Everything. Number one: you want to be able to send and receive formal appointments, and this usually involves email. Sure you can do that via an attachment, much like you could use an HTML editor to edit HTML mail you send in mutt, but that is not very convenient. Using manual invitation is just too error prone in my experience.
Number two: a smart system will even generate the responses and interpret them. For example, Google Calender can interpret responses for your invitation directly, so you always know how many people are coming to the meeting. It is not perfect in its implementation, but the idea is excellent.
Number three: tell me a calendar application that does its job extremely well. I know that everybody recommends Outlook, but I need something that will work on Windows and Linux, and synchronise between them.
Because the replication support in MySQL is very basic. A single master for the whole database, isn't that a bit limited? I had to run two database processes just because I had two data sources to replicate from.
Unfortunately, the patches from Google don't really fix the basic problem. I think MySQL needs a complete redesign of the replication function. Oracle seems to handle this much better: the replication is controlled on the master, not the client, and it works in just about any combination you can imagine. That is not to say that the MySQL replication is not useful in certain situations (it fans better), but it is very much limited to one kind of application.
> is because there is no standard GUI layer. > It's a hodgepodge of these widgets and those widgets, this license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.) > Windows provides all that.
You must be joking. Windows has a standard GUI layer? And what would that be? VB? MFC? XForms?.net? Or one of those third party tools? And did you ever read the small print that comes with Windows, the MFC runtime, MSVC etc? I think the GPL is a very nice license by comparison. Anyway, choice is not really a problem. You just pick something appropriate, and stick with it. KDE, Gnome, Tk, whatever you like, it will do fine. If you can't make up your mind, you are probably not the right person to do the job anyway:-)
> Plus a large market.
I can't argue with that. But is it efficient to ignore 5% of the market? Think about it in terms of revenue.
> If I understand the above: View > Sort By > choose Date, Descending (or Ascending if you want), and Threaded
Interesting, that actually works. It used to sort threads by the date of the head of the thread only, and now that has been changed to the last message in a thread. I am impressed.
Thunderbird uses the mbox format, which is not really a suitable way of storing more than 10 emails. IMAP would be a better alternative, if the IMAP support wasn't as pathetic as it is.
> Is that the level of user-friendliness one is to expect of Thunderbird; "my way or the high way"?
That is the impression I get, too. I was a regular user of Mozilla Mail, but since they cut up the suite, there is really no reason to use Thunderbird anymore.
> It's not complete yet, but it's already worth using it
It is better than nothing, but it is not a proper calendar either. BTW, is there any way to get rid of it temporarily if I don't want to use it? It takes up so much space that could have better use sometimes.
Anyway, if you need a real calendar, you have to go for a more powerful solution, such as Gmail, KMail, Evolution or Outlook. Note that the later two programs suck quite a lot.
Sorry to be so blunt, I'll try to explain what I mean. Whichever way you look at it, Firefox is the gold standard of browsers. It is more standard compliant and easier to use than IE, more compatibly than Konqueror, and much more extensible and better looking than Opera. While you can find better browsers for niche applications (lynx on telnet), there is no general purpose browser that comes even close to Firefox.
Thunderbird on the other hand is just a lot of promises. It still uses folders, while labels are obviously the way to go. Threading is poor. Integration between different message sources is basically non-existent. The search function sucks really badly. There is no integration with any reasonable calender (and don't call sunbird reasonable). And it is actually difficult to use, certainly compared to the competition (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Opera, KMail...).
I mean seriously: can Thunderbird even sort threads on the date of the most recent message in a thread? Last time I tried it could not. GMail does that by default, and it is by far the most sensible way to order messages. Make Thunderbird not suck, and I will give it another try.
> But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.
*could* take a good picture. Because there is more to a camera than lens and sensor. The amplifier and processing are nearly as important, and that's the point where it usually goes wrong with a picture phone. The article gives the perfect example: all the pictures from phones suffer from saturated colors without much detail. The pictures from the real cameras may not be as "vibrant", but they are actually sharper, and they retain much more details. Of course the pictures shown are scaled down to 0.15 mega pixels, so the difference in the original pictures should be much more obvious.
And then again, how often do you have enough light? Sunny 16 is all very well, but I find my dSLR absolutely essential in low light situations. With a 1.7/50 lens and anti shake at 400 ISO, I can take pictures with available light that are virtually impossible even with most film cameras.
> I'd love to see them continue to be in the game, but there are economy of scale issues here which they'll have to address in some manner.
I am sure that the Power CPU will survice. It has been around for a long time, it is very strong in the embedded market, and it is also present in supercomputing. Plus it seems to be a genuinely good architecture, very much unlike the IA-64. I guess it even beats the SPARC, which was the first RISC, and revolutionary at the time, but somehow it didn't age well.
Of course the first pure 64bit system was True64 on DEC Alpha. And while I admit that the Alpha was a very powerful processor for numerics, all the rest of the system just did not add up. RIP.
> I keep reading this online, but no one ever posts a link to any figures!
Me too. I have experience with the Athlon64 3000+, and it is noticeably faster with pure64 Ubuntu. That means it maybe gains 20%, which is remarkable, given that twice as many bits need to be shifted around. From what I have heard, the Core2 is slower in 64bit mode than in 32bit mode.
Of course the problem is software support. Ubuntu is compatible with respect to 32bit binaries, and anyway you can't load 32bit plug-ins into a 64bit firefox. So it all falls down because a few applications are not compatible (sounds familiar, hm)?
> When you talk "64-bit Linux-compatible CPU", you run smack into three problems; IA-64, Power, and SPARC.
I don't think those problems are serious. IA-64 may have the performance crown, but it is essentially dead. Power has taken a severe hit from Apple, and will probably find a niche with the cell processor. SPARC has hardware multi-threading going, but otherwise it is as good as dead.
The real problem for 64bit computing is software. Have you recently installed a 64bit OS? The number of issues you get with really common software is amazing. Consequently, people don't embrace 64bit as a revolution, but they see it as a hassle. I think 64bit kernel is coming due to big memory sizes (bank switching is really messy), but 64bit user-space will be some time.
I think that the merger was a really stupid idea. By this move, both AMD and ATI have gained a lot more competitors.
Nvidia used to make (the best) chip sets for AMD processors. But they are also competing with ATI, so they may concentrate on Intel chip sets.
Intel has just started making stand alone graphics card, that you could use with an AMD CPU. But why should they make life easy for AMD customers? I guess they may change the bus or otherwise bind the cards to an Intel CPU/chip set.
And ATI makes graphics card for Intel or AMD based PCs. But I have the feeling that it will get an awful lot more difficult to support the Intel platform.
Anticompetitive you say? Yes, probably, but so was the AMD/ATI merger. And in the end it may leave AMD fans with little choice, poor chip sets and graphics cards with poor driver support.
> There was a huge thud with DVD-Audio and SACD with the same premise - higher quality but only if you had the player for it. That format war took out both formats and this might do the same...
True, although at the moment the amount of data you need to download for a HD movie is still rather ridiculous. There is however a need for a big optical data storage. Blu-ray is probably better for this, because you can fit more data on a disk. But it does not have much of a chance unless Blu-ray gets cheaper per GB than DVD+R.
> I'd have a quite nice office class networked, duplexing, HP laserjet 4si printer... > I got it for $200 off ebay and $50 for a service kit.
I know it is not the same kind of robust printer, but I got an HP LJ 6 for free just by promising to take it. It does not do duplex, but I can do that myself.
And before that, I used to have a SPARCprinter. That was a funny beast: the raster engine was in software, and it would only run on a SPARC with Solaris 2.6. It did PostScript, but it was a bit on the slow side.
> HP knows that one of it's biggest competitors is not other printer manufacturers, > but the installed base of high quality, high reliability, maintainable workhorse printers they sold in the past.
> Microsoft doesn't maintain anything cross-platform.
True, but Adobe does not exactly have a perfect record either. Flash 8 and 9 where not available for Linux, and even Flash 9 Update has no plugin for a pure64 system. Way to go, Adobe.
> I don't mind the lying as much as the withholding of information since that is vital to actually solving the issue.
Sorry, but that is your job. If the customer knew what information is relevant, they could use the knowledge base and figure it out. But how should a granny know what is relevant? The new game the nephew installed, the sun outside, or the new coffeemaker in the kitchen? It is up to you to ask the right questions.
> 90% of the people are lying. Period. From trying to lay blame to a supplier to seriously being tooo stupid to realize that they did broke something.
Charming attitude. You may want to remember that being wrong does not imply lying, because lying requires intend. So while I completely believe that 90% of the people are wrong (or at least grossly clueless), I guess that much fewer are actually intentionally lying.
I switched about 10 years ago, and I have never looked back. I agree that a few things can be inconvenient:
* Cut & pasts under Windows is not quite as easy (C-C, C-V)
* Languages which more letters (such as most European languages) can be difficult to set up. At least non-latin letters tend to be rare, so it does not slow you down.
* Unless you have a Dvorak keyboard, you have to touch type, even for a single key press. Looking at the wrong keys just ruins the experience.
But apart from these issues, I am very happy. The layout works well for me in English, German, Dutch and French, although it is probably best for the English language. And getting a basic Dvorak layout is possible on just about any OS nowadays. (DOS used to be difficult, but that is kind of through now:-) )
I think the main problem is that you want both colour and readability in direct sunlight. While transflective displays work very well in bright light, they do not usually come in colour (of if they do, they are very dark). Colour displays usually need a back light, and it is very likely that it cannot compete with direct sunlight.
The math is simple: direct sun light is about 1000 watts per square meter, or 13 watts on your display size. The back light has to be stronger, say twice as bright, but you loose about 50% of the light in the light bulb, in the light distribution, in the polariser and again in the colour filter. So you would need 400 watt of electrical energy to drive the back light!
Short version of the story: colour, good contrast and direct sunlight don't mix. Maybe some day with e-ink, but not right now.
> Julio... writes: > "Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop...."
Call me old fashioned, but I am not sure that posting the submissions "unedited" is as good an idea as CmdrTacco seems to think. Any semi-literate person knows that you may have to supply additional information to keep the context of the citation correct. In this case, the missing part would be "Julio *wrote* the day before yesterday". As it is, the citation wrongly refers to next week, although it meant to be this week.
On the other hand this mistake tell us that submissions can be in the queue for over a day. Given the short lifetime of most submission, this explains the slightly stale feeling that slashdot conveys now. Again I am old fashioned enough to say that this was not always the case!
> I have NEVER in the past 2 years left on time from my departure... > NWA told me I *HAD* to check my laptop bag...
This might have something to do with your choice of airline. I have flown with a number of airlines, and most of them are friendly, reliable and on time. Not NWA, though.
> Even in France, 9 in 10 passenger miles are not by rail.
Yep, and especially in France, 50% of the time of a journey is spent getting to the station, waiting for the train, waiting for a connection, waiting for the industrial action to be over etc...
The speed of the train (just like the speed of a car) is just one piece of the puzzle. What people want is fast and easy door to door travel.
Slashdot Mirror
> Linux offers dozens of distros and I've never yet seen a chart that shows the pros and cons of each one
d istributions . But then there are also good ones, like http://www.emperorlinux.com/quality/value/distros/ . That may not be complete, and not exhaustive, but it is at least helpful.
I have seen a few, but they are rare. Most charts focus too much on completeness, which leads to a long long list of niche distros. Wikipedia is the perfect example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_
> what does a calendar have to do with e-mail?
Everything. Number one: you want to be able to send and receive formal appointments, and this usually involves email. Sure you can do that via an attachment, much like you could use an HTML editor to edit HTML mail you send in mutt, but that is not very convenient. Using manual invitation is just too error prone in my experience.
Number two: a smart system will even generate the responses and interpret them. For example, Google Calender can interpret responses for your invitation directly, so you always know how many people are coming to the meeting. It is not perfect in its implementation, but the idea is excellent.
Number three: tell me a calendar application that does its job extremely well. I know that everybody recommends Outlook, but I need something that will work on Windows and Linux, and synchronise between them.
Because the replication support in MySQL is very basic. A single master for the whole database, isn't that a bit limited? I had to run two database processes just because I had two data sources to replicate from.
Unfortunately, the patches from Google don't really fix the basic problem. I think MySQL needs a complete redesign of the replication function. Oracle seems to handle this much better: the replication is controlled on the master, not the client, and it works in just about any combination you can imagine. That is not to say that the MySQL replication is not useful in certain situations (it fans better), but it is very much limited to one kind of application.
Way to go.
> is because there is no standard GUI layer.
.net? Or one of those third party tools? And did you ever read the small print that comes with Windows, the MFC runtime, MSVC etc? I think the GPL is a very nice license by comparison. Anyway, choice is not really a problem. You just pick something appropriate, and stick with it. KDE, Gnome, Tk, whatever you like, it will do fine. If you can't make up your mind, you are probably not the right person to do the job anyway :-)
> It's a hodgepodge of these widgets and those widgets, this license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.)
> Windows provides all that.
You must be joking. Windows has a standard GUI layer? And what would that be? VB? MFC? XForms?
> Plus a large market.
I can't argue with that. But is it efficient to ignore 5% of the market? Think about it in terms of revenue.
> If I understand the above: View > Sort By > choose Date, Descending (or Ascending if you want), and Threaded
Interesting, that actually works. It used to sort threads by the date of the head of the thread only, and now that has been changed to the last message in a thread. I am impressed.
Thunderbird uses the mbox format, which is not really a suitable way of storing more than 10 emails. IMAP would be a better alternative, if the IMAP support wasn't as pathetic as it is.
> Is that the level of user-friendliness one is to expect of Thunderbird; "my way or the high way"?
That is the impression I get, too. I was a regular user of Mozilla Mail, but since they cut up the suite, there is really no reason to use Thunderbird anymore.
> It's not complete yet, but it's already worth using it
It is better than nothing, but it is not a proper calendar either. BTW, is there any way to get rid of it temporarily if I don't want to use it? It takes up so much space that could have better use sometimes.
Anyway, if you need a real calendar, you have to go for a more powerful solution, such as Gmail, KMail, Evolution or Outlook. Note that the later two programs suck quite a lot.
Sorry to be so blunt, I'll try to explain what I mean. Whichever way you look at it, Firefox is the gold standard of browsers. It is more standard compliant and easier to use than IE, more compatibly than Konqueror, and much more extensible and better looking than Opera. While you can find better browsers for niche applications (lynx on telnet), there is no general purpose browser that comes even close to Firefox.
Thunderbird on the other hand is just a lot of promises. It still uses folders, while labels are obviously the way to go. Threading is poor. Integration between different message sources is basically non-existent. The search function sucks really badly. There is no integration with any reasonable calender (and don't call sunbird reasonable). And it is actually difficult to use, certainly compared to the competition (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Opera, KMail...).
I mean seriously: can Thunderbird even sort threads on the date of the most recent message in a thread? Last time I tried it could not. GMail does that by default, and it is by far the most sensible way to order messages. Make Thunderbird not suck, and I will give it another try.
> But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.
*could* take a good picture. Because there is more to a camera than lens and sensor. The amplifier and processing are nearly as important, and that's the point where it usually goes wrong with a picture phone. The article gives the perfect example: all the pictures from phones suffer from saturated colors without much detail. The pictures from the real cameras may not be as "vibrant", but they are actually sharper, and they retain much more details. Of course the pictures shown are scaled down to 0.15 mega pixels, so the difference in the original pictures should be much more obvious.
And then again, how often do you have enough light? Sunny 16 is all very well, but I find my dSLR absolutely essential in low light situations. With a 1.7/50 lens and anti shake at 400 ISO, I can take pictures with available light that are virtually impossible even with most film cameras.
> I'd love to see them continue to be in the game, but there are economy of scale issues here which they'll have to address in some manner.
I am sure that the Power CPU will survice. It has been around for a long time, it is very strong in the embedded market, and it is also present in supercomputing. Plus it seems to be a genuinely good architecture, very much unlike the IA-64. I guess it even beats the SPARC, which was the first RISC, and revolutionary at the time, but somehow it didn't age well.
Of course the first pure 64bit system was True64 on DEC Alpha. And while I admit that the Alpha was a very powerful processor for numerics, all the rest of the system just did not add up. RIP.
> I keep reading this online, but no one ever posts a link to any figures!
Me too. I have experience with the Athlon64 3000+, and it is noticeably faster with pure64 Ubuntu. That means it maybe gains 20%, which is remarkable, given that twice as many bits need to be shifted around. From what I have heard, the Core2 is slower in 64bit mode than in 32bit mode.
Of course the problem is software support. Ubuntu is compatible with respect to 32bit binaries, and anyway you can't load 32bit plug-ins into a 64bit firefox. So it all falls down because a few applications are not compatible (sounds familiar, hm)?
> When you talk "64-bit Linux-compatible CPU", you run smack into three problems; IA-64, Power, and SPARC.
I don't think those problems are serious. IA-64 may have the performance crown, but it is essentially dead. Power has taken a severe hit from Apple, and will probably find a niche with the cell processor. SPARC has hardware multi-threading going, but otherwise it is as good as dead.
The real problem for 64bit computing is software. Have you recently installed a 64bit OS? The number of issues you get with really common software is amazing. Consequently, people don't embrace 64bit as a revolution, but they see it as a hassle. I think 64bit kernel is coming due to big memory sizes (bank switching is really messy), but 64bit user-space will be some time.
I think that the merger was a really stupid idea. By this move, both AMD and ATI have gained a lot more competitors.
Nvidia used to make (the best) chip sets for AMD processors. But they are also competing with ATI, so they may concentrate on Intel chip sets.
Intel has just started making stand alone graphics card, that you could use with an AMD CPU. But why should they make life easy for AMD customers? I guess they may change the bus or otherwise bind the cards to an Intel CPU/chip set.
And ATI makes graphics card for Intel or AMD based PCs. But I have the feeling that it will get an awful lot more difficult to support the Intel platform.
Anticompetitive you say? Yes, probably, but so was the AMD/ATI merger. And in the end it may leave AMD fans with little choice, poor chip sets and graphics cards with poor driver support.
> There was a huge thud with DVD-Audio and SACD with the same premise - higher quality but only if you had the player for it. That format war took out both formats and this might do the same ...
True, although at the moment the amount of data you need to download for a HD movie is still rather ridiculous. There is however a need for a big optical data storage. Blu-ray is probably better for this, because you can fit more data on a disk. But it does not have much of a chance unless Blu-ray gets cheaper per GB than DVD+R.
> I'd have a quite nice office class networked, duplexing, HP laserjet 4si printer...
> I got it for $200 off ebay and $50 for a service kit.
I know it is not the same kind of robust printer, but I got an HP LJ 6 for free just by promising to take it. It does not do duplex, but I can do that myself.
And before that, I used to have a SPARCprinter. That was a funny beast: the raster engine was in software, and it would only run on a SPARC with Solaris 2.6. It did PostScript, but it was a bit on the slow side.
> HP knows that one of it's biggest competitors is not other printer manufacturers,
> but the installed base of high quality, high reliability, maintainable workhorse printers they sold in the past.
Very true. Back in the old days...
> Microsoft doesn't maintain anything cross-platform.
True, but Adobe does not exactly have a perfect record either. Flash 8 and 9 where not available for Linux, and even Flash 9 Update has no plugin for a pure64 system. Way to go, Adobe.
> I don't mind the lying as much as the withholding of information since that is vital to actually solving the issue.
Sorry, but that is your job. If the customer knew what information is relevant, they could use the knowledge base and figure it out. But how should a granny know what is relevant? The new game the nephew installed, the sun outside, or the new coffeemaker in the kitchen? It is up to you to ask the right questions.
> 90% of the people are lying. Period. From trying to lay blame to a supplier to seriously being tooo stupid to realize that they did broke something.
Charming attitude. You may want to remember that being wrong does not imply lying, because lying requires intend. So while I completely believe that 90% of the people are wrong (or at least grossly clueless), I guess that much fewer are actually intentionally lying.
I switched about 10 years ago, and I have never looked back. I agree that a few things can be inconvenient:
:-) )
* Cut & pasts under Windows is not quite as easy (C-C, C-V)
* Languages which more letters (such as most European languages) can be difficult to set up. At least non-latin letters tend to be rare, so it does not slow you down.
* Unless you have a Dvorak keyboard, you have to touch type, even for a single key press. Looking at the wrong keys just ruins the experience.
But apart from these issues, I am very happy. The layout works well for me in English, German, Dutch and French, although it is probably best for the English language. And getting a basic Dvorak layout is possible on just about any OS nowadays. (DOS used to be difficult, but that is kind of through now
I think the main problem is that you want both colour and readability in direct sunlight. While transflective displays work very well in bright light, they do not usually come in colour (of if they do, they are very dark). Colour displays usually need a back light, and it is very likely that it cannot compete with direct sunlight.
The math is simple: direct sun light is about 1000 watts per square meter, or 13 watts on your display size. The back light has to be stronger, say twice as bright, but you loose about 50% of the light in the light bulb, in the light distribution, in the polariser and again in the colour filter. So you would need 400 watt of electrical energy to drive the back light!
Short version of the story: colour, good contrast and direct sunlight don't mix. Maybe some day with e-ink, but not right now.
> So once 95% of all websites decide that they want to be safe, how do organise the namespace?
.safe, .extrasafe, .doubleplussafe, .360safe etc. The only limit is the amount payed to the registrar :-)
That should be easy:
> Julio ... writes: ..."
> "Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop.
Call me old fashioned, but I am not sure that posting the submissions "unedited" is as good an idea as CmdrTacco seems to think. Any semi-literate person knows that you may have to supply additional information to keep the context of the citation correct. In this case, the missing part would be "Julio *wrote* the day before yesterday". As it is, the citation wrongly refers to next week, although it meant to be this week.
On the other hand this mistake tell us that submissions can be in the queue for over a day. Given the short lifetime of most submission, this explains the slightly stale feeling that slashdot conveys now. Again I am old fashioned enough to say that this was not always the case!
> I have NEVER in the past 2 years left on time from my departure...
> NWA told me I *HAD* to check my laptop bag...
This might have something to do with your choice of airline. I have flown with a number of airlines, and most of them are friendly, reliable and on time. Not NWA, though.
> Even in France, 9 in 10 passenger miles are not by rail.
Yep, and especially in France, 50% of the time of a journey is spent getting to the station, waiting for the train, waiting for a connection, waiting for the industrial action to be over etc...
The speed of the train (just like the speed of a car) is just one piece of the puzzle. What people want is fast and easy door to door travel.