It's worth pointing out that in the UK (and most of Europe) the caller pays for the call and not the receiver.
After all, if you want a service (eg. to talk to someone) it seems only fair that you should pay for it and not someone else - when I go to get my hair cut, it's not as if the barber pays me for the privilidge of me coming to him.
Because of this, cold calling by companies to mobile phone users is virtually non-existant.
i believe the topic at hand is fragmentation, not how well it works as a filesystem. in that regard, FAT32 and NTFS do have horrible problems with fragmentation, while HFS+ defragments on the fly.
Which means this isn't a valid test. If the OS did not defragment HFS+ on the fly then you would have a far better test to see which fragments better.
So either you turn it off, or you check FAT32 and NTFS using an OS that defragments those on the fly too.
The defragmentation-on-the-fly feature is skewing the results. Thats not to say that HFS+ wouldn't be better (after all isn't FAT32 and NTFS far older technology?), but the gap would be rather closer.
You HAVE to unmute the sound on any Linux distro that uses ALSA.
Is this true? If so... why?
Why on earth does the system once it's worked out, configured and primed your soundcard feel the need to gag it before it's even had the chance to make one note of noise?
Why would you want something that makes people immediately think that the installation and configuration process of their soundcard is broken because their OS claims it works, but they can't hear a damn thing even with the volume on max? Yet it works just fine under Windows.
Sure, "all you need to do it un-mute the volume", but if the solution is so simple, why couldn't the system do it for you in the first place?
You should check the product line before dissing them.
I was joking (hence the smiley) but there was a serious comment hidden away.
If it wasn't for MS and Compaq giving them a swift kick up their complacent arse, we'd all be still living in black and white days with a piss poor diary, 4k note limit, limited contact fields, no today screen and expansion slots which necessitate a great big sleeve.
I had a Vx, it was pretty good but time has moved on and unfortunately Palm hasn't moved on as quickly as they should have done.
The products are very capable, but they've gone from being leader of the pack (by a massive margin) to copying the specs (with the exception of the screen dimension and camera) of nearly every PocketPC 2003 device out there.
Nice to know that a simple PDA could bring a WiFi network to its knees
Last time I looked a simple PDA has a 400mhz processor, 64 meg of RAM, a 64k colour screen, multiple expansion sockets and support for WiFi and/or bluetooth.
Hardly simple. You must be thinking of one of those Palm products:o)
I find it interesting that no-one has picked up on this:
This is 2004, you should know by now not to open a file from an untrusted source.
So stand up everyone, sit down all those who have downloaded a binary only file from the internet that they didn't personally verify.
Now stand down all those who downloaded RPM's or binary equivilants.
Now stand down all those people who downloaded open source applications but didn't check that the configure and/or makefile script didn't do anything nasty.
Now stand down all those people who didn't go through the source code line by line to ensure that nothing nasty was in there.
Hmmm, no-one is standing. How unsurprising.
The fact is you deal with things that can you cannot truely trust on a day to day basis (hello Windows and even the Linux kernel). If you cann't personally verify every single line then it's untrusted.
Anyone who says "don't run something from an untrusted source" is preaching something which is realistically impractical to actually adhere to.
Questions to the Slashdot owners
on
Freecache
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Does that mean that Slashdot will now link to potentially low-bandwidth sites using Freecache?
Will you update their FAQ on the whole subject of caching since Google and Freecache seem to feel that the legalities of site caching is small enough for it to be a non-issue?
Or are we still going to be relying on people posting links and site content in the comments because the original site has been blown away under the load?
I find it interesting to note that iTunes under Windows completely ignores the styleguides that Microsoft have.
Yet, Office for Mac adheres to Apple's styleguides.
Whether you think the Windows styleguide sucks or not isn't the issue - one is there for a good reason and I don't see why a company should feel the need to ignore it.
Say what you will, the ability for a clueless end-user to click "accept" on an email and automatically schedule themselves for a meeting is a Big Deal(tm).
I don't consider myself clueless and it's a Big Deal(tm) for me.
I don't get paid for managing my calendar and I don't want to waste my time managing my calendar. If someone or something will do it for me or make my life easier, then all the better.
It plays MP3 files by converting them to ATRAC on your PC.
In that case, I expect it to be a resounding success. Just like the NetMD was.
The biggest problem Sony have is that anything cool they do, will get cripped by their music division to the point it's lost all of its cool-ness. They could have been a challenger to the iPod, but not with the current mindset.
If I remember correctly from a previous article (3-6 months ago), Dell prohibits its tech support from helping customers remove certain programs that could be considered spyware. They are unable to do so because Dell, and some other suppliers have partnerships with the makers of the borderline spyware.
Not quite. The reason that Dell support prohibits its tech support from doing so is that some programs have a EULA that require you to install and run the spyware. Therefore by helping them uninstall it, Dell's support is encouraging users to break the EULA which could put them into legal trouble.
If you install and run Spybot S&D you'll see a warning message telling you that if you remove the spyware on some applications you may be violating the EULA.
This goes double for an underdog OS trying to win converts. It has to offer a user experience at least as good, and probably better. Carrying on about OSS, configurability and monopolies means jack to most users. They want it to be as easy as what they have now.
People will put up with a lot of problems if they are working with something they are comfortable with. Especially when they feel they can be more productive with it than the time taken to learn something else.
Therefore if you want people to migrate you have to offer something that is easily 200% better than what they currently have. Otherwise you'll get the response "yes thats cool, but I'm better off sticking with this".
Case in point: I write all my website code in Perl, I've looked a PHP and it is better in many ways - but I'm far more productive with Perl, know immediately how to use Perl and can do what I want to do with Perl just fine. Since PHP isn't 200% better, I'm not too bothered about not learning it. It's cool, but I'm better off sticking with Perl.
In many companies, a much easier battle is to get the company to move, say, for Microsoft Outlook to Thunderbird
It is? Have you used Outlook in a corporate environment? Do you know what not only does it support email, but also a calendar, contacts, journal, notes and tasks? That you can book appointments and have it automatically send the requests to them, check availability and add it to their diary, review and manage other people's diaries, act as a delegate for sending mail on other peoples behalf, assign tasks to individuals and track their progress and 101 other things which I don't have the time to type in here right now?
Because, and without sounding harsh, if you did know all that, you'd realise that getting a company to migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird is nigh on impossible given the different feature sets of the two products.
Don't believe IRC is evil? Just try logging on with an even remotely female-sounding nick sometime.
I hacked together a perl bot using the eliza module, created a sexy sounding female persona on a talker (chat program a little bit like IRC) and logged the bot onto it.
Entering "back care" in quotation marks got me the answer in 25 seconds, much less than either of the "offline" sources. If they're going to have an accurate test, at least make sure the person performing it knows how to use a search engine.
I generally avoid quotation marks in searches unless a large number of results come back. Far too many times have I entered something with quotes only to have little to no results, but removing them provides the answer.
This is especially true of Google Groups where if people ask a question in a slightly different way and using a different order of words then your search with quotes will invariably fail.
I think it's a little harsh to suggest that the user did not know how to use a search engine. As with a lot of things, there are several different ways to search for something - some of which are quicker than others. My first search would have been parliamentary group back care uk and then filter back what I got with various quotes, pluses and minuses.
I'm not an expert and it might not be the best way but I don't believe that the above search would tend towards the notion that I can't use Google.
Re:we should see how business friendly these OSes
on
Gentoo Linux Musings
·
· Score: 1
Then we'll see what OS is really easiest and fastest and cheapest, we'll assume these people all cost $0.002 per second... Meaning that the commercial OSes already start with quite an expensive handicap.
Firstly, making your commercial OS' have this handicap is going to mean that your results are going to always skew in favour of the free OS'.
Secondly, getting someone to write a document, set up email and then send something isn't a test of the OS'. Its a test of the applications.
Sorry Steve, but that's now quite how it is. Linux and OpenOffice are seen as Stable, Secure, *Better* alternatives.
I am playing devils advocate here but why, in every press release of companies who migrate to Linux, do they only mention licencing costs?
I have never seen a press release from a company who has said "we moved to linux on the desktop because its better", normally its "we moved to linux on the desktop because of concerns about the pricing of Microsoft licences".
ps. Note to mods hovering over the -1: Definition of devils advocate is worth reading first.
Whilst I agree, when the rest of the world blindly uses your own format, what real incentive is there to spend money supporting someone elses?
Secondly, what format? Its not like there is any other format out there that comes close to doc that needs serious improvement (plain text support and rtf is pretty decent given their limits).
Anyone know how to read Slashdot (preferably offline but online will do) on your PDA? I tried pointing it to http://www.slashdot.org/palm and it sucked and I tried http://www.slashdot.org and it sucked even more.
Try Avantslash. Works for WAP enabled phones too (automatically routes the phone through the google HTML to WML site).
There's been a lot of competition in the PalmOS world as well, which no doubt caused new PalmOS devices to come out with new and improved features. Long, long lists of devices on Palmsource. Think Sony Clie, Handspring, Kyocera, PalmOne, Tapwave... to name a few.
80% of the content on that page is PalmOne, 10% is Sony and 10% are companies that i've either never heard of or definately don't sell in the mainstream high-street shops. In those shops I see:
Palm: PalmOne and Sony.
Windows: HP, Acer, Dell, Fuijistu, Toshiba and Viewsonic.
Admitidally I'm in the UK, but it can't be too different in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, if you want a service (eg. to talk to someone) it seems only fair that you should pay for it and not someone else - when I go to get my hair cut, it's not as if the barber pays me for the privilidge of me coming to him.
Because of this, cold calling by companies to mobile phone users is virtually non-existant.
Which means this isn't a valid test. If the OS did not defragment HFS+ on the fly then you would have a far better test to see which fragments better.
So either you turn it off, or you check FAT32 and NTFS using an OS that defragments those on the fly too.
The defragmentation-on-the-fly feature is skewing the results. Thats not to say that HFS+ wouldn't be better (after all isn't FAT32 and NTFS far older technology?), but the gap would be rather closer.
The higher up the level you do it, the more people you affect and the more difficult it is to get it removed if you don't want it.
If MS do it, you can either disable it in the browser (if there is an option) or use a different browser. It only affects you.
If Versign do it, you have no choice in the matter.
I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if, in the future, you have to pay to get a 20 meg attachment limit and the free version is only 1 meg.
Still would be usable for most people, but if you want really big attachments, then you have to pay.
Is this true? If so ... why?
Why on earth does the system once it's worked out, configured and primed your soundcard feel the need to gag it before it's even had the chance to make one note of noise?
Why would you want something that makes people immediately think that the installation and configuration process of their soundcard is broken because their OS claims it works, but they can't hear a damn thing even with the volume on max? Yet it works just fine under Windows.
Sure, "all you need to do it un-mute the volume", but if the solution is so simple, why couldn't the system do it for you in the first place?
Bah, thats nothing. I uuencode all my attachments by hand.
I was joking (hence the smiley) but there was a serious comment hidden away.
If it wasn't for MS and Compaq giving them a swift kick up their complacent arse, we'd all be still living in black and white days with a piss poor diary, 4k note limit, limited contact fields, no today screen and expansion slots which necessitate a great big sleeve.
I had a Vx, it was pretty good but time has moved on and unfortunately Palm hasn't moved on as quickly as they should have done.
The products are very capable, but they've gone from being leader of the pack (by a massive margin) to copying the specs (with the exception of the screen dimension and camera) of nearly every PocketPC 2003 device out there.
A shame really.
Last time I looked a simple PDA has a 400mhz processor, 64 meg of RAM, a 64k colour screen, multiple expansion sockets and support for WiFi and/or bluetooth.
Hardly simple. You must be thinking of one of those Palm products :o)
This is 2004, you should know by now not to open a file from an untrusted source.
So stand up everyone, sit down all those who have downloaded a binary only file from the internet that they didn't personally verify.
Now stand down all those who downloaded RPM's or binary equivilants.
Now stand down all those people who downloaded open source applications but didn't check that the configure and/or makefile script didn't do anything nasty.
Now stand down all those people who didn't go through the source code line by line to ensure that nothing nasty was in there.
Hmmm, no-one is standing. How unsurprising.
The fact is you deal with things that can you cannot truely trust on a day to day basis (hello Windows and even the Linux kernel). If you cann't personally verify every single line then it's untrusted.
Anyone who says "don't run something from an untrusted source" is preaching something which is realistically impractical to actually adhere to.
- Does that mean that Slashdot will now link to potentially low-bandwidth sites using Freecache?
- Will you update their FAQ on the whole subject of caching since Google and Freecache seem to feel that the legalities of site caching is small enough for it to be a non-issue?
- Or are we still going to be relying on people posting links and site content in the comments because the original site has been blown away under the load?
Inquiring minds would like to know.Yet, Office for Mac adheres to Apple's styleguides.
Whether you think the Windows styleguide sucks or not isn't the issue - one is there for a good reason and I don't see why a company should feel the need to ignore it.
I don't consider myself clueless and it's a Big Deal(tm) for me.
I don't get paid for managing my calendar and I don't want to waste my time managing my calendar. If someone or something will do it for me or make my life easier, then all the better.
In that case, I expect it to be a resounding success. Just like the NetMD was.
The biggest problem Sony have is that anything cool they do, will get cripped by their music division to the point it's lost all of its cool-ness. They could have been a challenger to the iPod, but not with the current mindset.
When you're playing catch-up you need to encourage people to migrate. To do so, you need to make them feel warm and comfy.
Once you have the market share can you really then go off at a tangent and change things. People are more accepting then.
Of course, you could go off in a tangent now, and forever remain a niche OS with patchy hardware support.
Not quite. The reason that Dell support prohibits its tech support from doing so is that some programs have a EULA that require you to install and run the spyware. Therefore by helping them uninstall it, Dell's support is encouraging users to break the EULA which could put them into legal trouble.
If you install and run Spybot S&D you'll see a warning message telling you that if you remove the spyware on some applications you may be violating the EULA.
People will put up with a lot of problems if they are working with something they are comfortable with. Especially when they feel they can be more productive with it than the time taken to learn something else.
Therefore if you want people to migrate you have to offer something that is easily 200% better than what they currently have. Otherwise you'll get the response "yes thats cool, but I'm better off sticking with this".
Case in point: I write all my website code in Perl, I've looked a PHP and it is better in many ways - but I'm far more productive with Perl, know immediately how to use Perl and can do what I want to do with Perl just fine. Since PHP isn't 200% better, I'm not too bothered about not learning it. It's cool, but I'm better off sticking with Perl.
It is? Have you used Outlook in a corporate environment? Do you know what not only does it support email, but also a calendar, contacts, journal, notes and tasks? That you can book appointments and have it automatically send the requests to them, check availability and add it to their diary, review and manage other people's diaries, act as a delegate for sending mail on other peoples behalf, assign tasks to individuals and track their progress and 101 other things which I don't have the time to type in here right now?
Because, and without sounding harsh, if you did know all that, you'd realise that getting a company to migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird is nigh on impossible given the different feature sets of the two products.
I hacked together a perl bot using the eliza module, created a sexy sounding female persona on a talker (chat program a little bit like IRC) and logged the bot onto it.
The results were rather amusing.
I generally avoid quotation marks in searches unless a large number of results come back. Far too many times have I entered something with quotes only to have little to no results, but removing them provides the answer.
This is especially true of Google Groups where if people ask a question in a slightly different way and using a different order of words then your search with quotes will invariably fail.
I think it's a little harsh to suggest that the user did not know how to use a search engine. As with a lot of things, there are several different ways to search for something - some of which are quicker than others. My first search would have been parliamentary group back care uk and then filter back what I got with various quotes, pluses and minuses.
I'm not an expert and it might not be the best way but I don't believe that the above search would tend towards the notion that I can't use Google.
Firstly, making your commercial OS' have this handicap is going to mean that your results are going to always skew in favour of the free OS'.
Secondly, getting someone to write a document, set up email and then send something isn't a test of the OS'. Its a test of the applications.
I am playing devils advocate here but why, in every press release of companies who migrate to Linux, do they only mention licencing costs?
I have never seen a press release from a company who has said "we moved to linux on the desktop because its better", normally its "we moved to linux on the desktop because of concerns about the pricing of Microsoft licences".
ps. Note to mods hovering over the -1: Definition of devils advocate is worth reading first.
Whilst I agree, when the rest of the world blindly uses your own format, what real incentive is there to spend money supporting someone elses?
Secondly, what format? Its not like there is any other format out there that comes close to doc that needs serious improvement (plain text support and rtf is pretty decent given their limits).
Try Avantslash. Works for WAP enabled phones too (automatically routes the phone through the google HTML to WML site).
I am a little biased though.
80% of the content on that page is PalmOne, 10% is Sony and 10% are companies that i've either never heard of or definately don't sell in the mainstream high-street shops. In those shops I see:
Palm: PalmOne and Sony.
Windows: HP, Acer, Dell, Fuijistu, Toshiba and Viewsonic.
Admitidally I'm in the UK, but it can't be too different in the US.
I have a 6600 and I prefer web-browsing on it (Opera is a tad buggy at times) and entering text.
Given that you have to enter text for contacts, diary and notes - that pretty much means I still prefer using the PDA for the PDA type things.