This is another one of my long winded theoretical pieces so grab some popcorn and beer and sttle down for a read;)
Firstly, the question must be asked of many things that MS is planning on including in Longhorn: Why are they doing this? Why are they adding in a Flash killing, Windows only Technology, and why are they adding an Office/Mail "security" feature that only works on Windows? The answer should be as obvious as the sky is blue: They want to kill off the competition. This should really, after all these years of bone crushing MS failures and successes in killing off alternatives, be blindingly obvious.
The next question is whether it will succede. That is anyone's guess. I tend to look at the last few times MS has attempted to intoduce MS only technologies in the browser, such as VBScript (instead of the ECMAScript compatible JScript), ActiveX (which only ended up with providing plug-in developers extra work into porting to Mac and Mozilla) and others. There is a very good chance that Sparkle will just fall flat on it's face as the millions of Flash developers will not suddenly switch over to something that will only work in one browser, especially after those same developers spent fucking years getting all their html stuff to work in all browsers.
On the other hand, Macromedia has a historical record of making catastrophically bad user interfaces for their products and has a knack of having good luck shots along with a host of bad decisions. They neglected Freehand for ages, for instance, only to have to rush like mad in a catch up game with Illustrator a couple of years down the road. Their latest product activation spree has irritated more than one developer.
There is a final line to this: With both Adobe and Macromedia kissing Microsoft's backside and concentrating most of their efforts on Windows at the expense of the Macintosh, they might have done something that they will highly regret in the future when Microsoft tries to kill both of them off. They might then realise that never ending price rises and neglecting their original markets was a costly mistake.
Does anyone remember that choice item, which was used as the password for a backdoor coded into asp some years ago by a witty Microsoft engineer? I was sitting next to a friend of mine as he cracked a local online store with this vulnerability to see if it actually worked. He was a decent guy, Linux fan through and through and informed the company about the hole.
I have titanium artificial hips. Good to know that I'm going to have my hips melt on me and fry me from the inside when one of these things goes off nearby.
is all I can say. SuSE being owned by an American company and not one with a very good track record at that is a bad day for those of us who cherished SuSE's indepedance from strange US IP laws and the abuse of the law through such vagiaries such as the Patriot Act. DMCA etc as well as Microsoft abuse. I find this pretty crap. And sadly this means jobs get lost in Germany and Novell is almost sure to fuck this up on the desktop.
Re:SPORT!!! and the American way of life
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Hackers On Atkins
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Because most vegetables in cans taste like shit for one, although that's besides the point, but mainly because most vegetables in cans sit in a solution of usually salty water, which leaches out all the benefits that those vegetables ever had. It would probably be ok if anyone actually used the can water while cooking, but mostly it is just thrown away, along with your chances of eating decent food.
If you truly desperately need vegetables that can be preserved and you are not simply too lazy or have too little time to peel and cook normal vegetables, then get frozen vegetables and use that. But do yourself a favour and don't eat greens from cans.
I was in a shop this afternoon and almost bought the Redhat 9 boxed version today. The Linux section of the shop, here in Switzerland (large mall type place like BestBuy called MediaMarkt) has the Linux packages really nicely laid out. There was the complete SuSE line, personal and pro, and both the RedHat personal and pro versions. Nice packaging both of them with RedHat stealing the show with it's cool red and grey offerings.
In two months they won't be around anymore.
This is incredibly stupid reasoning from a marketing point of view, no matter how much it is costing RedHat. It removes the standard way that normal people get introduced to their distro and loses them huge amounts of mindshare. Normally I would think that it doesn't matter as SuSE and Mandrake can close the gap, and perhaps they will (and perhaps they would if they had the marketing budget) but chiefly I just think that it leaves a subliminal whole in a shelf that will probably get filled with Microsoft stuff.
Good thing I run OSX. At least they know what marketing is.
Your post is, to put it simply, uninformed propaganda. The only country in Europe that has significant support is Germany, not "the Europeans", and this should be obvious since SuSE is a German company. If all of Europe were on some anti-Capitalist witch-hunt, then perhaps you could explain what Mandrake has been doing in bankruptcy protection (chapter 11 equiv) for the last half a year, you fucking idiot?
And some city adapting Linux because they want to be able to control it, was probably also some anti-American mindfuck, in your star-spangled sunglasses, I suppose?
With baboons like you sprouting your Nazi-like propaganda we'll probably be fighting you Yanks in the trenches in the next 20 years.
SPORT!!! and the American way of life
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Hackers On Atkins
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· Score: 3, Informative
AS someone who has battled the pounds/kilos his whole life I thought I should relate this little story for the aspiring low kilo hacker:
I was born crippled with congenital dislocation of the hips, which meant that a lot of my childhood and early adulthood was spent with a lot of pain if I had to walk distances or even stand for more than 30 minutes. My mother was and is a health fanatic and put me on a number of diets which never seemed to work very well (one of them was an early version of the Atkins diet). I tried to do weightlifting/bodybuilding at school to compensate for my bad self image with a little success but stopped when I went to Uni and ballooned because I did the usual student thing of eating loads of fast food shit that I'd never had at home.
I left my home country (South Africa) and went to live in Berlin, Germany where I worked for the USAF. During this time I discovered swimming, the one sport that I could do with little pain. I was amazed. In about three quarters of a year I was as fit as hell with my four times weekly programme of 45 minutes crawling back and forth in the distance swimming lanes of the local indoor pool. I felt wonderful, for the first time in my life girls were going nuts over me and life was good.
During the dotcom years I gained massive amounts of weight due to enormously long work days and a diet of pizzas, burgers and beer.
That was three years ago and I've been a depressed, lonley fat pig the whole time. A while ago I decided that work could kiss my fat butt on the hole and I started my swimming programme (3 times a week@40 minutes at 6AM in the mornings) as well as simply stopping junk food (No pizzas, burgers, beer).
Already now, only a short while later I am feeling damn good about myself and looking forward to having a social and love life again with the added plus of having a clearer mind than any fad diet could give me.
In my time working for the USAF and my one visit to the US, I noticed how damn difficult it is to buy vegetables and food you actually have to cook--most supermarkets seem to be stuffed with precooked, processed shit that is neither nutritional nor healthy and people resort to chemical crpa like olestra etc in order to avoid actually getting out of their huge fucking cars and moving their bodies.
Do sport, drop the junk food and beer and eat vegetables (not from cans). You'll be fucking amazed.
I had to fucking read this twice. Some fucking lunatics have created a virus that is 100% fatal in mice and are now trying to do the same thing again with cowpox which can infect humans as well. And these famous fucking researchers haven't been able to find a cure for AIDS but it's ok to make something even more deadly in the name of science?????
Jesus motherfucking Christ, has everyone already forgotten the 5 dead and twenty infected with the letter born Anthrax attacks in 2001, carried out by some pissed off ex-military scientist with a chip on his shoulder???? And they think that no one would ever do it again???? Or that the virus couldn't escape and mutate???? And if they don't do it someone else will and "good thing it's being done in the US where every political and military action is 100% above board"?????
Kill them. Yes, for once I actively call for the executions of sick bastards who have so little respect for life that they would create items as dangerous and deadly as this. A bullet to the back of the head, try that for non contagious!!
I think the idea that napster and itunes compete is good up to the point where I see that Napster is only available on Windows, be it due to wma content or whatever. I'm not paranoid enough to believe that Microsoft is funding Napster, since MS has its own service chugging along in Europe (Apple where the fuck are you here????) Rather I believe napster did this because they assumed that Windows Media Player is the most easily accesible player on 90% of desktops and allows easy DRM.
We'll see where this goes. personally, if Apple manages to clinch a deal globally with Record companies, they might have the edge with independant musicians having easier access to the store than with Napster which is stuck squarely between the sweaty balls of the Major labels.
I see this as an excellent effort to help the spread of Linux in corporate and industry environments. No, some of these apps have missing functionality and the range is limited, but this is almsot exactly what Mac users went through for around two and a half years before Macromedia, Adobe and Quark ported the major applications. Up until then quite a lot had to done in the Classic Mac OS9 environment running in OSX as a process, and a lot of the applications weren't perfect. There were some crashes and some things that didn't work any more but the admittedly loyal mac users put up with this because no one wants to dual boot all the time and they didn't want to forgo the advantages of OSX.
Crossover Office brings that very same functionality to Linux. It means that large corporations with loads of Office 2000 Licences and knowledge who are tired of Microsoft highjacking fees and changing licencing can use their legacy documents along with all the macros and VBA add-ons that they have on a platform that they can better control and customise, which is more secure (no VBA virus is going to trash their Linux system even if it trashes the Office installation) and far cheaper to maintain and purchase. The advantages are enormous. And Munich obviously knew this, since this is what they are doing.
Equally web designers who want to design with powerful tools and test on the end users platform no longer have to have two platforms or dual boot in order to serve on the same platform that their site will finally be hosted on.
Even all those movie studios who use Linux and Cinepaint will appreciate being able to use Photoshop as well.
I see advantages and good times ahead for codeweavers.
While Nokia should be commended for innovation in developing the nGage and this PDA (because the functionality is almost exactly the same as similarly sized high end PDA's out there) I doubt that these will sell well. The idea of holding the thing on edge to phone with is simply not practical (Did they do usability testing?) and I really fail to see advantages in functionality in this device, compared to other PDA's in that ailing market. Nokia's only advantage is in it's brand recognition, which is huge in Europe. They would be wiser to explore features such as voice recognition or gestures or easier usability in their devices.
I just remembered that Nokia also has the plus point of good connections amongst the telcos, which helps them to push features such as MIDP gaming amongst their clients.
If you take a look at the Aero application archetypes section of the Longhorn preview, you'll notice that Microsoft is milking.Net for all it's worth and attempting to embrace and extend the internet yet again. All those pretty "Rich client" demos of.Net apps that don't need a website, while interesting and pushing the curve a bit, point to Microsoft trying to get companies to develop sites with web services (theoretically cross platform but hopefully Windows servers obviously) and to develop native.Net applications that use those web services instead of developing websites for them. The advantage for Microsoft is that it would be an effective way to lock people into Windows clients ("This travel site application only works on Win2k6").
Apart from that I see Microsoft is developing detailed usability guidelines which is a good idea considering how poorly implemented some Windows applications are. what is even more interesting is that they have some interfaces that are still as confusing as ever.
I'm not sure how this works in the US legal system, but this document that SCO has produced is a legal document. That means it's a statement of fact in court as seen by SCO. While this might be a standard way of doing things i.e. throwing every available answer at the opposition so that those defenses are not nullified by ommission, it also is a very good vehicle for anyone who contributed to the Linux kernel to warn SCO that they (the contributors) intend to sue SCO for abuse of copyright as SCO clearly states that it distributed GPL software in full knowledge that they did not accept the copyrights of those authors since SCO claims that the GPL is invalid. This suit would work whether or not the GPL is invalidated.
All it would take is for Linus, Cox, Marcelo and the hundreds of others who contributed to warn of an intention to use AND GO TO THE PRESS WITH THIS ARGUMENT. Even the shitrag IT press such as CNet would understand such a legal threat and it would cause a major drop in SCO's stock value. Repeated a number of times by other developers, such as those of Samba, it would make SCO effectivily worthless by the time this trial gets going.
The sad thing is, that while many talk about class action lawsuits, it is almost wholly hot air and will never materialise, since talk is cheap and action requires effort.
There is no such thing as registering your computers with some data protection bureau.
1.You really have some strange fantasies about life and the law in Europe, some of which seem to belong more in Hollywood than in real life. Come on over and visit for a while. You'll be amazed considering the drivel you've just posted.
2.The word you used, "bureau" reminded me more of what your government is doing with it's patriot act.
Here is a link to some info on Brazilian use of sugarcane to make ethanol which is used as fuel for Brazilian cars. Renewable, provides jobs and doesn't pollute as much, and makes Brazil a lot less dependant on oil and oil companies.
Wierd thing is that they're the only country to ever have done this. This would give Africa and asia valuble export resource that is renewable.
Reminds me of the book where the Magic Dragon franchise had video columns in front of each one showing images from other franchises around the world.
I think it's a brilliant idea. It has little practical use apart from a sort of virtual meeting point, but I can see this becoming a huge hit. Normal people, who unlike us geeks, will not be worrying about bandwidth, bitdepth, framerates etc will love the idea.
You were perhaps wondering why people like the agricultural activist Jose Bove in France is so popular for demolishing GM crops and why the whole of Europe is utterly against GM foods and why even starving countries like Ethiopia and Zimbabwe don't want fucking GM flour? They are well aware that if they fall into this trap they are then legal captives of some motherfucking pig corporation which has a pig of a politician in its pocket that has no qualms using his fucking army to invade other fucking countries who don't want to sell their souls to big corporation.
FUCK MONSATO! They are one of the causes of terrorism because poor people have had enough of being abused.
After reading this latest round of SCO wierdness I'm beginning to worry if the disease that afflicts their minds is contagious. It sounds like a scary form of paranoid schizophrenia. Perhaps a good mental health professional could help.
I assume there will be people out there in any case who will claim that Apple integrates iTunes in Mac OSX just as Microsoft integrates WMP in WinXP and should there fore be under the same penalties as Microsoft.
To this I say, on your Mac OSX system you just navigate to your Applications folder, drag the iTunes application to the trash and emmpty the trash. Boom, it's gone. No, mindbogglingly complex setup panel just to hide WMP, and even if you delete the.exe it will get restored automatically. Nothing like that at all.
I saw some images of the newest Chinese main battle tank about a year ago, and it already has a laser system for blinding enemy gunners and optical guidance systems, and there is talk of the Chinese also doing a lot of high powered laser research.
But apart from that, while I can very good immediate uses for laser weapons in defending against missile attacks, I can't see these being of much use in close combat in the near future, even they make them much smaller. An assault rifle and machine gun will still offer far higher rates of fire ofr a long time to come, and one shouldn't forget that more people on the US side died from 19 nutcases with boxcutters (WTC) and roadside bombs (Iraq) than any other weapon. On the other sides in Afghanistan and Iraq, they had no chance against the US in open warefare in any case, which explains the boxcutters and the roadside bombs.
I can see CDs or DVDs replacing tapes, but not hard drives, not at the rate hard drives fail. And restoring from a corrupt tape is more likely to get you at least some of your data back, whereas restoring from a corrupt hard drive is painful and expensive.
Client/Server will be around for a long time, and the article just replaced it with some new buzzwords for the same technology. You want a simple but massively popular client/server application? You're looking at one now. And there's the link to Apple's iTunes with its iTMS which doesn't seem to be dying at all, at least not in the last 3.5 days.
VB6. It might decline, but it will be around for a guaranteed 5 to 10 years. There are thousands of VB6 applications out there that no one is going to rewrite in VB.Net while the current ones are still working, and the legions of VBA, especially Excell, applications will guarantee another long stretch, and it's by no means certain that VB.Net will be the replacement as it means basically relearning the language, at which point it would probably just be easier to switch to C# or jump ship and do it in Java.(Eclipse and SWT have the potential to make all those early client side Java dreams true)
As for the rest, well they might be dying out or declining but my mother and sister still use Win98SE as do literally a full 40% of computer users worldwide. They'll probably switch when they get new computers but not before, and as long as their current computers work they won't switch (Browser, e-mail and office work, basta)
Amongst non technophiles this happened already
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Death of the PDA?
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The uptake here in Europe (and in Asia AFAIK) of mobile phones was very big and was certainly helped by the single GSM standard and almost blanket coverage from Malaga to Nordkap. (I've heard though that "plans" in the US are cheaper though). This meant that the number of mobile users is astronomical in Europe and that complete luddites are more than happy with their new phones that can take and send pictures, play songs and downloadable games and transfer addressbook and calendar items to one another.
None of them have heard of Bluetooth and even fewer care. Normal people i.e. those who don't read/. want a pocketable light device that is fun and easy to use. They don't care whether it's Symbian, MS or Linux inside, or whether it has 64MB RAM or whatever.
The MS man: Taylor, predictably, wasn't impressed. "The Linux stack is more of a cobbled-together set of things," he concludes. "They do their integration through people."
Damn right! Linux gives jobs back to people, where it's supposed to be. Linux doesn't outsoursce your job to someone in India who answers your problems only if he can find the answer on a list.
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This is another one of my long winded theoretical pieces so grab some popcorn and beer and sttle down for a read;)
Firstly, the question must be asked of many things that MS is planning on including in Longhorn: Why are they doing this? Why are they adding in a Flash killing, Windows only Technology, and why are they adding an Office/Mail "security" feature that only works on Windows? The answer should be as obvious as the sky is blue: They want to kill off the competition. This should really, after all these years of bone crushing MS failures and successes in killing off alternatives, be blindingly obvious.
The next question is whether it will succede. That is anyone's guess. I tend to look at the last few times MS has attempted to intoduce MS only technologies in the browser, such as VBScript (instead of the ECMAScript compatible JScript), ActiveX (which only ended up with providing plug-in developers extra work into porting to Mac and Mozilla) and others. There is a very good chance that Sparkle will just fall flat on it's face as the millions of Flash developers will not suddenly switch over to something that will only work in one browser, especially after those same developers spent fucking years getting all their html stuff to work in all browsers.
On the other hand, Macromedia has a historical record of making catastrophically bad user interfaces for their products and has a knack of having good luck shots along with a host of bad decisions. They neglected Freehand for ages, for instance, only to have to rush like mad in a catch up game with Illustrator a couple of years down the road. Their latest product activation spree has irritated more than one developer.
There is a final line to this: With both Adobe and Macromedia kissing Microsoft's backside and concentrating most of their efforts on Windows at the expense of the Macintosh, they might have done something that they will highly regret in the future when Microsoft tries to kill both of them off. They might then realise that never ending price rises and neglecting their original markets was a costly mistake.
Does anyone remember that choice item, which was used as the password for a backdoor coded into asp some years ago by a witty Microsoft engineer? I was sitting next to a friend of mine as he cracked a local online store with this vulnerability to see if it actually worked. He was a decent guy, Linux fan through and through and informed the company about the hole.
But what if he hadn't been?
I have titanium artificial hips. Good to know that I'm going to have my hips melt on me and fry me from the inside when one of these things goes off nearby.
Kentucky fried theolein!
is all I can say. SuSE being owned by an American company and not one with a very good track record at that is a bad day for those of us who cherished SuSE's indepedance from strange US IP laws and the abuse of the law through such vagiaries such as the Patriot Act. DMCA etc as well as Microsoft abuse. I find this pretty crap. And sadly this means jobs get lost in Germany and Novell is almost sure to fuck this up on the desktop.
Because most vegetables in cans taste like shit for one, although that's besides the point, but mainly because most vegetables in cans sit in a solution of usually salty water, which leaches out all the benefits that those vegetables ever had. It would probably be ok if anyone actually used the can water while cooking, but mostly it is just thrown away, along with your chances of eating decent food.
If you truly desperately need vegetables that can be preserved and you are not simply too lazy or have too little time to peel and cook normal vegetables, then get frozen vegetables and use that. But do yourself a favour and don't eat greens from cans.
I was in a shop this afternoon and almost bought the Redhat 9 boxed version today. The Linux section of the shop, here in Switzerland (large mall type place like BestBuy called MediaMarkt) has the Linux packages really nicely laid out. There was the complete SuSE line, personal and pro, and both the RedHat personal and pro versions. Nice packaging both of them with RedHat stealing the show with it's cool red and grey offerings.
In two months they won't be around anymore.
This is incredibly stupid reasoning from a marketing point of view, no matter how much it is costing RedHat. It removes the standard way that normal people get introduced to their distro and loses them huge amounts of mindshare. Normally I would think that it doesn't matter as SuSE and Mandrake can close the gap, and perhaps they will (and perhaps they would if they had the marketing budget) but chiefly I just think that it leaves a subliminal whole in a shelf that will probably get filled with Microsoft stuff.
Good thing I run OSX. At least they know what marketing is.
Your post is, to put it simply, uninformed propaganda. The only country in Europe that has significant support is Germany, not "the Europeans", and this should be obvious since SuSE is a German company. If all of Europe were on some anti-Capitalist witch-hunt, then perhaps you could explain what Mandrake has been doing in bankruptcy protection (chapter 11 equiv) for the last half a year, you fucking idiot?
And some city adapting Linux because they want to be able to control it, was probably also some anti-American mindfuck, in your star-spangled sunglasses, I suppose?
With baboons like you sprouting your Nazi-like propaganda we'll probably be fighting you Yanks in the trenches in the next 20 years.
AS someone who has battled the pounds/kilos his whole life I thought I should relate this little story for the aspiring low kilo hacker:
I was born crippled with congenital dislocation of the hips, which meant that a lot of my childhood and early adulthood was spent with a lot of pain if I had to walk distances or even stand for more than 30 minutes. My mother was and is a health fanatic and put me on a number of diets which never seemed to work very well (one of them was an early version of the Atkins diet). I tried to do weightlifting/bodybuilding at school to compensate for my bad self image with a little success but stopped when I went to Uni and ballooned because I did the usual student thing of eating loads of fast food shit that I'd never had at home.
I left my home country (South Africa) and went to live in Berlin, Germany where I worked for the USAF. During this time I discovered swimming, the one sport that I could do with little pain. I was amazed. In about three quarters of a year I was as fit as hell with my four times weekly programme of 45 minutes crawling back and forth in the distance swimming lanes of the local indoor pool. I felt wonderful, for the first time in my life girls were going nuts over me and life was good.
During the dotcom years I gained massive amounts of weight due to enormously long work days and a diet of pizzas, burgers and beer.
That was three years ago and I've been a depressed, lonley fat pig the whole time. A while ago I decided that work could kiss my fat butt on the hole and I started my swimming programme (3 times a week@40 minutes at 6AM in the mornings) as well as simply stopping junk food (No pizzas, burgers, beer).
Already now, only a short while later I am feeling damn good about myself and looking forward to having a social and love life again with the added plus of having a clearer mind than any fad diet could give me.
In my time working for the USAF and my one visit to the US, I noticed how damn difficult it is to buy vegetables and food you actually have to cook--most supermarkets seem to be stuffed with precooked, processed shit that is neither nutritional nor healthy and people resort to chemical crpa like olestra etc in order to avoid actually getting out of their huge fucking cars and moving their bodies.
Do sport, drop the junk food and beer and eat vegetables (not from cans). You'll be fucking amazed.
I had to fucking read this twice. Some fucking lunatics have created a virus that is 100% fatal in mice and are now trying to do the same thing again with cowpox which can infect humans as well. And these famous fucking researchers haven't been able to find a cure for AIDS but it's ok to make something even more deadly in the name of science?????
Jesus motherfucking Christ, has everyone already forgotten the 5 dead and twenty infected with the letter born Anthrax attacks in 2001, carried out by some pissed off ex-military scientist with a chip on his shoulder???? And they think that no one would ever do it again???? Or that the virus couldn't escape and mutate???? And if they don't do it someone else will and "good thing it's being done in the US where every political and military action is 100% above board"?????
Kill them. Yes, for once I actively call for the executions of sick bastards who have so little respect for life that they would create items as dangerous and deadly as this. A bullet to the back of the head, try that for non contagious!!
I think the idea that napster and itunes compete is good up to the point where I see that Napster is only available on Windows, be it due to wma content or whatever. I'm not paranoid enough to believe that Microsoft is funding Napster, since MS has its own service chugging along in Europe (Apple where the fuck are you here????) Rather I believe napster did this because they assumed that Windows Media Player is the most easily accesible player on 90% of desktops and allows easy DRM.
We'll see where this goes. personally, if Apple manages to clinch a deal globally with Record companies, they might have the edge with independant musicians having easier access to the store than with Napster which is stuck squarely between the sweaty balls of the Major labels.
I see this as an excellent effort to help the spread of Linux in corporate and industry environments. No, some of these apps have missing functionality and the range is limited, but this is almsot exactly what Mac users went through for around two and a half years before Macromedia, Adobe and Quark ported the major applications. Up until then quite a lot had to done in the Classic Mac OS9 environment running in OSX as a process, and a lot of the applications weren't perfect. There were some crashes and some things that didn't work any more but the admittedly loyal mac users put up with this because no one wants to dual boot all the time and they didn't want to forgo the advantages of OSX.
Crossover Office brings that very same functionality to Linux. It means that large corporations with loads of Office 2000 Licences and knowledge who are tired of Microsoft highjacking fees and changing licencing can use their legacy documents along with all the macros and VBA add-ons that they have on a platform that they can better control and customise, which is more secure (no VBA virus is going to trash their Linux system even if it trashes the Office installation) and far cheaper to maintain and purchase. The advantages are enormous. And Munich obviously knew this, since this is what they are doing.
Equally web designers who want to design with powerful tools and test on the end users platform no longer have to have two platforms or dual boot in order to serve on the same platform that their site will finally be hosted on.
Even all those movie studios who use Linux and Cinepaint will appreciate being able to use Photoshop as well.
I see advantages and good times ahead for codeweavers.
While Nokia should be commended for innovation in developing the nGage and this PDA (because the functionality is almost exactly the same as similarly sized high end PDA's out there) I doubt that these will sell well. The idea of holding the thing on edge to phone with is simply not practical (Did they do usability testing?) and I really fail to see advantages in functionality in this device, compared to other PDA's in that ailing market. Nokia's only advantage is in it's brand recognition, which is huge in Europe. They would be wiser to explore features such as voice recognition or gestures or easier usability in their devices.
I just remembered that Nokia also has the plus point of good connections amongst the telcos, which helps them to push features such as MIDP gaming amongst their clients.
If you take a look at the Aero application archetypes section of the Longhorn preview, you'll notice that Microsoft is milking .Net for all it's worth and attempting to embrace and extend the internet yet again. All those pretty "Rich client" demos of .Net apps that don't need a website, while interesting and pushing the curve a bit, point to Microsoft trying to get companies to develop sites with web services (theoretically cross platform but hopefully Windows servers obviously) and to develop native .Net applications that use those web services instead of developing websites for them. The advantage for Microsoft is that it would be an effective way to lock people into Windows clients ("This travel site application only works on Win2k6").
Apart from that I see Microsoft is developing detailed usability guidelines which is a good idea considering how poorly implemented some Windows applications are. what is even more interesting is that they have some interfaces that are still as confusing as ever.
I'm not sure how this works in the US legal system, but this document that SCO has produced is a legal document. That means it's a statement of fact in court as seen by SCO. While this might be a standard way of doing things i.e. throwing every available answer at the opposition so that those defenses are not nullified by ommission, it also is a very good vehicle for anyone who contributed to the Linux kernel to warn SCO that they (the contributors) intend to sue SCO for abuse of copyright as SCO clearly states that it distributed GPL software in full knowledge that they did not accept the copyrights of those authors since SCO claims that the GPL is invalid. This suit would work whether or not the GPL is invalidated.
All it would take is for Linus, Cox, Marcelo and the hundreds of others who contributed to warn of an intention to use AND GO TO THE PRESS WITH THIS ARGUMENT. Even the shitrag IT press such as CNet would understand such a legal threat and it would cause a major drop in SCO's stock value. Repeated a number of times by other developers, such as those of Samba, it would make SCO effectivily worthless by the time this trial gets going.
The sad thing is, that while many talk about class action lawsuits, it is almost wholly hot air and will never materialise, since talk is cheap and action requires effort.
There is no such thing as registering your computers with some data protection bureau.
1.You really have some strange fantasies about life and the law in Europe, some of which seem to belong more in Hollywood than in real life. Come on over and visit for a while. You'll be amazed considering the drivel you've just posted.
2.The word you used, "bureau" reminded me more of what your government is doing with it's patriot act.
Does that make Capitalism Fascism's hyperactive kid with TS?
Les cons qui croient qu'ils sont intelligents par-ce qu'ils saient des mots en francais ne sont que des cochons sanglantes qui mangent de la merde.
Here is a link to some info on Brazilian use of sugarcane to make ethanol which is used as fuel for Brazilian cars. Renewable, provides jobs and doesn't pollute as much, and makes Brazil a lot less dependant on oil and oil companies.
Wierd thing is that they're the only country to ever have done this. This would give Africa and asia valuble export resource that is renewable.
Reminds me of the book where the Magic Dragon franchise had video columns in front of each one showing images from other franchises around the world.
I think it's a brilliant idea. It has little practical use apart from a sort of virtual meeting point, but I can see this becoming a huge hit. Normal people, who unlike us geeks, will not be worrying about bandwidth, bitdepth, framerates etc will love the idea.
You were perhaps wondering why people like the agricultural activist Jose Bove in France is so popular for demolishing GM crops and why the whole of Europe is utterly against GM foods and why even starving countries like Ethiopia and Zimbabwe don't want fucking GM flour? They are well aware that if they fall into this trap they are then legal captives of some motherfucking pig corporation which has a pig of a politician in its pocket that has no qualms using his fucking army to invade other fucking countries who don't want to sell their souls to big corporation.
FUCK MONSATO! They are one of the causes of terrorism because poor people have had enough of being abused.
After reading this latest round of SCO wierdness I'm beginning to worry if the disease that afflicts their minds is contagious. It sounds like a scary form of paranoid schizophrenia. Perhaps a good mental health professional could help.
I assume there will be people out there in any case who will claim that Apple integrates iTunes in Mac OSX just as Microsoft integrates WMP in WinXP and should there fore be under the same penalties as Microsoft.
.exe it will get restored automatically. Nothing like that at all.
To this I say, on your Mac OSX system you just navigate to your Applications folder, drag the iTunes application to the trash and emmpty the trash. Boom, it's gone. No, mindbogglingly complex setup panel just to hide WMP, and even if you delete the
I saw some images of the newest Chinese main battle tank about a year ago, and it already has a laser system for blinding enemy gunners and optical guidance systems, and there is talk of the Chinese also doing a lot of high powered laser research.
But apart from that, while I can very good immediate uses for laser weapons in defending against missile attacks, I can't see these being of much use in close combat in the near future, even they make them much smaller. An assault rifle and machine gun will still offer far higher rates of fire ofr a long time to come, and one shouldn't forget that more people on the US side died from 19 nutcases with boxcutters (WTC) and roadside bombs (Iraq) than any other weapon. On the other sides in Afghanistan and Iraq, they had no chance against the US in open warefare in any case, which explains the boxcutters and the roadside bombs.
I can see CDs or DVDs replacing tapes, but not hard drives, not at the rate hard drives fail. And restoring from a corrupt tape is more likely to get you at least some of your data back, whereas restoring from a corrupt hard drive is painful and expensive.
Client/Server will be around for a long time, and the article just replaced it with some new buzzwords for the same technology. You want a simple but massively popular client/server application? You're looking at one now. And there's the link to Apple's iTunes with its iTMS which doesn't seem to be dying at all, at least not in the last 3.5 days.
VB6. It might decline, but it will be around for a guaranteed 5 to 10 years. There are thousands of VB6 applications out there that no one is going to rewrite in VB.Net while the current ones are still working, and the legions of VBA, especially Excell, applications will guarantee another long stretch, and it's by no means certain that VB.Net will be the replacement as it means basically relearning the language, at which point it would probably just be easier to switch to C# or jump ship and do it in Java.(Eclipse and SWT have the potential to make all those early client side Java dreams true)
As for the rest, well they might be dying out or declining but my mother and sister still use Win98SE as do literally a full 40% of computer users worldwide. They'll probably switch when they get new computers but not before, and as long as their current computers work they won't switch (Browser, e-mail and office work, basta)
The uptake here in Europe (and in Asia AFAIK) of mobile phones was very big and was certainly helped by the single GSM standard and almost blanket coverage from Malaga to Nordkap. (I've heard though that "plans" in the US are cheaper though). This meant that the number of mobile users is astronomical in Europe and that complete luddites are more than happy with their new phones that can take and send pictures, play songs and downloadable games and transfer addressbook and calendar items to one another.
/. want a pocketable light device that is fun and easy to use. They don't care whether it's Symbian, MS or Linux inside, or whether it has 64MB RAM or whatever.
None of them have heard of Bluetooth and even fewer care. Normal people i.e. those who don't read
The MS man: Taylor, predictably, wasn't impressed. "The Linux stack is more of a cobbled-together set of things," he concludes. "They do their integration through people."
Damn right! Linux gives jobs back to people, where it's supposed to be. Linux doesn't outsoursce your job to someone in India who answers your problems only if he can find the answer on a list.