Well, I can only assume you didn't try T-Mobile or AT&T. They've both connected me using a bare SIM card in an unlocked cell phone. I'm on T-Mobile with no contract and an unlocked phone right now.
So I can't import legally purchased legitimate DVDs from regions where they're cheaper, or buy movies on DVD before they're done showing them at the movie theater.
Free software reduces the ability of the elite to profit off of the 'inferior people' of the world, and therefore it must be destroyed. Unions, even though they are a product of free association, also threaten libertarians ability to exploit others, and so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.
That's because you're looking at the right-wing libertarians, who value individual liberty over everything else, even if that individual liberty is one person's liberty to exploit hundreds of others.
If you look at the left-wing libertarians, it's a different story. They (we) recognize that maximizing individual freedom does not necessarily maximize the overall freedom of everyone in society; to think so is to fall victim to the fallacy of composition. Consider a town in which one person has $1 billion and 999 others have $1 each and live in wage-servitude to the billionaire. Now consider a town where everyone has $100,000. Which is more free? The right-wing libertarian would say that there's no difference, if in both cases people are free to spend their money as they wish. The left-libertarian would say that clearly overall, the second town has more freedom, as capital is what gives you freedom in our society. So to preserve everyone's freedom, we need to put some limits on the individual's ability to acquire capital at the expense of his fellow man.
The 'L'ibertarian party lost me several years ago. I still believe social and economic freedom of libertarianism are good goals to pursue. Unfortunately, like most conservatives, I don't have a party. Even worse, the party that has abandoned my beliefs stole the name.
Could be worse, you could be a left-wing libertarian like me. Lots of the Libertarian Party folks won't even admit that it's possible for people like me to exist, even though our usage of the term 'libertarian' predates their party.
That word "most" makes me suspect it'll be like the Kindle text-to-speech and DRM-free options--something that the publishers will be allowed to turn off. In which case, good luck finding popular books that you can loan.
There are often special deals on Kindle books. Often publishers give away the first book in a series free, in the hope of getting you hooked. I've also picked up books for $1.99 or so.
As I understand it, with the Kindle, you do some trick to mail it to yourself, and it goes through Amazon's infrastructure and arrives on your device wirelessly.
Or you plug the Kindle in via USB, and it appears as a hard drive. Then you drag your file into the documents folder, and eject the disk. Done.
(Remembering to convert the file using the free open source mobipocket file conversion tools, mobi format basically being HTML in a Palm PDB database.)
Plus, if you RTFA and decode the marketingisms about "Smart Work", this has less to do with Linux vs. Windows and more to do with IBM selling Lotus Notes to people.
Good luck with that, given that IBM Lotus Domino still requires Windows to install and run the servers and build applications.
When developing for Windows, you don't know the screen size, so you can't hand-optimize layout.
You don't know whether the user is on Windows XP, Vista, or 7, so there are at least three possible sets of UI conventions.
You don't know the resolution of the pointing device. You don't know whether the keyboard has a numeric keypad, whether it can handle multiple simultaneous keypresses or not, whether there's a joystick, or how many buttons the mouse has.
Yet still, somehow, people develop for Windows, because that's where the market is.
And the PC got big when DOS was the core OS. Back then, you didn't know how many colors the screen could display, whether there was a mouse at all, and so on. Yet still, software developers didn't move to the more homogenous Mac platform.
Which would you rather develop for, a platform which has everything being the same capability, or one with a grossly fragmented market where screens, UI conventions, etc are all different?
As a BlackBerry Curve user, here are the things I find most annoying about the phone:
The OS requires all applications to be resident in system heap the whole time. This means that even though I have 2GB of flash memory free in the phone, I'm down to a couple of hundred KB of space for any additional apps I want.
Apps that perform background processing can interfere with voice calls.
For some unknown reason, TCP/IP over cell network has a different API from TCP/IP over wifi. That means apps have to be specifically (re)written to work with wifi. Most of them aren't, which means the wifi feature is only really useful for browsing the web. And since Opera Mini isn't written to work with wifi, you're stuck with the poor built-in browser.
No native IMAP support in the Mail program.
Even though development is in Java, the dev kit requires Windows.
The UI (including the new one in the Bold and Storm) has no decent toolkit, so apps have to roll their own controls, which means they tend to be bloated, which means you run out of heap faster.
Does anyone know if BlackBerry are addressing some or all of these issues?
Won't ever *buy* anything from the PS Store though, don't want to sponsor anything that is such a huge threat to the first sale doctrine...
I did "buy" a few things from the PlayStation store, because they were games priced at $4.99 in a special offer. That's a reasonable price for an indefinite rental.
$30+ on a game I can't resell when I'm done with it? Oh, hell no.
Maybe you're the one who should research Bill Gates. He may have spent a lot of time on Microsoft, but he was rich before he started--he had a million dollar a year trust fund when he went to Harvard. He was born into money.
My understanding is that typically IBM manages the hardware. That's what the service contracts are for. When a drive fails, an engineer turns up and replaces it for you. You don't even have to call, the mainframe detects the failing drive and calls IBM for you.
It's worth remembering, though, that they could have chosen to run up to 60 Linux LPARs on a mainframe. That way they'd get the five nines reliability of mainframe hardware, the lower power requirements and reduced maintenance pain from having everything on a single box, and they'd be able to maintain it all using familiar Linux tools.
There's also a 31 bit version of Linux for System z, so they might not even have had to replace the hardware.
I hope someone did some solid cost/benefit analysis.
Someone like Google could add a checkbox in their Labs features that automatically encrypts email between users who have the feature enabled on their system, and publicizes the spec so others can implement on the server side.
We already have a spec, S/MIME. But Google doesn't even support that, let alone make it easy to use with Gmail.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly why Apple won't allow a good Google Voice app on the iPhone.
Well, I can only assume you didn't try T-Mobile or AT&T. They've both connected me using a bare SIM card in an unlocked cell phone. I'm on T-Mobile with no contract and an unlocked phone right now.
"I'm Korean, you insensitive clod!"
So I can't import legally purchased legitimate DVDs from regions where they're cheaper, or buy movies on DVD before they're done showing them at the movie theater.
LEVEL 6: GOATSE LEVEL
That's blatantly false. Consider DVD region coding, which exists not to prevent piracy, but to prevent the free market from lowering prices.
That's because you're looking at the right-wing libertarians, who value individual liberty over everything else, even if that individual liberty is one person's liberty to exploit hundreds of others.
If you look at the left-wing libertarians, it's a different story. They (we) recognize that maximizing individual freedom does not necessarily maximize the overall freedom of everyone in society; to think so is to fall victim to the fallacy of composition. Consider a town in which one person has $1 billion and 999 others have $1 each and live in wage-servitude to the billionaire. Now consider a town where everyone has $100,000. Which is more free? The right-wing libertarian would say that there's no difference, if in both cases people are free to spend their money as they wish. The left-libertarian would say that clearly overall, the second town has more freedom, as capital is what gives you freedom in our society. So to preserve everyone's freedom, we need to put some limits on the individual's ability to acquire capital at the expense of his fellow man.
Could be worse, you could be a left-wing libertarian like me. Lots of the Libertarian Party folks won't even admit that it's possible for people like me to exist, even though our usage of the term 'libertarian' predates their party.
That word "most" makes me suspect it'll be like the Kindle text-to-speech and DRM-free options--something that the publishers will be allowed to turn off. In which case, good luck finding popular books that you can loan.
There are often special deals on Kindle books. Often publishers give away the first book in a series free, in the hope of getting you hooked. I've also picked up books for $1.99 or so.
Or you plug the Kindle in via USB, and it appears as a hard drive. Then you drag your file into the documents folder, and eject the disk. Done.
(Remembering to convert the file using the free open source mobipocket file conversion tools, mobi format basically being HTML in a Palm PDB database.)
Yes, the Kindle does those things too. And makes your notes and annotations available via Amazon's web site if you log in.
Good luck with that, given that IBM Lotus Domino still requires Windows to install and run the servers and build applications.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
Platgiarism? That's a stupid name for a program.
When developing for Windows, you don't know the screen size, so you can't hand-optimize layout.
You don't know whether the user is on Windows XP, Vista, or 7, so there are at least three possible sets of UI conventions.
You don't know the resolution of the pointing device. You don't know whether the keyboard has a numeric keypad, whether it can handle multiple simultaneous keypresses or not, whether there's a joystick, or how many buttons the mouse has.
Yet still, somehow, people develop for Windows, because that's where the market is.
And the PC got big when DOS was the core OS. Back then, you didn't know how many colors the screen could display, whether there was a mouse at all, and so on. Yet still, software developers didn't move to the more homogenous Mac platform.
That's why nobody develops for Windows, right?
As a BlackBerry Curve user, here are the things I find most annoying about the phone:
Does anyone know if BlackBerry are addressing some or all of these issues?
So does this work on WINE on Linux or Mac, or is this Windoze only?
I did "buy" a few things from the PlayStation store, because they were games priced at $4.99 in a special offer. That's a reasonable price for an indefinite rental.
$30+ on a game I can't resell when I'm done with it? Oh, hell no.
I think it's down to your living where there's poor T-Mobile coverage. I have a bunch of friends with Android phones, but I haven't seen a single Pre.
Maybe you're the one who should research Bill Gates. He may have spent a lot of time on Microsoft, but he was rich before he started--he had a million dollar a year trust fund when he went to Harvard. He was born into money.
My understanding is that typically IBM manages the hardware. That's what the service contracts are for. When a drive fails, an engineer turns up and replaces it for you. You don't even have to call, the mainframe detects the failing drive and calls IBM for you.
It's worth remembering, though, that they could have chosen to run up to 60 Linux LPARs on a mainframe. That way they'd get the five nines reliability of mainframe hardware, the lower power requirements and reduced maintenance pain from having everything on a single box, and they'd be able to maintain it all using familiar Linux tools.
There's also a 31 bit version of Linux for System z, so they might not even have had to replace the hardware.
I hope someone did some solid cost/benefit analysis.
[Opinions mine, not IBMs.]
'cause Apple's application inspection regime has worked well to prevent malware, right?
If your platform security relies on code inspection to catch malware, you're setting yourself up for epic fail.
We already have a spec, S/MIME. But Google doesn't even support that, let alone make it easy to use with Gmail.