You just have to take into consideration the fact that Microsoft had to fix a Y2K bug in their version numbering scheme. Windows 98 whould have been Windows 1998, but they didn't realize the seriousness of the bug until after release.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
My taste in music is my business and I don't want other people knowing that my most listened to album is Tom Dooley and Other Hits by The Kingston Trio.
This is the part that I don't understand, and have never understood, going back to the controversy over ads in Gmail, advertisers tracking you with cookies, etc. No other person knows this fact. Even assuming Apple were to store this data (which I doubt, as it would serve very little purpose) do you really think that there is a person out there who is that interested in you that he is going to go look up what songs you've been listening to in some giant database? Nobody at Apple is looking at the last 3 CD's you've listened to and using it to decide what ad to show you, and nobody at Google is reading your email to decide which ads are relevant. And doubleclick does not have a giant profile of you in their system that advertisers can peruse through.
The founder of a group called 2old2play is younger than I am? I went to the article expecting to see some insightful commentary from somebody at least in his 40's. I stopped reading when I got to his age.
Then again, now that I look closer at his name and the name of the group, I have a hard time believing he's over 18.
I had a Dell laptop some years ago that had a 1600x1200 15" screen. It still confuses me that it seems quite common to be able to buy a 15" laptop at that resolution, yet I can't find an external LCD screen smaller than 21" that offers that resolution. (My 21" CRT monitor at home is starting to make funny noises, and while I'd love to replace it with an equivalent size LCD screen, it's not really in the budget.)
As for why, my 17" CRT at work was recently replaced by a 17" LCD, and while the LCD is much nicer in many ways, I really do notice the fact that I have lost a third of my screen real estate. I can no longer meaningfully use a browser and text editor side by side, I can't see nearly as much context to my code when I have 3 or more files open at the same time, and I don't have nearly as much room to work in Photoshop without all of the stupid palettes getting in my way. (Although in all honesty, I really consider the last one to be a design flaw in Photoshop's UI) In general, other than Photoshop, (which, again, I consider to be a terribly designed interface and is pretty much the only program I use fullscreen because it is useless otherwise) the smaller the resolution I have, the less things I can have in front of me at one time, and the more frustrated I get trying to dig around for whatever it was that just got hidden last time I switched windows.
I would also suggest that different people have different interests, and its possible that (either by coincidence or by some effort on **BB's part) **BB tends to submit articles that ScuttleMonkey finds interesting.
Even if nobody ever clicks on it, it's useful because having a few hundred links from archived slashdot articles to a site of your choice will give you a nice boost in Page Rank.
I agree with the subject- nofollow the suckers. If people want to click on the links they can, but I don't see why submitters should get a nice little Google boost every time they get an article accepted on Slashdot.
Re:video DRM is more tolerable than music DRM
on
A Look at Google DRM
·
· Score: 1
But I'd really like to pay a buck or two to see an NFL game every Sunday.
You know, most places in the U.S. you can get an NFL game every Sunday (and Saturday and Monday, too) for absolutely free. If you're willing to pay a buck or two a week for it, I'll gladly rent you my old rabbit ears antenna.
First of all, if you can't stop looking at your computer screen 15 hours a day (and you really should) at least make sure you're taking enough breaks. Stop looking at the screen for 5 minutes or more at least every other hour or so. More sleep should help reduce eye strain, too.
Don't use white or bright background colors. I find greys and deep blues to work best for me.
Lighting can help a lot, but depending on where you work, there may not be much you can do about it. Ideally you want to replace as much direct lighting as possible with ambient light sources. If you have your own office, try killing the overhead lights and get one of the torchiere style floor lamps that directs all or most of the light upwards. There was one office I worked in where the ballasts in the space I shared with three other people had gone bad and made a horrible buzzing noise. We turned off the overhead lights and all aimed our desk lamps (halogen guys that bear a strong resemblance to the Pixar logo) at a central spot on the ceiling. A lot of people gave us crap for it, but I think that was the best light I've ever had for extended computer work.
Finally, as many other people have mentioned, if your primary problem is lack of concentration, you probably really need more sleep. Try getting at least an extra two hours of sleep each night, and spend several hours a week on a hobby you enjoy that doesn't require looking at a flat screen, and you may find that most days you can get as much work done in 10 hours as you currently do in 15.
Actually, do any of the Gnome integrated window managers even offer "focus follows mouse" any more? I can't remember seeing it the last few times I was screwing around with the settings...
Yes, It's still an option, but you have to go well out of your way to change it. I think pretty much all of the common window managers default to "click to focus" these days, at the ones I've used in the last year or so.
I guess I still don't understand the motivation to maximize. I don't have to hit any keys at all to get my web browser to be the size that I want. When I open a new browser window, it is automatically set at the same size as the last time I opened a browser window. I tend to keep my browser about 800-900 pixels wide and just a little shorter than the height of my screen. Depending on which computer I'm using, this takes up about 1/2 (home), 2/3 (work), or 3/4 (laptop) of my screen. If I open up multiple windows, each one gets offset slightly from the previous one. When I run other programs, they usually (but not always) open in the empty space on the right. In all of this, there is no mouse involved, and no keyboard combinations. The only time I have to use the mouse is if I have to move one of the non-browser programs so that it sits next to one of the browsers without covering something I want to see, but that is not even an option if you do everything maximized. So how is hitting Alt+Space, x every time you open a window easier?
When LaserDisc was introduced in 1978, they were GREAT. They were amazing. They could push right up against the limits of the NTSC standard. LD was really over-designed because very few people had TV sets good enough to show them off properly.
And how many people have TV sets good enough to show off HD properly? I don't know any numbers myself, but based on the people I know, I would be surprised if more than 5-10% of people in the U.S. have an HD capable TV larger than 27 inches. DVD didn't take off just because of picture quality, DVD took off the way it did because it offered huge improvements in almost every way over VHS. No HD format could ever offer as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD did over VHS.
I'm not saying that there's no demand or no need for an improved format, but I think a lot of people overestimate the demand. I would not be surprized to see BluRay/HDDVD turn into the new laser disk, where the small percentage of the population that really cares about getting the most out of their HDTV will pay the price premium for the new format, while the rest of the world will go on happily using what they already have. Maybe someday one of these new formats will finally surpass DVD in popularity, but I do not expect it to be soon. More likely, I think they'll both be niche products like Laser Disc, SACD and DVD-Audio, until an HD format comes along that offers more of an advantage over DVD than just higher resolution.
Personally, I just got a new DVD player recently as my first generation Sony was in pretty bad shape. On my TV, I don't even see much difference between the composite and compontent inputs, so I am certainly in no hurry to spend more money to upgrade to an HD capable player as long as the current TV still works.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but from what I recall of wind tunnel dynamics, unless you are using a 1:1 scale model, you need to adjust either the speed of the tunnel or the viscosity of the tunnel medium in order to still get meaningful results. For example, in order to test a half scale model in "real" conditions, you either need to double the speed of the tunnel, or use something more viscous than air in the tunnel.
If that is actually the case, this tunnel would only be useful for testing a full scale model, unless they plan to test objects that move substantially slower than mach 6. On the other hand, I could be way off base here, as it's been a long time since I studied this kind of stuff.
It's not just intent, it's also an issue of scale. If you break my arm by taking it, looking dead in my eye, and twisting it as hard as you can, then there should be severe repercussions, yes, but I wouldn't expect to get you thrown in prison for life. The kid tried to organize a small scale DoS against his high school web server. No money was lost and no damage was done. This is worthy of a felony conviction? Suspend him for a week and be done with it.
Joe Brockmeier and I have teamed up in a story on NewsForge to point out how the mainstream and trade press misrepresent the annual summary of vulnerabilities from US-CERT. They're doing it again this year to make it appear as if it is more secure than UNIX/Linux.
I don't get it. Are they saying that US-CERT is more secure than UNIX/Linux? Or is 'it' referring to the mainstream and trade press?
Come on guys. If you write this kind of stuff for a living, would it kill you to proofread?
(Never mind that the whole article looks to be nothing more than flamebait to generate ad revenues.)
I don't know how many lines of code it is, but the last documentation tht I can find of a bug being found in the TeX source is from 1995. So while I don't know of any way to prove that a program is bug free, it is at least possible to make a very complex program sufficiently bug free that no one has found any in over 10 years.
Of course this illustrates my previous point- no new features have been added to TeX since long before 1995. The only way it has become so bug free is through careful maintenance of a stable code base and (I assume, although I've never looked at the source myself) a solid initial design.
I've always attributed it to people being used to the behavior of MS Windows. And I'm not saying that to start a flamewar. I'm serious. Unreliable avionics systems should be unacceptable, but these days, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Many years ago, I remember reading a quote from an employee at a major aircraft subcontractor along the lines of "If my company paid as much attention to the quality of our work as Microsoft, airplanes would be falling out of the sky on a weekly basis, and people would accept this as normal." I've heard many people, even programmers, claim that bugfree programs are impossible to write. They are not- they just cost far more in time and money than most companies can afford in this commercial climate. When success depends largely on being first to market and bugs and crashes are accepted as a normal fact of life, then they always will be a normal fact of life.
Unfortunately, I think the blame lies at least in large part with the consumer. As long as people put up with programming errors in a $500 software suite that they would never accept in an $80 DVD player, we will continue to have these problems. Unfortunately, too many people still consider computers to be too much black magic that is out side of their (or anyone else's) grasp. Most people have little to know knowledge of how their car works under the hood, but they still believe that the engineer who designed it has enough knowledge to do it without making mistakes and expect the manufacturer to pay for those mistakes when they happen. Why should they believe any differently about the people who write the software they use?
I never said that there were "revolutionary" changes, just substantial changes. Gnome 2.x is a pretty substantial improvement from Gnome 1.x, and the same could be said of KDE over the last 5 years. Likewise, both environments were a substantial change from anything we had in the Linux world before. I'll grant that Windows XP and Windows 2000 are not that significantly different- when I said five years, I was thinking more in terms of the difference between Windows XP and Windows 98 or Windows NT 4, which were released about 5 years apart from each other. I realize that's not how it read, but even then, my point stands.
Changes don't have to be "ZOMG REFOLUTINRRY" to be substantial. Considering the orignal post, state of the art ethernet is 100 times faster than what was available about 10 years ago. I would say that an increase in speed from 10 Mb/s to 1Gb/s is pretty substantial, but were there any revolutionary changes to ethernet along the way?
Why is it that the capabilities of the machine have increased by 4 (or more) orders of magnitude, yet the software still takes as long to load and doesn't really do more except look pretty?
If you really believe that, you need to sit down and spend some time with a c. 1988 copy of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Personally, I'm not so sure that all of the features added over the years have been useful (for example, Word's autocorrect/autoformat often drives me completely batty) but it takes a remarkable amount of ignorance to say that they aren't there.
No, I think he's (sarcastically) pointing out that Bob Metcalfe, of all people, should know that just because a technology was developed 25 or 30 years ago does not automatically make it an old clunker, because technology evolves over time. Linux and Windows may be derived from 25 year old technology, but the most current versions of each are substantially improved over what was available even 5 years ago, just as ethernet has evoved substantially from what Bob Metcalfe origiannly invented.
At any rate, one has to wonder why this guy still has any credibility. He may have invented an amazingly useful technology 30 years ago, but for as long as I have been working with computers (close to 10 years now) I have never heard/seen anything coming out of his mouth/keyboard that wasn't an outright troll.
My wife's first flip phone (purchased from Sprint in 1999) had both the screen on the front of the phone and buttons to cancel/ignore an incoming call. I believe it was made by a company called Touchpoint. Both of my Samsung flip phones (first one purchased in '99 as well) had this feature (albeit without the screen on the front, so it's good for getting a phone to shut up quickly if you forgot to turn it off before going to a meeting, but not for screening calls) as well as the Handspring Treo 300 that I got in 2002.
So I have to agree. This is hardly a new feature. If anything, the only new feature is that they clearly labeled the buttons for people who don't read the instruction booklets, although I think the Treo 300 had that too.
Maybe the only new feature is that it's on the front instead of the side- I can see how that might be considered by some to be a great leap forward.
Firefox's DOM Inspector and XMLHttpRequest Monitor are dearly missing in Opera.
Where is this XMLHttpRequest monitor that you speak of? I have been doing development using XmlHttpRequest for a long time now, and have never noticed such a feature/extension before, although I have many times wished dearly to have something of the sort.
The biggest problem in my opinion with Windows is the thrid party developers who refuse to write software that will run in limited user mode
It's not just third party developers that are the problem. Quick test for you. What day is next Thursday? If you're like 90% of the people that I know, when you need to see a calendar in Windows, they first thing you do is double-click the clock in the task bar. But guess what happens if you double-click the clock when you are not an admin user? I could come up with at least a half dozen examples, because the last time I reinstalled XP on my wife's and my laptop, I tried to go the limited user route. It lasted less than a month before I gave up and coverted all of the users to admin users, and most of the reasons were not the fault of third party developers.
but I'm gonna go ahead and guess you probably think "Safari" is a terrible name for a browser, because you don't make the connection with surfin' and exploring.
And how many people under the age of 30 would make any connection between the words "surfing" and "safari" unless they stumbled across (or were forced to listen to) their dad's Beach Boys cassettes/LP's as a kid? I suspect that even for most people who are familiar with that one song, the name Safari is more likely to conjure up images of an African hunting expedition than a longboard.
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
on
Google to Buy Opera?
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· Score: 1
...they're quickly losing the race to releasing new -- and NEEDED -- applications.
If an SMS gateway and Blogsearch are what you consider NEEDED applications, I think you have way too much free time on your hands.
Slashdot Mirror
You just have to take into consideration the fact that Microsoft had to fix a Y2K bug in their version numbering scheme. Windows 98 whould have been Windows 1998, but they didn't realize the seriousness of the bug until after release.
My taste in music is my business and I don't want other people knowing that my most listened to album is Tom Dooley and Other Hits by The Kingston Trio.
This is the part that I don't understand, and have never understood, going back to the controversy over ads in Gmail, advertisers tracking you with cookies, etc. No other person knows this fact. Even assuming Apple were to store this data (which I doubt, as it would serve very little purpose) do you really think that there is a person out there who is that interested in you that he is going to go look up what songs you've been listening to in some giant database? Nobody at Apple is looking at the last 3 CD's you've listened to and using it to decide what ad to show you, and nobody at Google is reading your email to decide which ads are relevant. And doubleclick does not have a giant profile of you in their system that advertisers can peruse through.
Something must be busted in Slashcode. Somehow this game was given a score of 7, rather than the usual 8.
The founder of a group called 2old2play is younger than I am? I went to the article expecting to see some insightful commentary from somebody at least in his 40's. I stopped reading when I got to his age.
Then again, now that I look closer at his name and the name of the group, I have a hard time believing he's over 18.
I had a Dell laptop some years ago that had a 1600x1200 15" screen. It still confuses me that it seems quite common to be able to buy a 15" laptop at that resolution, yet I can't find an external LCD screen smaller than 21" that offers that resolution. (My 21" CRT monitor at home is starting to make funny noises, and while I'd love to replace it with an equivalent size LCD screen, it's not really in the budget.)
As for why, my 17" CRT at work was recently replaced by a 17" LCD, and while the LCD is much nicer in many ways, I really do notice the fact that I have lost a third of my screen real estate. I can no longer meaningfully use a browser and text editor side by side, I can't see nearly as much context to my code when I have 3 or more files open at the same time, and I don't have nearly as much room to work in Photoshop without all of the stupid palettes getting in my way. (Although in all honesty, I really consider the last one to be a design flaw in Photoshop's UI) In general, other than Photoshop, (which, again, I consider to be a terribly designed interface and is pretty much the only program I use fullscreen because it is useless otherwise) the smaller the resolution I have, the less things I can have in front of me at one time, and the more frustrated I get trying to dig around for whatever it was that just got hidden last time I switched windows.
Anyone have statistics on the times of day at which R.P. and **BB stories turn up?
4 36978
One of the editors just looked it up in another thread.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173521&cid=14
I would also suggest that different people have different interests, and its possible that (either by coincidence or by some effort on **BB's part) **BB tends to submit articles that ScuttleMonkey finds interesting.
Even if nobody ever clicks on it, it's useful because having a few hundred links from archived slashdot articles to a site of your choice will give you a nice boost in Page Rank.
I agree with the subject- nofollow the suckers. If people want to click on the links they can, but I don't see why submitters should get a nice little Google boost every time they get an article accepted on Slashdot.
But I'd really like to pay a buck or two to see an NFL game every Sunday.
You know, most places in the U.S. you can get an NFL game every Sunday (and Saturday and Monday, too) for absolutely free. If you're willing to pay a buck or two a week for it, I'll gladly rent you my old rabbit ears antenna.
First of all, if you can't stop looking at your computer screen 15 hours a day (and you really should) at least make sure you're taking enough breaks. Stop looking at the screen for 5 minutes or more at least every other hour or so. More sleep should help reduce eye strain, too.
Don't use white or bright background colors. I find greys and deep blues to work best for me.
Lighting can help a lot, but depending on where you work, there may not be much you can do about it. Ideally you want to replace as much direct lighting as possible with ambient light sources. If you have your own office, try killing the overhead lights and get one of the torchiere style floor lamps that directs all or most of the light upwards. There was one office I worked in where the ballasts in the space I shared with three other people had gone bad and made a horrible buzzing noise. We turned off the overhead lights and all aimed our desk lamps (halogen guys that bear a strong resemblance to the Pixar logo) at a central spot on the ceiling. A lot of people gave us crap for it, but I think that was the best light I've ever had for extended computer work.
Finally, as many other people have mentioned, if your primary problem is lack of concentration, you probably really need more sleep. Try getting at least an extra two hours of sleep each night, and spend several hours a week on a hobby you enjoy that doesn't require looking at a flat screen, and you may find that most days you can get as much work done in 10 hours as you currently do in 15.
Actually, do any of the Gnome integrated window managers even offer "focus follows mouse" any more? I can't remember seeing it the last few times I was screwing around with the settings...
Yes, It's still an option, but you have to go well out of your way to change it. I think pretty much all of the common window managers default to "click to focus" these days, at the ones I've used in the last year or so.
I guess I still don't understand the motivation to maximize. I don't have to hit any keys at all to get my web browser to be the size that I want. When I open a new browser window, it is automatically set at the same size as the last time I opened a browser window. I tend to keep my browser about 800-900 pixels wide and just a little shorter than the height of my screen. Depending on which computer I'm using, this takes up about 1/2 (home), 2/3 (work), or 3/4 (laptop) of my screen. If I open up multiple windows, each one gets offset slightly from the previous one. When I run other programs, they usually (but not always) open in the empty space on the right. In all of this, there is no mouse involved, and no keyboard combinations. The only time I have to use the mouse is if I have to move one of the non-browser programs so that it sits next to one of the browsers without covering something I want to see, but that is not even an option if you do everything maximized. So how is hitting Alt+Space, x every time you open a window easier?
When LaserDisc was introduced in 1978, they were GREAT. They were amazing. They could push right up against the limits of the NTSC standard. LD was really over-designed because very few people had TV sets good enough to show them off properly.
And how many people have TV sets good enough to show off HD properly? I don't know any numbers myself, but based on the people I know, I would be surprised if more than 5-10% of people in the U.S. have an HD capable TV larger than 27 inches. DVD didn't take off just because of picture quality, DVD took off the way it did because it offered huge improvements in almost every way over VHS. No HD format could ever offer as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD did over VHS.
I'm not saying that there's no demand or no need for an improved format, but I think a lot of people overestimate the demand. I would not be surprized to see BluRay/HDDVD turn into the new laser disk, where the small percentage of the population that really cares about getting the most out of their HDTV will pay the price premium for the new format, while the rest of the world will go on happily using what they already have. Maybe someday one of these new formats will finally surpass DVD in popularity, but I do not expect it to be soon. More likely, I think they'll both be niche products like Laser Disc, SACD and DVD-Audio, until an HD format comes along that offers more of an advantage over DVD than just higher resolution.
Personally, I just got a new DVD player recently as my first generation Sony was in pretty bad shape. On my TV, I don't even see much difference between the composite and compontent inputs, so I am certainly in no hurry to spend more money to upgrade to an HD capable player as long as the current TV still works.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but from what I recall of wind tunnel dynamics, unless you are using a 1:1 scale model, you need to adjust either the speed of the tunnel or the viscosity of the tunnel medium in order to still get meaningful results. For example, in order to test a half scale model in "real" conditions, you either need to double the speed of the tunnel, or use something more viscous than air in the tunnel.
If that is actually the case, this tunnel would only be useful for testing a full scale model, unless they plan to test objects that move substantially slower than mach 6. On the other hand, I could be way off base here, as it's been a long time since I studied this kind of stuff.
It's not just intent, it's also an issue of scale. If you break my arm by taking it, looking dead in my eye, and twisting it as hard as you can, then there should be severe repercussions, yes, but I wouldn't expect to get you thrown in prison for life. The kid tried to organize a small scale DoS against his high school web server. No money was lost and no damage was done. This is worthy of a felony conviction? Suspend him for a week and be done with it.
Joe Brockmeier and I have teamed up in a story on NewsForge to point out how the mainstream and trade press misrepresent the annual summary of vulnerabilities from US-CERT. They're doing it again this year to make it appear as if it is more secure than UNIX/Linux.
I don't get it. Are they saying that US-CERT is more secure than UNIX/Linux? Or is 'it' referring to the mainstream and trade press?
Come on guys. If you write this kind of stuff for a living, would it kill you to proofread?
(Never mind that the whole article looks to be nothing more than flamebait to generate ad revenues.)
I don't know how many lines of code it is, but the last documentation tht I can find of a bug being found in the TeX source is from 1995. So while I don't know of any way to prove that a program is bug free, it is at least possible to make a very complex program sufficiently bug free that no one has found any in over 10 years.
Of course this illustrates my previous point- no new features have been added to TeX since long before 1995. The only way it has become so bug free is through careful maintenance of a stable code base and (I assume, although I've never looked at the source myself) a solid initial design.
I've always attributed it to people being used to the behavior of MS Windows. And I'm not saying that to start a flamewar. I'm serious. Unreliable avionics systems should be unacceptable, but these days, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Many years ago, I remember reading a quote from an employee at a major aircraft subcontractor along the lines of "If my company paid as much attention to the quality of our work as Microsoft, airplanes would be falling out of the sky on a weekly basis, and people would accept this as normal." I've heard many people, even programmers, claim that bugfree programs are impossible to write. They are not- they just cost far more in time and money than most companies can afford in this commercial climate. When success depends largely on being first to market and bugs and crashes are accepted as a normal fact of life, then they always will be a normal fact of life.
Unfortunately, I think the blame lies at least in large part with the consumer. As long as people put up with programming errors in a $500 software suite that they would never accept in an $80 DVD player, we will continue to have these problems. Unfortunately, too many people still consider computers to be too much black magic that is out side of their (or anyone else's) grasp. Most people have little to know knowledge of how their car works under the hood, but they still believe that the engineer who designed it has enough knowledge to do it without making mistakes and expect the manufacturer to pay for those mistakes when they happen. Why should they believe any differently about the people who write the software they use?
I never said that there were "revolutionary" changes, just substantial changes. Gnome 2.x is a pretty substantial improvement from Gnome 1.x, and the same could be said of KDE over the last 5 years. Likewise, both environments were a substantial change from anything we had in the Linux world before. I'll grant that Windows XP and Windows 2000 are not that significantly different- when I said five years, I was thinking more in terms of the difference between Windows XP and Windows 98 or Windows NT 4, which were released about 5 years apart from each other. I realize that's not how it read, but even then, my point stands.
Changes don't have to be "ZOMG REFOLUTINRRY" to be substantial. Considering the orignal post, state of the art ethernet is 100 times faster than what was available about 10 years ago. I would say that an increase in speed from 10 Mb/s to 1Gb/s is pretty substantial, but were there any revolutionary changes to ethernet along the way?
Why is it that the capabilities of the machine have increased by 4 (or more) orders of magnitude, yet the software still takes as long to load and doesn't really do more except look pretty?
If you really believe that, you need to sit down and spend some time with a c. 1988 copy of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Personally, I'm not so sure that all of the features added over the years have been useful (for example, Word's autocorrect/autoformat often drives me completely batty) but it takes a remarkable amount of ignorance to say that they aren't there.
No, I think he's (sarcastically) pointing out that Bob Metcalfe, of all people, should know that just because a technology was developed 25 or 30 years ago does not automatically make it an old clunker, because technology evolves over time. Linux and Windows may be derived from 25 year old technology, but the most current versions of each are substantially improved over what was available even 5 years ago, just as ethernet has evoved substantially from what Bob Metcalfe origiannly invented.
At any rate, one has to wonder why this guy still has any credibility. He may have invented an amazingly useful technology 30 years ago, but for as long as I have been working with computers (close to 10 years now) I have never heard/seen anything coming out of his mouth/keyboard that wasn't an outright troll.
My wife's first flip phone (purchased from Sprint in 1999) had both the screen on the front of the phone and buttons to cancel/ignore an incoming call. I believe it was made by a company called Touchpoint. Both of my Samsung flip phones (first one purchased in '99 as well) had this feature (albeit without the screen on the front, so it's good for getting a phone to shut up quickly if you forgot to turn it off before going to a meeting, but not for screening calls) as well as the Handspring Treo 300 that I got in 2002.
So I have to agree. This is hardly a new feature. If anything, the only new feature is that they clearly labeled the buttons for people who don't read the instruction booklets, although I think the Treo 300 had that too.
Maybe the only new feature is that it's on the front instead of the side- I can see how that might be considered by some to be a great leap forward.
Firefox's DOM Inspector and XMLHttpRequest Monitor are dearly missing in Opera.
Where is this XMLHttpRequest monitor that you speak of? I have been doing development using XmlHttpRequest for a long time now, and have never noticed such a feature/extension before, although I have many times wished dearly to have something of the sort.
The biggest problem in my opinion with Windows is the thrid party developers who refuse to write software that will run in limited user mode
It's not just third party developers that are the problem. Quick test for you. What day is next Thursday? If you're like 90% of the people that I know, when you need to see a calendar in Windows, they first thing you do is double-click the clock in the task bar. But guess what happens if you double-click the clock when you are not an admin user? I could come up with at least a half dozen examples, because the last time I reinstalled XP on my wife's and my laptop, I tried to go the limited user route. It lasted less than a month before I gave up and coverted all of the users to admin users, and most of the reasons were not the fault of third party developers.
but I'm gonna go ahead and guess you probably think "Safari" is a terrible name for a browser, because you don't make the connection with surfin' and exploring.
And how many people under the age of 30 would make any connection between the words "surfing" and "safari" unless they stumbled across (or were forced to listen to) their dad's Beach Boys cassettes/LP's as a kid? I suspect that even for most people who are familiar with that one song, the name Safari is more likely to conjure up images of an African hunting expedition than a longboard.
...they're quickly losing the race to releasing new -- and NEEDED -- applications.
If an SMS gateway and Blogsearch are what you consider NEEDED applications, I think you have way too much free time on your hands.