I completely agree. The way they have things set up, it's a race to be that top 1 in 10 not to go out on a limb and risk being label as the loser. Stick with what you know, make sure you only color inside the lines, refine something that worked in the past (or for someone else). But come up with wildly new ideas and get them out the door? Nobody is signing up for that.
I know why they have this system in place, but it's so completely misguided them up to now that I don't know if they could recover from it (from a "OK, from now on we innovate!" perspective) even if they ditched it tomorrow.
Went through that once, and it sucked donkey nuts. So I've been buying Nvidia, because I know it'll work. It works on my windows gaming machine and it works on my workstation.
I don't care even a little bit about the closed nature of the drivers.
When, I read the summary that was the first thing I thought. Most of the people who use Google+ use it specifically because they can do both private and public posting from the same site. I do agree the Google+ is not very active in comparison to Facebook
I don't think I've ever posted publicly on G+. I gave up on Facebook a long time ago, mostly because of the activity level. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad there. I even went so far as to disable all apps universally, and still got quite a lot of junk from people. Also, having to "friend" everyone is not a terribly elegant way to share info (though I hear it's different now).
If I didn't, I'd be free to avail myself of any number of other options from several manufacturers, each with pretty much the same choices in what OS I could run.
At any rate, I was making reference to Henry Ford's quote: "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." What I like is having choices.
to Apple? Because that's what people want - something that works, not something you have to make a hobby of just to keep running between distro-hops.
No, I want an OS that is open, reliable and easy to install on a variety of commodity hardware. I want an OS that has a lot of variety in software. I want to be able to pick my window manager, for example. I don't want to pay a premium in hardware to be given entrance to a walled garden. I don't want to be given a choice of "any color you like, as long as it's white".
And as long as we're in anecdote-land, the computer I'm using to post this was a refurb from woot. On first boot, I put the LiveCD in the drive and did exactly nothing further from a configuration standpoint once the the installer was done. Yes, I've been using Linux for a long, long time and had something not worked it wouldn't have been hard to fix, but I didn't need to do anything to be fully up and running. It literally "just works".
That's a far cry from your so-called "hobby" needed to get or keep a desktop Linux machine running. Yes there can be hardware issues, yes there can be arcane configuration requirements. No, it's not for everyone. Yes, my experience does not necessarily mirror anyone else's. But at least stop spewing such utter bullshit like needing to treat a Linux desktop as a hobby. The fact is that it's never been easier to get up and running and it's getting even easier as time goes on.
So your two examples are a sci-fi TV show, and an OS that works well on servers but is an absolute failure on the desktop because its "do one thing well" mentality creates fragmentation and doesn't fit the needs or expectations of average users.
So you're saying that Apple in an average person's car would work better than Linux on an average user's desktop because it would "fit the needs or expectations of average users"?
Can you be more specific? Like telling us what doensn't work?
Having already posted a reply, I have a gut feeling this submission is in some way trollish. No specifics, vague notions of "telecommuting"
(do people even use that word?), and management-buzzword phrases like "hard time trying to find the right tools to keep communication flowing with my clients". Really? IM, email, online doc sharing, VOIP, video chat, Libre Office (or even MS Office in Wine)... shit even old-school ftp drop boxes: none of those will work in keeping communication "flowing"?
I get the feeling the submitter is looking to say, "See? Even Slashdot -- largely regarded as Nerd Central -- can't think of ways Linux can provide the tools and services necessary to serve the business-ready needs of today's modern telecommuting professional". Or some such reverse-astroturfing thing.
It could also be that the submitter isn't a technical person. But the submission smells funny.
If your clients work on Windows and you can best interact with them using that OS, then use that OS.
I've been working via a Linux desktop nearly every day since the mid-90's and even now I have an old laptop with Windows XP on it. Because every once in a while, a client issue will require me to fire it up. And sometimes the boss wants me to edit a Visio doc. Or whatever. In those cases, it's the right tool for the job. For day-to-day dev work, I'll be staring at XFCE and xterms and whatnot.
So it's basically key/value where the value is a serialized freeform array ? So then, if there is no structural integrity at the DB level, it has to be implemented in the application logic ? Doesn't that merely displace the performance bottleneck from the DB to the application ?
By not imposing any structure on what is being stored, performance is very, very good. And yeah, it's up to the application to put and get what it needs properly. The real win is that if your data isn't "relational" meaning that you don't need to correlate anything in a normalized sort of way, it's very very fast. And the storage model is different too. It works well for things that are event based, for instance.
Computing time is cheap. Development time, not so much.
Actually, at scale, the exact opposite is true. I worked next to a guy at Google who won a five-day paid vacation to Hawaii for making "most" plain searches 0.09 seconds faster, thereby freeing up a considerable amount of hardware. There was always a hardware crunch at Google. Don't know if there still is or not, though. I suspect so.
So that's good at finding the record if you already know the key, but there's no help in finding a record if you don't know the key, or getting a count of records with the same attribute attached... SQL for the win.
This isn't totally true. In MongoDB, for example, you don't even really have to think about the "primary key" for every document. Many times I don't know it or even care to. If you wants to look up customers in by name, you'd index the last_name and first_name fields and then do your query like so:
Since there's a compound index on those two keys, the key/values being looked up are those. That will return everything in that document which matches that name. A count is done by replacing the find() method call with the count() method call.
You get a lot of flexibility. Let's say that for the above some users had an avatar. Then for those who have one, I just save it with their stuff. If not, no big deal. But I never have to go back and add a "column", I just save a new document that happens to have an 'avatar' key and there it is right alongside records, and it doesn't matter if some documents have an avatar or not. In fact, I could store binary data, then a shopping list and then a bunch of key/value pairs in the same collection (a collection is analogous to a table).
It does take a mental shift, but definitely has its uses. And like everything, right tool for the job. SQL for the win in some case, not in others.
Not totally true. If for example I asked you, "How would I go about getting app-crushingly high I/O latency and random outages?" you would certainly be able to offer an answer contrary to your above statement.
My hope is that your resume never crosses my desk. All the time and hassle to hire someone, get them trained, get them integrated into the workplace and then they quit because of some woolly-headed platform issue? I very much never want to hire someone like you.
Regarding searches, I've long since switched over to Google, but for me, mail will always be on Yahoo!, even though I don't use anything else from the company any more.
Given this knowledge, how much longer do you believe it is that Yahoo will still be able to provide you with free email?
I interviewed a half dozen Yahoo employees while I worked for "another" search engine company. I asked them why they were leaving. Four of them said (basically) that it was because Yahoo doesn't care about engineers or ideas, just eyeballs and money. If your project doesn't show good numbers, no matter how much better the user experience might be if it was adopted, your project will languish or be canceled. One guy mentioned that his group's hardware was cast-off servers from around the dotcom era, and they couldn't get new hardware because they were infrastructure or something. The marketing types handled the budget.
Contrast this with that other search engine company, which once gave an engineer a 5-day paid Hawaii vacation because he figured out how to make searches a tenth of a second faster.
Anyway, I don't know if what the interviewees said was true, but it made sense. They wanted to work at a place that was driven by ideas and technology, not marketing.
This is a good question, and it' s a harder one to answer now than it was 200+ years ago. Back then a fellow could go find a place to be left alone if he liked without his license plates being automatically tracked and his movements stored and retained in databases unknown for durations unknown. He could publish "subversive" literature without the PATRIOT ACT causing his ISP to give him up involuntarily. He could start a religious movement without getting on an FBI list. And so on.
Your livelihood requires that you fly, but you still like the 4th Amendment? Well, sorry. That's really too bad. You have the choice to retain and fight for your rights from the welfare line. You a fan of the 2nd Amendment, whether for sport, defense, hunting, or otherwise? That's not going to go so well for you in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, et al. Like "alternative" literature? Don't check those books out of a public library too often (for any possible value of "often"). Because if you do that enough, you will be placed on a list the entrance requirements for which you can never know, the contents you can never see, and which has a removal process you will never participate in.
Is an over-reaching, NKVD-style TSA policy of harassing regular citizens on subways in the name of security theater the hill upon which you want to make your stand? Could be for some, might not be for others. I suspect it depends quite a lot on perspective, political/power connections, and money. For the average Joe, there's no real effective solution except to submit, or be branded a criminal. Remember, the US has become a country where 18-man SWAT teams can beat down your door in the middle of the night, Brazil-like, after having obtained a warrant on merely the flimsiest of anonymous tips.
There's no point in asking what rights you have, because you have none. You can't even photograph public buildings with that iPhone, much less prevent a goon too dumb to get a job as a mall security guard from seizing it, no matter how much or how loudly you protest. And if you cause enough stink, the TSA meatheads will get an actual cop to come over and give you grief. If they want to badly enough, they can now, thanks to President Obama, detain you indefinitely if they so choose. Even confessing to whatever they think you might well do at some point in the future may not get your released. You won't be allowed to talk to anyone about it, either -- not even a lawyer. And even when (if) you are let go, don't talk about it or they can jug your once again.
For those not counting, the Federal government has in this one encounter wiped its collective ass with the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and (probably) 9th Amendments, as well as pissing on the grave of habeas corpus.
We're in the same boat. It's been a challenge to fill a couple positions. And we've been absolutely bombarded by resumes from people who are spouses of H1Bs. "Must be eligible to work in the U.S." doesn't mean a lot I guess.
But overall I'm surprised at the amount of fluff and outright fabrication in about 7/8 of the resumes that come in. If we want someone with python and MongoDB experience, don't spend 15 minutes googling and then feel qualified to add those to your resume. It annoys me to no end that I have to waste time just making sure that an item on a resume wasn't put there because it's in the job posting. I don't know if people think that initial phone call is a "foot in the door" or what, but when I find out that what you say your skills are were listed falsely, I'm not inclined to think of you in a positive light.
I typically don't run the media PC hooked up to my TV unless I'm actually watching a movie or listening to music. Because of a hardware peculiarity, the power button won't put it into standby like my desktop PC. So I just leave it shut off unless I'm using it. It's got 10.04 on it now and boot time is about 30 seconds (never timed it, I usually turn it on and head to he kitchen for a drink). I'd love a fast boot time.
Nonsense. I've had my Torch for over 6 months, used daily. After applying the first OS6 fixpack, this has NEVER happened.
Because it has never happened to you, it can't happen to others? I guess when you have one data point, you can make the curve point any direction you want...
I had a BB Storm. It locked up (and required the battery to be pulled; there was no other way to reset it) at least weekly. My wife had one she bought at the same time as mine, same thing. Neither of us had any apps on it (because, seriously, the BB app store is a complete joke). Worst phone I've ever used. My old clamshell was a better phone.
My wife was for some reason hot for the Storm when it came out. I got one on a 2-for-1 deal, so basically free. Not worth it even at that price. Woof. What an utter piece of garbage. The main problem with it is that it had trouble being a phone. Seriously: It would often have trouble simply taking or making a call.
My phone would often ring once. Just one ring. That's apparently all it wanted to do sometimes. The last time it was my wife, and my pheon was just sitting there plugged in. I asked her about the call and she said it rang a few times and went to voice mail. My call log had it marked as a missed call. It happened fairly frequently that I'd get one or maybe two rings and then the call would go to voice mail.
If you were using an app (something besides the browser, since it couldn't actually view web pages and therefore couldn't be used) and you got a call, you had an even chance of having your phone lock up. You'd try to answer the call and would be greeted with a little spinning clock icon -- until you removed and replaced the battery.
Sometimes it'd lock up just because it wanted to. Again with the battery trick.
The radio could go from four bars to 5-20 seconds of no bars, effectively ending your call. You could be totally stationary when this happens, and it happened about every 5th call. I suspect this was the cause of the "1-2 rings then vmail" rings thing above. It seemed to have real trouble when someone tried to make it behave like a phone.
If your battery died, charging it and turning it on wouldn't turn the radios on. It'd stay unconnected until you manually "restore connections". If you forgot to do this, you're phone would appear to be fully functional but would never ring. How handy.
If your battery was very low and you plugged it in, you wouldn't be able to make or take a call. If you tried to make a call, you'd be greeted with the message "Battery too low to use radios". This is when it's plugged into the wall, and could suck up as much juice as it likes. If someone called you when the batteries are too low for radio use, then the call would go to voice mail.
There were many other nits and general inconveniences, but that's what sticks out. I replaced it with a droid phone and am kicking myself for trying to save a few bucks a month until my contract was up. I should have flushed that piece of shit within weeks of owning it.
Oh, and I should add: I never put a single, solitary app on it. And my wife's phone had the exact same troubles. It was poorly designed and/or badly manufactured. In either case, I'll never own a Blackberry again -- not even if one is given to me.
Or, rather, it wouldn't have much special stuff that would do you any good unless you were on their network. Goobuntu (like the Red Hat-based "grhat" before it) is very close to the regular publicly-available distribution. It looks and feels just like Ubuntu (aside from a Google-ish splash screen and desktop wallpaper). But they've added on tools so that devs can check code in/out, compile apps in the same environment one finds on the linux-based workstations, has some encryption for sensitive stuff, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree. The way they have things set up, it's a race to be that top 1 in 10 not to go out on a limb and risk being label as the loser. Stick with what you know, make sure you only color inside the lines, refine something that worked in the past (or for someone else). But come up with wildly new ideas and get them out the door? Nobody is signing up for that.
I know why they have this system in place, but it's so completely misguided them up to now that I don't know if they could recover from it (from a "OK, from now on we innovate!" perspective) even if they ditched it tomorrow.
-B
Went through that once, and it sucked donkey nuts. So I've been buying Nvidia, because I know it'll work. It works on my windows gaming machine and it works on my workstation.
I don't care even a little bit about the closed nature of the drivers.
-B
When, I read the summary that was the first thing I thought. Most of the people who use Google+ use it specifically because they can do both private and public posting from the same site. I do agree the Google+ is not very active in comparison to Facebook
I don't think I've ever posted publicly on G+. I gave up on Facebook a long time ago, mostly because of the activity level. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad there. I even went so far as to disable all apps universally, and still got quite a lot of junk from people. Also, having to "friend" everyone is not a terribly elegant way to share info (though I hear it's different now).
-B
> So, you're saying you don't like ThinkPads?
If I didn't, I'd be free to avail myself of any number of other options from several manufacturers, each with pretty much the same choices in what OS I could run.
At any rate, I was making reference to Henry Ford's quote: "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." What I like is having choices.
-B
to Apple? Because that's what people want - something that works, not something you have to make a hobby of just to keep running between distro-hops.
No, I want an OS that is open, reliable and easy to install on a variety of commodity hardware. I want an OS that has a lot of variety in software. I want to be able to pick my window manager, for example. I don't want to pay a premium in hardware to be given entrance to a walled garden. I don't want to be given a choice of "any color you like, as long as it's white".
And as long as we're in anecdote-land, the computer I'm using to post this was a refurb from woot. On first boot, I put the LiveCD in the drive and did exactly nothing further from a configuration standpoint once the the installer was done. Yes, I've been using Linux for a long, long time and had something not worked it wouldn't have been hard to fix, but I didn't need to do anything to be fully up and running. It literally "just works".
That's a far cry from your so-called "hobby" needed to get or keep a desktop Linux machine running. Yes there can be hardware issues, yes there can be arcane configuration requirements. No, it's not for everyone. Yes, my experience does not necessarily mirror anyone else's. But at least stop spewing such utter bullshit like needing to treat a Linux desktop as a hobby. The fact is that it's never been easier to get up and running and it's getting even easier as time goes on.
-B
So your two examples are a sci-fi TV show, and an OS that works well on servers but is an absolute failure on the desktop because its "do one thing well" mentality creates fragmentation and doesn't fit the needs or expectations of average users.
So you're saying that Apple in an average person's car would work better than Linux on an average user's desktop because it would "fit the needs or expectations of average users"?
-B
Can you be more specific? Like telling us what doensn't work?
Having already posted a reply, I have a gut feeling this submission is in some way trollish. No specifics, vague notions of "telecommuting" (do people even use that word?), and management-buzzword phrases like "hard time trying to find the right tools to keep communication flowing with my clients". Really? IM, email, online doc sharing, VOIP, video chat, Libre Office (or even MS Office in Wine)... shit even old-school ftp drop boxes: none of those will work in keeping communication "flowing"?
I get the feeling the submitter is looking to say, "See? Even Slashdot -- largely regarded as Nerd Central -- can't think of ways Linux can provide the tools and services necessary to serve the business-ready needs of today's modern telecommuting professional". Or some such reverse-astroturfing thing.
It could also be that the submitter isn't a technical person. But the submission smells funny.
-B
If your clients work on Windows and you can best interact with them using that OS, then use that OS.
I've been working via a Linux desktop nearly every day since the mid-90's and even now I have an old laptop with Windows XP on it. Because every once in a while, a client issue will require me to fire it up. And sometimes the boss wants me to edit a Visio doc. Or whatever. In those cases, it's the right tool for the job. For day-to-day dev work, I'll be staring at XFCE and xterms and whatnot.
Use whatever allows you to work best.
-B
Thank heavens for Ghostery.
You misspelled "NoScript".
So it's basically key/value where the value is a serialized freeform array ? So then, if there is no structural integrity at the DB level, it has to be implemented in the application logic ? Doesn't that merely displace the performance bottleneck from the DB to the application ?
By not imposing any structure on what is being stored, performance is very, very good. And yeah, it's up to the application to put and get what it needs properly. The real win is that if your data isn't "relational" meaning that you don't need to correlate anything in a normalized sort of way, it's very very fast. And the storage model is different too. It works well for things that are event based, for instance.
Computing time is cheap. Development time, not so much.
Actually, at scale, the exact opposite is true. I worked next to a guy at Google who won a five-day paid vacation to Hawaii for making "most" plain searches 0.09 seconds faster, thereby freeing up a considerable amount of hardware. There was always a hardware crunch at Google. Don't know if there still is or not, though. I suspect so.
-B
So that's good at finding the record if you already know the key, but there's no help in finding a record if you don't know the key, or getting a count of records with the same attribute attached... SQL for the win.
This isn't totally true. In MongoDB, for example, you don't even really have to think about the "primary key" for every document. Many times I don't know it or even care to. If you wants to look up customers in by name, you'd index the last_name and first_name fields and then do your query like so:
db.users.find({last_name : 'Cluster', first_name : 'Lost'})
Since there's a compound index on those two keys, the key/values being looked up are those. That will return everything in that document which matches that name. A count is done by replacing the find() method call with the count() method call.
You get a lot of flexibility. Let's say that for the above some users had an avatar. Then for those who have one, I just save it with their stuff. If not, no big deal. But I never have to go back and add a "column", I just save a new document that happens to have an 'avatar' key and there it is right alongside records, and it doesn't matter if some documents have an avatar or not. In fact, I could store binary data, then a shopping list and then a bunch of key/value pairs in the same collection (a collection is analogous to a table).
It does take a mental shift, but definitely has its uses. And like everything, right tool for the job. SQL for the win in some case, not in others.
-B
The cloud is the answer to NOTHING.
Not totally true. If for example I asked you, "How would I go about getting app-crushingly high I/O latency and random outages?" you would certainly be able to offer an answer contrary to your above statement.
-B
My hope is that your resume never crosses my desk. All the time and hassle to hire someone, get them trained, get them integrated into the workplace and then they quit because of some woolly-headed platform issue? I very much never want to hire someone like you.
-B
Regarding searches, I've long since switched over to Google, but for me, mail will always be on Yahoo!, even though I don't use anything else from the company any more.
Given this knowledge, how much longer do you believe it is that Yahoo will still be able to provide you with free email?
-B
Or some equally inane marketing bullshit
I interviewed a half dozen Yahoo employees while I worked for "another" search engine company. I asked them why they were leaving. Four of them said (basically) that it was because Yahoo doesn't care about engineers or ideas, just eyeballs and money. If your project doesn't show good numbers, no matter how much better the user experience might be if it was adopted, your project will languish or be canceled. One guy mentioned that his group's hardware was cast-off servers from around the dotcom era, and they couldn't get new hardware because they were infrastructure or something. The marketing types handled the budget.
Contrast this with that other search engine company, which once gave an engineer a 5-day paid Hawaii vacation because he figured out how to make searches a tenth of a second faster.
Anyway, I don't know if what the interviewees said was true, but it made sense. They wanted to work at a place that was driven by ideas and technology, not marketing.
-B
What are we willing to risk to defend our Rights?
This is a good question, and it' s a harder one to answer now than it was 200+ years ago. Back then a fellow could go find a place to be left alone if he liked without his license plates being automatically tracked and his movements stored and retained in databases unknown for durations unknown. He could publish "subversive" literature without the PATRIOT ACT causing his ISP to give him up involuntarily. He could start a religious movement without getting on an FBI list. And so on.
Your livelihood requires that you fly, but you still like the 4th Amendment? Well, sorry. That's really too bad. You have the choice to retain and fight for your rights from the welfare line. You a fan of the 2nd Amendment, whether for sport, defense, hunting, or otherwise? That's not going to go so well for you in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, et al. Like "alternative" literature? Don't check those books out of a public library too often (for any possible value of "often"). Because if you do that enough, you will be placed on a list the entrance requirements for which you can never know, the contents you can never see, and which has a removal process you will never participate in.
Is an over-reaching, NKVD-style TSA policy of harassing regular citizens on subways in the name of security theater the hill upon which you want to make your stand? Could be for some, might not be for others. I suspect it depends quite a lot on perspective, political/power connections, and money. For the average Joe, there's no real effective solution except to submit, or be branded a criminal. Remember, the US has become a country where 18-man SWAT teams can beat down your door in the middle of the night, Brazil-like, after having obtained a warrant on merely the flimsiest of anonymous tips.
-B
There's no point in asking what rights you have, because you have none. You can't even photograph public buildings with that iPhone, much less prevent a goon too dumb to get a job as a mall security guard from seizing it, no matter how much or how loudly you protest. And if you cause enough stink, the TSA meatheads will get an actual cop to come over and give you grief. If they want to badly enough, they can now, thanks to President Obama, detain you indefinitely if they so choose. Even confessing to whatever they think you might well do at some point in the future may not get your released. You won't be allowed to talk to anyone about it, either -- not even a lawyer. And even when (if) you are let go, don't talk about it or they can jug your once again.
For those not counting, the Federal government has in this one encounter wiped its collective ass with the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and (probably) 9th Amendments, as well as pissing on the grave of habeas corpus.
Have a nice day.
-B
You need to SHOW people what you have done, using examples relevant to what the potential employer would be interested in.
But in this case, what he'll show people will be the same ubiquitous Drupal site, with the same theme everyone uses, over and over.
-B
Though .223 works too.
-B
We're in the same boat. It's been a challenge to fill a couple positions. And we've been absolutely bombarded by resumes from people who are spouses of H1Bs. "Must be eligible to work in the U.S." doesn't mean a lot I guess.
But overall I'm surprised at the amount of fluff and outright fabrication in about 7/8 of the resumes that come in. If we want someone with python and MongoDB experience, don't spend 15 minutes googling and then feel qualified to add those to your resume. It annoys me to no end that I have to waste time just making sure that an item on a resume wasn't put there because it's in the job posting. I don't know if people think that initial phone call is a "foot in the door" or what, but when I find out that what you say your skills are were listed falsely, I'm not inclined to think of you in a positive light.
-B
That blog post was epic fail.
-B
I typically don't run the media PC hooked up to my TV unless I'm actually watching a movie or listening to music. Because of a hardware peculiarity, the power button won't put it into standby like my desktop PC. So I just leave it shut off unless I'm using it. It's got 10.04 on it now and boot time is about 30 seconds (never timed it, I usually turn it on and head to he kitchen for a drink). I'd love a fast boot time.
-B
Nonsense. I've had my Torch for over 6 months, used daily. After applying the first OS6 fixpack, this has NEVER happened.
Because it has never happened to you, it can't happen to others? I guess when you have one data point, you can make the curve point any direction you want...
I had a BB Storm. It locked up (and required the battery to be pulled; there was no other way to reset it) at least weekly. My wife had one she bought at the same time as mine, same thing. Neither of us had any apps on it (because, seriously, the BB app store is a complete joke). Worst phone I've ever used. My old clamshell was a better phone.
-B
My wife was for some reason hot for the Storm when it came out. I got one on a 2-for-1 deal, so basically free. Not worth it even at that price. Woof. What an utter piece of garbage. The main problem with it is that it had trouble being a phone. Seriously: It would often have trouble simply taking or making a call.
My phone would often ring once. Just one ring. That's apparently all it wanted to do sometimes. The last time it was my wife, and my pheon was just sitting there plugged in. I asked her about the call and she said it rang a few times and went to voice mail. My call log had it marked as a missed call. It happened fairly frequently that I'd get one or maybe two rings and then the call would go to voice mail.
If you were using an app (something besides the browser, since it couldn't actually view web pages and therefore couldn't be used) and you got a call, you had an even chance of having your phone lock up. You'd try to answer the call and would be greeted with a little spinning clock icon -- until you removed and replaced the battery.
Sometimes it'd lock up just because it wanted to. Again with the battery trick.
The radio could go from four bars to 5-20 seconds of no bars, effectively ending your call. You could be totally stationary when this happens, and it happened about every 5th call. I suspect this was the cause of the "1-2 rings then vmail" rings thing above. It seemed to have real trouble when someone tried to make it behave like a phone.
If your battery died, charging it and turning it on wouldn't turn the radios on. It'd stay unconnected until you manually "restore connections". If you forgot to do this, you're phone would appear to be fully functional but would never ring. How handy.
If your battery was very low and you plugged it in, you wouldn't be able to make or take a call. If you tried to make a call, you'd be greeted with the message "Battery too low to use radios". This is when it's plugged into the wall, and could suck up as much juice as it likes. If someone called you when the batteries are too low for radio use, then the call would go to voice mail.
There were many other nits and general inconveniences, but that's what sticks out. I replaced it with a droid phone and am kicking myself for trying to save a few bucks a month until my contract was up. I should have flushed that piece of shit within weeks of owning it.
Oh, and I should add: I never put a single, solitary app on it. And my wife's phone had the exact same troubles. It was poorly designed and/or badly manufactured. In either case, I'll never own a Blackberry again -- not even if one is given to me.
-B
Or, rather, it wouldn't have much special stuff that would do you any good unless you were on their network. Goobuntu (like the Red Hat-based "grhat" before it) is very close to the regular publicly-available distribution. It looks and feels just like Ubuntu (aside from a Google-ish splash screen and desktop wallpaper). But they've added on tools so that devs can check code in/out, compile apps in the same environment one finds on the linux-based workstations, has some encryption for sensitive stuff, etc.
You'd do just as well with regular old Ubuntu.
-B