If you install the "Fallback" session mode for GNOME 3, you get something that vaguely resembles GNOME 2 but has some annoying subtle differences. One of these is that to edit the panels, you need to Alt-Right Click.
There are no panels in Unity, so it's definitely G3 we're talking about:)
Can I point out something? There's selection bias going on here with the vast majority of people who are saying "They don't make them like they used to" and bringing up old devices that still work as examples.
Here's what I've found. There are some goods that last a long time, and there's everything else. 9/10 items actually end up being thrown away before they fail anyway. Of the remainder, a significant number will fail because the MTBF of some component in it kicks in according to manufacturer's spec, which has always been measured in years, but not decades.
So what are you left with? The exceptions. And there always will be exceptions. And those items will last a long time, and you'll point it out to your friends and go "Hey, they don't make 'em like they used to. This 'ere TV has lasted 40 years I'll have you know"
But was that TV typical? Of course not! If it was, then a huge number of Mitsubishi TVs from 1983 would still be in use, and they're not. Some were thrown away because they were obsolete, others not large enough, etc, but even allowing for that, if TVs from that era never failed, they'd be all over the place. It's fair to say the majority that were given time to fail did.
Likewise all those people claiming that all you have to do is spend three times as much on a fancy European brand. Really?
The reality is that thirty years from now, the only likely reason someone won't post to Slashdot saying "I bought this Dell 21" LCD monitor back in 2011, and it still works a charm!" is because by that time, people aren't using monitors. Or monitors now have 1200dpi resolutions. Or are 3D. Or go entirely around the viewer. Or for some other reason just aren't practical as far as actually using them goes, much as a CGA monitor from 1983 would be today.
I have some very old computers from 1990 that are still working. I also have thrown away a lot of stuff from that era that do not work. Those items that survive survive because they win the game of probabilities, not because some manager back in 1990, 1980, 1970, or whatever, said to himself "Let's make a device our consumers will never need to replace." Since the invention of the lightbulb, that's never been the case.
I have been considering Seamonkey, the times I've tried it (from the Ubuntu repository) it's had a few problems with a few websites, but quite honestly, at this point I'm game for anything that's Firefoxy but works. If switching back to Firefox 3.6 was an easy option, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I wish Canonical would put it in the repositories.
Regarding speed: if I had the capability to expand the memory on my Thinkpad (maxed out now at 2G) I'd do it, but as I can't, the reality is that Firefox's sucking up of memory results in a serious speed issue. Once it sucks up enough, the browser crawls as it enters swap hell.
I don't get that from Chromium, even when memory use is in the same ballpark (as shown above.) I suspect part of it is that Chromium's one-process-per-tab (actually it's not that simple but...) architecture helps in terms of meaning the front process can get everything in memory relatively quickly without being disturbed by activity in the other tabs, something that's harder to do when a single process is managing everything. But that's a theory, I haven't examined the code to know for sure.
As a follow up on my prior post. Right now I have Firefox and Chrome open on my VM (1.5G). A quick visit to chrome://about/memory/ on Chrome gives these figures:
OK, let's check the validity of these figures using top:
Firefox: 796m Resident (looks in the same ballpark)
Chromium: Well, lots of processes, but I added them to get 901m, a little more than Chromium reported, but we're definitely still in the same ballpark if we recognize that much of that memory will be shared amongst processes. Chances are Chromium's figures are accurate.
Now, have a guess how many tabs I have open.
Firefox: one window with 9 tabs open (GMail, Google Calendar, Blogger, Twitter, Ameritrade, Google Finance, a help page from Google, a Google Docs Spreadsheet, and an Android Market page. Yes, I appreciate the irony that most of these pages are from Google.
Chromium: Ready for this? Window #1 -34 tabs. Window #2 - 14 tabs. These include, amongst many, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google+, Blogger, lots of Slashdot tabs (of course!), lots of Wikipedia tabs (not that I expect them to be memory intensive), Yahoo Mail (always a memory hog), a bunch of Amazon pages, and a few more.
That's a real life example. "But... but... my Firefox only tak..." Let me cut you off right there.
Both browsers have been up for days now and have been heavily used. I've opened and closed tabs repeatedly under both browsers. The one thing I've avoided doing is loading Yahoo Mail into Firefox, because I'd still like to use the VM rather than see it grind to a halt.
Oh yeah, version numbers! I forgot. It's Chromium 12.0.742.112 (90304) Ubuntu 10.10 vs Firefox 7.0. Yeah, I know, Firefox 7.0 is not 8.0, but it's recent enough. Firebug is loaded (but OTOH that shouldn't make a blind bit of difference - Chromium has a Firebug clone built in. It's a fair test.) However, I've disabled all plug-ins with Firefox (so, no, Firefox hasn't grown out of control due to massive Flash ads or any crap like that.) I haven't with Chromium, there are Flash ads in my Chrome.
Now you can tweak the figures, turn them upside down, complain that I'm not using the very latest version of Firefox or whatever (no deal, I still have the same problem with my Ubuntu 11.10 machine at home - the only reason I'm not reporting those figures here and now is that I'm not at home), but I have 48 tabs open in a recent Chromium and only 9 in a recent Firefox, and Chromium is kicking Firefox's ass memory wise.
Why do the pro benchmarks say otherwise? I've no idea. I don't know what their methodology is. I know they're crap, and anyone who's used both browsers knows they're crap. It could be there's a difference between loading 32 tabs in two fresh browsers vs seeing what the memory use is like after several hours of actual use. But either way, in the real world, Firefox needs improvement.
And I desperately hope it gets it, because I'd much prefer to use Firefox, my old friend, than Chromium, if the memory usage thing wasn't an issue.
If people need to lie about the bloat in Firefox and claim that there are memory leaks that haven't been fixed for years, that's really their thing. But the reality is that on pretty much every memory benchmark I've seen for the last few years, Firefox is consistently ahead of pretty much all the other browsers, and always ahead of Chrome.
OK, but in the real world when I run recent versions of Firefox with more than a few tabs my entire computer slows to a crawl, whereas I can run Chrome with way more tabs open and without suffering the same problem. And it's not just my experience, otherwise there wouldn't be the complaints from so many.
I don't likeChrome particularly, but I'm finding I'm using it more and more because I just find having Firefox running at all fairly intolerable. I'm hoping desperately that your attitude isn't shared by the Firefox developers themselves, otherwise my favorite browser will never be fixed!
More likely it had to do with a complete lack of consumer interest in small, low resolution, pre-Honeycomb, Android tablets. Everyone from Lenovo to Archos is producing better tablets in that price and specification range.
I still don't know why people want tablets. I have a Lenovo 10" myself and don't see what the big deal is. But I can honestly say that there's no way people who want them are going to settle for something like the Streak. It doesn't make sense on any level.
Well, there was a reason, which was that the precise combination of technologies hadn't reached the right price level and level of reliability until around the time the iPhone came out.
Other touch devices had come out, and been on the market for years, and in practical terms they differed only slightly from iPhone. Palm produced a range of touchscreen phones from the late 90s, for example. They suffered for the following reasons:
Poor data support from mobile phone operators - GSM operators only offered circuit switched data, and IS-95 operators didn't offer data at all for a long time. Over the following years you started to get extremely slow, power hungry, packet switched data (GPRS etc) until the first 3G networks started to seriously establish themselves, and even then the US, in particular, took a long time to have that data established. Lest you think this is smoke and mirrors, the iPhone 1 was an EDGE device - at the time AT&T's 3G network was too new to be supported.
Early touch screen technology wasn't friendly. In practice, only resistive technologies were mature enough to be used in portable devices until the middle of the last decade, and resistive technologies, in practice, need a stylus to work properly.
The mobile web was immature, and mobile CPUs were far behind desktop CPUs, making it a problem rendering full websites
Mobile screen technologies were also poor. The first colour cellphones, with some exceptions, had dreadful screens, largely due to the fact that producing a power efficient, low cost, colour screen was extremely difficult
Battery technologies continue to improve. Ask yourself how something as hungry as an iPhone would have fared using 1999's batteries
What we have here is what I call the TiVo phenomenom. TiVo seemed radically new to everyone when it came out, and it's become taken as read that everyone who's produced a DVR since has built something that would look radically different had TiVo's engineers not produced a DVR. However, a closer look shows that virtually everything about TiVo is obvious. Who would not have thought "I have a disk large enough, I'd like to automate recording TV shows onto the disk, and watch them at my leisure?"
So... why was TiVo first? Actually, the clearest evidence that TiVo did something obvious is to look at when their DVR came out. The TiVo came about at exactly the time it became easy to produce a $400 box containing a hard disk large enough to record a large number of TV programs. A year prior, and hard disk prices would have been too high for anything like a decent number of shows to fit on a single device, or else the device would have been well over the magic $400 figure needed for consumers to open their wallets.
iPhone is a product of its time, not of its manufacturer. With EDGE being just fast enough for mobile web use, the ARM CPUs of the time being just fast enough to render webpages designed for the desktop, touchscreen technology being just about ready for friendly use, memory (both RAM and flash) being just cheap and small enough to work in the box, and batteries being just powerful enough to run such a device for nearly a day given average use, the iPhone was able to be released. A year earlier, and it would have been an expensive, power hungry, heavy, slow, network impaired, flop.
Also, if people didn't want to program, Excel wouldn't be so damned popular. Excel and other spreadsheet systems are used 90% of the time as an IDE with a really good integration of data and logic.
Always thought Microsoft missed a trick by not integrating Excel into Windows, actually making it the shell. They make have pissed off a lot of computer snobs, but there'd have been a dramatic improvement in usability - as in advanced features being intuitively used by regular users, and it'd probably have put the final nail in Apple's coffin.
Alas, they thought web browsers would make a better shell, and, well, now it looks like we'll all be working on iPads. Great.
My Kindle (third generation, 3G) reads PDFs too. I think it was only early versions that didn't.
I actually use the feature from time to time to get around the Kindles awful fonts. Import into OpenOffice.org, format using Century Schoolbook, export as PDF using page size settings optimized for the Kindle, and you have a nice looking document. Only works if you have access to the raw content of course, but for a lot of public domain stuff and websites...
Actually I do, which is why I wrote what I did. Unfortunately Ron Paul's most ardent supporters tend to be those who think he's something he clearly isn't.
You're perpetuating a lie - I have to think you are doing it on purpose.
No, you are. You're simply mindlessly rejecting criticism of Ron Paul because it suits you. You know damn well Paul's "response" is inadequate and doesn't make any sense. We're supposed to believe that Paul doesn't care what's written under his name, and that over a period of years he ignored repeated racist content posted in his eponymous newsletter?
When the allegations first came out I came across apologists like you too, who pretended it was something that happened once, and that Ron Paul couldn't possibly have noticed because of that. They conveniently ignored the fact it wasn't one off, that it happened over and over again, that nothing had been posted to withdraw the articles, and that Ron Paul clearly did have the ability to distance himself from the newsletter, something he did not do.
I've dealt with too many people like Ron Paul in my life not to notice what he is, and the gulf between what his acolytes think he is and what he is. You know the arguments you're using make no sense. I suggest you take the next step and accept the reason for that.
What I said about Ron Paul is that he probably doesn't mean what you think he does. Ron's no civil libertarian enthusiast, he just believes that the jackboots should be worn by State government officials, not Feds. Yes, he has a record of voting against Federal expansion, but don't confuse that with civil libertarianism. And given his newsletter's comments on race, I wouldn't be surprised if ultimately he'd have come down on the Confederacy's side during the Civil War.
And yes I know a lot of people romanticize that group, but the Confederacy was the closest many states ever saw to fascism in modern American history - unsurprising, given the reason it was formed, and the attitudes of the states that formed it.
Well, the main problem is that he said mean, mean, horrible things about our Lord and Saviour George W. Bush after all poor George had done was try to depose him by helping out with a coup.
You can avoid your messages being intercepted using this technique simply by piggybacking it on the one protocol that large telcos in every country are trying to find ways to block. Hooray!
There is a candidate right now that is anti-war, anti-torture, anti-extrajudicial killings...
Sure there might be one perceived as being that, and likewise there are on the left too. However, NONE OF THEM WILL BE A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT.
The lesson from Obama is that even if someone CLAIMS to be against those things, if he actually gets nominated, he WILL not be that man.
Buddy Roemer? Ron Paul? None have a fighting chance, and frankly, the former probably doesn't mean it, and the latter certainly doesn't mean what you think he does.
With Bush, there was the perception something could be done about it. There was an opposing side, that didn't always do the right thing, but occasionally stood against the extremes.
Obama stood as that, stood as "Change", and then gave us a big "Fuck you". Essentially, what we know now is that it's going to take decades to actually get someone in power who's not a right wing (pro-war, pro-torture, pro-extrajudicial killings, pro-corporate, anti-worker) extremist. Decades. Because there's no good reason to believe that the next jackass the Democrats put up will be any less extreme than Obama.
Funny, when Apple released source code in this manner (big chunks all at once) the open source community was up in arms, claiming they weren't being good open-source citizens.
That's complete crap. Slashdot quoted the KHTML devs OUT OF CONTEXT at the time implying that, but it was false at the time and it's still false. And the majority of responses to the Slashdot article took Apple's "side" in the non-existent war.
The KHTML people kept being bugged by users asking when Apple's changes would be integrated with KHTML. Finally, one of the devs wrote an article explaining the situation - basically that Apple's changes weren't really available in a form that would make them easy to integrate. He didn't criticize Apple, he was simply explaining a technical problem. Apple, remember, didn't simply extend KHTML to make WebKit, they refactored the entire thing.
And that's absolutely fine. Nobody in the Free Software or Open Source movements has any problem with someone taking code, and making modifications to make it more suitable for their own uses. Few developers expect every change to be something they can integrate back into their own code. I can't even begin, to be honest, to comprehend the mentality that says that forks have to be limited in that way, and outside of the occasional prima-donna developer who slaps a GPL or Apache license on some code without thinking about it and then gets all upset when someone uses their code in a way they don't like, I suspect the majority of devs feel the same way.
Now, there is a small community who insist that any forks are bad. That all code has to be contributed to a single project. They're the people who get all upset that there's a GNOME and a KDE because it means "all this effort" is being duplicated. They think Firefox and Chrome should merge. They think that Linux should be given a Win32 API so that people don't have to rewrite all the existing apps for GNU/Linux. Those people are loud, obnoxious, and post to Slashdot, but few of them have ever done any development work in their entire lives.
Personally I consider Windows 7 to be the first version of Windows since 2000 that isn't absolutely awful. As a "Have to use Windows to interoperate with others occasionally" person, I consider it to be the version of Windows I want.
Personally I don't know anyone who doesn't prefer it over XP, but, whatever...
You are aware that an physician is neither a minimum wage job, nor a job for which a degree is not needed, correct?
Go back to the OP's point and ask yourself if anything you just posted pertains to the point, namely that Ron Paul clearly doesn't give a crap about the one opportunity most people have to avoid minimum wage hell.
You're lying, or just very inexperienced with Android development
Or I don't code the way you've chosen to.
I appreciate the quantity of Android apps you've written, but if a particular feature of development is bugging you so much, I have to wonder why you've not even tried to avoid it?
Google made it clear from the beginning that Honeycomb wasn't going to be opened. There's been no problem getting the source for Honeycomb's mobile peer, Gingerbread - I'm running it right now courtesy of Cyanogen.
I don't like the fact that Google didn't open Honeycomb, but they had their reasons, and I respect them. Unlike ICS, Honeycomb was always a rushed "production" beta, and Google didn't want developers working from it. ICS, on the other hand, is the future direction of Android. There's no reason to suppose that Google isn't going to release the source for it, as failing to do so would pretty much kill the platform.
I think some specifics might make this a more useful post. I've not come across the issues you describe.
As far as the "XML files (being) the preferred way of designing a UI", that's kinda dubious at best. Generally most of the specifics are coded in Java, with only basic metadata about the app being specified in XML. True, there's more metadata than there is in a desktop Java application, but it's not a lot.
I should state here I hate XML with a passion, so if I thought Android development burdened people with large amounts of entirely unnecessary and pointless XML coding, I'd be the first to be screaming from the hilltops. I just don't see that as being the case, however.
I'm pretty sure we'll see the source of 4.0. Generally Google doesn't release the source immediately, it makes a source code drop a little after the OS is announced and released.
You're going to read a lot of comments a long the lines of "Yes, because only a legitimate emailer will know {long list of obscure hoops you apparently have to jump through to send email, most of which are not documented in any RFC.}"
In reality, the answer is no. It's a fucking stupid idea, and the fact that there are a lot of fucking stupid idiots choosing things like this as a way to block spam doesn't justify it. In reality, it's something a spammer (generally a person who knows a little more about sending email than the average office network administrator) will know how to get around, but something your users and the people they want to communicate with will not.
Reject spam because it's spam, not because it doesn't comply to a made-up, easily circumvented, rule.
Slashdot Mirror
If you install the "Fallback" session mode for GNOME 3, you get something that vaguely resembles GNOME 2 but has some annoying subtle differences. One of these is that to edit the panels, you need to Alt-Right Click.
There are no panels in Unity, so it's definitely G3 we're talking about :)
Can I point out something? There's selection bias going on here with the vast majority of people who are saying "They don't make them like they used to" and bringing up old devices that still work as examples.
Here's what I've found. There are some goods that last a long time, and there's everything else. 9/10 items actually end up being thrown away before they fail anyway. Of the remainder, a significant number will fail because the MTBF of some component in it kicks in according to manufacturer's spec, which has always been measured in years, but not decades.
So what are you left with? The exceptions. And there always will be exceptions. And those items will last a long time, and you'll point it out to your friends and go "Hey, they don't make 'em like they used to. This 'ere TV has lasted 40 years I'll have you know"
But was that TV typical? Of course not! If it was, then a huge number of Mitsubishi TVs from 1983 would still be in use, and they're not. Some were thrown away because they were obsolete, others not large enough, etc, but even allowing for that, if TVs from that era never failed, they'd be all over the place. It's fair to say the majority that were given time to fail did.
Likewise all those people claiming that all you have to do is spend three times as much on a fancy European brand. Really?
The reality is that thirty years from now, the only likely reason someone won't post to Slashdot saying "I bought this Dell 21" LCD monitor back in 2011, and it still works a charm!" is because by that time, people aren't using monitors. Or monitors now have 1200dpi resolutions. Or are 3D. Or go entirely around the viewer. Or for some other reason just aren't practical as far as actually using them goes, much as a CGA monitor from 1983 would be today.
I have some very old computers from 1990 that are still working. I also have thrown away a lot of stuff from that era that do not work. Those items that survive survive because they win the game of probabilities, not because some manager back in 1990, 1980, 1970, or whatever, said to himself "Let's make a device our consumers will never need to replace." Since the invention of the lightbulb, that's never been the case.
You think that's bad, you try copying a 17 megabyte file on my freelance gig Mac...
I have been considering Seamonkey, the times I've tried it (from the Ubuntu repository) it's had a few problems with a few websites, but quite honestly, at this point I'm game for anything that's Firefoxy but works. If switching back to Firefox 3.6 was an easy option, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I wish Canonical would put it in the repositories.
Regarding speed: if I had the capability to expand the memory on my Thinkpad (maxed out now at 2G) I'd do it, but as I can't, the reality is that Firefox's sucking up of memory results in a serious speed issue. Once it sucks up enough, the browser crawls as it enters swap hell.
I don't get that from Chromium, even when memory use is in the same ballpark (as shown above.) I suspect part of it is that Chromium's one-process-per-tab (actually it's not that simple but...) architecture helps in terms of meaning the front process can get everything in memory relatively quickly without being disturbed by activity in the other tabs, something that's harder to do when a single process is managing everything. But that's a theory, I haven't examined the code to know for sure.
As a follow up on my prior post. Right now I have Firefox and Chrome open on my VM (1.5G). A quick visit to chrome://about/memory/ on Chrome gives these figures:
Chromium: 664,412k/78,571k Private/Proportional Firefox: 811,876k/813,485k Private/Proportional
OK, let's check the validity of these figures using top:
Firefox: 796m Resident (looks in the same ballpark) Chromium: Well, lots of processes, but I added them to get 901m, a little more than Chromium reported, but we're definitely still in the same ballpark if we recognize that much of that memory will be shared amongst processes. Chances are Chromium's figures are accurate.
Now, have a guess how many tabs I have open.
Firefox: one window with 9 tabs open (GMail, Google Calendar, Blogger, Twitter, Ameritrade, Google Finance, a help page from Google, a Google Docs Spreadsheet, and an Android Market page. Yes, I appreciate the irony that most of these pages are from Google.
Chromium: Ready for this? Window #1 -34 tabs. Window #2 - 14 tabs. These include, amongst many, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google+, Blogger, lots of Slashdot tabs (of course!), lots of Wikipedia tabs (not that I expect them to be memory intensive), Yahoo Mail (always a memory hog), a bunch of Amazon pages, and a few more.
That's a real life example. "But... but... my Firefox only tak..." Let me cut you off right there.
Both browsers have been up for days now and have been heavily used. I've opened and closed tabs repeatedly under both browsers. The one thing I've avoided doing is loading Yahoo Mail into Firefox, because I'd still like to use the VM rather than see it grind to a halt.
Oh yeah, version numbers! I forgot. It's Chromium 12.0.742.112 (90304) Ubuntu 10.10 vs Firefox 7.0. Yeah, I know, Firefox 7.0 is not 8.0, but it's recent enough. Firebug is loaded (but OTOH that shouldn't make a blind bit of difference - Chromium has a Firebug clone built in. It's a fair test.) However, I've disabled all plug-ins with Firefox (so, no, Firefox hasn't grown out of control due to massive Flash ads or any crap like that.) I haven't with Chromium, there are Flash ads in my Chrome.
Now you can tweak the figures, turn them upside down, complain that I'm not using the very latest version of Firefox or whatever (no deal, I still have the same problem with my Ubuntu 11.10 machine at home - the only reason I'm not reporting those figures here and now is that I'm not at home), but I have 48 tabs open in a recent Chromium and only 9 in a recent Firefox, and Chromium is kicking Firefox's ass memory wise.
Why do the pro benchmarks say otherwise? I've no idea. I don't know what their methodology is. I know they're crap, and anyone who's used both browsers knows they're crap. It could be there's a difference between loading 32 tabs in two fresh browsers vs seeing what the memory use is like after several hours of actual use. But either way, in the real world, Firefox needs improvement.
And I desperately hope it gets it, because I'd much prefer to use Firefox, my old friend, than Chromium, if the memory usage thing wasn't an issue.
OK, but in the real world when I run recent versions of Firefox with more than a few tabs my entire computer slows to a crawl, whereas I can run Chrome with way more tabs open and without suffering the same problem. And it's not just my experience, otherwise there wouldn't be the complaints from so many.
I don't likeChrome particularly, but I'm finding I'm using it more and more because I just find having Firefox running at all fairly intolerable. I'm hoping desperately that your attitude isn't shared by the Firefox developers themselves, otherwise my favorite browser will never be fixed!
More likely it had to do with a complete lack of consumer interest in small, low resolution, pre-Honeycomb, Android tablets. Everyone from Lenovo to Archos is producing better tablets in that price and specification range.
I still don't know why people want tablets. I have a Lenovo 10" myself and don't see what the big deal is. But I can honestly say that there's no way people who want them are going to settle for something like the Streak. It doesn't make sense on any level.
Well, there was a reason, which was that the precise combination of technologies hadn't reached the right price level and level of reliability until around the time the iPhone came out.
Other touch devices had come out, and been on the market for years, and in practical terms they differed only slightly from iPhone. Palm produced a range of touchscreen phones from the late 90s, for example. They suffered for the following reasons:
What we have here is what I call the TiVo phenomenom. TiVo seemed radically new to everyone when it came out, and it's become taken as read that everyone who's produced a DVR since has built something that would look radically different had TiVo's engineers not produced a DVR. However, a closer look shows that virtually everything about TiVo is obvious. Who would not have thought "I have a disk large enough, I'd like to automate recording TV shows onto the disk, and watch them at my leisure?"
So... why was TiVo first? Actually, the clearest evidence that TiVo did something obvious is to look at when their DVR came out. The TiVo came about at exactly the time it became easy to produce a $400 box containing a hard disk large enough to record a large number of TV programs. A year prior, and hard disk prices would have been too high for anything like a decent number of shows to fit on a single device, or else the device would have been well over the magic $400 figure needed for consumers to open their wallets.
iPhone is a product of its time, not of its manufacturer. With EDGE being just fast enough for mobile web use, the ARM CPUs of the time being just fast enough to render webpages designed for the desktop, touchscreen technology being just about ready for friendly use, memory (both RAM and flash) being just cheap and small enough to work in the box, and batteries being just powerful enough to run such a device for nearly a day given average use, the iPhone was able to be released. A year earlier, and it would have been an expensive, power hungry, heavy, slow, network impaired, flop.
Agree.
Also, if people didn't want to program, Excel wouldn't be so damned popular. Excel and other spreadsheet systems are used 90% of the time as an IDE with a really good integration of data and logic.
Always thought Microsoft missed a trick by not integrating Excel into Windows, actually making it the shell. They make have pissed off a lot of computer snobs, but there'd have been a dramatic improvement in usability - as in advanced features being intuitively used by regular users, and it'd probably have put the final nail in Apple's coffin.
Alas, they thought web browsers would make a better shell, and, well, now it looks like we'll all be working on iPads. Great.
My Kindle (third generation, 3G) reads PDFs too. I think it was only early versions that didn't.
I actually use the feature from time to time to get around the Kindles awful fonts. Import into OpenOffice.org, format using Century Schoolbook, export as PDF using page size settings optimized for the Kindle, and you have a nice looking document. Only works if you have access to the raw content of course, but for a lot of public domain stuff and websites...
Actually I do, which is why I wrote what I did. Unfortunately Ron Paul's most ardent supporters tend to be those who think he's something he clearly isn't.
No, you are. You're simply mindlessly rejecting criticism of Ron Paul because it suits you. You know damn well Paul's "response" is inadequate and doesn't make any sense. We're supposed to believe that Paul doesn't care what's written under his name, and that over a period of years he ignored repeated racist content posted in his eponymous newsletter?
When the allegations first came out I came across apologists like you too, who pretended it was something that happened once, and that Ron Paul couldn't possibly have noticed because of that. They conveniently ignored the fact it wasn't one off, that it happened over and over again, that nothing had been posted to withdraw the articles, and that Ron Paul clearly did have the ability to distance himself from the newsletter, something he did not do.
I've dealt with too many people like Ron Paul in my life not to notice what he is, and the gulf between what his acolytes think he is and what he is. You know the arguments you're using make no sense. I suggest you take the next step and accept the reason for that.
I said Buddy Roemer probably doesn't mean it.
What I said about Ron Paul is that he probably doesn't mean what you think he does. Ron's no civil libertarian enthusiast, he just believes that the jackboots should be worn by State government officials, not Feds. Yes, he has a record of voting against Federal expansion, but don't confuse that with civil libertarianism. And given his newsletter's comments on race, I wouldn't be surprised if ultimately he'd have come down on the Confederacy's side during the Civil War.
And yes I know a lot of people romanticize that group, but the Confederacy was the closest many states ever saw to fascism in modern American history - unsurprising, given the reason it was formed, and the attitudes of the states that formed it.
Well, the main problem is that he said mean, mean, horrible things about our Lord and Saviour George W. Bush after all poor George had done was try to depose him by helping out with a coup.
Big meanie.
You can avoid your messages being intercepted using this technique simply by piggybacking it on the one protocol that large telcos in every country are trying to find ways to block. Hooray!
OK, I'm being an ass. It's a cool concept.
Sure there might be one perceived as being that, and likewise there are on the left too. However, NONE OF THEM WILL BE A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT.
The lesson from Obama is that even if someone CLAIMS to be against those things, if he actually gets nominated, he WILL not be that man.
Buddy Roemer? Ron Paul? None have a fighting chance, and frankly, the former probably doesn't mean it, and the latter certainly doesn't mean what you think he does.
Obama. No question.
With Bush, there was the perception something could be done about it. There was an opposing side, that didn't always do the right thing, but occasionally stood against the extremes.
Obama stood as that, stood as "Change", and then gave us a big "Fuck you". Essentially, what we know now is that it's going to take decades to actually get someone in power who's not a right wing (pro-war, pro-torture, pro-extrajudicial killings, pro-corporate, anti-worker) extremist. Decades. Because there's no good reason to believe that the next jackass the Democrats put up will be any less extreme than Obama.
That's complete crap. Slashdot quoted the KHTML devs OUT OF CONTEXT at the time implying that, but it was false at the time and it's still false. And the majority of responses to the Slashdot article took Apple's "side" in the non-existent war.
The KHTML people kept being bugged by users asking when Apple's changes would be integrated with KHTML. Finally, one of the devs wrote an article explaining the situation - basically that Apple's changes weren't really available in a form that would make them easy to integrate. He didn't criticize Apple, he was simply explaining a technical problem. Apple, remember, didn't simply extend KHTML to make WebKit, they refactored the entire thing.
And that's absolutely fine. Nobody in the Free Software or Open Source movements has any problem with someone taking code, and making modifications to make it more suitable for their own uses. Few developers expect every change to be something they can integrate back into their own code. I can't even begin, to be honest, to comprehend the mentality that says that forks have to be limited in that way, and outside of the occasional prima-donna developer who slaps a GPL or Apache license on some code without thinking about it and then gets all upset when someone uses their code in a way they don't like, I suspect the majority of devs feel the same way.
Now, there is a small community who insist that any forks are bad. That all code has to be contributed to a single project. They're the people who get all upset that there's a GNOME and a KDE because it means "all this effort" is being duplicated. They think Firefox and Chrome should merge. They think that Linux should be given a Win32 API so that people don't have to rewrite all the existing apps for GNU/Linux. Those people are loud, obnoxious, and post to Slashdot, but few of them have ever done any development work in their entire lives.
Personally I consider Windows 7 to be the first version of Windows since 2000 that isn't absolutely awful. As a "Have to use Windows to interoperate with others occasionally" person, I consider it to be the version of Windows I want.
Personally I don't know anyone who doesn't prefer it over XP, but, whatever...
You are aware that an physician is neither a minimum wage job, nor a job for which a degree is not needed, correct?
Go back to the OP's point and ask yourself if anything you just posted pertains to the point, namely that Ron Paul clearly doesn't give a crap about the one opportunity most people have to avoid minimum wage hell.
Or I don't code the way you've chosen to.
I appreciate the quantity of Android apps you've written, but if a particular feature of development is bugging you so much, I have to wonder why you've not even tried to avoid it?
Google made it clear from the beginning that Honeycomb wasn't going to be opened. There's been no problem getting the source for Honeycomb's mobile peer, Gingerbread - I'm running it right now courtesy of Cyanogen.
I don't like the fact that Google didn't open Honeycomb, but they had their reasons, and I respect them. Unlike ICS, Honeycomb was always a rushed "production" beta, and Google didn't want developers working from it. ICS, on the other hand, is the future direction of Android. There's no reason to suppose that Google isn't going to release the source for it, as failing to do so would pretty much kill the platform.
I think some specifics might make this a more useful post. I've not come across the issues you describe.
As far as the "XML files (being) the preferred way of designing a UI", that's kinda dubious at best. Generally most of the specifics are coded in Java, with only basic metadata about the app being specified in XML. True, there's more metadata than there is in a desktop Java application, but it's not a lot.
I should state here I hate XML with a passion, so if I thought Android development burdened people with large amounts of entirely unnecessary and pointless XML coding, I'd be the first to be screaming from the hilltops. I just don't see that as being the case, however.
I'm pretty sure we'll see the source of 4.0. Generally Google doesn't release the source immediately, it makes a source code drop a little after the OS is announced and released.
You're going to read a lot of comments a long the lines of "Yes, because only a legitimate emailer will know {long list of obscure hoops you apparently have to jump through to send email, most of which are not documented in any RFC.}"
In reality, the answer is no. It's a fucking stupid idea, and the fact that there are a lot of fucking stupid idiots choosing things like this as a way to block spam doesn't justify it. In reality, it's something a spammer (generally a person who knows a little more about sending email than the average office network administrator) will know how to get around, but something your users and the people they want to communicate with will not.
Reject spam because it's spam, not because it doesn't comply to a made-up, easily circumvented, rule.
Pretty sure they got rid of their liberal wing back in January 2009.