The entire VoIP/video chat market is a cesspool of junk.
Amen.
I had a Nokia N800 a coupla years ago (wonderful machine, pity Nokia screwed it up), and I ran Gizmo, got myself a Gizmo ID, even paid for some external call connectivity (first and last time I ever needed to). I also installed Gizmo on my laptop and desktop.
Crap all round. Dire interface. Crackly, stuttering voice no matter how good the bandwidth. As others have said, the reason people use Skype is it works.
Not entirely. I have no need or desire to use Skype to call landlines or mobiles, or vice versa; but I do need to call other Skype users and they me, and to conference-call them.
What the developers have missed is that we need a single way to create a SIP ID, a single global directory, and a single global ID/addressing format. Until this is addressed, SIP is a dead duck.
Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species.
Certainly plausible, or perhaps some ed board jerk has a "degree" in "education" or "management" which included some basics stats.
The real problem is that a null hypothesis implies the default case of inaction. In other words, a valid null hypothesis for the origin of species would be that it "just happened"; that there was no external causative agency. It is therefore up to the proponents of ID or any other theory to show their proof.
(In any case, natural selection is wasteful in the extreme, and can be taken as evidence of the absence of any intelligence at work.)
...suite of e-mail, task management and calendar applications. The appeals court decided that such a suite could not be considered productivity software...
If the battery power/network status icons are missing, then somehow your settings got cleared. That would be a bug and should be filed.
I think the problem is that bugs this bad shouldn't make it into a production release. I'm running Gnome in 10.4 and there are still stupid bugs with widgets randomly failing to appear at login time, that should have been fixed years ago when I reported them.
I think it's good that a company like Canonical should develop new stuff, but they really reallyreally need to get some professional Usability testing people in, and pay attention to them; and they also need to get rid of the idea that only Clueless Newbies[tm] use Ubuntu.
Some people use Ubuntu for (gasp) work: they like the stability and ease of updating that Ubuntu has been providing to date (with a few crass blunders, for sure, like slavishly following Debian's foolishness in replacing kpdf/kdvi with Okular); and they don't appreciate being treated like idiots and having the usability sacrificed by thoughtless developers who believe everyone always has the latest, fastest, biggest hardware.
So bye bye Ubuntu — it's been nice knowing you, sorry you flunked the test, so long, thanks for all the fish, game over, you lose.
Price isn't everything, but mobile contracts may be, depending on where you are: mine is €20 a month for the phone plus €5 a month for the Internet, and I've never hit the IP cap — but I'm not interested in downloading video, music, or games, so it's just email, Twitter, and the occasional web browse.
There is a much more insidious failure to Android, though, as I have been bitching about for a year or more: it cannot use any wifi connection that has a proxy, because the Android software has no settings for proxies in the wifi setup. Immediately this means no wifi connections to corporate or campus networks, cutting out the business and academic community at a stroke. You have to use your phone provider's lame-ass excuse for 3G, Edge or whatever-it's-called-this-week, at whatever inflated, capped rate and service your contract imposes. I'm a low-level user, so this doesn't bother me for smartphone usage: it would bother me big time for tablet usage.
It's unclear why Android doesn't do proxies. It does have settings for them on the 3G/Edge setup (where they are never needed) but not in wifi (where they often are). I blogged about it, and I know some Google people read my blog, but it's clear that this will never be fixed because Google don't see it as a problem. The conclusion is that the lack of proxy settings is a sweetener for the telcos to sell Android smartphones and tablets, because lack of wifi proxy settings means extra 3G/Edge usage which raises their revenues. Yes, you can root the smartphone or the tablet, and install some stack of apps that may fix the problem, but many users won't do this. An iPhone or iPad doesn't have this problem (they may have others, though), which is why, when I can afford it, I will probably junk Android for good.
So WTF is Algebra II? It looks just like the regular algebra we did in high school, except it's been dumbed down by giving the answers. If you want to test whether they can do algebra, give them just the questions and let them work out the answer themselves. Who are the dumbfuck teachers who think this is a good idea?
If it were possible to enforce a rule that all porn merchants had to use a.xxx domain, then being able to block the domain would surely be a positive benefit for jurisdictions opposed to porn. But it's not, so it won't be.
How about forcing all fundamentalist sites to be on.fundie? Or all right-wing sites to be on.fascist? Then we can block the whole lot of them in one swell foop.
I googled "two planets one orbit" and was shocked by the sick porn it brought up.
Oh, sorry, typed it wrong...
Re:In that case, MS has failed beyond belief
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 1
Despite all the evil MS may represent, I'm sure MS don't want to kill Nokia.
They just want to assimilate them. Nokia is merely the dupe singled out for assimilation. If they had listened to the Maemo and Meego users early on, they might even have stolen a march on Android, but by failing signally to understand that a phone is no longer just a phone, and is not even just a smartphone, or a tablet, or a pad, but a computer, they have effectively signed their own death warrant, and handed it to Microsoft for execution.
No loss. Nokia screwed it up with the N800 (not a phone) and Maemo by failing to understand that it was a pocket computer, not a "tablet". Their complete lack of comprehension here meant that when they came to make the N900 they picked the wrong form factor and failed dismally to provide a decent suite of built-in apps, despite having made the same mistake with the N800. Plus the N900 was grossly overpriced for what it was. I loved my N800, but I gave up on Nokia when Androids became available.
It's disastrous news for the human race, especially those in countries where "Nokia" means "cellphone", and a brilliant coup for Microsoft: they will now raise an entire generation in these countries knowing nothing but Windows Phone 7, and believing that this is the only OS. It might save Nokia, but there is no way I would ever buy one of their phones again anyway.
There may be another reason: we don't have any more money or time to spend on travel than we are already spending. This is not "peak demand", because we may still want to travel more (demand still present) but simply cannot.
This also shows up when a message is sent to someone for whom you have two or more cellphone numbers. I saw a message I had sent my son at his foreign cellphone number (by mistake) coming up as a new thread, which I knew was "wrong". I re-sent it to his local cellphone number and it filed correctly. But both threads had the same name title, and did not have anything to distinguish them (a UI error: they should have the class of device appended in parentheses when the recipient has more than one SMS-capable device).
But if the messages are going to entirely different people, I'd suspect a match routine error, and I'd want to check the code and the data for character-set encoding problems. I would hope by now that everything is UTF-8, but if this stuff was coded by people whose sole language is English, all bets are off.
The simplest was a restore of a file from the backups of an old Sun SparcStation IPX (still extant, but non-booting at the moment). This was straightforward: dig out the SSI QIC drive, plug it into the SCSI port on my Ubuntu box, load the tape, and type the tar command.
More tedious but no more difficult was restoring a program written in BASIC on my first pocket machine, a 1982 Sharp PC-1500 (now donated to Bruce Damer's DigiBarn museum). This backed up onto a micro audio cassette on a Dictaphone-style Radio Shack handheld recorder. In 1998 or thereabouts I wanted the implementation of Logo I had written for the kids, so I dug out the machine, cleaned it up, and it stayed dead. I had to resurrect the system unit from a clone on Ebay before I could get it to boot; but then loading the file from tape worked fine, and dialing up via the RS-232 port modem at 2400 baud to my VAX and sending the file via Kermit went just fine.
Exactly. In every country I have been in where it has been deregulated, the result has been higher prices and lower service. Somehow we must nail this myth that deregulation means competition: it doesn't, it means cartels, and it means the ownership of the productive capacity passes into the hands of ignorant investors and greedy bankers instead of the producers, so you end up with energy companies being owned by anonymous, uninterested, and incompetent asset-strippers.
I used to use FTree (http://www.ftree.org/) which is simple but reliable. Then I found Gramps, which is slicker and prettier. The problem with all these programs is they seem to consider it obligatory to provide extensive reports for the professional genealogist, but the views of the data available for domestic use are very limited (displayed trees only give 3 generations, and only give forebears, not descendants, I think), and the printout facilities provided are restrictive to say the least (I want my ENTIRE tree as a single PDF, please, shrunk to whatever microscopic font size is needed to make it fit on ONE page).
I am suprised that they would work for the common good, rather than the coorporate interest.
Some bits of the Commission are independent, some are in the pockets of big business.
The reality though is that 2015 is a loong way away, and by then these costs woudl have collapsed by nature.
No, they would still be there...the cellphone companies are making a killing on these charges.
Everybody would be walking aroud with an voip phone tapping into free bandwidth. This has already started with android 2.3 and SIP VoIP
Not an icicle's chance in hell. Wifi is nowhere near widespread enough for this, and still won't be in 2015. SIP is fine as a concept, but cannot take off until there is a unified directory that works. Right now it's just an interesting plaything.
This is suboptimal. The.iso is 717Mb, and Brasero on my Ubuntu 10.4 won't let me burn it to an 80min CD because it's too big. So just how am I expected to test this gizmo?
Slashdot Mirror
The entire VoIP/video chat market is a cesspool of junk.
Amen.
I had a Nokia N800 a coupla years ago (wonderful machine, pity Nokia screwed it up), and I ran Gizmo, got myself a Gizmo ID, even paid for some external call connectivity (first and last time I ever needed to). I also installed Gizmo on my laptop and desktop.
Crap all round. Dire interface. Crackly, stuttering voice no matter how good the bandwidth. As others have said, the reason people use Skype is it works.
Not entirely. I have no need or desire to use Skype to call landlines or mobiles, or vice versa; but I do need to call other Skype users and they me, and to conference-call them.
What the developers have missed is that we need a single way to create a SIP ID, a single global directory, and a single global ID/addressing format. Until this is addressed, SIP is a dead duck.
Ireland, however, uses 5' 3". Fortunately we are an island, with no rail intercommunication with anywhere else :-)
Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species.
Certainly plausible, or perhaps some ed board jerk has a "degree" in "education" or "management" which included some basics stats.
The real problem is that a null hypothesis implies the default case of inaction. In other words, a valid null hypothesis for the origin of species would be that it "just happened"; that there was no external causative agency. It is therefore up to the proponents of ID or any other theory to show their proof.
(In any case, natural selection is wasteful in the extreme, and can be taken as evidence of the absence of any intelligence at work.)
Why the fuck do oil producers get tax breaks? Apart from the fact that their puppets (Bush père and Bush fils) ran the show for so many years.
Good call. Too much time is wasted using it...
If the battery power/network status icons are missing, then somehow your settings got cleared. That would be a bug and should be filed.
I think the problem is that bugs this bad shouldn't make it into a production release. I'm running Gnome in 10.4 and there are still stupid bugs with widgets randomly failing to appear at login time, that should have been fixed years ago when I reported them.
I think it's good that a company like Canonical should develop new stuff, but they really really really need to get some professional Usability testing people in, and pay attention to them; and they also need to get rid of the idea that only Clueless Newbies[tm] use Ubuntu.
Some people use Ubuntu for (gasp) work: they like the stability and ease of updating that Ubuntu has been providing to date (with a few crass blunders, for sure, like slavishly following Debian's foolishness in replacing kpdf/kdvi with Okular); and they don't appreciate being treated like idiots and having the usability sacrificed by thoughtless developers who believe everyone always has the latest, fastest, biggest hardware.
So bye bye Ubuntu — it's been nice knowing you, sorry you flunked the test, so long, thanks for all the fish, game over, you lose.
Price isn't everything, but mobile contracts may be, depending on where you are: mine is €20 a month for the phone plus €5 a month for the Internet, and I've never hit the IP cap — but I'm not interested in downloading video, music, or games, so it's just email, Twitter, and the occasional web browse.
There is a much more insidious failure to Android, though, as I have been bitching about for a year or more: it cannot use any wifi connection that has a proxy, because the Android software has no settings for proxies in the wifi setup. Immediately this means no wifi connections to corporate or campus networks, cutting out the business and academic community at a stroke. You have to use your phone provider's lame-ass excuse for 3G, Edge or whatever-it's-called-this-week, at whatever inflated, capped rate and service your contract imposes. I'm a low-level user, so this doesn't bother me for smartphone usage: it would bother me big time for tablet usage.
It's unclear why Android doesn't do proxies. It does have settings for them on the 3G/Edge setup (where they are never needed) but not in wifi (where they often are). I blogged about it, and I know some Google people read my blog, but it's clear that this will never be fixed because Google don't see it as a problem. The conclusion is that the lack of proxy settings is a sweetener for the telcos to sell Android smartphones and tablets, because lack of wifi proxy settings means extra 3G/Edge usage which raises their revenues. Yes, you can root the smartphone or the tablet, and install some stack of apps that may fix the problem, but many users won't do this. An iPhone or iPad doesn't have this problem (they may have others, though), which is why, when I can afford it, I will probably junk Android for good.
So WTF is Algebra II? It looks just like the regular algebra we did in high school, except it's been dumbed down by giving the answers. If you want to test whether they can do algebra, give them just the questions and let them work out the answer themselves. Who are the dumbfuck teachers who think this is a good idea?
How about forcing all fundamentalist sites to be on .fundie? Or all right-wing sites to be on .fascist? Then we can block the whole lot of them in one swell foop.
Great idea, huh?
If you persist in electing assholes (or failing to campaign against them hard enough), you'll get this kind of activity going unchallenged.
Ireland had the same class of problem wrt their financial woes: electing assholes (or failing to campaign against them hard enough).
The solution is to stop electing assholes.
These are not the droids we have been waiting for....
Oh, sorry, typed it wrong...
Despite all the evil MS may represent, I'm sure MS don't want to kill Nokia.
They just want to assimilate them. Nokia is merely the dupe singled out for assimilation. If they had listened to the Maemo and Meego users early on, they might even have stolen a march on Android, but by failing signally to understand that a phone is no longer just a phone, and is not even just a smartphone, or a tablet, or a pad, but a computer, they have effectively signed their own death warrant, and handed it to Microsoft for execution.
No loss. Nokia screwed it up with the N800 (not a phone) and Maemo by failing to understand that it was a pocket computer, not a "tablet". Their complete lack of comprehension here meant that when they came to make the N900 they picked the wrong form factor and failed dismally to provide a decent suite of built-in apps, despite having made the same mistake with the N800. Plus the N900 was grossly overpriced for what it was. I loved my N800, but I gave up on Nokia when Androids became available. It's disastrous news for the human race, especially those in countries where "Nokia" means "cellphone", and a brilliant coup for Microsoft: they will now raise an entire generation in these countries knowing nothing but Windows Phone 7, and believing that this is the only OS. It might save Nokia, but there is no way I would ever buy one of their phones again anyway.
There may be another reason: we don't have any more money or time to spend on travel than we are already spending. This is not "peak demand", because we may still want to travel more (demand still present) but simply cannot.
This also shows up when a message is sent to someone for whom you have two or more cellphone numbers. I saw a message I had sent my son at his foreign cellphone number (by mistake) coming up as a new thread, which I knew was "wrong". I re-sent it to his local cellphone number and it filed correctly. But both threads had the same name title, and did not have anything to distinguish them (a UI error: they should have the class of device appended in parentheses when the recipient has more than one SMS-capable device).
But if the messages are going to entirely different people, I'd suspect a match routine error, and I'd want to check the code and the data for character-set encoding problems. I would hope by now that everything is UTF-8, but if this stuff was coded by people whose sole language is English, all bets are off.
So if it continues to accelerate, will it pass through the geographic north pole on 21st Dec 2012? :-)
The simplest was a restore of a file from the backups of an old Sun SparcStation IPX (still extant, but non-booting at the moment). This was straightforward: dig out the SSI QIC drive, plug it into the SCSI port on my Ubuntu box, load the tape, and type the tar command.
More tedious but no more difficult was restoring a program written in BASIC on my first pocket machine, a 1982 Sharp PC-1500 (now donated to Bruce Damer's DigiBarn museum). This backed up onto a micro audio cassette on a Dictaphone-style Radio Shack handheld recorder. In 1998 or thereabouts I wanted the implementation of Logo I had written for the kids, so I dug out the machine, cleaned it up, and it stayed dead. I had to resurrect the system unit from a clone on Ebay before I could get it to boot; but then loading the file from tape worked fine, and dialing up via the RS-232 port modem at 2400 baud to my VAX and sending the file via Kermit went just fine.
Exactly. In every country I have been in where it has been deregulated, the result has been higher prices and lower service. Somehow we must nail this myth that deregulation means competition: it doesn't, it means cartels, and it means the ownership of the productive capacity passes into the hands of ignorant investors and greedy bankers instead of the producers, so you end up with energy companies being owned by anonymous, uninterested, and incompetent asset-strippers.
I used to use FTree (http://www.ftree.org/) which is simple but reliable. Then I found Gramps, which is slicker and prettier. The problem with all these programs is they seem to consider it obligatory to provide extensive reports for the professional genealogist, but the views of the data available for domestic use are very limited (displayed trees only give 3 generations, and only give forebears, not descendants, I think), and the printout facilities provided are restrictive to say the least (I want my ENTIRE tree as a single PDF, please, shrunk to whatever microscopic font size is needed to make it fit on ONE page).
I am suprised that they would work for the common good, rather than the coorporate interest.
Some bits of the Commission are independent, some are in the pockets of big business.
The reality though is that 2015 is a loong way away, and by then these costs woudl have collapsed by nature.
No, they would still be there...the cellphone companies are making a killing on these charges.
Everybody would be walking aroud with an voip phone tapping into free bandwidth. This has already started with android 2.3 and SIP VoIP
Not an icicle's chance in hell. Wifi is nowhere near widespread enough for this, and still won't be in 2015. SIP is fine as a concept, but cannot take off until there is a unified directory that works. Right now it's just an interesting plaything.
This is suboptimal. The .iso is 717Mb, and Brasero on my Ubuntu 10.4 won't let me burn it to an 80min CD because it's too big. So just how am I expected to test this gizmo?
XSLT2
The USA has the best judges money can buy. And a large number of very ignorant or stupid ones as well.