No. You can have unprotected files, but there are certain conditions under which Vista (and it's drivers) will "magically" downgrade the quality of any media going across certain paths. Mostly, it should only occur if you're trying to use protected media under 'improper conditions', but sometimes it can occur if the system just thinks that 'something may be wrong'.
Evidence to support your claims ?
Possible worst-case scenarios are: your business partner sends you a video clip in the email, not knowing that it's DRMed. You open the email while waiting for the final render of your $.5M video clip, and the presence of the 'unauthorized media' causes Vista to degrade the quality of the render for 30 seconds. If you're lucky and catch the problem, your QC people may spend hours unsuccessfully trying to track down the source of the problem.
Ah, I see, you're just making stuff up.
I suggest liberal application of tin foil to your cranium, it should help you significantly.
So why was it good for Apple to switch OS architecture and not for Microsoft?
Microsoft _did_ "switch OS architecture" - to Windows NT, from DOS.
Apple tried to do the same thing during the same timeframe as well - more than once - but their "next generation OS" projects never really came to fruition. Then they bought NeXT, replaced the display system and updated the UI to something that didn't work as well, but looked really cool (although many of the major UI issues have been fixed and/or worked around, there's still some train wrecks in there - like the Dock).
In the time used to delay Vista, they culd have churned out a BSD based OS like Apple did to look and feel like anything they like.
Which would be, at most, a step sideways (more realistically a step backwards). There's nothing significantly wrong with the internals of Windows NT. In pretty much every way, it's superior to that of OS X (although OS X is catching up quickly).
Microsoft SHOULD switch away from Win32 if for no other reason than that message queue bug that turns just about every vulnerability into a critical vulnerability.
Whenever I get apiece of software of which I cannot verify the source, I suspect a backdoor password being there.
Do you have source code to all your hardware's firmware and the complete schematic's to its design ?
Re:OS/2 was never the gaming platform of the futur
on
Is Vista the New OS/2?
·
· Score: 1
Evidently you never tried OS/2. As a gaming platform, it performed admirably, better than Windows of the time. Command & Conquer in a window (could be switched to Full Screen on the fly) with full sound while answering email? No problem.
If you were lucky enough to have the game work at all (most "modern" games from that timeframe didn't, due to incompatibilities with their DOS extenders) and a massively powerful (for the time) machine, OS/2 worked "admirably" as a gaming platform. However, overall, it sucked, because of those problems (and, yes, I *did* use OS/2, from about 1991 to 1995).
Added to that, if you could run a game as you describe in OS/2, it was also possible to do so in Windows 95 - with the added bonus of being able to quickly and easily reboot to "real" DOS for troublesome titles.
Windows 95 and DirectX were the final nail in the coffin for OS/2's gaming aspirations.
I had a 350MHz G3 that ran OSX just fine, 10.3.x went on easily and 10.4.x just needed me to hook up a DVD reader (since the system, being so old, didnt have one by default).
If a 350Mhz G3 iMac runs OS X "just fine" for you, then a PC from the same timeframe (~500Mhz P3) will run Vista similarly "just fine".
What you can't do is browse network shares as another user, change settings (video, networking), and other things like that.
Shift+right click on the control panel applets to get a "Run As" option.
Contrast this to say, KDE, where if I want to change a video setting for example, it tells you the settings that can't be changed, and has a button that says "Administrator mode" and asks you to enter credentials that have access to the settings - WITHOUT logging out. The only I've noticed that windows does anywhere near this sort of user friendliness is when you try to run an executable named install.exe or setup.exe, it automatically pops up the Run-as dialog instead of trying to run it.
Yes, it's mainly a UI issue. To compare fairly, however, you need to be running a version of KDE dating to 2001 (I can't remember if KDE had graphical sudo back then, but I'm guessing not).
Since Win2000, I have been disappointed with Microsoft's continual failure to depart from their OS kernel model that makes them persistently vulnerable and unstable.
You mistake "engineering tradeoff" with "failure".
To understand why it is an "engineering tradeoff" and not a "failure", observe that almost all contemporary OSes run most (if not all) drivers in privileged mode, even today - and they certainly were in the timeframe you are talking about.
Back before Win2000's release (and each release thereafter) I had hoped to see something along the lines of WINE or some sort of virtualization mode for compatibility and a "native mode" for all modern releases of applications.
The "compatibility mode" in Windows NT (WoW) runs in user space and works similarly to WINE (ie: translates API calls).
And when MacOSX came out and did precisely what I had hoped Windows would do, not only was I pleased to discover that my idea wasn't unique but that it was workable and functionable.
OS X runs drivers in privileged mode as well.
But it also served as proof that Microsoft COULD have done this and probably SHOULD have done this.
It's a lot easier to do something like OS X's "Classic" when you're starting in 1998 and not 1988. By the time hardware was fast enough to do what you want to do in Windows, the cards were already dealt.
You forget Microsoft was doing it's "next generation" OS in the late 80's/early '90s, 5 - 10 years before Apple were.
Perhaps they WILL do this eventually, but will it be soon enough?
They won't, because there's no point in completely rearchitecting how legacy support is implemeneted, when it's for *legacy support only*. It would be a completely waste of time and money, delivering a barely noticable benefit to only a tiny proportion of users.
If it doesn't translate into any real-world advantage, it makes no difference to me.
It does, however, allow you to figure out where the problem is - and it clearly isn't in the OS.
The differences between the Mac Dock and the NeXT Dock are slim (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two shared actual code in addition to the name) compared to the differences between the Mac Dock and the Start Bar - which, if anything, copied concepts from the Mac's menu bar (Apple-Menu -> Start Menu).
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
The Taskbar has more in common with UI elements found in Windows *1.0* than it does with the NeXTSTEP Dock.
Again, you show your hypocrisy.
You need to consult a dictionary.
Claiming that the Windows Start Bar is not a copy of the NeXT Dock, but that the Mac OS Dock have more in common than Exposé and Flip3D, that's just laughable.
Please list the similarities you think exist solely between the NeXT Dock and the Taskbar and between Expose and Flip3D.
Well, yeah, that's your - somewhat absurd - main point. It has become clear that you will not let facts influence your convictions, hence further discussion is pointless.
Ok, you don't need to consult a dictionary. This is an excellent example of hypocrisy on your part.
Your posts to this thread are notable in their evasiveness about even giving examples based out of _opinion_, let alone venturing into anything that could be classified as fact.
All I did was ask for a clarification of your argument. Instead of providing one, you engaged in ad hominem attacks, the hallmark of mindless trolling. Not quite sure how the blame for that can be laid at my feet.
Apple are progressively upgrading the OS having smaller releases. This is closer to the Linux way of working.
Apple's (and Linux's for that matter) release schedules are getting longer as the volume of improvements required is getting smaller. Once 10.5 arrives, don't expect to see 10.6 within two years, maybe even three.
Once you get your basic design right you can gradually improve and alter things. This is where Microsoft failed, their security model was flawed, so with Vista they've fixed it (or so they say).
The security model in Vista has not changed. The *UI* has certainly improved (LUA prompting), but the security model itself is essentially the same one that's been in NT since its first release.
There's nothing significantly wrong with the design of Windows NT - certainly nothing even close to the flaws in traditional unix (like a superuser).
find it unlikely that XP SP 2 on a 1GHZ P3 would run faster than Mac OS X 10.4 on a G5 iMac.
It's more responsive.
What exactly are you running on these computers, and what specific things run slower on the Mac than on the Windows box?
Browsers, email clients, terminal windows, word, excel, etc. Individual tasks are faster on the Mac, as the CPU is faster, but the interactive performance - especially when multitasking - is nowhere near as responsive. Menus have noticable delays before showing, there are pauses switching between windows or tabs, the beachball is a common sight.
Yeah, and I should accept your word above my experience why?
Because something like iozone says the comparative IO performance of OS X and XP is a wash.
No. Say you have two computers, an older one and a newer one. You bought the newer one to replace the older, but the older is still running as a file server or something along those lines. Buying a new version of Mac OS X for your newer computer allows you to legally move the previous license from the newer to the older computer - this is not the case with Windows.
That would depend on your Windows license (OEM versions, I'll agree, are not supposed to be moved between machines).
If you mean to say that Apple copied stuff form Windows, then yeah, that's true.
No, I didn't.
Unfortunately, the magnitude of Apple's intellectual theft quite simply can't compare to what Microsoft has done.
Yet still no examples that aren't laughably vague, if not simply wrong.
They would be, if Microsoft stopped at copying functionality. Unfortunately, they also copied the lookd and feel of those apps and features, which makes the idea that this whole thing is just a huge coincidence borderline insane.
The "look and feel" of Windows is substantially different to OS X.
And how is that?
Expose presents a spatial view of all visible windows on the screen and is designed primarily to be used with the mouse.
Alt+Tab/Flip3D presents a most-recently-used stack of application windows and is designed primarily to be used with the keyboard.
And you're *still* ignoring the fact that the functionality of Flip3D - with minor cosmetic changes - has been around since Windows 95, so saying it's a "knockoff" of OS X is simply nonsensical.
That comparison makes no sense, because the Dock was around before the Start bar, while Flip3D came after Exposé.
The OS X Dock is substantially different to the NeXT Dock (and almost all the ways it is different, are ways it is similar to the Taskbar).
So basically, you're telling me that Microsoft took this from NeXT? Could be. I guess they aren't stealing only from Apple.
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
This is true. I am the primary Exchange administrator for my organization, and we intentionally limit most employee mailboxes to 60MB. This is because your e-mail client is not a god damned filesystem . Email messages by themselves should not be more than a few KB, even with the overhead of using MS Word-rich text or MS HTML. Attachments are the problem, and we instruct our users to save the attachments to the filesystem where they can be cataloged and index with by the indexing server. This culture of storing everything in your mailbox leads to bad business practices, and an IT management nightmare.
The real problem here is that, despite its inadequacies, email is the best solution people have found for storing, transferring and referencing their data.
The real solution, therefore, is not to lambast people about using email as a "filesystem" and/or beat them over the head with ridiculously low inbox quotas, it's to implement something functionally as good (or better) that you find more to your administrative tastes, and then show people how to use it.
You can, but it's ill-advised. The Windows VM system is tuned with with assumption a pagefile will exist.
Never used swap on my audio workstation (only 1G of memory), but I have 2 G in my windows machine and It still uses the pagefile.
Windows will always page out while the system is idle - this is generally A Good Thing, as it allows any new (or additional) memory allocations to be serviced immediately (simply by marking the already paged-out RAM as free), rather than having to actively page it out first. However, historically Windows has been fairly aggressive at handing over "idle" RAM to other processes or the buffer cache (especially the buffer cache). This is the behaviour most people are criticising when they complain about Windows "swapping too much" - not the "swapping" (paging) per se, but the agressive reallocation of already-paged RAM.
(I believe this behaviour was improved significantly in Windows 2003, and hence Vista as well.)
It's not clear whether society has figured out all the rules of propriety when using a cell phone.
There is no need for new "rules". The situation is no different to, for example, bad singing or randomly speaking words at a normal volume. I would expect most people would consider that rude, if someone else sat down next to them and started doing it.
Why is someones use of a cellphone superseded by your displeasure at them using it? Honestly.
Let's consider a similar situation without the mobile phone, to get the point across.
People in close proximity. One (or more) of them making a constant, relatively random noises on the frequencies our ears are particularly attuned to, at a volume at (if not slightly above) the normal level of speech. For an example, consider someone singing (badly) or rambling incoherently (I'm sure we've all sat next to a crazy person on a train or bus at least once).
Most people would (I expect) consider this rude, selfish and inconsiderate behaviour and an imposition on everyone else around. Why is it any different because a mobile phone is involved ?
Anyone ever figured out why people talk louder on cellphones? Are they actually talking louder, or is it just a perception we have? Is it because on of their ears isn't available to hear back their loud talking so they compensate? A J. Seinfeld would say, "What's the deal?"
It's because most of them are too stupid to realise how good the microphone on the average mobile phone is, and assume because it's not directly in front of their mouth, they need to shout to be heard.
It should not be the job of anyone else but the parent to get the point across that "Stealing is not only unethical, but also unlawful" Personally, I don't think that the current crop of juvenile are all delinquents and dumb enough not to understand the concept of theft, ethics, and the law. Rather, I think the CHILDREN understand these concepts perfectly well, but they think they can circumvent the system just because they are legally "minors".
Or alternatively the children didn't realise the legal construct of copyright even existed, given its utter lack of any counterpart in nature.
[...] (and having to re-buy that hookup every time someone upgrades the phone?).
I can strongly recommend Nokia in this regard. They only have a few different charger types, and tend to be compatible across multiple phone generations.
Slashdot Mirror
No. You can have unprotected files, but there are certain conditions under which Vista (and it's drivers) will "magically" downgrade the quality of any media going across certain paths. Mostly, it should only occur if you're trying to use protected media under 'improper conditions', but sometimes it can occur if the system just thinks that 'something may be wrong'.
Evidence to support your claims ?
Possible worst-case scenarios are: your business partner sends you a video clip in the email, not knowing that it's DRMed. You open the email while waiting for the final render of your $.5M video clip, and the presence of the 'unauthorized media' causes Vista to degrade the quality of the render for 30 seconds. If you're lucky and catch the problem, your QC people may spend hours unsuccessfully trying to track down the source of the problem.
Ah, I see, you're just making stuff up.
I suggest liberal application of tin foil to your cranium, it should help you significantly.
So why was it good for Apple to switch OS architecture and not for Microsoft?
Microsoft _did_ "switch OS architecture" - to Windows NT, from DOS.
Apple tried to do the same thing during the same timeframe as well - more than once - but their "next generation OS" projects never really came to fruition. Then they bought NeXT, replaced the display system and updated the UI to something that didn't work as well, but looked really cool (although many of the major UI issues have been fixed and/or worked around, there's still some train wrecks in there - like the Dock).
In the time used to delay Vista, they culd have churned out a BSD based OS like Apple did to look and feel like anything they like.
Which would be, at most, a step sideways (more realistically a step backwards). There's nothing significantly wrong with the internals of Windows NT. In pretty much every way, it's superior to that of OS X (although OS X is catching up quickly).
Microsoft SHOULD switch away from Win32 if for no other reason than that message queue bug that turns just about every vulnerability into a critical vulnerability.
WTF are you talking about ?
Whenever I get apiece of software of which I cannot verify the source, I suspect a backdoor password being there.
Do you have source code to all your hardware's firmware and the complete schematic's to its design ?
Evidently you never tried OS/2. As a gaming platform, it performed admirably, better than Windows of the time. Command & Conquer in a window (could be switched to Full Screen on the fly) with full sound while answering email? No problem.
If you were lucky enough to have the game work at all (most "modern" games from that timeframe didn't, due to incompatibilities with their DOS extenders) and a massively powerful (for the time) machine, OS/2 worked "admirably" as a gaming platform. However, overall, it sucked, because of those problems (and, yes, I *did* use OS/2, from about 1991 to 1995).
Added to that, if you could run a game as you describe in OS/2, it was also possible to do so in Windows 95 - with the added bonus of being able to quickly and easily reboot to "real" DOS for troublesome titles.
Windows 95 and DirectX were the final nail in the coffin for OS/2's gaming aspirations.
Your arguments never made any sense.
Why ?
Must be my fault of course. Without Microsoft I'd still be using an Abacus - whatever.
Still got a grudge against that straw man, eh ?
I had a 350MHz G3 that ran OSX just fine, 10.3.x went on easily and 10.4.x just needed me to hook up a DVD reader (since the system, being so old, didnt have one by default).
If a 350Mhz G3 iMac runs OS X "just fine" for you, then a PC from the same timeframe (~500Mhz P3) will run Vista similarly "just fine".
What you can't do is browse network shares as another user, change settings (video, networking), and other things like that.
Shift+right click on the control panel applets to get a "Run As" option.
Contrast this to say, KDE, where if I want to change a video setting for example, it tells you the settings that can't be changed, and has a button that says "Administrator mode" and asks you to enter credentials that have access to the settings - WITHOUT logging out. The only I've noticed that windows does anywhere near this sort of user friendliness is when you try to run an executable named install.exe or setup.exe, it automatically pops up the Run-as dialog instead of trying to run it.
Yes, it's mainly a UI issue. To compare fairly, however, you need to be running a version of KDE dating to 2001 (I can't remember if KDE had graphical sudo back then, but I'm guessing not).
Since Win2000, I have been disappointed with Microsoft's continual failure to depart from their OS kernel model that makes them persistently vulnerable and unstable.
You mistake "engineering tradeoff" with "failure".
To understand why it is an "engineering tradeoff" and not a "failure", observe that almost all contemporary OSes run most (if not all) drivers in privileged mode, even today - and they certainly were in the timeframe you are talking about.
Back before Win2000's release (and each release thereafter) I had hoped to see something along the lines of WINE or some sort of virtualization mode for compatibility and a "native mode" for all modern releases of applications.
The "compatibility mode" in Windows NT (WoW) runs in user space and works similarly to WINE (ie: translates API calls).
And when MacOSX came out and did precisely what I had hoped Windows would do, not only was I pleased to discover that my idea wasn't unique but that it was workable and functionable.
OS X runs drivers in privileged mode as well.
But it also served as proof that Microsoft COULD have done this and probably SHOULD have done this.
It's a lot easier to do something like OS X's "Classic" when you're starting in 1998 and not 1988. By the time hardware was fast enough to do what you want to do in Windows, the cards were already dealt.
You forget Microsoft was doing it's "next generation" OS in the late 80's/early '90s, 5 - 10 years before Apple were.
Perhaps they WILL do this eventually, but will it be soon enough?
They won't, because there's no point in completely rearchitecting how legacy support is implemeneted, when it's for *legacy support only*. It would be a completely waste of time and money, delivering a barely noticable benefit to only a tiny proportion of users.
If it doesn't translate into any real-world advantage, it makes no difference to me.
It does, however, allow you to figure out where the problem is - and it clearly isn't in the OS.
The differences between the Mac Dock and the NeXT Dock are slim (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two shared actual code in addition to the name) compared to the differences between the Mac Dock and the Start Bar - which, if anything, copied concepts from the Mac's menu bar (Apple-Menu -> Start Menu).
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
The Taskbar has more in common with UI elements found in Windows *1.0* than it does with the NeXTSTEP Dock.
Again, you show your hypocrisy.
You need to consult a dictionary.
Claiming that the Windows Start Bar is not a copy of the NeXT Dock, but that the Mac OS Dock have more in common than Exposé and Flip3D, that's just laughable.
Please list the similarities you think exist solely between the NeXT Dock and the Taskbar and between Expose and Flip3D.
Well, yeah, that's your - somewhat absurd - main point. It has become clear that you will not let facts influence your convictions, hence further discussion is pointless.
Ok, you don't need to consult a dictionary. This is an excellent example of hypocrisy on your part.
Your posts to this thread are notable in their evasiveness about even giving examples based out of _opinion_, let alone venturing into anything that could be classified as fact.
Well, I don't.
Your posts to this thread indicate otherwise.
Must be your fault.
All I did was ask for a clarification of your argument. Instead of providing one, you engaged in ad hominem attacks, the hallmark of mindless trolling. Not quite sure how the blame for that can be laid at my feet.
SP2 was basically just bugfixes plus windows firewall.
How did this myth that SP2 added windows firewall get started ?
SP2 just turned the firewall on by default. It was already there, and had been since XP's initial release.
Apple are progressively upgrading the OS having smaller releases. This is closer to the Linux way of working.
Apple's (and Linux's for that matter) release schedules are getting longer as the volume of improvements required is getting smaller. Once 10.5 arrives, don't expect to see 10.6 within two years, maybe even three.
Once you get your basic design right you can gradually improve and alter things. This is where Microsoft failed, their security model was flawed, so with Vista they've fixed it (or so they say).
The security model in Vista has not changed. The *UI* has certainly improved (LUA prompting), but the security model itself is essentially the same one that's been in NT since its first release.
There's nothing significantly wrong with the design of Windows NT - certainly nothing even close to the flaws in traditional unix (like a superuser).
Vista is to XP what ME was to 98... A polished version.
Uh, no.
Vista is to XP what Windows 2000 is to Windows NT 3.51, or OS X is to NeXT/OpenSTEP.
If you think Vista is just a GUI refresh, you haven't been paying attention.
find it unlikely that XP SP 2 on a 1GHZ P3 would run faster than Mac OS X 10.4 on a G5 iMac.
It's more responsive.
What exactly are you running on these computers, and what specific things run slower on the Mac than on the Windows box?
Browsers, email clients, terminal windows, word, excel, etc. Individual tasks are faster on the Mac, as the CPU is faster, but the interactive performance - especially when multitasking - is nowhere near as responsive. Menus have noticable delays before showing, there are pauses switching between windows or tabs, the beachball is a common sight.
It's just "sluggish".
Yeah, and I should accept your word above my experience why?
Because something like iozone says the comparative IO performance of OS X and XP is a wash.
No. Say you have two computers, an older one and a newer one. You bought the newer one to replace the older, but the older is still running as a file server or something along those lines. Buying a new version of Mac OS X for your newer computer allows you to legally move the previous license from the newer to the older computer - this is not the case with Windows.
That would depend on your Windows license (OEM versions, I'll agree, are not supposed to be moved between machines).
If you mean to say that Apple copied stuff form Windows, then yeah, that's true.
No, I didn't.
Unfortunately, the magnitude of Apple's intellectual theft quite simply can't compare to what Microsoft has done.
Yet still no examples that aren't laughably vague, if not simply wrong.
They would be, if Microsoft stopped at copying functionality. Unfortunately, they also copied the lookd and feel of those apps and features, which makes the idea that this whole thing is just a huge coincidence borderline insane.
The "look and feel" of Windows is substantially different to OS X.
And how is that?
Expose presents a spatial view of all visible windows on the screen and is designed primarily to be used with the mouse.
Alt+Tab/Flip3D presents a most-recently-used stack of application windows and is designed primarily to be used with the keyboard.
And you're *still* ignoring the fact that the functionality of Flip3D - with minor cosmetic changes - has been around since Windows 95, so saying it's a "knockoff" of OS X is simply nonsensical.
That comparison makes no sense, because the Dock was around before the Start bar, while Flip3D came after Exposé.
The OS X Dock is substantially different to the NeXT Dock (and almost all the ways it is different, are ways it is similar to the Taskbar).
So basically, you're telling me that Microsoft took this from NeXT? Could be. I guess they aren't stealing only from Apple.
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
No, unlike you i'm not mindless.
Strange, then, that you seem incapable of engaging in meaningful discussion.
What can OS X do that KDE can't?
Convince developers they *don't* know better.
This is true. I am the primary Exchange administrator for my organization, and we intentionally limit most employee mailboxes to 60MB. This is because your e-mail client is not a god damned filesystem . Email messages by themselves should not be more than a few KB, even with the overhead of using MS Word-rich text or MS HTML. Attachments are the problem, and we instruct our users to save the attachments to the filesystem where they can be cataloged and index with by the indexing server. This culture of storing everything in your mailbox leads to bad business practices, and an IT management nightmare.
The real problem here is that, despite its inadequacies, email is the best solution people have found for storing, transferring and referencing their data.
The real solution, therefore, is not to lambast people about using email as a "filesystem" and/or beat them over the head with ridiculously low inbox quotas, it's to implement something functionally as good (or better) that you find more to your administrative tastes, and then show people how to use it.
I don't think you can do that in windows.
You can, but it's ill-advised. The Windows VM system is tuned with with assumption a pagefile will exist.
Never used swap on my audio workstation (only 1G of memory), but I have 2 G in my windows machine and It still uses the pagefile.
Windows will always page out while the system is idle - this is generally A Good Thing, as it allows any new (or additional) memory allocations to be serviced immediately (simply by marking the already paged-out RAM as free), rather than having to actively page it out first. However, historically Windows has been fairly aggressive at handing over "idle" RAM to other processes or the buffer cache (especially the buffer cache). This is the behaviour most people are criticising when they complain about Windows "swapping too much" - not the "swapping" (paging) per se, but the agressive reallocation of already-paged RAM.
(I believe this behaviour was improved significantly in Windows 2003, and hence Vista as well.)
It's not clear whether society has figured out all the rules of propriety when using a cell phone.
There is no need for new "rules". The situation is no different to, for example, bad singing or randomly speaking words at a normal volume. I would expect most people would consider that rude, if someone else sat down next to them and started doing it.
IE is integrated with the GUI itself, so it's bound to have some extra "functionality" like this.
IE is no more "integrated" into the Windows "GUI" than, say, khtml is into KDE.
Why is someones use of a cellphone superseded by your displeasure at them using it? Honestly.
Let's consider a similar situation without the mobile phone, to get the point across.
People in close proximity. One (or more) of them making a constant, relatively random noises on the frequencies our ears are particularly attuned to, at a volume at (if not slightly above) the normal level of speech. For an example, consider someone singing (badly) or rambling incoherently (I'm sure we've all sat next to a crazy person on a train or bus at least once).
Most people would (I expect) consider this rude, selfish and inconsiderate behaviour and an imposition on everyone else around. Why is it any different because a mobile phone is involved ?
Anyone ever figured out why people talk louder on cellphones? Are they actually talking louder, or is it just a perception we have? Is it because on of their ears isn't available to hear back their loud talking so they compensate? A J. Seinfeld would say, "What's the deal?"
It's because most of them are too stupid to realise how good the microphone on the average mobile phone is, and assume because it's not directly in front of their mouth, they need to shout to be heard.
It should not be the job of anyone else but the parent to get the point across that "Stealing is not only unethical, but also unlawful" Personally, I don't think that the current crop of juvenile are all delinquents and dumb enough not to understand the concept of theft, ethics, and the law. Rather, I think the CHILDREN understand these concepts perfectly well, but they think they can circumvent the system just because they are legally "minors".
Or alternatively the children didn't realise the legal construct of copyright even existed, given its utter lack of any counterpart in nature.
[...] (and having to re-buy that hookup every time someone upgrades the phone?).
I can strongly recommend Nokia in this regard. They only have a few different charger types, and tend to be compatible across multiple phone generations.