This (and in fact the rest of the pages) offers some very useful pointers to people advocating Linux. To quote:
As a representative of the Linux community, participate
in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional
manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language.
Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation
with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words
will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the
Linux community.
Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's
unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not
only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase
their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
Don't bite if offered flame-bait. Too many threads degenerate
into a ``My O/S is better than your O/S'' argument.
Let's accurately describe the capabilities of Linux and
leave it at that.
Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful
to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others.
If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash
the competition. Linux is a good, solid product
that stands on its own.
Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is
a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
Refer to another product by its proper name.
There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company
or its products by using ``creative spelling''.
If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel.
Without the efforts of people involved with the
GNU project,
MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux
kernel would not be very useful to most people.
Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular
application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom
that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive
others of their freedom.
There will be cases where Linux is not the
answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another
solution.
A classic case of this would be Twitter, who in the rare moments when he does come out with something constructive and insightful, tends to ruin any credibility by creatively misspelling Microsoft and Windows.
Naturally that is his prerogative, but the decision to do that, which he (and others) take, do not particularly help the advocacy of Linux.
I'm a skier, been skiing for over 7 years now and (if I dare say it) I'm pretty reasonable. I'm not an expert, but as long as it isn't icy moguls (or moguls for that matter) can handle most of the pistes... and I enjoy it.
Now snowboarding looks cool. You can do things you can't do with skis, it certainly looks like fun and you can do some great tricks. So I gave it a go, several times. The problem was that here was I, standing at a resort with my snowboard on and looking at what I could do. The black down the mountain? Nope. The long red? Nope. The winding blue through the trees? Nope. The rubbish green which snakes past the lifts. Well, sort of as long as I didn't mind falling over a bit.
So here am I, completely unable to go off and explore the mountain because the tool I was using to do it, I couldn't use properly. I hadn't invested the time and the effort to learn and here was I, unable to get the best out of it.
So what should I do? Spend the next week (and only week of my holiday) falling about on a green run? Or slap back on my ski's and head off and explore the mountain, try all the runs, get to the summit and check out the blacks down the back - plus a little off piste?
I did what, I suspect, a lot of people did. I put my ski's back on. My weeks holiday in the snow is precious. I don't have the time and money to fly abroad to ski again multiple times a year so in the end I wussed out, picked what I knew was comfortable and that I could do and went with that.
I rationalise that my holiday was too short to be sitting face down on a green run when I could be taking full advantage of what the mountain had to offer. I did the training and the falling over 7 years ago when I was learning to ski - it's taken me years (literally) to get where I am now and, in one fell swooop, I don't want to go back again to that.
I think a lot of people consider Windows vs something else in the same way that I consider skiing vs snowboarding.
Hardware is clearly an area where Microsoft has no business trying to compete in.
Not true, they make very nice mice and keyboards.
Regarding their failure in the console market, it is worth pointing out that no-one new has entered that arena and succeeded in any way since Sony arrived with the Playstation. There have been plenty that failed or exited altogether (Phantom, Nokia and Sega spring to mind).
If Microsoft are unable to enter the market and do well with the billions they've thrown at it, then I don't really hold up much hope for anyone else. As such, I can only assume we'll be stuck with just Sony and Nintendo in the years to come...
I, for one, am extremely grateful that this question has been posted to Slashdot.
The next time someone moans "oh, I just want a phone that does talking and texting - why do no phones do this any more?", I can point them to here and hopefully shut another Slashdot phone whinger up.
Then the rest of us can get back to enjoying our phones with Bluetooth, Java, IM, GPS, camera, web-browsing, calendar, PC synchronisation and MP3 playback.
I'm most disappointed by the fact that you still appear to be stuck to the limit of 4GB memory sticks.
4GB and over cards are coming down in price and it would be great to put one of those big things into this device. To be fair though, it would only be really useful for homebrew (which Sony hates), piracy (which Sony really hates) and movies (which Sony would rather you bought the UMD).
Still a shame though. Especially when you consider that by the end of this year you'll be seeing £100 mobile phone supporting the high capacity cards. Surely the PSP-slim is expected to be around for far longer than that and it's storage options are going to look positively anaemic.
(as an aside, does anyone know whether you can buy anything that'll allow you to use standard - and significantly cheaper - storage with the memory stick pro duo? I don't own a PSP, but if I do, I'd far rather not pay through the nose for Sony's inflated storage medium)
Obviously looks don't make or break a social networking site. In fact, I would wager that marketing (movies have their own MySpace pages now, what?) has much more to do with it than usability or functionality.
MySpace has a significant advantage over facebook - that is the length of time it has been running and the user base. People will put up with something that isn't so great if all their friends are using it (insert IM client you think is lousy here).
If MySpace and facebook launched at the same time today - it wouldn't surprise me if facebook would be more popular.
Facebook also digs away at the insecurities in people...your peers can see your profile on Facebook, and while they may have 50, 100, 200 friends they will mockingly see that you have a pathetically small number, confirming your worst fears about the low opinion they have probably held of you over all those years etc.
So just like real life then.
As in, there are some people who think that the number of friends you have (however rare you see, speak or do anything with them) is more important than a smaller number of quality friends who you see, speak and socialise with more often.
Peter Moore has admitted the company is shy of their goal, some 400,000 units short of the 12 million Xboxes they'd planned to ship. These facts combined have made for some grim questions...
Unless my maths are wrong, they're 3% shy of their target. Which doesn't seem to be too shabby.
... including the San Jose Merc's Nooch asking why you'd want to buy an Xbox in the first place.
Ummm, because the Wii hasn't got the graphics capability of the XBox? The PS3 and the Wii combined don't have the half of the games portfolio that the Xbox has? That the online gaming for the Xbox is way ahead of the other consoles? That the PS3 costs double that of the Xbox?
I don't own any console but this whole piece just seems to be pointless Xbox bashing to me.
Jobs has already said the European version will be 3G. So... what's your point again?
If that is the case then you're right and, as you rather rudely put it, I have no point. However Jobs confirming the iPhone will be 3G is news to me.
Do you have a link for a credible source? I did a brief search but there was nothing confirming what you said on Google, Google News or BBC News.
Google does have a lot of links to speculation on a 3G iPhone on technology blogs and Apple rumour sites - but those need to always be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
Mobile browsing has been the red headed step child of the internet. It sucks. The iPhone seems like it will remedy that, and no other company seems to be in a position to compete with it, or will be in a position to do so for some time.
I can't speak for the US, but here in the UK, if you don't have 3G then you're never going anywhere with giving the user a decent browsing experience. Speaking only about browsing, Apple will be behind the game even before they've launched.
I use NetFront on a PocketPC and on 2.5G its not particularly pleasant, but not impossible as long as you turn off images. On 3G I can turn on images and use Google Maps the way it was intended. In fact, if it wasn't for the small (non-VGA) screen which necessitates wrapping text to the screen (so destroying tabular data), browsing would be almost on par with my desktop
The iPhone will probably be good at some things and not so good at others. I don't think it would be too rash to suggest that browsing falls in the latter category.
What's the purpose of caller ID after I've picked up the phone? I'm not going to talk to some challenge response bot if I'm someone who needs to be IDd and screened anyway.
Identification of who is talking on a conference call would be extremely useful. Especially since a lot of people sound the same as I have the memory of a goldfish. When someone speaks you could have a little display that tells you their name and the company they work for.
Dell, HP and Lenovo all scored higher than Apple because of their plans (or "plans for releasing plans" in the case of HP). In reality, Apple is ahead of all of these companies in eliminating toxic chemicals from its products.
Maybe so, but if Apple had said this at the very beginning (when originally asked) then they wouldn't have needed to go through this entire PR exercise now.
Apple learnt a valuable lesson today; there are some issues (not all, but some) that when you're secretive about, people get rightly suspicious and assume you're up to no good. If they'd responded to Greenpeace in the first place, then this negative press would have never occurred.
About the only use for one. Just comparing the number of great games on the DS and the PSP, I'd never consider a PSP.
According to Metacritic:
The NDS has 213 games with 49 rated 75% or more. (source)
The PSP has 255 games with 83 rated 75% or more. (source)
I don't own either (or any console for that matter) but, based on the stats above, it looks like the PSP has more games and more that are considered "excellent".
Interesting to note that after only a couple of months release the PS3 has 19 games with a metacritic rating of 75 or above yet the Wii has only 9 games.
(The Xbox 360 has 79 games, but then it has been out for over a year, so not a fair comparison).
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons, especially revolving around the new controller and how to make best use of it - and to be fair, I'm not qualified in any way to comment - but the statistics do show that for whatever reasons the current portfolio of Wii games rated "excellent" is smaller than that of a system which has been out for a much shorter time.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw this into the pot for some discussion.
You want the O2 Jet then. It has 540 hours standby and 9 hours 50 minutes talk time (so almost 4 hours more than your request).
I wish phone companies would work on making it a better phone rather than adding useless extras.
They do. The problem is that the majority of people on Slashdot who say "I wish I could get a phone that only does X and Y" haven't bothered to do five minutes of research.
Mainly because there is some simple functionality in it that means at 7pm it turns off automatically and doesn't wake up until 8am the next morning. Even then, after 6ish I generally exercise some restraint on whether I read the email when it arrives or not (more often than not I don't bother).
This is almost as silly as the "Powerpoint dumbs down presentations" argument that is occasionally trotted out. If people are stupid enough to shackle themselves to their device or produce crappy presentations then that is the fault of them and not the technology.
My question to that organization is, why in the year 2006 do you have employees who do not possess the skills to use basic, standard tools to process basic business information
Interestingly enough, for a lot of companies, those "basic, standard tools" are Microsoft Windows, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint and Excel. However, as soon as schools start using those products in their teachings, there are plenty of people (especially on here) who complain about the lock-in to Microsoft.
I'd love for people to learn alternative operating systems and applications, but at the same time understand the frustrations that come from having someone new to your team who can't update an Excel spreadsheet or make some modifications to a Powerpoint presentation.
Companies are blah about replacements to pretty much anything that already works and already does the job well enough. Eventually they'll shift, but only when all their hardware has broken down and been replaced by stuff that can run it, the current operating system of choice is no longer supported and they have major applications that won't run in that aforementioned operating system.
This is hardly new, they have been working this way for years and I fully expect them to be "blah" about the next version of Office and Windows as well.
Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that is blindingly obvious.
Therein lies Microsoft's problem -- each new iteration of their software all of a sudden must render their older generation software "not good enough", giving the lie to all earlier claims about previous generations of product. This is the classical Microsoft business model. Microsoft is about selling a product, not providing customer satisfaction.
To be fair, this is the business model that applies to more that just Microsoft and more than just the software industry.
Honestly. there is ZERO reason to upgrade from even Office 2000. Outlook 2000 is 10 times faster than outlook 2003 and god help us on the mess that is outlook 2007.
I wouldn't say ZERO.
Outlook 2000 has the annoying habit of opening all your reminders in separate windows whereas 2002 has them all in one. When you have as many reminders and tasks as me, then you quickly appreciate that.
I would love Outlook 2003 over 2002 (and especially 2000) for the saved search folders and the fact that it's better at coping when your network connection unexpectedly dies. Granted they aren't big things and certainly not enough to justify the high cost - but later versions of Outlook have often had useful additions or changes.
Now, reasons to upgrade Word or Excel for me is close to zero...
A survey indicates that iPod owners may not be as loyal to their devices as Mac owners are to their computers, thus opening the possibility for Microsoft's Zune to enter the market.
Whilst I have no doubt that Apple make superior hardware and software to Dell/HP/etc and Microsoft, I can't help thinking that part of this "loyalty" that Mac owners have is because once they've purchased the software to run, they have no choice in moving away from the platform unless they want to re-purchase all their software again.
Similarly, I have no doubts that someone who considers moving away from their iPod and happens to have bought a large amount of music from the iTunes store will also have second thoughts when they find out that their music won't work[1] on their next non-Apple purchase. Those who stick to regular MP3's will be able to move to and from other devices with little to no problems.[2]
[1] Yes, I know there are ways around it - but not everyone knows them or is technically savvy enough to be able to do it.
For those who don't want to (or can't) buy allofmp3's DRM-free music, they are providing DRM-laden music that can be played only within a restricted player provided by the website
You forgot to mention that the although the latter music option is DRM'ed and needs their own player - it is free. Gratis. Nado. Nothing. Zilch. Thats right, you pay nothing for the music.
Actually, in the spirit of "picture worth 1000 words," let me SHOW you what the slashdot home page looks like on my BlackBerry 8700;
I agree. It's terrible viewing Slashdot on a phone, PDA or BlackBerry. I read your comment this morning on the train using my 8700 this morning too.
However the difference was that I was using AvantSlash to parse and filter out all the cruft, hence presenting you with a PDA and mobile friendly version.
Disclaimer: I'm biased as I wrote it, but you're exactly the type of person I wrote it for.
Slashdot Mirror
This (and in fact the rest of the pages) offers some very useful pointers to people advocating Linux. To quote:
A classic case of this would be Twitter, who in the rare moments when he does come out with something constructive and insightful, tends to ruin any credibility by creatively misspelling Microsoft and Windows.
Naturally that is his prerogative, but the decision to do that, which he (and others) take, do not particularly help the advocacy of Linux.
I'm a skier, been skiing for over 7 years now and (if I dare say it) I'm pretty reasonable. I'm not an expert, but as long as it isn't icy moguls (or moguls for that matter) can handle most of the pistes ... and I enjoy it.
Now snowboarding looks cool. You can do things you can't do with skis, it certainly looks like fun and you can do some great tricks. So I gave it a go, several times. The problem was that here was I, standing at a resort with my snowboard on and looking at what I could do. The black down the mountain? Nope. The long red? Nope. The winding blue through the trees? Nope. The rubbish green which snakes past the lifts. Well, sort of as long as I didn't mind falling over a bit.
So here am I, completely unable to go off and explore the mountain because the tool I was using to do it, I couldn't use properly. I hadn't invested the time and the effort to learn and here was I, unable to get the best out of it.
So what should I do? Spend the next week (and only week of my holiday) falling about on a green run? Or slap back on my ski's and head off and explore the mountain, try all the runs, get to the summit and check out the blacks down the back - plus a little off piste?
I did what, I suspect, a lot of people did. I put my ski's back on. My weeks holiday in the snow is precious. I don't have the time and money to fly abroad to ski again multiple times a year so in the end I wussed out, picked what I knew was comfortable and that I could do and went with that.
I rationalise that my holiday was too short to be sitting face down on a green run when I could be taking full advantage of what the mountain had to offer. I did the training and the falling over 7 years ago when I was learning to ski - it's taken me years (literally) to get where I am now and, in one fell swooop, I don't want to go back again to that.
I think a lot of people consider Windows vs something else in the same way that I consider skiing vs snowboarding.
Not true, they make very nice mice and keyboards.
Regarding their failure in the console market, it is worth pointing out that no-one new has entered that arena and succeeded in any way since Sony arrived with the Playstation. There have been plenty that failed or exited altogether (Phantom, Nokia and Sega spring to mind).
If Microsoft are unable to enter the market and do well with the billions they've thrown at it, then I don't really hold up much hope for anyone else. As such, I can only assume we'll be stuck with just Sony and Nintendo in the years to come...
I, for one, am extremely grateful that this question has been posted to Slashdot.
The next time someone moans "oh, I just want a phone that does talking and texting - why do no phones do this any more?", I can point them to here and hopefully shut another Slashdot phone whinger up.
Then the rest of us can get back to enjoying our phones with Bluetooth, Java, IM, GPS, camera, web-browsing, calendar, PC synchronisation and MP3 playback.
I'm most disappointed by the fact that you still appear to be stuck to the limit of 4GB memory sticks.
4GB and over cards are coming down in price and it would be great to put one of those big things into this device. To be fair though, it would only be really useful for homebrew (which Sony hates), piracy (which Sony really hates) and movies (which Sony would rather you bought the UMD).
Still a shame though. Especially when you consider that by the end of this year you'll be seeing £100 mobile phone supporting the high capacity cards. Surely the PSP-slim is expected to be around for far longer than that and it's storage options are going to look positively anaemic.
(as an aside, does anyone know whether you can buy anything that'll allow you to use standard - and significantly cheaper - storage with the memory stick pro duo? I don't own a PSP, but if I do, I'd far rather not pay through the nose for Sony's inflated storage medium)
MySpace has a significant advantage over facebook - that is the length of time it has been running and the user base. People will put up with something that isn't so great if all their friends are using it (insert IM client you think is lousy here).
If MySpace and facebook launched at the same time today - it wouldn't surprise me if facebook would be more popular.
So just like real life then.
As in, there are some people who think that the number of friends you have (however rare you see, speak or do anything with them) is more important than a smaller number of quality friends who you see, speak and socialise with more often.
Unless my maths are wrong, they're 3% shy of their target. Which doesn't seem to be too shabby.
Ummm, because the Wii hasn't got the graphics capability of the XBox? The PS3 and the Wii combined don't have the half of the games portfolio that the Xbox has? That the online gaming for the Xbox is way ahead of the other consoles? That the PS3 costs double that of the Xbox?
I don't own any console but this whole piece just seems to be pointless Xbox bashing to me.
If that is the case then you're right and, as you rather rudely put it, I have no point. However Jobs confirming the iPhone will be 3G is news to me.
Do you have a link for a credible source? I did a brief search but there was nothing confirming what you said on Google, Google News or BBC News.
Google does have a lot of links to speculation on a 3G iPhone on technology blogs and Apple rumour sites - but those need to always be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
Thanks.
I can't speak for the US, but here in the UK, if you don't have 3G then you're never going anywhere with giving the user a decent browsing experience. Speaking only about browsing, Apple will be behind the game even before they've launched.
I use NetFront on a PocketPC and on 2.5G its not particularly pleasant, but not impossible as long as you turn off images. On 3G I can turn on images and use Google Maps the way it was intended. In fact, if it wasn't for the small (non-VGA) screen which necessitates wrapping text to the screen (so destroying tabular data), browsing would be almost on par with my desktop
The iPhone will probably be good at some things and not so good at others. I don't think it would be too rash to suggest that browsing falls in the latter category.
Identification of who is talking on a conference call would be extremely useful. Especially since a lot of people sound the same as I have the memory of a goldfish. When someone speaks you could have a little display that tells you their name and the company they work for.
The Telechips TCC72x supports OGG.
Not without some extra software mind you and I have no idea about the cost.
Quote Jobs:
Maybe so, but if Apple had said this at the very beginning (when originally asked) then they wouldn't have needed to go through this entire PR exercise now.
Apple learnt a valuable lesson today; there are some issues (not all, but some) that when you're secretive about, people get rightly suspicious and assume you're up to no good. If they'd responded to Greenpeace in the first place, then this negative press would have never occurred.
Was I the only one that didn't laugh once through Smosh Short 2: Stranded?
If anyone ever tells me that broadcast television is dead and YouTube is the future, then I'll point them to that.
According to Metacritic:
I don't own either (or any console for that matter) but, based on the stats above, it looks like the PSP has more games and more that are considered "excellent".
Interesting to note that after only a couple of months release the PS3 has 19 games with a metacritic rating of 75 or above yet the Wii has only 9 games.
(The Xbox 360 has 79 games, but then it has been out for over a year, so not a fair comparison).
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons, especially revolving around the new controller and how to make best use of it - and to be fair, I'm not qualified in any way to comment - but the statistics do show that for whatever reasons the current portfolio of Wii games rated "excellent" is smaller than that of a system which has been out for a much shorter time.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw this into the pot for some discussion.
You want the O2 Jet then. It has 540 hours standby and 9 hours 50 minutes talk time (so almost 4 hours more than your request).
They do. The problem is that the majority of people on Slashdot who say "I wish I could get a phone that only does X and Y" haven't bothered to do five minutes of research.
I never turn off my Blackberry.
Mainly because there is some simple functionality in it that means at 7pm it turns off automatically and doesn't wake up until 8am the next morning. Even then, after 6ish I generally exercise some restraint on whether I read the email when it arrives or not (more often than not I don't bother).
This is almost as silly as the "Powerpoint dumbs down presentations" argument that is occasionally trotted out. If people are stupid enough to shackle themselves to their device or produce crappy presentations then that is the fault of them and not the technology.
Interestingly enough, for a lot of companies, those "basic, standard tools" are Microsoft Windows, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint and Excel. However, as soon as schools start using those products in their teachings, there are plenty of people (especially on here) who complain about the lock-in to Microsoft.
I'd love for people to learn alternative operating systems and applications, but at the same time understand the frustrations that come from having someone new to your team who can't update an Excel spreadsheet or make some modifications to a Powerpoint presentation.
Don't gforget that:
Companies are blah about replacements to pretty much anything that already works and already does the job well enough. Eventually they'll shift, but only when all their hardware has broken down and been replaced by stuff that can run it, the current operating system of choice is no longer supported and they have major applications that won't run in that aforementioned operating system.
This is hardly new, they have been working this way for years and I fully expect them to be "blah" about the next version of Office and Windows as well.
Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that is blindingly obvious.
To be fair, this is the business model that applies to more that just Microsoft and more than just the software industry.
I wouldn't say ZERO.
Outlook 2000 has the annoying habit of opening all your reminders in separate windows whereas 2002 has them all in one. When you have as many reminders and tasks as me, then you quickly appreciate that.
I would love Outlook 2003 over 2002 (and especially 2000) for the saved search folders and the fact that it's better at coping when your network connection unexpectedly dies. Granted they aren't big things and certainly not enough to justify the high cost - but later versions of Outlook have often had useful additions or changes.
Now, reasons to upgrade Word or Excel for me is close to zero...
Whilst I have no doubt that Apple make superior hardware and software to Dell/HP/etc and Microsoft, I can't help thinking that part of this "loyalty" that Mac owners have is because once they've purchased the software to run, they have no choice in moving away from the platform unless they want to re-purchase all their software again.
Similarly, I have no doubts that someone who considers moving away from their iPod and happens to have bought a large amount of music from the iTunes store will also have second thoughts when they find out that their music won't work[1] on their next non-Apple purchase. Those who stick to regular MP3's will be able to move to and from other devices with little to no problems.[2]
[1] Yes, I know there are ways around it - but not everyone knows them or is technically savvy enough to be able to do it.
[2] Another good reason for DRM free music.
You forgot to mention that the although the latter music option is DRM'ed and needs their own player - it is free. Gratis. Nado. Nothing. Zilch. Thats right, you pay nothing for the music.
Which suddenly makes it a lot more appealing.
I agree. It's terrible viewing Slashdot on a phone, PDA or BlackBerry. I read your comment this morning on the train using my 8700 this morning too.
However the difference was that I was using AvantSlash to parse and filter out all the cruft, hence presenting you with a PDA and mobile friendly version.
Disclaimer: I'm biased as I wrote it, but you're exactly the type of person I wrote it for.