The presence of the command line is not a problem.
Linux, Windows and OSX all have a command line... And infact MS have been working hard to improve their CLI in recent versions.
For day to day use average users will never have to touch the CLI on any of these systems... However the big difference is:
On windows the CLI is useless
When you ask a geek how to do something, on linux he will typically use the cli not because its the only way to do something but because its the best way. On windows the cli is rarely the best way, and often not even usable at all.
Also when it comes to supporting others, via forums or over the phone a command line is just easier to explain... On a forum you can cut+paste commands and have the user paste back the responses. Similarly on the phone the commandline is a similar paradigm since its conversation based. Trying to explain the layout of a gui over the phone is a huge pain in the ass because not only can you not see it, but the user's description of what they can see is down to the individual and might not make sense to you. A CLI is easy to explain so long as you can read.
And on all systems geeks will mess with things that most users wont understand, wether it be the registry or a textual configuration file when you want to do something advanced or fix a major problem you need to delve deeper than most users will understand.
Windows was always massively inferior to MacOS (and amigaos, and unix etc) too, look how that turned out...
Not everyone will pay more for branded goods, but some will... Many will simply take cheap or well marketed, even if the product is inferior.
Those that go for branded goods are doing so for the brand, not for any superior quality... Does a rolex really tell time more accurately than a cheap watch?
You might not, but a lot of users do... I have seen plenty of instances where xp embedded boxes become worm fodder because they are treated as if they were proper embedded systems, and not a regular windows workstation which needs patching and av.
People simply aren'y aware of this... If it was clear and common knowledge that products were either crippled in the US, or cost significantly more then there would be more public outcry about it. As it stands, 99% of people don't even realise there is a problem.
People are willing to pay more for "brand", it has very little to do with quality, providing the quality doesn't sink so low relative to the competition as to damage the brand.
A lot of "web based" apps are actually very poorly designed and depend on IE6, which holds users back...
If you do it properly and produce web based apps that work on any browser, then the OS becomes irrelevant at which point linux for free looks far more attractive than any version of windows.
Part of number 1 was caused intentionally by MS in trying to avoid number 2 from happening...
It's hardly embedded in the proper sense of the word... Check what processor and how much ram the device has. Also you need to update it and run AV on it like any other windows box, or it will get hit with worms and other kinds of malware.
Re:What is my overriding reason to migrate off XP?
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10 Years of Windows XP
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By "won't boot" do you mean it won't power up to the BIOS screen, or that it won't boot the OS?
What happens if you populate A2/B2 and leave A1/B1 empty? Perhaps those slots are faulty...
Is the memory configured for dual channel, and are A1/A2 the same channel?
Windows 32bit is more than capable of addressing far more than 4GB, however the lower end versions are simply not licensed for this purpose and therefore have the ability artificially disabled.
This is known as Damaged Goods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damaged_good) where the developers have spent significant time to develop a negative feature, and that had they not spent this time you would have gotten a better product.
GPL is more restrictive clearly, however it's a tradeoff...
The law doesn't let you murder or enslave people, but it also provides you a relative protection against having this happen to you. Basically it tries to ensure that everyone has the same level of freedom.
In an anarchic state you might start off with more freedoms, but before long warlords will seize control and you will most likely be subjugated to their will. So a small number of people will abuse the extra freedom given to them to harm the majority.
To me, hacking is actually very American. Go out to the garage. Take it apart. Make it better.
Sad then that so many american companies are actively trying to restrict or remove people's abilities to do just that, especially on computers where unlike a car anyone can get into it without the need for specialist tools and there is no potential safety risk etc.
Yes, i second the call for a skinnable interface... Some people prefer the current interface, some prefer the ms2k7 style ribbon etc. You can't suit everyone with the defaults, so make the interface flexible, let users choose the skin and provide a handful of sensible defaults to choose from.
But since the driver is open and distributed under the GPL, perhaps someone should fix it up and integrate it into the kernel, the less third party drivers you need to build and install the better - in kernel drivers always seem more stable and are a lot less hassle to deal with.
Thats the problem with blackberry devices depending on RIM for service...
Your mobile operator could fail, but theres more than one operator... Your own email server could fail, but your in control of this yourself and can take steps to fix it... Plus, it only affects you and not anyone else, you have a choice of email providers and if you run the server yourself its your own fault if it fails.
You are stuck with RIM service if you want a blackberry handset, you don't have a choice unless you switch to a different type of handset.
There were multiple incompatible network services, AOL, Compuserve and many smaller ones... That simply doesn't work because they are all limited in scope and incompatible, you end up having to have 50 different accounts in order to communicate with everyone.
The Internet worked because it was a single network, open to all and used by everyone.
And it's also worth noting that artists existed and survived just fine prior to the invention of copyright... They worked a job just like everyone else, they got paid while they performed their work and if they stopped performing they stopped being paid.
William Shakespeare was able to write his plays without needing copyright protection, why can't modern artists do the same? In fact, it's partly due to copyright that its unlikely any of todays works will go down in history the way Shakespeare did...
A lot of work is simply forgotten and/or lost when the publisher stops selling it after a year or two, and this work then sits useless, still copyrighted and not in the public domain for many years. By the time copyright expires, the work is long since forgotten.
I could pay additional money to have a permanent fibre installed, which would run to the equivalent of several thousand dollars per month plus a big up front installation fee... Other than that, not really.
The off peak period runs from midnight to 8am, so if i want to start watching a movie at midnight it will be around 2am by the time its finished, and then i have work in the morning...
My desire to not wait is based on spoilers, if i wait a few weeks for anything semi popular chances are i will have been exposed to people talking about it online...
You can purchase *some* season DVDs here, they are usually out a long time after they were released in other countries, and sometimes are not available at all. I could purchase them from the US for half the price several months earlier, but the media cartels try to enforce regional discrimination to prevent me doing that.
The point is we live in a globally interconnected world, media should be available at the same time, at the same price and under the same conditions everywhere. The media cartels are trying to recreate the world of years ago when it was rare for people to communicate regularly with those from other countries and people would not realise just how badly theyre being price-gouged or forced to wait.
It may well be legal to make a single digital backup of a DVD for your personal use, but it would not be possible if CSS had not been cracked.
Same applies to bluray, which includes a new copy protection scheme...
This is a case of big content trying to take away our rights...
If we buy a copy of a movie or any other media, we should have the right to:
Make backups for personal use Format shift for personal use (eg onto a fileserver, or transcode for playing on a portable device) Sell the original when we no longer want it, assuming we delete, transfer together or otherwise destroy any other copies we have made
And yet DRM schemes seek to take away these rights, and label those who would wish to exercise them as pirates. It's a slippery slope and only gets worse...
Streaming is not practical for me, i have a data cap during the day and can only download freely at night. Most of the streaming companies like netflix are not available worldwide, they aren't available here...
If you sign up to a private torrent site (for free, it works on the basis that your helping your fellow users by seeding) you will find that all the crap is filtered for you, and the available content will be well labelled according to source and quality.
I would rather not wait, i have lots of foreign friends online who will give me spoilers not to mention i frequent various websites such as this one where spoilers are sometimes posted. Ofcourse sometimes those friends will, having seen a movie several months before its available here state that the movie is complete garbage and i will not bother seeing it as a result.
Something else which disturbs me, is that cinemas in places with high piracy are often much nicer because they're forced to compete against the cheap dvds being sold on street corner, whereas countries with tougher copyright enforcement often have inferior cinemas with smaller screens, poor service, uncomfortable seats, dirty or smelly environments etc. Similarly i read a while ago about Nokia offering an unlimited mp3 download service in china for a fixed monthly fee, whereas people in other countries get saddled with expensive per-track fees for drm encumbered music files.
People would have more sympathy for content producers if copyright terms were reasonable...
The ISP only gets paid so long as they continue to provide service, if they stop providing service then they get nothing. It costs them money to provide service, and so its a fair exchange to pay them to continue. Do you think the ISP should continue to get paid because you were able to use their service to download data at some point in the past?
The same should be true of content producers, they should get paid only so long as they are working for that money. They should not be getting paid for content they produced 50 years ago. Everyone else has to work for their money, why should someone who produces media get special treatment?
If copyright terms become more reasonable then i am all for tougher enforcement of them. Until then, those content sellers are trying to screw us, so screw them.
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The presence of the command line is not a problem.
Linux, Windows and OSX all have a command line... And infact MS have been working hard to improve their CLI in recent versions.
For day to day use average users will never have to touch the CLI on any of these systems... However the big difference is:
On windows the CLI is useless
When you ask a geek how to do something, on linux he will typically use the cli not because its the only way to do something but because its the best way. On windows the cli is rarely the best way, and often not even usable at all.
Also when it comes to supporting others, via forums or over the phone a command line is just easier to explain... On a forum you can cut+paste commands and have the user paste back the responses. Similarly on the phone the commandline is a similar paradigm since its conversation based. Trying to explain the layout of a gui over the phone is a huge pain in the ass because not only can you not see it, but the user's description of what they can see is down to the individual and might not make sense to you.
A CLI is easy to explain so long as you can read.
And on all systems geeks will mess with things that most users wont understand, wether it be the registry or a textual configuration file when you want to do something advanced or fix a major problem you need to delve deeper than most users will understand.
That wouldn't suit their goals of promoting windows phone, since the majority of users would probably choose android.
Windows was always massively inferior to MacOS (and amigaos, and unix etc) too, look how that turned out...
Not everyone will pay more for branded goods, but some will...
Many will simply take cheap or well marketed, even if the product is inferior.
Those that go for branded goods are doing so for the brand, not for any superior quality... Does a rolex really tell time more accurately than a cheap watch?
You might not, but a lot of users do...
I have seen plenty of instances where xp embedded boxes become worm fodder because they are treated as if they were proper embedded systems, and not a regular windows workstation which needs patching and av.
People simply aren'y aware of this...
If it was clear and common knowledge that products were either crippled in the US, or cost significantly more then there would be more public outcry about it. As it stands, 99% of people don't even realise there is a problem.
People are willing to pay more for "brand", it has very little to do with quality, providing the quality doesn't sink so low relative to the competition as to damage the brand.
Two problems there...
A lot of "web based" apps are actually very poorly designed and depend on IE6, which holds users back...
If you do it properly and produce web based apps that work on any browser, then the OS becomes irrelevant at which point linux for free looks far more attractive than any version of windows.
Part of number 1 was caused intentionally by MS in trying to avoid number 2 from happening...
It's hardly embedded in the proper sense of the word... Check what processor and how much ram the device has.
Also you need to update it and run AV on it like any other windows box, or it will get hit with worms and other kinds of malware.
By "won't boot" do you mean it won't power up to the BIOS screen, or that it won't boot the OS?
What happens if you populate A2/B2 and leave A1/B1 empty? Perhaps those slots are faulty...
Is the memory configured for dual channel, and are A1/A2 the same channel?
Actually its more about control...
Windows 32bit is more than capable of addressing far more than 4GB, however the lower end versions are simply not licensed for this purpose and therefore have the ability artificially disabled.
Take a read of http://www.geoffchappell.com/viewer.htm?doc=notes/windows/license/memory.htm
This is known as Damaged Goods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damaged_good) where the developers have spent significant time to develop a negative feature, and that had they not spent this time you would have gotten a better product.
GPL is more restrictive clearly, however it's a tradeoff...
The law doesn't let you murder or enslave people, but it also provides you a relative protection against having this happen to you. Basically it tries to ensure that everyone has the same level of freedom.
In an anarchic state you might start off with more freedoms, but before long warlords will seize control and you will most likely be subjugated to their will. So a small number of people will abuse the extra freedom given to them to harm the majority.
They will be once the purchase of motorola mobility goes through...
Not only gets no money, but the lawyers will still want to get paid...
To me, hacking is actually very American. Go out to the garage. Take it apart. Make it better.
Sad then that so many american companies are actively trying to restrict or remove people's abilities to do just that, especially on computers where unlike a car anyone can get into it without the need for specialist tools and there is no potential safety risk etc.
Yes, i second the call for a skinnable interface...
Some people prefer the current interface, some prefer the ms2k7 style ribbon etc. You can't suit everyone with the defaults, so make the interface flexible, let users choose the skin and provide a handful of sensible defaults to choose from.
Have a read of:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas
And then make a 45 camera ball...
But since the driver is open and distributed under the GPL, perhaps someone should fix it up and integrate it into the kernel, the less third party drivers you need to build and install the better - in kernel drivers always seem more stable and are a lot less hassle to deal with.
Thats the problem with blackberry devices depending on RIM for service...
Your mobile operator could fail, but theres more than one operator...
Your own email server could fail, but your in control of this yourself and can take steps to fix it... Plus, it only affects you and not anyone else, you have a choice of email providers and if you run the server yourself its your own fault if it fails.
You are stuck with RIM service if you want a blackberry handset, you don't have a choice unless you switch to a different type of handset.
There were multiple incompatible network services, AOL, Compuserve and many smaller ones...
That simply doesn't work because they are all limited in scope and incompatible, you end up having to have 50 different accounts in order to communicate with everyone.
The Internet worked because it was a single network, open to all and used by everyone.
And it's also worth noting that artists existed and survived just fine prior to the invention of copyright... They worked a job just like everyone else, they got paid while they performed their work and if they stopped performing they stopped being paid.
William Shakespeare was able to write his plays without needing copyright protection, why can't modern artists do the same? In fact, it's partly due to copyright that its unlikely any of todays works will go down in history the way Shakespeare did...
A lot of work is simply forgotten and/or lost when the publisher stops selling it after a year or two, and this work then sits useless, still copyrighted and not in the public domain for many years. By the time copyright expires, the work is long since forgotten.
I could pay additional money to have a permanent fibre installed, which would run to the equivalent of several thousand dollars per month plus a big up front installation fee... Other than that, not really.
The off peak period runs from midnight to 8am, so if i want to start watching a movie at midnight it will be around 2am by the time its finished, and then i have work in the morning...
My desire to not wait is based on spoilers, if i wait a few weeks for anything semi popular chances are i will have been exposed to people talking about it online...
You can purchase *some* season DVDs here, they are usually out a long time after they were released in other countries, and sometimes are not available at all. I could purchase them from the US for half the price several months earlier, but the media cartels try to enforce regional discrimination to prevent me doing that.
The point is we live in a globally interconnected world, media should be available at the same time, at the same price and under the same conditions everywhere. The media cartels are trying to recreate the world of years ago when it was rare for people to communicate regularly with those from other countries and people would not realise just how badly theyre being price-gouged or forced to wait.
As i read it, you are free to receive voice but not to transmit it yourself.
It may well be legal to make a single digital backup of a DVD for your personal use, but it would not be possible if CSS had not been cracked.
Same applies to bluray, which includes a new copy protection scheme...
This is a case of big content trying to take away our rights...
If we buy a copy of a movie or any other media, we should have the right to:
Make backups for personal use
Format shift for personal use (eg onto a fileserver, or transcode for playing on a portable device)
Sell the original when we no longer want it, assuming we delete, transfer together or otherwise destroy any other copies we have made
And yet DRM schemes seek to take away these rights, and label those who would wish to exercise them as pirates. It's a slippery slope and only gets worse...
Well...
Streaming is not practical for me, i have a data cap during the day and can only download freely at night.
Most of the streaming companies like netflix are not available worldwide, they aren't available here...
If you sign up to a private torrent site (for free, it works on the basis that your helping your fellow users by seeding) you will find that all the crap is filtered for you, and the available content will be well labelled according to source and quality.
I would rather not wait, i have lots of foreign friends online who will give me spoilers not to mention i frequent various websites such as this one where spoilers are sometimes posted. Ofcourse sometimes those friends will, having seen a movie several months before its available here state that the movie is complete garbage and i will not bother seeing it as a result.
Something else which disturbs me, is that cinemas in places with high piracy are often much nicer because they're forced to compete against the cheap dvds being sold on street corner, whereas countries with tougher copyright enforcement often have inferior cinemas with smaller screens, poor service, uncomfortable seats, dirty or smelly environments etc.
Similarly i read a while ago about Nokia offering an unlimited mp3 download service in china for a fixed monthly fee, whereas people in other countries get saddled with expensive per-track fees for drm encumbered music files.
People would have more sympathy for content producers if copyright terms were reasonable...
The ISP only gets paid so long as they continue to provide service, if they stop providing service then they get nothing. It costs them money to provide service, and so its a fair exchange to pay them to continue. Do you think the ISP should continue to get paid because you were able to use their service to download data at some point in the past?
The same should be true of content producers, they should get paid only so long as they are working for that money. They should not be getting paid for content they produced 50 years ago.
Everyone else has to work for their money, why should someone who produces media get special treatment?
If copyright terms become more reasonable then i am all for tougher enforcement of them. Until then, those content sellers are trying to screw us, so screw them.