especially now that Sprints super-cheapo SERO plans are avaliable to anyone in the know, there is no reason whatsoever to go with some crappy overpriced EDGE device, even if the UI is Nirvana (and given that its a first generation product, I'm skeptical). Don't look at the bandwidth numbers and think that your EDGE device is similar to a dialup; its not. It's more like a low bandwidth satellite connection, with roundtrip latencies approaching 2-3 seconds while the connection is maxed out (and given that its 128 kbps, thats not hard). EVDO, UMTS, and other 3G technologies blow the doors off this; both Sprint and Verizon sell PDAs and Phones that give you live streaming video, even from things like ORB and Slingbox.
Don't go with EDGE. It sucks. I worked with an EDGE phone for a long time, and now that I've got EVDO (particularly Rev A) I would never, ever go back. Even at twice the price.
Queue the legion of Microsoft apologists, saying things like:
a) It's only because MS Office has the largest market share, this could of happened to any office suite!
b) It's not a big deal, obviously the state department's IT department is incompetent.
c) Damn Hackers, always trying to ruin a good thing!
d) Macs run on Intel processors now, so they're vulnerable too!
e) This is probably because the NSA sponsors SELinux.
f) In Soviet Russia, MS Office hacks YOU!
Did I miss any?
I think you missed my point.
I'm not talking about wedging Debian into your homebuilt monster. I'm talking about random professionals I know, who currently buy whatever machines from Dell, with XP (now Vista). Instead, go buy a fully supported machine from a Vendor running Linux. They're are out there; or, buy a commercial Linux, with support.
I'm *definitely* not talking about saving dollars. I'm talking about taking your budgetary allocation for computers, and spending on something that *isn't* MS.
MS = bad business. Don't spend money on them. Buy a system preloaded with Linux, or buy a Mac. Either way, don't pay money to MS; because you should vote with your dollars, and refuse to contribute to a corrupt company well known for its bad business.
I suppose, but I think you're missing the point.
MS has shady practices. They do uncool things in the realm of politics and business. You should make a decision not to give them your dollars. It's not so much that I care what OS you use; it's that I care that you're giving MS your $$$s.
They're bad business. They're bad corporate citizens. Don't buy their products on *principle*.
Make a conscious decision to move away from Microsoft technologies, at whatever levels of personal cost you can accept.
Buy Linux. Buy a Mac.
Getting on Slashdot and whining about this crap is goofy if you're posting from IE, running XP or Vista, running MS Office; and especially stupid if your a corporate decision maker that hasn't at least spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can migrate from MS.
MS's business practices are bad. They're rotten to the core, and that's been proven over and over again. Don't do business with them; take it elsewhere.
It's really not impossible; major corporations have made the jump before, and we're building a first class IT infrastructure that will be MS-free end-to-end.
Stop whinning. Make a decision. Vote with your $$$, and whenever you have a choice don't buy MS.
I feel the same way he does.
Try openSuSE, even though Novell has that pack with MS. I suggest using the KDE desktop.
I feel vastly more in control when I'm using KDE than either OS X (ho-hum) or Windows (ick).
If intel keeps supporting its equipment with excellent OSS support, I'll happily switch to an all-intel platform, even at a significant premium.
NVIDIA's Linux drivers are pretty good, but ATI/AMD's are god awful, and both NVIDIA's & AMD/ATI's are much more difficult to use than Intels.
I'd love to see an Intel GPU/CPU platform that was performance competitive with ATI/AMD or NVIDIA's offerings.
Please read the bug report.
"KDE ignored the setting for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, it seems to be permanently off".
This isn't about the BCI. This is about sub-pixel font anti-aliasing.
Frankly, this hobbles Linux compared to Windows/OS X.
It's an incredibly useless metric, but you can look at driver sizes in MB on Nvidia's website, at least "compressed"
Linux: ~12 MB
NT4: ~13 MB
XP: ~40 MB
Vista: ~53 MB
Sorry, I didn't mean to compare the Linux Kernel vs Vista.
I meant to compare the Nvidia Vista drivers vs Vista, the Linux Kernel, and everything else.
Vista took 5+ years to develop with 50 million SLOCs, while the Nvidia Vista drivers were developed in 1 year, with approximately 20 million SLOCs. That's the comparison I was aiming at, even though I know that SLOCs are a poor metric.
Look at one of the references in the linked article: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=393& pgno=1
A "Vista Certified" device that:
A)Is incredibly difficult to get to install, and
B)Results in repeatable on-boot BSODs, and
C)Is incredibly difficult to get to uninstall, *and*
D)Leaves packages on your HD after uninstall that cause repeatable on-boot BSODs.
Either the Vista (display) driver development process is as much of an after-thought as Linux driver development, or Vista's "NEW AND INNOVATIVE" hardware environment is so incredibly buggy that wrestling with all the necessary work arounds is a very difficult task.
My guess? The new Vista driver model is so overly complex that developers will have a hard time working with it indefinitely. Either development budgets will have to go up (unlikely, for ATI and Nvidia, at least), or hardware release cycles will have to slow. Given that Vista has been in *public* development for such a long time (Betas & Release candidates), I'm guessing there is a systematic problem to driver development that most hardware companies cannot adapt to.
Take a look at this: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=357
"Finally, the complexity of these drivers is simply astounding. Diercks claimed that each of the six drivers that NVIDIA has to develop for Windows Vista is roughly 20 million lines of code long; about as much code as Windows NT 4! While I am sure there is some significant driver overlap between the six separate modules and the 20 million lines on each, projects of that magnitude are something most normal people couldnt even begin to wrap their heads around. "
Consider that Vista contains approximately 50 million lines of code, and took 5+ years to develop. Consider that Linux Kernel 2.6.0 was 6 million lines of code, and contains *thousands* of drivers.
Now, does this mean that Vista driver programmers are simply going to give up, Vista will collapse, and we'll all switch to another OS? Of course not; these companies *will* manage to overcome the overly complex development environment, and will create working drivers. In Time.
What we may see, however, is that Linux drivers will start improving faster than Windows drivers; and I can even potentially forsee a day when the Linux binary video drivers beat Vista drivers to the punch, in terms of properly supporting newer hardware. Architectural problems don't necessarily cause development to fail, but serious organizational difficulties impact release cycle, and result in more annoyance and security bugs.
I'm not sure that it would kill use as prior art; you might wanna try contacting Vonage ;-)
I tend to have these sorts of problems.
Often, I'll buy bleeding edge parts, and just assume I can get them to work. The unfortunate part about using Linux is that you really should evaluate the parts you are buying before you install them.
It's not *that* big of a problem, since 50-60% of all parts sold will work properly. It's just a minor PITA.
Well, when(if; it's becoming rarer these days) I need to do a new install, I install SuSE off an SLP SMB mount, and I keep my repository 100% up to date. I get a fresh, fully "patched" system on each install.
Of course, the only time I've done a fresh install (not an upgrade) in the last 4 years is when I switched my girlfriend to openSuSE from Windows.