Evolution and Thunderbird have the potential to render Outlook obsolete. Evolution has the Exchange support and calendaring but no XP version. Thunderbird is cross-platform but Exchange support and Calendaring are ongoing.
Sorry, but neither Tbird or Evolution are really even contenders for supplanting Outlook. One of the biggest reasons: They can't connect or sync to *anything*! Outlook syncs to web-based services and calendars, multiple PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. Palm Sync for Mozilla and Thunderbird has been vaporware for at least six years. (It's taken that long to get the extremely basic roaming profiles synchronization from Netscape 4 back into the first Mozilla Seamonkey release of just a few weeks ago!)
There has been no effort or commitment of the Mozilla team to add sync functions for Palm, much less PocketPC/WindowsMobile devices or any of the myriad web services.
Further, there is no open source solution of any kind that I'm aware of that's even remotely complete that addresses the issue of task and to-Do list managment and again, provides any sort of sync support.
In my mind, this is one of the biggest failing of the open source movement, and even though I *hate* Outlook with a passion, I am seriously considering moving to it simply because it's the *only* viable way to get my vital data synchronized between the various apps and platforms I want to use.
That's the really ironic part: Oulook's ability to sync makes it the perfect data exchange hub, and allows me to choose best-of-breed applications for mail, tasks, calendar, contacts, etc, or even multiples of each to leverage cool new web services interfaces and the like. In other words, Outlook actually lets me replace (or augment) Outlook, but nothing else can give me that same capability... This is weird, and a complete failure of the open source model to respond to real market needs. (Which is hardly surprising since this sort of thing is rarely important to programmers, who are still the only audience open source deveopers care about. Microsoft can win in the end by realizing this and building the apps and functionality that real users really want...
In terms of actual capbility for creating and managing office documents and content, there really hasn't been much significant improvement since Office 4.3. Office 97 is functionally completely adequate, but MS made sure that it's unstable running on XP, so if you want it to work with long documents (and can't use a tool like WordPerfect that can deal with them correctly), you have to upgrade to at least Office 2000.
Although I'm impressed by the UI streamlining of the "Ribbon" in Office 12 (or whatever they call it), I really don't want to get on the MS upgrade treadmill by placing critical reliance on apps that have enforced license policies that prevent me from using them (legally) on many machines over many years, as I've done with Office 97 and 2000. This "anti-piracy" crap is really just designed to force me into a $400 upgrade every other year whether I want it or not.
It's enough to make me seriously consider doing without MS Office, but I'm really not prepared to go the hair-shirt route just yet - although I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Unix bigot, MS really is the best desktop environment going. (Yes, even better than the Mac, since there's a lot more quality software, and a much higher percentage of that is free, or at least much more reasonably priced than Mac software which can get expensive in a hurry. Besides, can you imagine the outcry if MS tried to charge $129 for security updates and fixes of really nasty sloppy bugs like Apple does with their OS X upgrades? And no, no desktop based on Linux, BSD or Unix is really even close - I've been hoping for a decade now, but am still waiting.)
But then the majority of the Mac users I know haven't seen the point in upgrading to Tiger either, and that doesn't stop Apple fanboys proclaiming it like teh greatest OS evar.
I counter your anecdote with my anecdote: I know about a dozen people on Macs and every single one of them has upgraded to Tiger (in fact most of them are on iLife 06 even). And yes, they do think its the greatest OS ever. Whatever works for you.
Actually, anyone that buys iLife has pretty much ceded any claim to being anything other than a rabid Apple fanboy - other than Garage Band (which is of no use for the hordes of us that count the CD player and the radio as the only instruments we play), all of its functions are generally available for free in other OSes, including Windows.
I love OS X, but Apple's near-mandatory upgrades at $130 a pop ever several months is a genuine ripoff. Cann you imagine the outcry if Microsoft tried that? I bought XP about 2 1/2 hears ago, but SP2, and lots of other valuable updates and fixes have been freely available automatically through Windows Update. Windows has its (substantial) drawbacks for sure, but there sure is a double standard when talk of Apple comes up - at least the hair-shirted Linux-on-the-desktop guys are consistent...
Several years ago, I proposed here on/. a stable and self-regulating variable patent duration system. While I haven't worked it all the way through to find the optimal values, the basic idea is this: Patents in areas where there is little to no innovation (as measured by the number of patents *granted* in that category in the past year) would receive maximum protection, just as they do today. Patents in areas where there is a *lot* of activity would have their terms reduced down to a minimum of 4-5 years so that their duration is roughly inversely proportional to the number of patents granted in that category, down to the minimum length.
There are several benefits to this approach:
First, the system rewards those that create real breakthroughs with longer terms for their patents, whether these are breakthroughs in new areas, or improvments in moribund areas. (Remember that the patent system exists to protect and *encourage* innovation and especially commercial exploitation of that innovation by providing an incentive to transfer improved technologies into the hands of the populace for the benefit of the society as a whole.)
Second, the system is self-regulating: as the pace of patents being issued slows, the term of newly issued patents will increase again, rewarding those that make significant improvements even in "mature" categories. The short term of 4-5 years is long enough to recover R&D expenditures in a "hot" market, but short enough to not stifle further innovation by locking up for decades the profit potential in what should be a hotly contested market.
Third, it fairly strongly discourages the filing of "junk" patents like the zillions of fluff patents filed by most big corporations (IBM, anyone?), since getting those patents issued just reduces the value of any really innovative patents they might want to pursue.
Fundamentally, it's important to recognize that patents are an economic instrument at least as much as they are a technical instrument, and Congress has made it very clear that their purpose was to *encourage* progress in the arts and sciences. Most patent reforms being discussed now only address the technical side, and are thus doomed to fail, usually by so weakening patents that they eliminate the incentive for inventors (whether individual or corporate) to make the investments of time and money required to create new and useful innovations. We want and need patents of all kinds, but we need to make sure they're working for the good of all, not just a few. (To be honest I have *far* more of a problem with the perversion of copyright laws to indefinite duration than I do with even the worst examples of patents - patents can at least be contested, and even bad ones go away after a couple of decades, but copyright will soon hold hostage an entire century's output of human creativity. That's flat wrong. I really see no logical reason why any copyright protection should last longer than the longest patent term. If twenty-one years is enough to recover what is sometimes millions of dollars in the marketplace, it should also be more than enough to recover the effort (both monetary and in man-years)involved in creating books, songs, and movies.)
The resulting shorter terms for many patents would benefit the economy because they would create a strong incentive to bring technologies to market more quickly. This benefits both technology creators and consumers, and the self-regulating nature of inversely variable terms prevents the entire patent system from being dominated by large companies with deep pockets.
Although I'm sure there are difficulties presented by this proposal, it seems to adress the biggest problems quite well, and is worth considering...
How many legitimate programs can get away with passing advertising messages, embedding adverts, popping up annoying content etc. and not get called adware.
How many companies can do this and then charge for `premium` functionality?
Good question, there are lots of ad-based apps and services that are not generally considered adware. For instance, until very recently, you could count Opera in that category. You still can count Google (Maps, Earth, and Gmail, anyone?), Yahoo and their ilk in that category. (Interestingly, MSN seems to have stepped back from this, although their recent deal with TimeWarner may mark the end of that and a full-frontal assault on Google's ad-based model.)
Like it or not, ad-based apps/services are a proven business model, and are probably here to stay...
Firefox was supposed to be the lean, fast, lightweight alternative to Mozilla; it doesn't appear to have turned out that way.
Nope. That's why those of us that care about performance still use the Mozilla Suite (now under the deplorable name of Seamonkey) instead of the separate Firefox, Thunderbird, nVu, etc.
Even running just the browser and e-mail, I find my XP box is significantly faster and more stable with the Moz Suite than the FF/TB combo. Memory leaks and the like are still huge problem either way, but at least you don't have to duplicate all that code in two different apps, and the integration between e-mail and the browser is smoother in the Suite, too.
And don't even get me started on the features like roaming profiles (store your prefs, bookmarks, etc on a network server so they're available from anywhere!) and searching of bookmarks that doesn't obliterate their heirarchical location that worked in Netscape 4.x that *still* haven't made it into any of the Mozilla apps...
I'd also check out Stalker Software's latest version of Communigate Pro. I'm heavily leaning toward this for my own new company. It's a very capable, and very reasonably priced (~$700 for 25-user license), especially when you consider that not only is it a generic SIP switch and PBX, but also a world-class e-mail and calendar server that works as a truly open drop-in replacement for Exchange server with Outlook, or standards-based or web clients. (CGP is used by some of the world's largest ISPs as their mail server, so it's seriously industrial strength and routinely trounces competitors in the shootouts for large-scale mail servers for ISPs, Universities, and small countries and planetoids.)
The integrated calendaring is what sold me initially, but the SIP/PBX functions look like they could be a super addition, and provide some very interesting opportunities for a truly integrated messaging and communications backbone encompassing voice, e-mail, calndaring, and even screen sharing and video. Pretty darn cool.
Caveat: The PBX functionality is new and although I've talked to Stalker about it, I haven't actually tried it yet. It looks to be greatly enhanced in the brand new version 6, though.
It runs on darn near anything (around 2-3 dozen hardware and OS platforms including all major open source OSes) and there's a free trial available if you want to try it.
My research leans toward Polycom, Snom, or Cisco for IP phone sets. Personally, I think support for 802.3af (NOT proprietary) Power over Ethernet is pretty much mandatory, though, and the incremental cost per port is falling like a rock.
I have no affiliation with Stalker other than as a potential customer, but tell them Dub Dublin sent you so they'll give me a good discount when it's time for me to buy...;-)
Quoth them: "We consider Open Source Media to be a description of what we are and do, not a trade name.", "We chose the name "Open Source" because it signals the way we produce radio and web content."
Apparently "Open Source" now means blogging about politics. Who knew?
Actually, if half the people here *had* a clue, they'd realize that "open source" is not something owned by hackers or anyone else. It's a *generic* term, for goodness sake! The fact that the crowd that hangs out here associates it with computer programming is almost incidental - it *is* a good description of what the bloggers are doing now - providing a very open and transparent source of news and information that is more resistant to manipulation and distortion than anything we've ever seen before.
Seriously - until the advent of this sort of open source media, CBS would have gotten away with passing off fraudulent documents in their effort to smear a sitting US President and sway an upcoming election. The open source reporting of the blogs, although flawed at times, converged extremely rapidly on the truth, weeding out the best analysis from the worst, and applying a degree of critical thinking and review that is unheard of in any conventional sort of journalism at an equally unheard-of pace.
Eric Raymond's dictum of "all bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs" explains one of the chief strengths of open source programming, but the same is also true of open source news reporting and analysis - it's the collective effort of distributed human intelligence "cycles" for a common goal that dinstinguishes "open source" in either case.
That's why what OSM is doing *is* open source. It's just reporting and news analysis in this case, and it's an exciting change that is going to fundamentally alter the reliability of media for the better(and may well ultimately significantly diminish the ability of all parties to "spin" events) for a long time to come.
"Open source" doesn't have to have anything to do with code (the term was in use, although not widely, many years before it became common amongst computer types.)
Bottom line: Hackers don't own the term "open source" any more than they own the term "free beer".
That is absolutely wrong. People who know will tell you that bird flu kills those with healthy immune systems far easier than those with weak immune systems.
Really? Why would that be? Can you give any evidence for this? I'm not doubting you, but I can't understand why that would be true and how we would know as the number of deaths from bird flu is as yet fairly low.
The problem with many virulent infections is the collateral damage that a very healthy immune system can do when fighting off disease in lung tissue - this is why many types of infections, which are not all that serious in themselves, result in secondary infections and pneumonia. In fact, detailed analysis of the historical resords reveals that most of the victims of the 1918 flu were killed by pneumonia caused by secondary infections, not the flu itself. The existence of modern antibiotics to effectively treat such secondary infections is one of the biggest reasons that drawing a parallel between the 1918 flu and anything that could happen today (at least in a developed country) is pretty flawed reasoning.
Bird Flu hysteria is just that. Here is a very well-researched current article that points out a number of very good reasons why Bird Flu is unlikely to be anywhere near as big a concern as the professional hand-wringers are saying: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html The article includes many links to a number of reliable sources as well as panicky and completely unsupportable press accounts.
Remember that in 1976, more people died from the Swine Flu *vaccine* amid similar hysteria than from the swine flu itself. There may be a lesson there. (And if you can handle the truth, you might want to have a good look at how similar hysteria drives the "global warming" alarmists, too...)
I honestly think that distribution of video media over computers will be hamstrung until providers consider how the way they make their media available will work with a Home Entertainment Center PC.
No, the PC will never be it - people watch TVs because watching PCs sucks pond water.
Pay attention to what this enables, though, even if it's not in the announcement: There is nothing about the technologies decscribed that would prevent downloading them as new features for a Tivo unit connected to an Ethernet. Tivo's been trying madly to get me to plug mine into the net, offering useless and entirely uncompelling freebies like the "home media option". If I could access decent programming through my Tivo, though (so it's on my TV, not my computer, where I have never, ever, watched a movie), that might convince me both to hook the Tivo to the net as well as consider keeping Tivo's ridiculously priced service. $15/mo for a guide is a ripoff, but if they were to throw in the ability to download and watch whatever I want from a reasonably large library of decent quality shows, they've dramtically increased the desirability of Tivo's service.
Note that when presented this way, this is an very interesting and much more practical hybrid between traditional Tivo wishlist recording and true VoD systems, and one that has a preexisting very large viewer base just waiting for the right software upgrade for thier Tivo boxes. This service, like all broadcast services, wants eyballs - and Tivo can deliver them - without a PC and the tech hassles that would otherwise limit the audience to propellerheads.
Interestingly, this effectively makes WB's archive yet another cable channel (although with somewhat different flexibility, since there's no "live" feed), but one that does not have to pay for transponder space, or deal with the MSOs. AOL could easily springboard this into hundreds of similar "channels", somce of which would even be mirrors (as in archive mirrors!) of existing channels. Miss that cool "Dogfights" special on the History Channel the other night? Maybe you just discovered a cool new series and want to "catch up" on the old episodes? No problem - just tell the Tivo to download them from the archive and you've got a week or two to watch them before they automatically vanish. This really could change TV viewing forever - it's almost as good as real VoD, but isn't locked into clunky cable networks - AOL and DirecTV could clean up with this sort of thing in a DirecTivo-NG. Just don't let AMC put seventy-five commercial breaks into a movie using only three commercials, and it'll work fine...
I've heard that AOL's software basically associates itself with various file types, puts itself into various context-sensitive menus, etc....
Hmm, that would make them just exactly like... Apple! Thier QuickTime player is perhaps the worst offender w.r.t. taking over things you don't want it to. Heck, QT takes over as your *TIFF* viewer, even when you tell it not to. Apple/QT is now far worse about hijacking PCs than Real, who for all their faults at least listened to complaints and made new versions much less intrusive.
But somehow, Apple is immune from serious criticism, even if it's justified, and that's especially true here on Slashdot...
If you really love Linux/Unix/Etc, then at least try to support it in a way that encourages new users.
Why? I'm not a zealot, although I freely admit to a strong preference for Unix. More importantly, over the past several years, Windows has come to offer pretty much everything Unix/Linux does, but not the reverse. (With U/Win, Microsoft's own SFU, or even the clunky Gnu-flavored Cygwin, it's hard to tell my XP box from most of the Unix workstations I've used for the past two decades, and it runs all those vital windows apps, too - things like Palm desktop, which is required for my Treo (unless I use Outlook - heaven forfend!), just for starters, and Visio, which is mentioned in another post...)
It's time to realize that so long as Microsoft avoids unduly onerous license fees (and most of us only pay those through the MS tax on new computers anyway), most people will *never* have any interest in an OSS desktop OS. (As for license fees, Microsoft is flirting with the limits of market acceptance now, so that could mean price cuts moving forward, something they've never done before.)
From an average customer's point-of-view, any decision for BSD/Linux involves some level of hair-shirt-wearing and things that just can't be done, while choosing Windows offers the best of both the Windows and Unix worlds. Like it or not, it's that simple. Most of the world (including me) don't give a rat's behind about promoting Stallman's bizarre communistic agenda - we just want flexible software that works with reasonably open and/or well-defined interfaces. The ball in in Microsoft's court - interestingly, the best way to further strengthen their monopoly is not to try too hard to make it happen - opening up some actually helps thier position from here on out.
Seriously, closed source drivers are a reality, especially in the wireless world, where it's becoming very clear that there simply aren't many OEMs that will support open source drivers at all, and those that do are likely to lag the Windows world by years.
That's why FreeBSD is working in "Project Evil" which will let BSD directly use Windows device drivers. This is a very pragmatic approach, and one that will eliminate the driver issue entirely for FreeBSD if it works as planned.
Thanks for mentioning Dia. I've been looking for a free Visio-like program.
Dia is *nothing* like Visio. At best, it's very crude emulation of perhaps 5% of Visio's functionality (and I'm being generous at that). If that's all you need, fine, but if you really use Visio at all (especially its native intelligence, complex stencils, and DB links), then Dia is a cruel joke. Dia's layout engine is not even capable of things that Visio 1.0 could do, way back in the Shapeware days. Dia also locks your work into a completely non-interoperable file format, while still managing to be pretty useless in talking with most open and defacto formats, including Visio. At least the execrable GIMP has a reasonable subset of its target's functionality, even if it is wrapped in one of the most non-intuitive and user-hostile GUIs on the planet.
Visio (along with Corel Draw) is one of the biggest reasons I will probably never move off a Windows desktop: Linux et al offer nothing even remotely like it - heck even the Mac can't hold its own against Visio (plus OSX requires the much more expensive Illustrator just to match CorelDraw...)
I've tried varying Linux and BSD desktops nearly a dozen times over the years, but none of the open source OS platforms can touch the usefulness of the apps available for Windows, so I come trudging back every time. I've finally given up and realized that I'm probably a Windows user for life, just becasue it lets me get the job done where nothing else can. That's a powerful advantage. I'd actually like to move to the Mac, but it costs much more, especially since there is much more open source/shareware for Windows than OS X, which can nickel-and-dime you to death.
I'm starting a new company now, and have the luxury of defining a complete IT environment from scratch. After looking at all the alternatives to avoid Microsoft, I surprised myself by tentatively deciding to standardize on a Windows desktop, for both overall cost and functionality reasons. (Servers, though, will be 100% BSD, Solaris, or Linux, in that order of preference, depending on app requirements - fortunately, we foresee no critical server apps that require Windows.)
So, out of curiosity, are you more into the NetBSD logo then? I didn't like it much at all at first, but on the other hand it might look better in 10 years than most.
The NetBSD logo is among the best as open source logos go (MySQL and Sleepycat are probably the best, but they're real corporate efforts.) I'll agree that 3D shaded/gradient logos may well look very "turn of the century" in a few years (like much of the currently fashionable "urban/industrial" architecture with galvanized trim), but I think it's really to early to tell for certain.
I think this new FreeBSD logo, while not to my own tastes, is very well-done, given the theme Gural chose to pursue. The custom FreeBSD font is very well-done and is an extra-nice touch, along with packaging designs, etc.
If you stop and think about it, this is a hard logo to do well - they wanted to distance themselves from the old daemon in tennis shoes, but what else says Unix (or even BSD) without actually saying "Unix" (which you can't do for copyright reasons)? I think Gural has done a great job of echoing the daemon logo without being hidebound by realism. This is a nice logo, done fairly well. We'll see how it holds up...
So, if you are going to copy a trend, try to do it before the guy who started it moves on.
Lexus is finally starting to notice this, which is why those butt-ugly clear & chrome taillight lenses are mercifully beginning to go out of fashion. I always thought it odd that an upscale (although bland) brand like Lexus decided to blatantly embrace (and unfortunately popularize) a ricerocket/drifter trend like those hideous taillights. Nissan, though should at least get some points for trying to bring back sixties jet-pod taillights within the confines of the chromy taillight theme on the Altima.
Oddly, the only phrase that can really describe such a design is "Cadillac-ugly", which is funny because they don't use that sort of taillight - that's quite possibly their only redeeming design feature these days.
Instead I started with Buffalo's TeraStations which are affordable and have built-in RAID support.
While the Buffalo product isn't bad, it's really not industrial strength, either.
Check out Infrant's ReadyNAS servers as an alternative (http://infrant.com/) - lots of really nice features (including NFS support, if you want/need it, unlike Buffalo), much better performance, and a rack-mount option, if you're into that kinky rack thing...
Seriously, if you're looking for a killer low-cost, high-performance NAS server appliance, check it out. I haven't found anything that better balances cost and performance, although let me say I've not yet seen one in action up close, so I can't offer a real recommendation just yet.
Why not? I can't imagine a situation in which someone who would be willing to license their code under the BSD license would be unwilling to license it under the GPL.
Pretty much *every* author that chooses the BSD license is unwilling to license their code under the GPL. There are those of us who understand that BSD is the truly free license, and that you cannot have more freedom by *adding* restrictions to use, especially if those additional restrictions are there simply to further a radical political agenda purpose-designed to eliminate all commerce in software.
In fact in my mind, if the truly free licenses needs any restrictions at all, those restrictions shoud be aimed to prohibit taking code with a truly free license (BSD, MIT, X, etc.) and locking it up in a viral protection scheme like the GPL.
Truly free licenses are very, very different from the GPL, which seeks the most heinous sort of discriminatory prohibition - one that is based on the fundamental premise that all buying and selling of software is evil and should not be permitted. Only a few moonbats like Stallman really believe that...
Because backward/forward button is not enough. I might want to be able to bookmark where I'm at.
Definitely not enough. Pay attention to how often you find your place in a book (especially a reference book) by just "opening it to 'about there'", which will often get you surprisingly close to your target. In fact, if bookmarks have some sort of relative position indicator, they often don't even need labels, making such a reader even easier.
One thing that's definitely needed is the ability to flip pages *very* fast, preferably in bunches. (Say 4, 10, 20 or 50 pages at a time - the even numbers are important, since the reader should have some clear way of keepng right and left pages separate - pay attention, and you'll be surprised how often that's important, too. Of course, the display really should be able to show at least two pages at a time, too.)
be able to read whether it's bright or dark outside.
Horsepuckey. Why add an additional requirement? One of the most poisonous ideas of the 20th century (that we need to give up in the 21st) is that screens need to glow. High quality and readbility is absolutely independent of the luminosity of the display, except in those really rare occasions when you read in the pitch black.
We need high resolution, color saturation, and contrast (think a screen that looks like National Geographic), not a light emitter. Luminous displays will also eat so much power that they'll never make the thing a real alternative to paper. Battery technology has improved dramatically over the past few years, but it's *still* next-to-impossible to find a small, lightweight computer that will run for an entire shift, much less days or weeks, which is what's really necessary for such a device.
Also keep in mind that even the biggest honking PC graphics cards of today (also notorious power hogs) are not even remotely capable of driving such a display with magazine-quality resolution.
(Do the math: let's say we want to show two 8x10 inch pages at 1200 dpi: that's 115 megapixels per page or 230 megapixels total. An HDTV screen at 1920x1080 is only 2 megapixels, so a magazine quality e-book needs to crank the pixel equivalent of 115 HDTV screens!)
Paper works *really* well, and any display technology has a *long* way to go before it catches up - my guess is that a real, practical e-book alternative is still a couple of decades off. (I'd love to be wrong about that one, but I'm probably not...)
Wow, Acronym Soup. No wonder I always hated Windows:-).
C'mon, like MS is any worse in the gobbledygook department than anybody else? Yeah, apt-getting.DEBs, installing an RPM with alien, or using emerge to do the./make configure;make;makeinstall is so much easier than dealing with a few MS acronyms...:-)
What is it about computers that inspires people to inscrutability? Is it some deep-seated nerd-need to intellectually bludgeon people with invented complexity? (Not that hackers have a monopoly here: government bureaucrats are similarly adept at obfuscation.)
If there is no hope for a Firefox-style rebirth, maybe the developer effort should move on to something with a future.
Riiiiight. Butchering Mozilla into separate applications for browsing, e-mail, editing, etc., each of which are almost exactly the same size as the Mozilla suite alone (~22 MB for Mozilla, ~21 MB each for the others), was sure a big win, wasn't it? Not only that, the Firefox split also brought extension incompatibility and upgrade problems that make Microsoft's DLL Hell in NT look pretty good.
OpenOffice is probably fatally flawed, and Sun and the OOo community has certainly completely botched the thing by letting a bunch of clueless Object Oriented architects try to impose inappropriate architectures on the old StarOffice. It's now both bad and slooow - the original StarOffice was niether, but it did suffer from a uniquely bad user interface.
The really odd thing is that even before Sun shelled out the big bucks for Star Division, they *already owned* the code to a top-notch set of office components that were built on a proper object architecture: The productivity apps they picked up when they bought Lighthouse Design. These were very nice, truly-OO apps that (like all of Lighthouse's stuff) were designed for NeXTstep. I'm told by some folks that know that converting that Objective C code over to Java would have been a LOT less work than what they've had to do for Star. It's a shame that only the Java object modeler survived Sun's acquisition of Lighthouse - they had some very nice productivity apps...
The 1RU has dual power supplies. I like that. The Dell might as well, but personally I'd buy a Sun over a Dell. But then I'd rather wax my butt crack with an angry wasp than buy a Dell.
ROFL! Now, that's a colorful comparison...
I've worked for both Sun and Dell at fairly high levels, and I can tell you one thing for sure: Sun cares a whole lot more than Dell about making sure things work. (I left Dell after (only barely) withstanding intense pressure from multiple Directors and VPs (including Quality!) to ship a cost-saving change that was *guaranteed* to cause Dell laptop customers to lose both data and suspend capability. The argument literally degenerated to, "Who cares? It'll save big bucks and help us meet targets!")
Sun has its problems to be sure, but it has a culture of doing the right thing, where Dell has a culture of doing whatever optimizes income, regardless of the fallout. (Dell also carefully manages/manipulates the customer experience to make sure that Dell customers "feel loved" and "feel positive about Dell", even though their problems are often not solved.)
Consider buying Dell if you want stock, but buy Sun if you want a computer, especially one that will just flat work.
I'm looking at a whole raft of new computers now, and Dell isn't even going to be considered...
Isn't ThinkGeek actually owned by Slashdot? (Or at least the OSDN/Slashdot/Sourceforge syndicate?)
(I've never bought anything from ThinkGeek, for two reasons: 1) most (99%) of it has no appeal at all for me, and 2) their prices are outrageous, so even the few things that do hold some interest are out of the question...)
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution and Thunderbird have the potential to render Outlook obsolete. Evolution has the Exchange support and calendaring but no XP version. Thunderbird is cross-platform but Exchange support and Calendaring are ongoing.
Sorry, but neither Tbird or Evolution are really even contenders for supplanting Outlook. One of the biggest reasons: They can't connect or sync to *anything*! Outlook syncs to web-based services and calendars, multiple PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. Palm Sync for Mozilla and Thunderbird has been vaporware for at least six years. (It's taken that long to get the extremely basic roaming profiles synchronization from Netscape 4 back into the first Mozilla Seamonkey release of just a few weeks ago!)
There has been no effort or commitment of the Mozilla team to add sync functions for Palm, much less PocketPC/WindowsMobile devices or any of the myriad web services.
Further, there is no open source solution of any kind that I'm aware of that's even remotely complete that addresses the issue of task and to-Do list managment and again, provides any sort of sync support.
In my mind, this is one of the biggest failing of the open source movement, and even though I *hate* Outlook with a passion, I am seriously considering moving to it simply because it's the *only* viable way to get my vital data synchronized between the various apps and platforms I want to use.
That's the really ironic part: Oulook's ability to sync makes it the perfect data exchange hub, and allows me to choose best-of-breed applications for mail, tasks, calendar, contacts, etc, or even multiples of each to leverage cool new web services interfaces and the like. In other words, Outlook actually lets me replace (or augment) Outlook, but nothing else can give me that same capability... This is weird, and a complete failure of the open source model to respond to real market needs. (Which is hardly surprising since this sort of thing is rarely important to programmers, who are still the only audience open source deveopers care about. Microsoft can win in the end by realizing this and building the apps and functionality that real users really want...
In terms of actual capbility for creating and managing office documents and content, there really hasn't been much significant improvement since Office 4.3.
Office 97 is functionally completely adequate, but MS made sure that it's unstable running on XP, so if you want it to work with long documents (and can't use a tool like WordPerfect that can deal with them correctly), you have to upgrade to at least Office 2000.
Although I'm impressed by the UI streamlining of the "Ribbon" in Office 12 (or whatever they call it), I really don't want to get on the MS upgrade treadmill by placing critical reliance on apps that have enforced license policies that prevent me from using them (legally) on many machines over many years, as I've done with Office 97 and 2000. This "anti-piracy" crap is really just designed to force me into a $400 upgrade every other year whether I want it or not.
It's enough to make me seriously consider doing without MS Office, but I'm really not prepared to go the hair-shirt route just yet - although I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Unix bigot, MS really is the best desktop environment going. (Yes, even better than the Mac, since there's a lot more quality software, and a much higher percentage of that is free, or at least much more reasonably priced than Mac software which can get expensive in a hurry. Besides, can you imagine the outcry if MS tried to charge $129 for security updates and fixes of really nasty sloppy bugs like Apple does with their OS X upgrades? And no, no desktop based on Linux, BSD or Unix is really even close - I've been hoping for a decade now, but am still waiting.)
But then the majority of the Mac users I know haven't seen the point in upgrading to Tiger either, and that doesn't stop Apple fanboys proclaiming it like teh greatest OS evar.
I counter your anecdote with my anecdote: I know about a dozen people on Macs and every single one of them has upgraded to Tiger (in fact most of them are on iLife 06 even). And yes, they do think its the greatest OS ever. Whatever works for you.
Actually, anyone that buys iLife has pretty much ceded any claim to being anything other than a rabid Apple fanboy - other than Garage Band (which is of no use for the hordes of us that count the CD player and the radio as the only instruments we play), all of its functions are generally available for free in other OSes, including Windows.
I love OS X, but Apple's near-mandatory upgrades at $130 a pop ever several months is a genuine ripoff. Cann you imagine the outcry if Microsoft tried that? I bought XP about 2 1/2 hears ago, but SP2, and lots of other valuable updates and fixes have been freely available automatically through Windows Update. Windows has its (substantial) drawbacks for sure, but there sure is a double standard when talk of Apple comes up - at least the hair-shirted Linux-on-the-desktop guys are consistent...
Toxoplasma infected rats do not...share this aversion; ...rats...actually seemed to be suicidally attracted to the cat-scented areas...
Toxoplasma infection...has been estimated...[to range]...from 22% in the UK to 84% in France.
>If that's the case, then why do French tanks have a reverse gear?
No, you've got it wrong - French tanks only have a reverse gear - it's ideal for falling back. What would the French ever use a forward gear for?
Several years ago, I proposed here on /. a stable and self-regulating variable patent duration system. While I haven't worked it all the way through to find the optimal values, the basic idea is this: Patents in areas where there is little to no innovation (as measured by the number of patents *granted* in that category in the past year) would receive maximum protection, just as they do today. Patents in areas where there is a *lot* of activity would have their terms reduced down to a minimum of 4-5 years so that their duration is roughly inversely proportional to the number of patents granted in that category, down to the minimum length.
There are several benefits to this approach:
First, the system rewards those that create real breakthroughs with longer terms for their patents, whether these are breakthroughs in new areas, or improvments in moribund areas. (Remember that the patent system exists to protect and *encourage* innovation and especially commercial exploitation of that innovation by providing an incentive to transfer improved technologies into the hands of the populace for the benefit of the society as a whole.)
Second, the system is self-regulating: as the pace of patents being issued slows, the term of newly issued patents will increase again, rewarding those that make significant improvements even in "mature" categories. The short term of 4-5 years is long enough to recover R&D expenditures in a "hot" market, but short enough to not stifle further innovation by locking up for decades the profit potential in what should be a hotly contested market.
Third, it fairly strongly discourages the filing of "junk" patents like the zillions of fluff patents filed by most big corporations (IBM, anyone?), since getting those patents issued just reduces the value of any really innovative patents they might want to pursue.
Fundamentally, it's important to recognize that patents are an economic instrument at least as much as they are a technical instrument, and Congress has made it very clear that their purpose was to *encourage* progress in the arts and sciences. Most patent reforms being discussed now only address the technical side, and are thus doomed to fail, usually by so weakening patents that they eliminate the incentive for inventors (whether individual or corporate) to make the investments of time and money required to create new and useful innovations. We want and need patents of all kinds, but we need to make sure they're working for the good of all, not just a few. (To be honest I have *far* more of a problem with the perversion of copyright laws to indefinite duration than I do with even the worst examples of patents - patents can at least be contested, and even bad ones go away after a couple of decades, but copyright will soon hold hostage an entire century's output of human creativity. That's flat wrong. I really see no logical reason why any copyright protection should last longer than the longest patent term. If twenty-one years is enough to recover what is sometimes millions of dollars in the marketplace, it should also be more than enough to recover the effort (both monetary and in man-years)involved in creating books, songs, and movies.)
The resulting shorter terms for many patents would benefit the economy because they would create a strong incentive to bring technologies to market more quickly. This benefits both technology creators and consumers, and the self-regulating nature of inversely variable terms prevents the entire patent system from being dominated by large companies with deep pockets.
Although I'm sure there are difficulties presented by this proposal, it seems to adress the biggest problems quite well, and is worth considering...
How many legitimate programs can get away with passing advertising messages, embedding adverts, popping up annoying content etc. and not get called adware.
How many companies can do this and then charge for `premium` functionality?
Good question, there are lots of ad-based apps and services that are not generally considered adware. For instance, until very recently, you could count Opera in that category. You still can count Google (Maps, Earth, and Gmail, anyone?), Yahoo and their ilk in that category. (Interestingly, MSN seems to have stepped back from this, although their recent deal with TimeWarner may mark the end of that and a full-frontal assault on Google's ad-based model.)
Like it or not, ad-based apps/services are a proven business model, and are probably here to stay...
Firefox was supposed to be the lean, fast, lightweight alternative to Mozilla; it doesn't appear to have turned out that way.
Nope. That's why those of us that care about performance still use the Mozilla Suite (now under the deplorable name of Seamonkey) instead of the separate Firefox, Thunderbird, nVu, etc.
Even running just the browser and e-mail, I find my XP box is significantly faster and more stable with the Moz Suite than the FF/TB combo. Memory leaks and the like are still huge problem either way, but at least you don't have to duplicate all that code in two different apps, and the integration between e-mail and the browser is smoother in the Suite, too.
And don't even get me started on the features like roaming profiles (store your prefs, bookmarks, etc on a network server so they're available from anywhere!) and searching of bookmarks that doesn't obliterate their heirarchical location that worked in Netscape 4.x that *still* haven't made it into any of the Mozilla apps...
I'd also check out Stalker Software's latest version of Communigate Pro. I'm heavily leaning toward this for my own new company. It's a very capable, and very reasonably priced (~$700 for 25-user license), especially when you consider that not only is it a generic SIP switch and PBX, but also a world-class e-mail and calendar server that works as a truly open drop-in replacement for Exchange server with Outlook, or standards-based or web clients. (CGP is used by some of the world's largest ISPs as their mail server, so it's seriously industrial strength and routinely trounces competitors in the shootouts for large-scale mail servers for ISPs, Universities, and small countries and planetoids.)
;-)
The integrated calendaring is what sold me initially, but the SIP/PBX functions look like they could be a super addition, and provide some very interesting opportunities for a truly integrated messaging and communications backbone encompassing voice, e-mail, calndaring, and even screen sharing and video. Pretty darn cool.
Caveat: The PBX functionality is new and although I've talked to Stalker about it, I haven't actually tried it yet. It looks to be greatly enhanced in the brand new version 6, though.
It runs on darn near anything (around 2-3 dozen hardware and OS platforms including all major open source OSes) and there's a free trial available if you want to try it.
My research leans toward Polycom, Snom, or Cisco for IP phone sets. Personally, I think support for 802.3af (NOT proprietary) Power over Ethernet is pretty much mandatory, though, and the incremental cost per port is falling like a rock.
I have no affiliation with Stalker other than as a potential customer, but tell them Dub Dublin sent you so they'll give me a good discount when it's time for me to buy...
Quoth them: "We consider Open Source Media to be a description of what we are and do, not a trade name.", "We chose the name "Open Source" because it signals the way we produce radio and web content."
Apparently "Open Source" now means blogging about politics. Who knew?
Actually, if half the people here *had* a clue, they'd realize that "open source" is not something owned by hackers or anyone else. It's a *generic* term, for goodness sake! The fact that the crowd that hangs out here associates it with computer programming is almost incidental - it *is* a good description of what the bloggers are doing now - providing a very open and transparent source of news and information that is more resistant to manipulation and distortion than anything we've ever seen before.
Seriously - until the advent of this sort of open source media, CBS would have gotten away with passing off fraudulent documents in their effort to smear a sitting US President and sway an upcoming election. The open source reporting of the blogs, although flawed at times, converged extremely rapidly on the truth, weeding out the best analysis from the worst, and applying a degree of critical thinking and review that is unheard of in any conventional sort of journalism at an equally unheard-of pace.
Eric Raymond's dictum of "all bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs" explains one of the chief strengths of open source programming, but the same is also true of open source news reporting and analysis - it's the collective effort of distributed human intelligence "cycles" for a common goal that dinstinguishes "open source" in either case.
That's why what OSM is doing *is* open source. It's just reporting and news analysis in this case, and it's an exciting change that is going to fundamentally alter the reliability of media for the better(and may well ultimately significantly diminish the ability of all parties to "spin" events) for a long time to come.
"Open source" doesn't have to have anything to do with code (the term was in use, although not widely, many years before it became common amongst computer types.)
Bottom line: Hackers don't own the term "open source" any more than they own the term "free beer".
That is absolutely wrong. People who know will tell you that bird flu kills those with healthy immune systems far easier than those with weak immune systems.
Really? Why would that be? Can you give any evidence for this? I'm not doubting you, but I can't understand why that would be true and how we would know as the number of deaths from bird flu is as yet fairly low.
The problem with many virulent infections is the collateral damage that a very healthy immune system can do when fighting off disease in lung tissue - this is why many types of infections, which are not all that serious in themselves, result in secondary infections and pneumonia. In fact, detailed analysis of the historical resords reveals that most of the victims of the 1918 flu were killed by pneumonia caused by secondary infections, not the flu itself. The existence of modern antibiotics to effectively treat such secondary infections is one of the biggest reasons that drawing a parallel between the 1918 flu and anything that could happen today (at least in a developed country) is pretty flawed reasoning.
This is explored in a more detail, along with a few good supporting links in Michael Fumento's recent article on this topic: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html
Recommended reading if you really care about separating the facts from the hype.
Bird Flu hysteria is just that. Here is a very well-researched current article that points out a number of very good reasons why Bird Flu is unlikely to be anywhere near as big a concern as the professional hand-wringers are saying: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html The article includes many links to a number of reliable sources as well as panicky and completely unsupportable press accounts.
Remember that in 1976, more people died from the Swine Flu *vaccine* amid similar hysteria than from the swine flu itself. There may be a lesson there. (And if you can handle the truth, you might want to have a good look at how similar hysteria drives the "global warming" alarmists, too...)
I honestly think that distribution of video media over computers will be hamstrung until providers consider how the way they make their media available will work with a Home Entertainment Center PC.
No, the PC will never be it - people watch TVs because watching PCs sucks pond water.
Pay attention to what this enables, though, even if it's not in the announcement: There is nothing about the technologies decscribed that would prevent downloading them as new features for a Tivo unit connected to an Ethernet. Tivo's been trying madly to get me to plug mine into the net, offering useless and entirely uncompelling freebies like the "home media option". If I could access decent programming through my Tivo, though (so it's on my TV, not my computer, where I have never, ever, watched a movie), that might convince me both to hook the Tivo to the net as well as consider keeping Tivo's ridiculously priced service. $15/mo for a guide is a ripoff, but if they were to throw in the ability to download and watch whatever I want from a reasonably large library of decent quality shows, they've dramtically increased the desirability of Tivo's service.
Note that when presented this way, this is an very interesting and much more practical hybrid between traditional Tivo wishlist recording and true VoD systems, and one that has a preexisting very large viewer base just waiting for the right software upgrade for thier Tivo boxes. This service, like all broadcast services, wants eyballs - and Tivo can deliver them - without a PC and the tech hassles that would otherwise limit the audience to propellerheads.
Interestingly, this effectively makes WB's archive yet another cable channel (although with somewhat different flexibility, since there's no "live" feed), but one that does not have to pay for transponder space, or deal with the MSOs. AOL could easily springboard this into hundreds of similar "channels", somce of which would even be mirrors (as in archive mirrors!) of existing channels. Miss that cool "Dogfights" special on the History Channel the other night? Maybe you just discovered a cool new series and want to "catch up" on the old episodes? No problem - just tell the Tivo to download them from the archive and you've got a week or two to watch them before they automatically vanish. This really could change TV viewing forever - it's almost as good as real VoD, but isn't locked into clunky cable networks - AOL and DirecTV could clean up with this sort of thing in a DirecTivo-NG. Just don't let AMC put seventy-five commercial breaks into a movie using only three commercials, and it'll work fine...
I've heard that AOL's software basically associates itself with various file types, puts itself into various context-sensitive menus, etc....
Hmm, that would make them just exactly like... Apple! Thier QuickTime player is perhaps the worst offender w.r.t. taking over things you don't want it to. Heck, QT takes over as your *TIFF* viewer, even when you tell it not to. Apple/QT is now far worse about hijacking PCs than Real, who for all their faults at least listened to complaints and made new versions much less intrusive.
But somehow, Apple is immune from serious criticism, even if it's justified, and that's especially true here on Slashdot...
If you really love Linux/Unix/Etc, then at least try to support it in a way that encourages new users.
Why? I'm not a zealot, although I freely admit to a strong preference for Unix. More importantly, over the past several years, Windows has come to offer pretty much everything Unix/Linux does, but not the reverse. (With U/Win, Microsoft's own SFU, or even the clunky Gnu-flavored Cygwin, it's hard to tell my XP box from most of the Unix workstations I've used for the past two decades, and it runs all those vital windows apps, too - things like Palm desktop, which is required for my Treo (unless I use Outlook - heaven forfend!), just for starters, and Visio, which is mentioned in another post...)
It's time to realize that so long as Microsoft avoids unduly onerous license fees (and most of us only pay those through the MS tax on new computers anyway), most people will *never* have any interest in an OSS desktop OS. (As for license fees, Microsoft is flirting with the limits of market acceptance now, so that could mean price cuts moving forward, something they've never done before.)
From an average customer's point-of-view, any decision for BSD/Linux involves some level of hair-shirt-wearing and things that just can't be done, while choosing Windows offers the best of both the Windows and Unix worlds. Like it or not, it's that simple. Most of the world (including me) don't give a rat's behind about promoting Stallman's bizarre communistic agenda - we just want flexible software that works with reasonably open and/or well-defined interfaces. The ball in in Microsoft's court - interestingly, the best way to further strengthen their monopoly is not to try too hard to make it happen - opening up some actually helps thier position from here on out.
Great stuff, those closed-source drivers.
;-)
Funny, they work fine on my Windows box...
Seriously, closed source drivers are a reality, especially in the wireless world, where it's becoming very clear that there simply aren't many OEMs that will support open source drivers at all, and those that do are likely to lag the Windows world by years.
That's why FreeBSD is working in "Project Evil" which will let BSD directly use Windows device drivers. This is a very pragmatic approach, and one that will eliminate the driver issue entirely for FreeBSD if it works as planned.
Thanks for mentioning Dia. I've been looking for a free Visio-like program.
Dia is *nothing* like Visio. At best, it's very crude emulation of perhaps 5% of Visio's functionality (and I'm being generous at that). If that's all you need, fine, but if you really use Visio at all (especially its native intelligence, complex stencils, and DB links), then Dia is a cruel joke. Dia's layout engine is not even capable of things that Visio 1.0 could do, way back in the Shapeware days. Dia also locks your work into a completely non-interoperable file format, while still managing to be pretty useless in talking with most open and defacto formats, including Visio. At least the execrable GIMP has a reasonable subset of its target's functionality, even if it is wrapped in one of the most non-intuitive and user-hostile GUIs on the planet.
Visio (along with Corel Draw) is one of the biggest reasons I will probably never move off a Windows desktop: Linux et al offer nothing even remotely like it - heck even the Mac can't hold its own against Visio (plus OSX requires the much more expensive Illustrator just to match CorelDraw...)
I've tried varying Linux and BSD desktops nearly a dozen times over the years, but none of the open source OS platforms can touch the usefulness of the apps available for Windows, so I come trudging back every time. I've finally given up and realized that I'm probably a Windows user for life, just becasue it lets me get the job done where nothing else can. That's a powerful advantage. I'd actually like to move to the Mac, but it costs much more, especially since there is much more open source/shareware for Windows than OS X, which can nickel-and-dime you to death.
I'm starting a new company now, and have the luxury of defining a complete IT environment from scratch. After looking at all the alternatives to avoid Microsoft, I surprised myself by tentatively deciding to standardize on a Windows desktop, for both overall cost and functionality reasons. (Servers, though, will be 100% BSD, Solaris, or Linux, in that order of preference, depending on app requirements - fortunately, we foresee no critical server apps that require Windows.)
So, out of curiosity, are you more into the NetBSD logo then? I didn't like it much at all at first, but on the other hand it might look better in 10 years than most.
The NetBSD logo is among the best as open source logos go (MySQL and Sleepycat are probably the best, but they're real corporate efforts.) I'll agree that 3D shaded/gradient logos may well look very "turn of the century" in a few years (like much of the currently fashionable "urban/industrial" architecture with galvanized trim), but I think it's really to early to tell for certain.
I think this new FreeBSD logo, while not to my own tastes, is very well-done, given the theme Gural chose to pursue. The custom FreeBSD font is very well-done and is an extra-nice touch, along with packaging designs, etc.
If you stop and think about it, this is a hard logo to do well - they wanted to distance themselves from the old daemon in tennis shoes, but what else says Unix (or even BSD) without actually saying "Unix" (which you can't do for copyright reasons)? I think Gural has done a great job of echoing the daemon logo without being hidebound by realism. This is a nice logo, done fairly well. We'll see how it holds up...
So, if you are going to copy a trend, try to do it before the guy who started it moves on.
Lexus is finally starting to notice this, which is why those butt-ugly clear & chrome taillight lenses are mercifully beginning to go out of fashion. I always thought it odd that an upscale (although bland) brand like Lexus decided to blatantly embrace (and unfortunately popularize) a ricerocket/drifter trend like those hideous taillights. Nissan, though should at least get some points for trying to bring back sixties jet-pod taillights within the confines of the chromy taillight theme on the Altima.
Oddly, the only phrase that can really describe such a design is "Cadillac-ugly", which is funny because they don't use that sort of taillight - that's quite possibly their only redeeming design feature these days.
Instead I started with Buffalo's TeraStations which are affordable and have built-in RAID support.
While the Buffalo product isn't bad, it's really not industrial strength, either.
Check out Infrant's ReadyNAS servers as an alternative (http://infrant.com/) - lots of really nice features (including NFS support, if you want/need it, unlike Buffalo), much better performance, and a rack-mount option, if you're into that kinky rack thing...
Seriously, if you're looking for a killer low-cost, high-performance NAS server appliance, check it out. I haven't found anything that better balances cost and performance, although let me say I've not yet seen one in action up close, so I can't offer a real recommendation just yet.
Why not? I can't imagine a situation in which someone who would be willing to license their code under the BSD license would be unwilling to license it under the GPL.
Pretty much *every* author that chooses the BSD license is unwilling to license their code under the GPL. There are those of us who understand that BSD is the truly free license, and that you cannot have more freedom by *adding* restrictions to use, especially if those additional restrictions are there simply to further a radical political agenda purpose-designed to eliminate all commerce in software.
In fact in my mind, if the truly free licenses needs any restrictions at all, those restrictions shoud be aimed to prohibit taking code with a truly free license (BSD, MIT, X, etc.) and locking it up in a viral protection scheme like the GPL.
Truly free licenses are very, very different from the GPL, which seeks the most heinous sort of discriminatory prohibition - one that is based on the fundamental premise that all buying and selling of software is evil and should not be permitted. Only a few moonbats like Stallman really believe that...
Because backward/forward button is not enough. I might want to be able to bookmark where I'm at.
Definitely not enough. Pay attention to how often you find your place in a book (especially a reference book) by just "opening it to 'about there'", which will often get you surprisingly close to your target. In fact, if bookmarks have some sort of relative position indicator, they often don't even need labels, making such a reader even easier.
One thing that's definitely needed is the ability to flip pages *very* fast, preferably in bunches. (Say 4, 10, 20 or 50 pages at a time - the even numbers are important, since the reader should have some clear way of keepng right and left pages separate - pay attention, and you'll be surprised how often that's important, too. Of course, the display really should be able to show at least two pages at a time, too.)
be able to read whether it's bright or dark outside.
Horsepuckey. Why add an additional requirement? One of the most poisonous ideas of the 20th century (that we need to give up in the 21st) is that screens need to glow. High quality and readbility is absolutely independent of the luminosity of the display, except in those really rare occasions when you read in the pitch black.
We need high resolution, color saturation, and contrast (think a screen that looks like National Geographic), not a light emitter. Luminous displays will also eat so much power that they'll never make the thing a real alternative to paper. Battery technology has improved dramatically over the past few years, but it's *still* next-to-impossible to find a small, lightweight computer that will run for an entire shift, much less days or weeks, which is what's really necessary for such a device.
Also keep in mind that even the biggest honking PC graphics cards of today (also notorious power hogs) are not even remotely capable of driving such a display with magazine-quality resolution.
(Do the math: let's say we want to show two 8x10 inch pages at 1200 dpi: that's 115 megapixels per page or 230 megapixels total. An HDTV screen at 1920x1080 is only 2 megapixels, so a magazine quality e-book needs to crank the pixel equivalent of 115 HDTV screens!)
Paper works *really* well, and any display technology has a *long* way to go before it catches up - my guess is that a real, practical e-book alternative is still a couple of decades off. (I'd love to be wrong about that one, but I'm probably not...)
Wow, Acronym Soup. No wonder I always hated Windows :-).
.DEBs, installing an RPM with alien, or using emerge to do the ./make configure;make;makeinstall is so much easier than dealing with a few MS acronyms... :-)
C'mon, like MS is any worse in the gobbledygook department than anybody else? Yeah, apt-getting
What is it about computers that inspires people to inscrutability? Is it some deep-seated nerd-need to intellectually bludgeon people with invented complexity? (Not that hackers have a monopoly here: government bureaucrats are similarly adept at obfuscation.)
If there is no hope for a Firefox-style rebirth, maybe the developer effort should move on to something with a future.
Riiiiight. Butchering Mozilla into separate applications for browsing, e-mail, editing, etc., each of which are almost exactly the same size as the Mozilla suite alone (~22 MB for Mozilla, ~21 MB each for the others), was sure a big win, wasn't it? Not only that, the Firefox split also brought extension incompatibility and upgrade problems that make Microsoft's DLL Hell in NT look pretty good.
OpenOffice is probably fatally flawed, and Sun and the OOo community has certainly completely botched the thing by letting a bunch of clueless Object Oriented architects try to impose inappropriate architectures on the old StarOffice. It's now both bad and slooow - the original StarOffice was niether, but it did suffer from a uniquely bad user interface.
The really odd thing is that even before Sun shelled out the big bucks for Star Division, they *already owned* the code to a top-notch set of office components that were built on a proper object architecture: The productivity apps they picked up when they bought Lighthouse Design. These were very nice, truly-OO apps that (like all of Lighthouse's stuff) were designed for NeXTstep. I'm told by some folks that know that converting that Objective C code over to Java would have been a LOT less work than what they've had to do for Star. It's a shame that only the Java object modeler survived Sun's acquisition of Lighthouse - they had some very nice productivity apps...
The 1RU has dual power supplies. I like that. The Dell might as well, but personally I'd buy a Sun over a Dell. But then I'd rather wax my butt crack with an angry wasp than buy a Dell.
ROFL! Now, that's a colorful comparison...
I've worked for both Sun and Dell at fairly high levels, and I can tell you one thing for sure: Sun cares a whole lot more than Dell about making sure things work. (I left Dell after (only barely) withstanding intense pressure from multiple Directors and VPs (including Quality!) to ship a cost-saving change that was *guaranteed* to cause Dell laptop customers to lose both data and suspend capability. The argument literally degenerated to, "Who cares? It'll save big bucks and help us meet targets!")
Sun has its problems to be sure, but it has a culture of doing the right thing, where Dell has a culture of doing whatever optimizes income, regardless of the fallout. (Dell also carefully manages/manipulates the customer experience to make sure that Dell customers "feel loved" and "feel positive about Dell", even though their problems are often not solved.)
Consider buying Dell if you want stock, but buy Sun if you want a computer, especially one that will just flat work.
I'm looking at a whole raft of new computers now, and Dell isn't even going to be considered...
Isn't ThinkGeek actually owned by Slashdot? (Or at least the OSDN/Slashdot/Sourceforge syndicate?)
(I've never bought anything from ThinkGeek, for two reasons: 1) most (99%) of it has no appeal at all for me, and 2) their prices are outrageous, so even the few things that do hold some interest are out of the question...)