Exactly, where do we draw the line... Eventually, windows will end up as one big bundle of non removable apps, preventing anyone from competing..
TCP/IP got included because they were laughably far behind everyone else who had been including TCP/IP by default for years... But i think the difference is in motives... They didn't throw in TCP/IP to screw trumpet, that was just a side effect... They threw in TCP/IP because it was laughable to not have it, they would much rather have had a proprietary networking protocol of their own creation there instead. IE on the other hand was done purely to screw Netscape, no other OS really bundled a browser at the time, and they realised they couldn't compete by offering a browser for sale.
There are modern versions of the Dreambox available, like the DM800 (single tuner) and DM8000 (4 tuner slots), the tuners are modular, you can fit hard drives and it supports usb/esata devices too... I have a DM800 because i couldn't justify the cost of the 8000 and it works nicely... The only issue as far as a media player is concerned is that it will only play mpeg2 and h.264 (which it does in hardware because the cpu is too slow on its own), but most videos can be acquired in those formats these days anyway.
On the other hand, the OSS drivers seem far more stable than the binary ones on hardware they do support (i have an older X1600), and a media player box like this is unlikely to need very much in the way of 3d capability... In this instance, the open ATI drivers are probably the best choice.
In some parts of the world... We cannot access many of the streaming services, because they are geo-restricted. We have bandwidth caps which prevent us downloading very much anyway.
The only option is torrents, but that doesn't get round the bandwidth caps... Some people have resorted to trading portable hard drives with friends/colleagues.
It's the same in the UK, you can get satellite where you're tied in to the supplied boxes (which are generally quite crap), where you have to pay extra to be able to use a tv in more than one room at a time, and can't have more than 1 room receiving HD content, and the PVR devices they supply record the content encrypted so if you cancel your subscription you lose everything you recorded. I haven't looked into cable but i believe that's the same too.
That's stupid, they should collect fees from the ones they reject too... And perhaps charge more when a single entity files multiple patents. Maybe then they would be less over worked, and companies would have some incentive not to file every trivial thing in the hope of it sticking.
I mean, to a company now the choice is between "patent rejected, pay nothing" and "patent approved, pay for it", its a zero risk game that can result in significant benefits.
As you point out, bloggers are answerable to noone and will give their own opinions... But for-profit companies are answerable to their profit margins, and will report whatever makes them the most profit - including running paid advertising dressed up as news, which happens far too often these days. You have just as little guarantee of quality from a major news agency.
Very few sources of information are truly impartial, it makes sense to read multiple sources anyway, and paying for content will make that very expensive.
Yes, the only time i ever read the newspaper, is the free one available on the (underground) train to work... There's no network access down in the tunnels so the paper provides a good snapshot to read... On the other hand, the used papers always end up making a mess as people drop them on the floor, even worse when it's raining because they turn to mush.
This is a big plus for OSS, once software reaches a certain level of functionality and stability it becomes extremely difficult to make large enough improvements to justify selling updated versions.. OSS on the other hand, does not need to sell new versions, and can easily just keep providing small incremental upgrades... There are quite a few OSS programs which haven't seen major updates in years, and do their job really well (and very quickly because hardware has long since overtaken their requirements).
If OOo had come up with this interface first, then it would be laughed at, and people would refuse to use it because "it's too different"... Given someone with zero computing experience, modern Linux distros are much simpler to use than windows, the install is a lot more hassle free (not that install really matters since end users usually receive preinstalls). The resulting install is a lot more usable because it comes with a decent set of applications which are sensibly labelled, apps are sorted by what they do, and are labelled according to what they do (eg firefox is labelled as firefox - web browser), windows typically just shows the app name and often hides it under a sub menu according to the program vendor's name which is totally irrelevant to the user or what they want to do. Finding and installing additional software is easier (package management), as is removing it.
And yes, this is based on real experience, i have setup several Ubuntu installs on old hardware, mostly for pensioners who have never used a computer before and want to chat with their kids/grandkids/greatgrandkids, or for people who are too poor to afford a new computer... Companies will often throw out hardware, sometimes as quick as midrange P4 based machines, which you can pick up cheaply or free, they make great desktops running linux.
To most of the people i've shown the ribbon interface to, it wasn't even obvious that the office menu was even clickable... It just looked like a logo that was put there for decoration.
Some people hate the ribbon, and the fact OOo doesn't have it is seen as a plus... Other people like the ribbon, and consider OOo to look dated because it lacks it.
When MS introduced the ribbon, they made it the mandatory interface for the versions it was introduced in, and this is what's bothering users...
So, why not make it optional in OOo? Give the option of 2 (or more) interfaces, or even make the interface themeable? Users like making themes, just look at all the themes available for firefox.
Provide 2 themes by default - classic and ribbon, and prompt the users to choose either (or download more themes) with some good screenshots the first time they run the application.
On Linux i could either use smartctl (from the cli and which is usually installed by default) or install GSmartControl which is a gui based frontend to the underlying cli program. Some distros might ship the gui version by default, tho i'm not sure...
There are probably other graphical tools for displaying this info which i'm not aware of.
MS could have used NFS in the first place, but they always prefer to come up with their own proprietary crap instead of using an existing standard... They even had their own networking protocol (netbeui), but were forced to implement tcp/ip because it became so ubiquitous.
The start bar is also a lot taller and i can't find a way to reduce it to it's previous size (or smaller)... This is especially a problem on netbooks which have small screens, having a thick startbar at the bottom and a thick titlebar at the top significantly reduces the available screen space for your applications.
Because OS reboots are still sometimes required, and a faster bootup makes them less painful... Many highend machines would take a very long time to boot, mostly due to thorough hardware checks... These machines are designed to be stable, but sometimes power failures and such occur. And with laptops and such, batteries are not to a level yet where we can just leave a laptop running all day without being plugged in.
Sounds like poorly written apps... Upon receiving a signal that the system is shutting down, applications should save their data/state, either into the main file if an autosave option is turned on, or into a temporary state file otherwise.. Once this is done, they can display a requester giving the user the option to cancel the shutdown... If the user ignores the requester, the shutdown proceeds after a few seconds anyway. On the next launch of this program, it gives you the option to reload previous state (like firefox does).
The OS should also give the option of saving state, ie which apps you have running and how they are laid out... some unix window managers already do this (windowmaker for example).
The issue comes from desktop vs server design... Unix is designed for servers which are frequently run headless as you describe, and therefore will obey the shutdown command automatically...
Windows (and the OSX gui) are designed from a desktop perspective, where there is always a local user present who can answer questions...
OSX is an interesting one, because the cli based shutdown tools work like unix normally does, but requesting a shutdown via the gui will wait for input.
The problem is mostly the diversity of hardware (and drivers) that windows/linux are expected to work on... Macs suspend reliably when you close the lid... My eee 901 running linux does too actually, but that machine was pretty much designed to run linux like the macbook is designed to run osx.
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Exactly, where do we draw the line...
Eventually, windows will end up as one big bundle of non removable apps, preventing anyone from competing..
TCP/IP got included because they were laughably far behind everyone else who had been including TCP/IP by default for years... But i think the difference is in motives... They didn't throw in TCP/IP to screw trumpet, that was just a side effect... They threw in TCP/IP because it was laughable to not have it, they would much rather have had a proprietary networking protocol of their own creation there instead.
IE on the other hand was done purely to screw Netscape, no other OS really bundled a browser at the time, and they realised they couldn't compete by offering a browser for sale.
There are modern versions of the Dreambox available, like the DM800 (single tuner) and DM8000 (4 tuner slots), the tuners are modular, you can fit hard drives and it supports usb/esata devices too...
I have a DM800 because i couldn't justify the cost of the 8000 and it works nicely... The only issue as far as a media player is concerned is that it will only play mpeg2 and h.264 (which it does in hardware because the cpu is too slow on its own), but most videos can be acquired in those formats these days anyway.
On the other hand, the OSS drivers seem far more stable than the binary ones on hardware they do support (i have an older X1600), and a media player box like this is unlikely to need very much in the way of 3d capability... In this instance, the open ATI drivers are probably the best choice.
In some parts of the world...
We cannot access many of the streaming services, because they are geo-restricted.
We have bandwidth caps which prevent us downloading very much anyway.
The only option is torrents, but that doesn't get round the bandwidth caps... Some people have resorted to trading portable hard drives with friends/colleagues.
The more they restrict these products, the more attractive torrents start to look...
What if you ditch windows media center and run some more consumer-friendly software that would ignore the broadcast flag?
It's the same in the UK, you can get satellite where you're tied in to the supplied boxes (which are generally quite crap), where you have to pay extra to be able to use a tv in more than one room at a time, and can't have more than 1 room receiving HD content, and the PVR devices they supply record the content encrypted so if you cancel your subscription you lose everything you recorded. I haven't looked into cable but i believe that's the same too.
Exactly, fast connections, necessitating a fast browser...
That's stupid, they should collect fees from the ones they reject too... And perhaps charge more when a single entity files multiple patents.
Maybe then they would be less over worked, and companies would have some incentive not to file every trivial thing in the hope of it sticking.
I mean, to a company now the choice is between "patent rejected, pay nothing" and "patent approved, pay for it", its a zero risk game that can result in significant benefits.
As you point out, bloggers are answerable to noone and will give their own opinions...
But for-profit companies are answerable to their profit margins, and will report whatever makes them the most profit - including running paid advertising dressed up as news, which happens far too often these days. You have just as little guarantee of quality from a major news agency.
Very few sources of information are truly impartial, it makes sense to read multiple sources anyway, and paying for content will make that very expensive.
Yes, the only time i ever read the newspaper, is the free one available on the (underground) train to work... There's no network access down in the tunnels so the paper provides a good snapshot to read... On the other hand, the used papers always end up making a mess as people drop them on the floor, even worse when it's raining because they turn to mush.
If they concentrate on making OOo better, then people will complain that it's too different...
This is a big plus for OSS, once software reaches a certain level of functionality and stability it becomes extremely difficult to make large enough improvements to justify selling updated versions.. OSS on the other hand, does not need to sell new versions, and can easily just keep providing small incremental upgrades...
There are quite a few OSS programs which haven't seen major updates in years, and do their job really well (and very quickly because hardware has long since overtaken their requirements).
If OOo had come up with this interface first, then it would be laughed at, and people would refuse to use it because "it's too different"...
Given someone with zero computing experience, modern Linux distros are much simpler to use than windows, the install is a lot more hassle free (not that install really matters since end users usually receive preinstalls).
The resulting install is a lot more usable because it comes with a decent set of applications which are sensibly labelled, apps are sorted by what they do, and are labelled according to what they do (eg firefox is labelled as firefox - web browser), windows typically just shows the app name and often hides it under a sub menu according to the program vendor's name which is totally irrelevant to the user or what they want to do.
Finding and installing additional software is easier (package management), as is removing it.
And yes, this is based on real experience, i have setup several Ubuntu installs on old hardware, mostly for pensioners who have never used a computer before and want to chat with their kids/grandkids/greatgrandkids, or for people who are too poor to afford a new computer...
Companies will often throw out hardware, sometimes as quick as midrange P4 based machines, which you can pick up cheaply or free, they make great desktops running linux.
To most of the people i've shown the ribbon interface to, it wasn't even obvious that the office menu was even clickable... It just looked like a logo that was put there for decoration.
Some people hate the ribbon, and the fact OOo doesn't have it is seen as a plus...
Other people like the ribbon, and consider OOo to look dated because it lacks it.
When MS introduced the ribbon, they made it the mandatory interface for the versions it was introduced in, and this is what's bothering users...
So, why not make it optional in OOo?
Give the option of 2 (or more) interfaces, or even make the interface themeable? Users like making themes, just look at all the themes available for firefox.
Provide 2 themes by default - classic and ribbon, and prompt the users to choose either (or download more themes) with some good screenshots the first time they run the application.
How do you check the SMART info on windows?
On Linux i could either use smartctl (from the cli and which is usually installed by default) or install GSmartControl which is a gui based frontend to the underlying cli program. Some distros might ship the gui version by default, tho i'm not sure...
There are probably other graphical tools for displaying this info which i'm not aware of.
They used to publish Xenix...
MS could have used NFS in the first place, but they always prefer to come up with their own proprietary crap instead of using an existing standard...
They even had their own networking protocol (netbeui), but were forced to implement tcp/ip because it became so ubiquitous.
The start bar is also a lot taller and i can't find a way to reduce it to it's previous size (or smaller)...
This is especially a problem on netbooks which have small screens, having a thick startbar at the bottom and a thick titlebar at the top significantly reduces the available screen space for your applications.
Because OS reboots are still sometimes required, and a faster bootup makes them less painful...
Many highend machines would take a very long time to boot, mostly due to thorough hardware checks... These machines are designed to be stable, but sometimes power failures and such occur.
And with laptops and such, batteries are not to a level yet where we can just leave a laptop running all day without being plugged in.
Sounds like poorly written apps... ... If the user ignores the requester, the shutdown proceeds after a few seconds anyway.
Upon receiving a signal that the system is shutting down, applications should save their data/state, either into the main file if an autosave option is turned on, or into a temporary state file otherwise.. Once this is done, they can display a requester giving the user the option to cancel the shutdown
On the next launch of this program, it gives you the option to reload previous state (like firefox does).
The OS should also give the option of saving state, ie which apps you have running and how they are laid out... some unix window managers already do this (windowmaker for example).
You lie...
Windows is an easy to use GUI based OS, therefore there is no possible operation that requires, or is easier done with, the CLI...
You must be thinking of Linux, where simple tasks like shutting down the system must be done from the command line.
The issue comes from desktop vs server design...
Unix is designed for servers which are frequently run headless as you describe, and therefore will obey the shutdown command automatically...
Windows (and the OSX gui) are designed from a desktop perspective, where there is always a local user present who can answer questions...
OSX is an interesting one, because the cli based shutdown tools work like unix normally does, but requesting a shutdown via the gui will wait for input.
The problem is mostly the diversity of hardware (and drivers) that windows/linux are expected to work on...
Macs suspend reliably when you close the lid... My eee 901 running linux does too actually, but that machine was pretty much designed to run linux like the macbook is designed to run osx.