Allowing access to external mail accounts via IMAP doesn't actually prevent them from doing this (getting my data). They still have to process the mail data in order to display it within the Gmail interface -- there's nothing stopping them from storing the data on their servers and using it for whatever they use it for (i.e., ad targeting). As long as they're treating my IMAP server as the "live" copy, my experience is the same.
In fact, they could even be open about this and call it "caching", and use their store in the event they have a problem connecting to my IMAP server, or if I'm accessing the same email message a second time. I wouldn't have a problem with this.
But, this doesn't address the needs of corporations, where the primary concern is simply having the mail on Google's servers at all. But, corporations can always use a commercial version of Gmail if it were to exist.
But, if they were able to add in POP support to accomplish a similar goal, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that they could add IMAP as an additional way to get your mail. It doesn't have to be a fundamental change to how Gmail is architected, just an extra protocol supported.
That'd be great for corporate customers -- and I'm not entirely sure that they don't already offer that in some form -- but that's a tough sell for ordinary consumers. Buying dedicated hardware is a tough way to get it to consumers. It really needs to be some sort of software -- either accessing it via Google's server, or installing it on your own.
It's great that they're improving the interface, and being able to access mail stored on Google's servers via IMAP is a nice addition. But what I REALLY want is to be able to store my mail on MY server, and access it via Google's awesome interface. Really, just use Google as an IMAP client to my mail server.
I know they offer to do that via POP, but I want the "live" copy of my mail to remain on my server, and for Google to access it via IMAP. I don't like the idea of all my mail being stored on someone else's server, especially when I'm not paying anything for it and therefore should have no real expectation of it still being there tomorrow.
Google for domains seems at first glance to do this, but your mail is actually still stored on Google's servers.
Has anyone ever heard of this sort of feature coming in the future?
I've set up two computers with two different wireless NICs using ndiswrapper, and have had success with both. One was a laptop using D-Link's DWL-G630 802.11g card, and the other was a desktop using the Linksys WMP54G 802.11g PCI card. Using ndiswrapper isn't as perfect as a native driver, but it works well, so I'm not complaining.
For the D-Link card, I documented my process here, and the same general process works for the Linksys card as well. The process is for Fedora Core 3 because at the time I wrote that, I couldn't get it to work with Fedora Core 4, but since that time I believe it's now possible.
Greg
For a long time, I've been saying that this is exactly what is needed for cell phones to really take off. A lot of comments here are criticizing it, but let me explain why I think this is important so much.
Most cell phone companies have pretty good coverage. But, the #1 place I hear people complain about not having coverage is their home. Coverage is great on highways, in downtown areas, but once you enter a suburban residential area, coverage becomes questionable.
Now, in most homes there is already a landline phone or at least broadband connection. So, why not make use of this pre-existing network which is in just the spot that cell phones are unreliable?
I've felt for a long time that cell phone should come with some sort of base station (like what comes with cordless phones), which you could connect to while in your house. This would be establishing the "last mile" of near-full cell phone coverage.
Most negative comments here seem to see this as providing an alternative way to make a call on your cell phone, but I don't think that's the point. The point, to me, is to provide a way to make call in the one place that most people probably want to, but don't have coverage.
I just bought a Coolmax Taurus PSU, which is designed to be silent. And it actually is near-silent. It uses a bigger fan that has a lower RPM. It's not extremely expensive, either. I recommend it.
The point is NOT to let you use VOIP with your cell phone. They aren't making this so that you can walk around your house talking on Skype or with some SIP service. I think that the actual reason behind this technology is quite smart.
I have a cell phone. The phone works great and has great reception when I'm out and about, at college, etc. But, I live in a suburban residential area. It is by no means "rural", but still there is not very good cell phone coverage in the area of my house. So, I can use my cell phone wonderfully out in the city area, but not very well around my home, which is the major reason I haven't switch yet to cell-phone-only. I am far from the only person I know who is in this situation. Great reception in general, but weak or no reception at home.
This technology would solve my problem. If I am out and there is cell phone coverage, the phone would use the cell towers. When I walk into my house and the tower reception goes away, the phone would switch right over to my bluetooth access. Sure, it wouldn't be cheap like Skype. But, chances are you'd pay some regular monthly fee (maybe higher than normal...) and this access point would be enabled.
So, the point isn't to make calls cheaper, it's to give you access in the one place that many people don't have it already.
I probably started later with computers than most people on/.... I didn't get one until I was in 6th grade, but I was instantly taken with it.
I had an interest in programming even before getting the computer, thanks to BASIC programs being published in Boy's Life magazine, of all places.
The program that really sparked my interest in computers was Dr. Sbaitso, which used to come with Sound Blaster sound cards... it was a sorta Eliza program you could talk to, but the "magic" of Creative's version was that it actually spoke to you. To me, the mystery of how a computer could carry on a conversation (as simple as it was) intrigued me quite a bit.
Now, 11 years later, I'm a grad student at Cornell doing my master's project in AI with natural language processing... so, there must be a connection there:-)
It would be better phrased, "When you have the private key associated with a certificate, only THAT key can sign software for your certificate..." Unfortunately, if that key is compromised then anyone with it can sign software as if they were you.
That's right, I was just trying to simplify. But also, if private keys start getting compromised, then much of the security world collapses:)
Most security assumes that private keys stay private, and if they become public, you no longer have security.
I've studied computer security at the graduate level, so I have some background in this stuff.
When you have a certificate, only YOU can sign software with YOUR certficiate, and once someone changes the data, the certificate becomes "corrupt" (heavily simplified). So, if you receive a program which is signed by the Mozilla foundation, either a) it was truly signed by the Mozilla foundation and is the same data that the Mozilla foundation intended to release, or b) Someone bought a certificate and claimed to be the Mozilla foundation. There are security measures in place to prevent case b from happening, so signed data can be assumed to be the actual data intended to be distributed by the signing party. (So now the problem becomes, do you trust the Mozilla foundation to release non-malicious code?)
On the other hand, an MD5 sum is usually a file stored somewhere which is a hash of the file. However, an MD5 sum is no more secure than the original file -- if someone maliciously altered the original data, they could just also alter the MD5 sum that goes along with it so that it matches. Basically, if you already don't 100% trust the data you are getting, you probably shouldn't trust the MD5 sum you are getting either. MD5 sums are useful for checking for transmission errors, but not so much for security. Of course, if the MD5 sum and data are stored on two different physical computers, the chances of this attack happening can be reduced.
So, certificates guarantee that the data is what the signer wanted you to get (which could be intentionally malicious!), and MD5 sums guarantee that what you downloaded is what's stored on the server (which could have been replaced with something malicious!).
The moral of the story is, when you study computer security too much, you become really paranoid about everything;-)
Plese give us a list of critical functionality that MS suite has that OO does not. And please leave dotnet off the list.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft Office doesn't do anything related to.NET. The.NET framework is, after all, just a large development library of classes and a new runtime system for Windows. Useful and valuable, as well... at least to those of us who write non-trivial systems.
But I've got one thing MS-Office does that is not (yet) matched by OO.org -- Visio. I used nothing but OpenOffice.org until I discovered that Visio could make my life much easier than it was. OO.org has no true equivalent. Dia is the closest thing, but that isn't actually a part of OO.org, and is not as good as Visio (when you get into complex diagramming needs). And Visio integrates quite nicely with the rest of the MS-Office components. Not that it's without its faults (i.e., importing a Visio diagram into Word sometimes messes up the rendering of the diagram, so you have to export the diagram into a graphic format).
Verizon already restricts people using Verison DSL. SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.
I have Verizon DSL. This is not true (at least where I am). None of my SMTP traffic goes through Verizon's servers, and all of my mail gets through.
Plus Verizon is the local telephone monopoly in this area, I don't want to voluntarially give additionnal business to any monopoly.
They are indeed a local phone monopoly, but have you followed local phone news lately? That market is tanking, and quickly. If you don't give any additional business to local phone companies and they must survive only on local phone service, they'll probably go out of business, or you'll have to pay exhorbitant fees to local calls. I don't know of any local phone company that doesn't offer at least some other services to offset the shrinking local phone market.
They've sucessfully challanged the law which requires them to share their wires with competitors.
Challenged the law, yes, but not to get rid of it. They just don't want to be forced to sell their lines wholesale for less than it costs to maintain them. I personally think that's reasonable. Whether you do or not, that is what they are challenging, not the fact that they have to sell to their competitors in general.
We need a regulated monopoly to bring IP to the home and then allow companies to compete in providing services over that wire. The regulated monopoly *must not* be allowed to compete in ancillary services.
Actually not a bad idea. But then you have to decide on a means of transmissions. So what will it be -- DSL (copper), cable, or fiber? Who's to decide?
I think that would be because Netcraft only counts website servers. So this means that Debian is the fastest growing Linux distro for use as a web server. I have a feeling that it would indeed not be the fastest growing desktop distro, although I could be wrong.
I used to be a Mozilla-only user. However, over time, it seemed that the speed of Mozilla started getting worse and worse, especially under Windows. On my dual-boot machine, I kept with Moz under Linux, but switched to Opera 7 under Windows. For the time, Opera was much quicker, not just at starting up, but seemingly at rendering web pages as well.
When I noticed that 1.4 had been released (in the comments for the Netscape 7.1 story) I figured I'd give Mozilla another try under Windows.
I was amazed.
Mozilla 1.4 is noticeably faster than previous versions under Windows, and seems on-par with Opera 7. For a while, I was running Opera 7 for browsing and Thunderbird for mail... I think now I'm going back to Mozilla for both.
Once the xft-enabled RPMs are up for Red Hat 9, I'll give it a try on that OS as well, but, as I said, speed didn't seem to be an issue there to begin with.
Bravo, Mozilla. Firebird is certainly fast, but some people like the integration of the web/e-mail programs, and it's nice to see a speed boost for us as well.
With my USA cell phone plan (Virgin Mobile), it IS free to receive text messages, and costs 10 cents to send one from my phone. However, this doesn't stop spam because you can also send messages from either Virgin's website, OR by sending an e-mail to a certain e-mail address.
Now, this is GREAT for convenience. If I'm at home and just want to get a quick message to my girlfriend, or she wants to get a quick message to me, we can use either the website or the e-mail gateway to send a message for free, and the other person can receive it for free.
But this "send for free" capability, especially it being attached to a computer, is what makes SMS spam possible.
I can send email and pics, browse the web, plus listen to MP3s all on one cellular device.
The question is, would you want to? While cell phones are the most convenient way to send a picture taken with the phone, it would still require some sort of docking station is order to send pics from my digital camera. And viewing pics and movies just isn't fun on a small screen.
Additionally, the "experience" of browsing the web is quite different on a cell phone than it is on laptop or desktop -- I've tried. Part of it is that most websites simply are unreadable on phones, part of it is that you know that you're paying by the kilobyte -- so much for opening tabs for every Slashdot story and Google result. Which brings up another point: To my knowledge, browsers aren't quite as good on phones. No tabs, and we no the Slashdot crowd loves their tabs;-) Another part of the "experience" left out.
It makes the notion of a hotspot almost meaningless.
The one good thing about cell phone net access -- you can do it from anywhere that you have cell coverage. I definitely do enjoy that.
In the end, the best result, imho, would be cell phone web access from laptops, unmetered. Does this exist?
Since Wal-Mart recently announced they were entering this market as well, will this patent help keep the competition level? Wal-Mart has a lot of money and is known for pushing smaller business out of the way when they want to. I'm all for Wal-Mart entering this market -- competition is good -- but not if it means that in 2 years' time they'll have a monopoly themselves.
Patents aren't always good, but maybe this one will help do what patents were intended for, protect businesses that come up with innovative ideas. Hmm... novel idea:)
Well, I seem to remember Microsoft pushing something I think was called "QuickBIOS" that pursued this idea. One good thing about Windows XP is that it certainly does boot up faster than most operating systems I've seen, so Microsoft wanted to get that long BIOS delay out of the picture. I'm not sure whatever happened to that, or if it only allowed you to boot Windows. But at any rate, Microsoft, of all people, is thinking of you;-)
I've been using Linux for quite some time now, and I actually ran into that Mozilla / Evolution dependency problem as well (on Red Hat 8). It seemed unbelievable to me at first, as well... installing a newer version of Mozilla had somehow broken Evolution. I never did figure out exactly what the link was, because I use Mozilla Mail rather than Evolution anyways.
Just an experienced warning to people who use both Mozilla and Evolution -- be careful!;-)
Last I heard NTFS support is very unreliable. You could very well end up trashing your file system if you attempt to write to an NTFS file system.
Writing is unreliable, but at the very least it seems to make sense to at least include the ability to read NTFS partitions. People can get by without writing, but reading can be very useful. I got it working in RH8, but only after a lot of research on Google. Funny thing was, it didn't require any extra downloads -- everything neccessary comes with RH8, you just need to mess with the kernel a bit. Seems like a no-brainer to include read suport by default
I'd also add to the gripe list that Red Hat 8 (as far as I can tell) didn't come with a menu editor prinstalled.
Yes, I definitely forgot this by accident. If we had this, the "extras" menu wouldn't be so badf... we could just move programs out of there and into the menus they belong in!
8.0 was great, but...
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...it left me feeling it could have been much better. It showed promise, but had a few faults which keep it just short of being, well... perfect. I always felt that if Red Hat addressed just a few concerns, 8.1 could be great. Problems, in my opinion, were:
*Lack of NTFS support by default: Near-neccessary for 2000/XP dual-booters
*That silly "Extras" menu: you never quite know where software is going to turn up
*Lack of a good package management front-end: That Windows-like one they include is good for managing the software on the RH8 CDs, but for removing, installing, and upgrading third-party RPMs, one must resort either to the command line, or better yet, apt4rpm. Apt4rpm should be in by default.
*No MP3 support in XMMS
*DMA is off by default on CD-ROM drives. This is easily fixed through config files, but for the average user, this is a hurdle to DVD playing and CD burning.
*No nVidia drivers
These were all easily fixed if you knew what you were doing, but kept RH8 out of the realm of being usable for average people -- or even being usable out of the box for techies. Does anyone know if any of these gripes have been addressed?
As opposed to mouse gestures...
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Pie-Menus in Mozilla
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been using mouse gestures for quite some time, and love them. I was wondering how this would compare to them. At first, I was afraid it would slow me down, adding menus to my mouse gestures.
After just a few minutes of experimentation, the thing I like most about these pie menus is that the two mouse gestures I used most (Back and Forward) still work! I just right-click and move left or right, and can ignore the menu. At the same time, these pie menus add menus, which allow me to see what other options I have available without looking at the config or documentation, like I have to do with mouse gestures for gestures that I have yet to memorize.
Great work. One thing I love about the Mozilla is the truly "innovative" atmosphere where people aren't afraid to try new things. Bravo.
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing access to external mail accounts via IMAP doesn't actually prevent them from doing this (getting my data). They still have to process the mail data in order to display it within the Gmail interface -- there's nothing stopping them from storing the data on their servers and using it for whatever they use it for (i.e., ad targeting). As long as they're treating my IMAP server as the "live" copy, my experience is the same.
In fact, they could even be open about this and call it "caching", and use their store in the event they have a problem connecting to my IMAP server, or if I'm accessing the same email message a second time. I wouldn't have a problem with this.
But, this doesn't address the needs of corporations, where the primary concern is simply having the mail on Google's servers at all. But, corporations can always use a commercial version of Gmail if it were to exist.
But, if they were able to add in POP support to accomplish a similar goal, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that they could add IMAP as an additional way to get your mail. It doesn't have to be a fundamental change to how Gmail is architected, just an extra protocol supported.
That'd be great for corporate customers -- and I'm not entirely sure that they don't already offer that in some form -- but that's a tough sell for ordinary consumers. Buying dedicated hardware is a tough way to get it to consumers. It really needs to be some sort of software -- either accessing it via Google's server, or installing it on your own.
It's great that they're improving the interface, and being able to access mail stored on Google's servers via IMAP is a nice addition. But what I REALLY want is to be able to store my mail on MY server, and access it via Google's awesome interface. Really, just use Google as an IMAP client to my mail server.
I know they offer to do that via POP, but I want the "live" copy of my mail to remain on my server, and for Google to access it via IMAP. I don't like the idea of all my mail being stored on someone else's server, especially when I'm not paying anything for it and therefore should have no real expectation of it still being there tomorrow.
Google for domains seems at first glance to do this, but your mail is actually still stored on Google's servers.
Has anyone ever heard of this sort of feature coming in the future?
I've set up two computers with two different wireless NICs using ndiswrapper, and have had success with both. One was a laptop using D-Link's DWL-G630 802.11g card, and the other was a desktop using the Linksys WMP54G 802.11g PCI card. Using ndiswrapper isn't as perfect as a native driver, but it works well, so I'm not complaining. For the D-Link card, I documented my process here, and the same general process works for the Linksys card as well. The process is for Fedora Core 3 because at the time I wrote that, I couldn't get it to work with Fedora Core 4, but since that time I believe it's now possible. Greg
Offtopic, but how exactly can it be possible for a question to be moderated informative?
Most cell phone companies have pretty good coverage. But, the #1 place I hear people complain about not having coverage is their home. Coverage is great on highways, in downtown areas, but once you enter a suburban residential area, coverage becomes questionable.
Now, in most homes there is already a landline phone or at least broadband connection. So, why not make use of this pre-existing network which is in just the spot that cell phones are unreliable?
I've felt for a long time that cell phone should come with some sort of base station (like what comes with cordless phones), which you could connect to while in your house. This would be establishing the "last mile" of near-full cell phone coverage.
Most negative comments here seem to see this as providing an alternative way to make a call on your cell phone, but I don't think that's the point. The point, to me, is to provide a way to make call in the one place that most people probably want to, but don't have coverage.
Bravo.
I just bought a Coolmax Taurus PSU, which is designed to be silent. And it actually is near-silent. It uses a bigger fan that has a lower RPM. It's not extremely expensive, either. I recommend it.
A lot of posts here seem to be missing the point.
The point is NOT to let you use VOIP with your cell phone. They aren't making this so that you can walk around your house talking on Skype or with some SIP service. I think that the actual reason behind this technology is quite smart.
I have a cell phone. The phone works great and has great reception when I'm out and about, at college, etc. But, I live in a suburban residential area. It is by no means "rural", but still there is not very good cell phone coverage in the area of my house. So, I can use my cell phone wonderfully out in the city area, but not very well around my home, which is the major reason I haven't switch yet to cell-phone-only. I am far from the only person I know who is in this situation. Great reception in general, but weak or no reception at home.
This technology would solve my problem. If I am out and there is cell phone coverage, the phone would use the cell towers. When I walk into my house and the tower reception goes away, the phone would switch right over to my bluetooth access. Sure, it wouldn't be cheap like Skype. But, chances are you'd pay some regular monthly fee (maybe higher than normal...) and this access point would be enabled.
So, the point isn't to make calls cheaper, it's to give you access in the one place that many people don't have it already.
I probably started later with computers than most people on /. ... I didn't get one until I was in 6th grade, but I was instantly taken with it.
:-)
I had an interest in programming even before getting the computer, thanks to BASIC programs being published in Boy's Life magazine, of all places.
The program that really sparked my interest in computers was Dr. Sbaitso, which used to come with Sound Blaster sound cards... it was a sorta Eliza program you could talk to, but the "magic" of Creative's version was that it actually spoke to you. To me, the mystery of how a computer could carry on a conversation (as simple as it was) intrigued me quite a bit.
Now, 11 years later, I'm a grad student at Cornell doing my master's project in AI with natural language processing... so, there must be a connection there
That's right, I was just trying to simplify. But also, if private keys start getting compromised, then much of the security world collapses :)
Most security assumes that private keys stay private, and if they become public, you no longer have security.
I've studied computer security at the graduate level, so I have some background in this stuff.
;-)
When you have a certificate, only YOU can sign software with YOUR certficiate, and once someone changes the data, the certificate becomes "corrupt" (heavily simplified). So, if you receive a program which is signed by the Mozilla foundation, either a) it was truly signed by the Mozilla foundation and is the same data that the Mozilla foundation intended to release, or b) Someone bought a certificate and claimed to be the Mozilla foundation. There are security measures in place to prevent case b from happening, so signed data can be assumed to be the actual data intended to be distributed by the signing party. (So now the problem becomes, do you trust the Mozilla foundation to release non-malicious code?)
On the other hand, an MD5 sum is usually a file stored somewhere which is a hash of the file. However, an MD5 sum is no more secure than the original file -- if someone maliciously altered the original data, they could just also alter the MD5 sum that goes along with it so that it matches. Basically, if you already don't 100% trust the data you are getting, you probably shouldn't trust the MD5 sum you are getting either. MD5 sums are useful for checking for transmission errors, but not so much for security. Of course, if the MD5 sum and data are stored on two different physical computers, the chances of this attack happening can be reduced.
So, certificates guarantee that the data is what the signer wanted you to get (which could be intentionally malicious!), and MD5 sums guarantee that what you downloaded is what's stored on the server (which could have been replaced with something malicious!).
The moral of the story is, when you study computer security too much, you become really paranoid about everything
I'm pretty sure Microsoft Office doesn't do anything related to .NET. The .NET framework is, after all, just a large development library of classes and a new runtime system for Windows. Useful and valuable, as well... at least to those of us who write non-trivial systems.
But I've got one thing MS-Office does that is not (yet) matched by OO.org -- Visio. I used nothing but OpenOffice.org until I discovered that Visio could make my life much easier than it was. OO.org has no true equivalent. Dia is the closest thing, but that isn't actually a part of OO.org, and is not as good as Visio (when you get into complex diagramming needs). And Visio integrates quite nicely with the rest of the MS-Office components. Not that it's without its faults (i.e., importing a Visio diagram into Word sometimes messes up the rendering of the diagram, so you have to export the diagram into a graphic format).
I have Verizon DSL. This is not true (at least where I am). None of my SMTP traffic goes through Verizon's servers, and all of my mail gets through.
Plus Verizon is the local telephone monopoly in this area, I don't want to voluntarially give additionnal business to any monopoly.
They are indeed a local phone monopoly, but have you followed local phone news lately? That market is tanking, and quickly. If you don't give any additional business to local phone companies and they must survive only on local phone service, they'll probably go out of business, or you'll have to pay exhorbitant fees to local calls. I don't know of any local phone company that doesn't offer at least some other services to offset the shrinking local phone market.
They've sucessfully challanged the law which requires them to share their wires with competitors.
Challenged the law, yes, but not to get rid of it. They just don't want to be forced to sell their lines wholesale for less than it costs to maintain them. I personally think that's reasonable. Whether you do or not, that is what they are challenging, not the fact that they have to sell to their competitors in general.
We need a regulated monopoly to bring IP to the home and then allow companies to compete in providing services over that wire. The regulated monopoly *must not* be allowed to compete in ancillary services.
Actually not a bad idea. But then you have to decide on a means of transmissions. So what will it be -- DSL (copper), cable, or fiber? Who's to decide?
I think that would be because Netcraft only counts website servers. So this means that Debian is the fastest growing Linux distro for use as a web server. I have a feeling that it would indeed not be the fastest growing desktop distro, although I could be wrong.
That's true -- I'm also still using 1.4RC1-gtk2 under Linux. The clean fonts are worth being slightly out-of-date.
But, we really need a build that has nice fonts AND is up-to-date. I'm sure there will be one within a few days.
When I noticed that 1.4 had been released (in the comments for the Netscape 7.1 story) I figured I'd give Mozilla another try under Windows.
I was amazed.
Mozilla 1.4 is noticeably faster than previous versions under Windows, and seems on-par with Opera 7. For a while, I was running Opera 7 for browsing and Thunderbird for mail... I think now I'm going back to Mozilla for both.
Once the xft-enabled RPMs are up for Red Hat 9, I'll give it a try on that OS as well, but, as I said, speed didn't seem to be an issue there to begin with.
Bravo, Mozilla. Firebird is certainly fast, but some people like the integration of the web/e-mail programs, and it's nice to see a speed boost for us as well.
Now, this is GREAT for convenience. If I'm at home and just want to get a quick message to my girlfriend, or she wants to get a quick message to me, we can use either the website or the e-mail gateway to send a message for free, and the other person can receive it for free.
But this "send for free" capability, especially it being attached to a computer, is what makes SMS spam possible.
The question is, would you want to? While cell phones are the most convenient way to send a picture taken with the phone, it would still require some sort of docking station is order to send pics from my digital camera. And viewing pics and movies just isn't fun on a small screen.
Additionally, the "experience" of browsing the web is quite different on a cell phone than it is on laptop or desktop -- I've tried. Part of it is that most websites simply are unreadable on phones, part of it is that you know that you're paying by the kilobyte -- so much for opening tabs for every Slashdot story and Google result. Which brings up another point: To my knowledge, browsers aren't quite as good on phones. No tabs, and we no the Slashdot crowd loves their tabs ;-) Another part of the "experience" left out.
It makes the notion of a hotspot almost meaningless.
The one good thing about cell phone net access -- you can do it from anywhere that you have cell coverage. I definitely do enjoy that.
In the end, the best result, imho, would be cell phone web access from laptops, unmetered. Does this exist?
Patents aren't always good, but maybe this one will help do what patents were intended for, protect businesses that come up with innovative ideas. Hmm... novel idea :)
Well, I seem to remember Microsoft pushing something I think was called "QuickBIOS" that pursued this idea. One good thing about Windows XP is that it certainly does boot up faster than most operating systems I've seen, so Microsoft wanted to get that long BIOS delay out of the picture. I'm not sure whatever happened to that, or if it only allowed you to boot Windows. But at any rate, Microsoft, of all people, is thinking of you ;-)
Just an experienced warning to people who use both Mozilla and Evolution -- be careful! ;-)
Writing is unreliable, but at the very least it seems to make sense to at least include the ability to read NTFS partitions. People can get by without writing, but reading can be very useful. I got it working in RH8, but only after a lot of research on Google. Funny thing was, it didn't require any extra downloads -- everything neccessary comes with RH8, you just need to mess with the kernel a bit. Seems like a no-brainer to include read suport by default
I'd also add to the gripe list that Red Hat 8 (as far as I can tell) didn't come with a menu editor prinstalled.
Yes, I definitely forgot this by accident. If we had this, the "extras" menu wouldn't be so badf... we could just move programs out of there and into the menus they belong in!
...it left me feeling it could have been much better. It showed promise, but had a few faults which keep it just short of being, well... perfect. I always felt that if Red Hat addressed just a few concerns, 8.1 could be great. Problems, in my opinion, were:
*Lack of NTFS support by default: Near-neccessary for 2000/XP dual-booters
*That silly "Extras" menu: you never quite know where software is going to turn up
*Lack of a good package management front-end: That Windows-like one they include is good for managing the software on the RH8 CDs, but for removing, installing, and upgrading third-party RPMs, one must resort either to the command line, or better yet, apt4rpm. Apt4rpm should be in by default.
*No MP3 support in XMMS
*DMA is off by default on CD-ROM drives. This is easily fixed through config files, but for the average user, this is a hurdle to DVD playing and CD burning.
*No nVidia drivers
These were all easily fixed if you knew what you were doing, but kept RH8 out of the realm of being usable for average people -- or even being usable out of the box for techies. Does anyone know if any of these gripes have been addressed?
After just a few minutes of experimentation, the thing I like most about these pie menus is that the two mouse gestures I used most (Back and Forward) still work! I just right-click and move left or right, and can ignore the menu. At the same time, these pie menus add menus, which allow me to see what other options I have available without looking at the config or documentation, like I have to do with mouse gestures for gestures that I have yet to memorize.
Great work. One thing I love about the Mozilla is the truly "innovative" atmosphere where people aren't afraid to try new things. Bravo.