I have to agree with daVinci1980: I'd love for Evolution to be ported to Windows, even if they only ported part of it (Evo Lite?). I use Thunderbird on both Windows and Linux because it's the only mail client I know of that works seamlessly on both platforms.
However, with Ximian now fully absorbed by Novell, I think the odds of a Windows port of Evo is highly unlikely.
For all our talk about how hydrogen is the future of cars, I've not yet seen one American car--not even a concept car--running on hydrogen. The Germans really build spectacular cars.
The Japanese, too; the New Ford Escape Hybrid runs on Toyota's first-generation hybrid motor.
"What's cool is that every pack has a different Surgeon General's Warning. Mine say, 'WARNING: Smoking can cause fetal injury or premature birth.' HAHA! F*** it! Found my brand!"
Ultimately, Sun is doomed. It has carved itself out a niche between IBM's big-iron machines and Dell's cheap-iron ones, but the gap in which Sun lives is rapidly narrowing. Even Apple is taking sales away from them, and if that happens, you know you're in trouble. As for Java...well, it's a good language and portable, too, but the coming onslaught of.NET is only going to hurt Sun more.
This means that Sun no longer has an edge it can use to drive a wedge between Dell, Microsoft, Apple and IBM, all of whom are rapidly closing in on it like a pack of wolves. Ultimately, Sun will go the way of Netscape (except that in Sun's case, it will be the rest of the industry crushing them instead of just MSFT). If they're smart, they'll open-source Java, because that's the only way I can think of for there to be something left of them once the company is gone.
As neat as machine learning would be, I think Firefox is just about the perfect browser now. It is precisely Firefox's small footprint and do-one-thing-and-do-it-well approach that people love about it.
I'd like to see a newsfeed aggregator built into it, but I'm not going to ask because all I have to do is download Sage. I'd also like to see the Mozilla-based browsers move away from the bookmarks.html format to something XML-based, like XBEL, which Epiphany and Galeon use to great effect. I especially like Epiphany's categorisation of bookmarks, which allow one bookmark to live in two bookmark categories.
I got my copies of The Matrix and The Animatrix used at Blockbuster; two for twenty dollars. Why would I want the other two films, both of which were abyssmal?
I am so sick of Jakob Nielsen. He's a tosser with a bad haircut.
Maybe old Jakob should redesign his site, making it look a bit less like something that came out of 1994 and then start telling people how their sites should be designed.
Isn't it interesting how email works together, regardless of OS or provider? Isn't it interesting how the Web is the same way?
Now look at the IM universe. AIM, MSNM, Y!M, ICQ, Jabber, etc. Of all those systems, only two work together (AIM & ICQ) and that's because they're both owned by the same company (AOL).
Why shouldn't I be able to send a message from AIM to MSNM? We seem to accept this as "this is how it is", but we ought to really think about what this structure truly represents.
Vint Cerf and friends invented TCP/IP, assuring that different systems could talk to each other using a common protocol; the tools came later. The same goes for Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web: without him, we'd have a Microsoft web, a Yahoo! web, an AOL web (though technically, they have one in their weird, proprietary, Rainman-based content) and so on and so forth.
I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank Vint and Tim and all those other folks who made the Internet truly open. All I have to do is look at the IM world to see what would have come about had they not created the open protocols and platforms we use today.
The funniest part about Gmail so far was when I logged into my account for the first time. Gmail sends you a message when you open your account, with the subject "Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know." I opened that message and noticed that one of the ads along the right side read:
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its...
That's comedy, right there.
Seriously, though, I moved my totally non-techie father over yesterday, too. He'd gotten sick of Hotmail's paltry 2MB limit. Now MSN says they'll up it to 250MB early next month. Sounds like too little, too late to me.
This isn't about backward-compatibility five years after a new console hits; it's about easing the transition from one platform to the next. By providing backward-compatibility for the PSX generation of games, Sony ensured that people who bought the PS2 could still play their PSX games on it until there were enough native PS2 games for it to obviate the old games. Sony used the PSX's huge game library as a springboard for the PS2. It was a great strategic move, both for Sony and for gamers.
I don't play many of my PSX titles today on my PS2. But i did when I got the PS2 and titles for it were thin on the ground. For the Xbox 2 to cut off the old generation of games from the new hardware is to force users to make a huge step--and investment--upward, which will have the effect of making gamers hold off on getting the Xbox 2 until the library of games for it has achieved critical mass.
I'm not really advocating the use of any music store over another. Rather, I was merely pointing to iTMS as an example of turning pirates into customers. iTMS is a good example, I think, because despite the Digital Rights Management its tracks come with, it was the first truly successful online music store. There's really no arguing that.
Sure, I'd like a music store that sells its tracks without DRM for 30 cents, but the labels aren't going to allow that to happen any time soon. When it does, I'll be first in line to sign up. I also think iTMS has the most lenient DRM of any music store. I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but Apple's DRM isn't all that bad, especially when you consider how some companies lock up their tracks in totally proprietary formats with DRM up the wazoo (I'm looking at you, Sony Connect).
Let me speak plainly: I'd like to see the big labels smashed. They don't believe in music. They don't believe in art. They don't believe in anything but maximising their return-on-investment and praying at the holy altar of the shareholder. Such narcissism is slowly killing the music industry. However, online music stores serve a purpose. Browse most file-sharing networks and you'll find plenty of popular stuff, but just try to find an old jazz track from 1960 and you're likely to come up short. It is here, in the not-so-popular space, that online music stores can truly shine.
About bloody time! Perhaps they're finally learning that if you make things easily available for a low price (like, say, the iTunes Music Store did), people will pirate less and pony up more. Everyone walks away happy.
I'd like for Nautilus' "browser" mode to retain its window attributes the way the "spatial" mode does. (Why was this not included in both modes?)
I'd like to see the menus in both Nautilus views become more consistent. There's a "Places" menu in "spatial" mode, but it's called "Go" in "browser" mode and there's a "Bookmarks" menu, too. My advice: drop "Places" and replace it with "Go" and "Bookmarks" in the "spatial" view.
I'd like to see new windows created in the center of the screen by default.
I'd also like to see all window positions saved so that when I open a program again, it starts in its same position I closed it.
I'd like to be able to switch from "spatial" to "browser" mode with one option in the menu.
While we're at it, I'd like to be able to set and unset the "show hidden files and directories" option directly from the menu.
Other than that, I quite like the new GNOME. Good work.
Dual-Boot Bug? I've been running Fedora Core 2 since it was released. I did a custom install so I could set the partitions and mount points myself and I can boot into Windows just fine; I have yet to run into that dual-boot bug.
Broken Audio? I had to install an extra module so XMMS would play MP3s, but they don't include that for copyright reasons and as such i wouldn't qualify it as "broken". Oh yeah: Rhythmbox is still a piece of crap, though.
Gnome 2.6 an abomination? As for GNOME 2.6, I like it: One setting change using Gconf changed the one-window-per-folder into an explorer-style browser (MUCH better!). Heck, the new save and open dialogs practically make the upgrade worth it alone.
Sounds like the reviewer just sort of had it in for FC2. I'm using it and I'm quite happy.
This is a great idea for a thread. I'm assuming this is after I've downloaded the eight jillion patches for Windows I need, but in no particular order:
Has anyone considered the fact that the reason they want to jack up the prices so high is that they want things like iTunes Music Store to fail? In this way, they can turn back the clock to the days when there were just CDs and they can continue to gouge customers.
It's really sad how the labels just don't get it; at this point, the big corporations are the ones holding music back. Online music sales could have made them billions at a reasonable cost to shoppers, but it appears that they are trying to bury their heads ever deeper in the sand, hoping that maybe if they ignore the Internet long enough, it will go away. Unfortunately for them, the Internet has proven that it will turn out to be one of the greatest cultural changes in human history, for everyone it touches.
I have gotten to really appreciate iTMS, especially with this whole Pepsi/iTunes promotion going on. However, if record labels inflate prices of online music beyond the willing price-point of their shoppers merely so they can squeeze more money out of them, they're going to find more and more people turning to free sharing services like Kazaa and Bittorrent. I say, it's better to open yourself up a bit and make a little money off someone (per track) than to turn the whole world into criminals in order to hold on to your plutocratic stranglehold of an entire industry.
I really have to agree with the article, because it's become clear that antitrust measures simply won't work on Microsoft. As an example, look at the old Bell monopoly. In that case, there was a clear, simple way of breaking up the company: geographically. In the case of Microsoft, how would one break it up? Geographically wouldn't work, not in today's globalized world. Breaking it up into OS and applications companies wouldn't work, because both companies would still be juggernauts. And as much as people want, no breakup would require the Windows source code to be opened up, because the government simply doesn't think that way. No, the only way Microsoft will die is by their own hand, thinking they can dictate terms in the computer industry. I sure hope Linux (and the BSDs) are the instrument that causes Microsoft to fall upon its own sword, but I'm not buying Cringely's within-this-decade estimate; Gates is just too savvy to what happened to big companies like IBM to let that happen to his baby. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen after Gates retires at the very earliest.
Fortunately, the open-source communtiy has an advantage Microsoft can't match; sheer collective power. No closed-source company can possibly compete with that forever, so what the open-source community needs to do is to keep plugging away, keep innovating, keep making the projects and products better and better, keep chipping away at the monolith. This community has the speed and maneuverability to be that "faster ship" Cringely refers to. But it's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of time.
The Comanche was a red herring. Our helicopters are great and a whole hell of a lot cheaper than the Comanche ever could have hoped to be. Hell, when my dad was flying AH-1J Cobras, the basic cost of a unit (without certain avionics equipment) was ~$800,000.
Personally, I think the Apache is overpriced ($25 million per unit), too. Remember in the First Gulf War, when they couldn't fly them because the sand damaged their engines? The Cobras flew in that, no problem.
The Comanche was a perfect example of feature creep, a bloated over-thinking of the helicopter's function as a weapon. The cost-per-copy, too, would simply have been too big a burden. Simple, durable, well-designed inexpensive weapons (like the Cobra or A-10 Warthog) are much more effective weapons than machines costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per copy, because if it is damaged--or if you lose one--it is far cheaper to repair or replace.
Look at who games are marketed to. They say they're targeting 18-34 year olds, but gaming really hits its prime between 13-25 year olds.
I, too, used to be an avid gamer, but my buying habits have slowed considerably. I'm in my mid-twenties and I still buy games, but far less frequently than I did in my early twenties. However, I've always been a voracious reader and my interest in books has not waned one iota.
As things stand, the only games I'm actively looking forward to are Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Half-Life 2. I hate to admit it, but I have to agree with torpor: games are, by and large, virtually a complete and utter waste of time and given a few hours of downtime, I'd rather read a book or play an old game.
This is not to say that there aren't games I love. I have great memories of Descent (1 and 2), Twisted Metal (1, 2 and Black), Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert), Ico (which everyone ever should be required to own), Grand Theft Auto (III and Vice City), Metal Gear Solid (1 and 2), Half Life, Deus Ex, Warcraft (1 through 3), Starcraft, Quake (1 through 3), NHL (199x - 200x), Final Fantasy (VII - X), Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and many more. But when you're 19 you don't quite realize just how expensive games are, probably because you're at college and mom & dad are funding you. When you have to pay your own expenses, games become a luxury, and an expensive one at that.
I concur; no one in my immediate family or (considerable) extended family has a super-high-tech phone. None of my friends have high-tech phones. Who needs all that nonsense? I bought a cell phone so I could make telephone calls, not take and view pictures, download ringtones, browse the web, etc. Once we get the "all you can eat" plans (as erick99 so aptly put it), we'll all be happier.
We were not playing Dance Dance Revolution, we were playing PyDance, a from-scratch DDR lookalike that was written by one of the guys on our mailing list; it runs off a Linux box. It's just so well done that you thought it was regular DDR.
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I have to agree with daVinci1980: I'd love for Evolution to be ported to Windows, even if they only ported part of it (Evo Lite?). I use Thunderbird on both Windows and Linux because it's the only mail client I know of that works seamlessly on both platforms.
However, with Ximian now fully absorbed by Novell, I think the odds of a Windows port of Evo is highly unlikely.
For all our talk about how hydrogen is the future of cars, I've not yet seen one American car--not even a concept car--running on hydrogen. The Germans really build spectacular cars.
The Japanese, too; the New Ford Escape Hybrid runs on Toyota's first-generation hybrid motor.
Do I smell Commander Keen Arena?
Just kidding. They really do need to do something, ANYTHING different.
That's rather like an old Bill Hicks line.
"What's cool is that every pack has a different Surgeon General's Warning. Mine say, 'WARNING: Smoking can cause fetal injury or premature birth.' HAHA! F*** it! Found my brand!"
Ultimately, Sun is doomed. It has carved itself out a niche between IBM's big-iron machines and Dell's cheap-iron ones, but the gap in which Sun lives is rapidly narrowing. Even Apple is taking sales away from them, and if that happens, you know you're in trouble. As for Java...well, it's a good language and portable, too, but the coming onslaught of .NET is only going to hurt Sun more.
This means that Sun no longer has an edge it can use to drive a wedge between Dell, Microsoft, Apple and IBM, all of whom are rapidly closing in on it like a pack of wolves. Ultimately, Sun will go the way of Netscape (except that in Sun's case, it will be the rest of the industry crushing them instead of just MSFT). If they're smart, they'll open-source Java, because that's the only way I can think of for there to be something left of them once the company is gone.
As neat as machine learning would be, I think Firefox is just about the perfect browser now. It is precisely Firefox's small footprint and do-one-thing-and-do-it-well approach that people love about it.
I'd like to see a newsfeed aggregator built into it, but I'm not going to ask because all I have to do is download Sage. I'd also like to see the Mozilla-based browsers move away from the bookmarks.html format to something XML-based, like XBEL, which Epiphany and Galeon use to great effect. I especially like Epiphany's categorisation of bookmarks, which allow one bookmark to live in two bookmark categories.
I got my copies of The Matrix and The Animatrix used at Blockbuster; two for twenty dollars. Why would I want the other two films, both of which were abyssmal?
I am so sick of Jakob Nielsen. He's a tosser with a bad haircut.
Maybe old Jakob should redesign his site, making it look a bit less like something that came out of 1994 and then start telling people how their sites should be designed.
Isn't it interesting how email works together, regardless of OS or provider? Isn't it interesting how the Web is the same way?
Now look at the IM universe. AIM, MSNM, Y!M, ICQ, Jabber, etc. Of all those systems, only two work together (AIM & ICQ) and that's because they're both owned by the same company (AOL).
Why shouldn't I be able to send a message from AIM to MSNM? We seem to accept this as "this is how it is", but we ought to really think about what this structure truly represents.
Vint Cerf and friends invented TCP/IP, assuring that different systems could talk to each other using a common protocol; the tools came later. The same goes for Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web: without him, we'd have a Microsoft web, a Yahoo! web, an AOL web (though technically, they have one in their weird, proprietary, Rainman-based content) and so on and so forth.
I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank Vint and Tim and all those other folks who made the Internet truly open. All I have to do is look at the IM world to see what would have come about had they not created the open protocols and platforms we use today.
The funniest part about Gmail so far was when I logged into my account for the first time. Gmail sends you a message when you open your account, with the subject "Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know." I opened that message and noticed that one of the ads along the right side read:
That's comedy, right there.
Seriously, though, I moved my totally non-techie father over yesterday, too. He'd gotten sick of Hotmail's paltry 2MB limit. Now MSN says they'll up it to 250MB early next month. Sounds like too little, too late to me.
This isn't about backward-compatibility five years after a new console hits; it's about easing the transition from one platform to the next. By providing backward-compatibility for the PSX generation of games, Sony ensured that people who bought the PS2 could still play their PSX games on it until there were enough native PS2 games for it to obviate the old games. Sony used the PSX's huge game library as a springboard for the PS2. It was a great strategic move, both for Sony and for gamers.
I don't play many of my PSX titles today on my PS2. But i did when I got the PS2 and titles for it were thin on the ground. For the Xbox 2 to cut off the old generation of games from the new hardware is to force users to make a huge step--and investment--upward, which will have the effect of making gamers hold off on getting the Xbox 2 until the library of games for it has achieved critical mass.
I'm not really advocating the use of any music store over another. Rather, I was merely pointing to iTMS as an example of turning pirates into customers. iTMS is a good example, I think, because despite the Digital Rights Management its tracks come with, it was the first truly successful online music store. There's really no arguing that.
Sure, I'd like a music store that sells its tracks without DRM for 30 cents, but the labels aren't going to allow that to happen any time soon. When it does, I'll be first in line to sign up. I also think iTMS has the most lenient DRM of any music store. I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but Apple's DRM isn't all that bad, especially when you consider how some companies lock up their tracks in totally proprietary formats with DRM up the wazoo (I'm looking at you, Sony Connect).
Let me speak plainly: I'd like to see the big labels smashed. They don't believe in music. They don't believe in art. They don't believe in anything but maximising their return-on-investment and praying at the holy altar of the shareholder. Such narcissism is slowly killing the music industry. However, online music stores serve a purpose. Browse most file-sharing networks and you'll find plenty of popular stuff, but just try to find an old jazz track from 1960 and you're likely to come up short. It is here, in the not-so-popular space, that online music stores can truly shine.
About bloody time! Perhaps they're finally learning that if you make things easily available for a low price (like, say, the iTunes Music Store did), people will pirate less and pony up more. Everyone walks away happy.
Other than that, I quite like the new GNOME. Good work.
Dual-Boot Bug? I've been running Fedora Core 2 since it was released. I did a custom install so I could set the partitions and mount points myself and I can boot into Windows just fine; I have yet to run into that dual-boot bug.
Broken Audio? I had to install an extra module so XMMS would play MP3s, but they don't include that for copyright reasons and as such i wouldn't qualify it as "broken". Oh yeah: Rhythmbox is still a piece of crap, though.
Gnome 2.6 an abomination? As for GNOME 2.6, I like it: One setting change using Gconf changed the one-window-per-folder into an explorer-style browser (MUCH better!). Heck, the new save and open dialogs practically make the upgrade worth it alone.
Sounds like the reviewer just sort of had it in for FC2. I'm using it and I'm quite happy.
This is a great idea for a thread. I'm assuming this is after I've downloaded the eight jillion patches for Windows I need, but in no particular order:
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,720 for "year of the penguin". (0.07 seconds)
No offense, everyone, but don't they say this every year?
"This year is the year Linux breaks through the Microsoft juggernaut! Really! We swear! Honest! We're totally serious and sure this time!"
Has anyone considered the fact that the reason they want to jack up the prices so high is that they want things like iTunes Music Store to fail? In this way, they can turn back the clock to the days when there were just CDs and they can continue to gouge customers.
It's really sad how the labels just don't get it; at this point, the big corporations are the ones holding music back. Online music sales could have made them billions at a reasonable cost to shoppers, but it appears that they are trying to bury their heads ever deeper in the sand, hoping that maybe if they ignore the Internet long enough, it will go away. Unfortunately for them, the Internet has proven that it will turn out to be one of the greatest cultural changes in human history, for everyone it touches.
I have gotten to really appreciate iTMS, especially with this whole Pepsi/iTunes promotion going on. However, if record labels inflate prices of online music beyond the willing price-point of their shoppers merely so they can squeeze more money out of them, they're going to find more and more people turning to free sharing services like Kazaa and Bittorrent. I say, it's better to open yourself up a bit and make a little money off someone (per track) than to turn the whole world into criminals in order to hold on to your plutocratic stranglehold of an entire industry.
I really have to agree with the article, because it's become clear that antitrust measures simply won't work on Microsoft. As an example, look at the old Bell monopoly. In that case, there was a clear, simple way of breaking up the company: geographically. In the case of Microsoft, how would one break it up? Geographically wouldn't work, not in today's globalized world. Breaking it up into OS and applications companies wouldn't work, because both companies would still be juggernauts. And as much as people want, no breakup would require the Windows source code to be opened up, because the government simply doesn't think that way. No, the only way Microsoft will die is by their own hand, thinking they can dictate terms in the computer industry. I sure hope Linux (and the BSDs) are the instrument that causes Microsoft to fall upon its own sword, but I'm not buying Cringely's within-this-decade estimate; Gates is just too savvy to what happened to big companies like IBM to let that happen to his baby. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen after Gates retires at the very earliest.
Fortunately, the open-source communtiy has an advantage Microsoft can't match; sheer collective power. No closed-source company can possibly compete with that forever, so what the open-source community needs to do is to keep plugging away, keep innovating, keep making the projects and products better and better, keep chipping away at the monolith. This community has the speed and maneuverability to be that "faster ship" Cringely refers to. But it's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of time.
The Comanche was a red herring. Our helicopters are great and a whole hell of a lot cheaper than the Comanche ever could have hoped to be. Hell, when my dad was flying AH-1J Cobras, the basic cost of a unit (without certain avionics equipment) was ~$800,000.
Personally, I think the Apache is overpriced ($25 million per unit), too. Remember in the First Gulf War, when they couldn't fly them because the sand damaged their engines? The Cobras flew in that, no problem.
The Comanche was a perfect example of feature creep, a bloated over-thinking of the helicopter's function as a weapon. The cost-per-copy, too, would simply have been too big a burden. Simple, durable, well-designed inexpensive weapons (like the Cobra or A-10 Warthog) are much more effective weapons than machines costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per copy, because if it is damaged--or if you lose one--it is far cheaper to repair or replace.
Look at who games are marketed to. They say they're targeting 18-34 year olds, but gaming really hits its prime between 13-25 year olds.
I, too, used to be an avid gamer, but my buying habits have slowed considerably. I'm in my mid-twenties and I still buy games, but far less frequently than I did in my early twenties. However, I've always been a voracious reader and my interest in books has not waned one iota.
As things stand, the only games I'm actively looking forward to are Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Half-Life 2. I hate to admit it, but I have to agree with torpor: games are, by and large, virtually a complete and utter waste of time and given a few hours of downtime, I'd rather read a book or play an old game.
This is not to say that there aren't games I love. I have great memories of Descent (1 and 2), Twisted Metal (1, 2 and Black), Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert), Ico (which everyone ever should be required to own), Grand Theft Auto (III and Vice City), Metal Gear Solid (1 and 2), Half Life, Deus Ex, Warcraft (1 through 3), Starcraft, Quake (1 through 3), NHL (199x - 200x), Final Fantasy (VII - X), Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and many more. But when you're 19 you don't quite realize just how expensive games are, probably because you're at college and mom & dad are funding you. When you have to pay your own expenses, games become a luxury, and an expensive one at that.
That means Duke Nukem Forever is really going to be hurting. You know, when it comes out.
I concur; no one in my immediate family or (considerable) extended family has a super-high-tech phone. None of my friends have high-tech phones. Who needs all that nonsense? I bought a cell phone so I could make telephone calls, not take and view pictures, download ringtones, browse the web, etc. Once we get the "all you can eat" plans (as erick99 so aptly put it), we'll all be happier.
We were not playing Dance Dance Revolution, we were playing PyDance, a from-scratch DDR lookalike that was written by one of the guys on our mailing list; it runs off a Linux box. It's just so well done that you thought it was regular DDR.