The level of arrogance, deleting a perfectly good rip of something because it was done by some random joe and not a "scene release", even if the scene version is noticeably worse in quality or such...
This ridiculous business of chopping every file up into thousands of small rar files, and often compressing a file multiple times (hint: compressing a file more than once does not save you more space, and video/audio files are typically already compressed)... Leaving users with the hassle of having to decompress it after downloading.
An obsession with FTP, despite the fact that there are newer better designed and more secure protocols out there these days... There really is no good reason to use FTP anymore.
Windows mobile suffers from the same issue as android, in that they don't control the hardware... But android can be more easily tailored by the hardware manufacturer to their hardware.
RIM has a good product in itself, but it's too proprietary for my liking, you need to run their closed source server side app, and connect it to one of a small set of supported mail systems. Their consumer oriented offering is lousy, and it seems artificially crippled so as not to cannibalise sales of the proprietary server based solution... They also suffer from being dependant on microsoft products, it's never a good idea to be dependant on one of your biggest competitors.
Fully agreed about windows mobile feeling like a desktop os shoehorned into a phone, and aside from that it's windows only by name, it isn't even source level compatible with desktop windows apps, unlike osx or linux based phones where some things will port simply by recompiling. Calling it windows really just misleads potential customers.
Games are the most popular things for running in wine, because they are the biggest thing generally missing on the systems that run wine... For most other types of app there are linux native versions which run better than alien binaries running under wine.
The free software community has not implemented it, and neither have the proprietary software vendors... MS has promised support for it in 2010, but we all know about deadlines...
Ofcourse, there is another XML open standard, OpenDocument, which has been around for several years longer, already has multiple implementations and MS has promised to support it in 2009 (again, we know what happens with deadlines but it's still scheduled to happen first), pretty much every other vendor already has support for it.
Yeah, alternative pdf readers need to get more promotion... A lot of people think pdf is a terrible format, because of how lousy adobe's default reader is, and many corporates only supply this horrendous program, configured with all the addons enabled so it takes twice as long to start up. OSX comes with a nice pdf reader by default, KDE has a good one, and with a good reader the format becomes extremely useful.
What benefits does it offer over PDF or Postscript, other than that you're using MS tools which intentionally only support their format to force people to use it?
It seems ridiculous to create a new format which replicates part of the functionality of one which already exists with an open spec and a large number of existing implementations. All this does it create extra hassle for developers who now end up being forced to support multiple formats.
That's insane, in university settings latex is generally the preferred tool... They could at the very least demand submissions in PDF format... And if they are promoting OO.o, why not ask for ODF instead?
Submitting as pdf is generally a far more sensible idea anyway...
If you submit it as a word file, people seem to forget that word has inherent compatibility problems anyway, openoffice is just a convenient target to blame but even if both sender and recipient use word there is no guarantee of compatibility... Different versions have compatibility problems, the mac version has significant compatibility issues with the windows version, patch levels can break things and even the way it's configured (like available font set and default printer) can break things, mostly formatting, in horrible ways. All in all openoffice does a rather good job for the most part.
Incidentally, if you are submitting PDF files containing math, have you considered latex? It generates very nice pdf files...
I've seen all kinds of clunky stuff, like tables with a ghost column added and colored white as a really half assed way of indenting the table... And openoffice shows your page margins by default, word does not, i have encountered thousands of word files where people place stuff outside of the defined margins.
Sun make a plugin for word to support opendocument files, microsoft also make such a plugin but it doesnt work anywhere near as well, and finally microsoft are supposedly going to implement opendocument support some time next year in a service pack.
It's not uncommon to lose the code, or to find yourself far from home when you need to enter the code, and have to drive home in silence... The code will come on a small piece of paper that you file away with all the other documentation about the car, and either lose it completely or spend a long time trying to find it when you need it.
Assuming you believe the lie about DRM being to prevent piracy...
That's not what it's about at all, pirates will just watch a lower quality version (DVD, even a camera rip) or wait for the drm to be cracked, they're not gonna suddenly go out and buy an expensive drm'd version just because it hasn't been cracked yet.
The only people hurt by DRM are legitimate consumers, who want to do perfectly reasonable things like put the movie on a media server, make a backup copy so that their kids don't scratch the original and convert the media to play on a portable device like an ipod. The purpose of DRM is to force these people into buying multiple copies of the same media, ie screwing more money out of existing paying customers.
For the obligatory car analogy, consider the codes common on car stereos, if the battery power is lost you have to enter a code... Thieves already know how to bypass or reset these codes, but a law abiding user who lets his battery drain or disconnects it, now has to go to the dealer and pay money to have the code reset. I have been in this situation myself, but luckily i knew a "thief" who would unlock the radio for half as much as the dealer.
Yes, these tax writeoffs are a scam, there should be a cap on how much they can write off based on a percentage of the actual cost to them. Companies should not be able to set their own arbitrary prices, and then claim tax benefits for donating goods as if they had been sold at this arbitrary price.
Yes, which is extremely disturbing.. What sets humans apart from animals, is our ability to understand how and why something works, rather than memorizing repetitive actions which is how you train animals.
When pascal and AppleII were taught in school, such systems were used outside of schools too... By the time kids currently in school leave school, what's in use today will have been replaced by something else. So teach them general concepts that they can adapt to anything, rather than specific applications.
We had a portable, it consisted of a desktop pc and a crt monitor on a trolley, portable because you could unplug it and push it around. It actually had a UPS on the trolley so it could continue running as you moved it too.
MSOffice 2007 is also substantially different from 2003 and all previous versions... And companies run a variety of versions, schools are also likely to have older equipment running older software... And by the time these kids finish school, MSOffice 2007 will be horrendously outdated and replaced with something else in many organizations.
So you can either teach the current version of MSOffice, which by the time kids enter the workplace will be obsolete and replaced with something different... Or you can teach the current version of OpenOffice, which by the time kids enter the workplace will be obsolete and kids will be using something different...
You have the same issue either way, but OpenOffice is considerably cheaper to obtain, cheaper to maintain license compliance, and places less demands on what you can run it on.
Also in my experience of using both suites, i would not say MSO is better at all... Admittedly, most of my usage is restricted to the word processing components of each, i have found OO (since version 2, i didn't like version 1) to be more robust especially at opening damaged files, have better pdf creating capability (its there by default, and creates a proper index etc), have better macro capabilities (you can reuse your existing knowledge of existing languages, dont have to learn a new specific language), have better regex find/replace, have a more sensible file format that is easier to manipulate using external tools, have the ability to export to latex, and generally seem to have a more sensible layout of options (changing the paper size is under format/page for instance)...
I don't like either of the spreadsheet apps, as whenever i've used them they came up with (the same) inaccurate/incorrect results, i can only imagine OO is trying to copy MS bugs for the sake of compatibility... Gnumeric has fared much better for me and is a lot less resource hungry.
As you would with many other devices... TV equipment, particularly the devices connecting to tvs often have different interfaces like cable boxes and dvd players etc, microwaves often have different interfaces, cars can have different interfaces...
All of these devices and many more can have lots of different interfaces to achieve the same thing, tho there is usually still some level of commonality between them.
I have very rarely seen any closed source applications which didn't require patches, support for when things break and training in how to use it... On the other hand, with open source the authors are less concerned about controlling distribution, so patching is easier (use a centralized repository, downloads easily obtained), and with closed source i have often had the additional burden of dealing with license compliance, sometimes license servers need to be set up and managed and sometimes codes have to be stored and entered into each installation.
There are two sides to every coin, some smaller open source apps have fairly flakey or highly manual install procedures, but for the most part things are fairly slick. A lot of OSS will actually come preinstalled with a linux distro, or on ready to run virtual images etc.
While most closed source is harder to obtain (cant just wget a url or apt-get install) harder to install (often has its own binary installer instead of using package management) harder to remove (same reason) and a whole heap of other problems...
You also have issues, at least on linux and bsd, where precompiled binaries from another system may not run at all, which often makes closed source apps an even bigger hassle, open source apps can be recompiled if there isnt a binary available with your distro.
Yes, it is perfectly possible to run Linux on the older large-box PS2 or PS3... But it's not advertised as a feature, not provided by default, and not made trivial for people to use...
Linux should come with the default PS3, and should come with a simple frontend like those on netbooks... And there should be some literature explaining how to use it and links to some websites containing more information. Most people who have PS3 consoles are not even aware that it has these capabilities, or are afraid of trying to install linux on it for fear of breaking it.
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Yes, and i can't stand the "scene"...
The level of arrogance, deleting a perfectly good rip of something because it was done by some random joe and not a "scene release", even if the scene version is noticeably worse in quality or such...
This ridiculous business of chopping every file up into thousands of small rar files, and often compressing a file multiple times (hint: compressing a file more than once does not save you more space, and video/audio files are typically already compressed)... Leaving users with the hassle of having to decompress it after downloading.
An obsession with FTP, despite the fact that there are newer better designed and more secure protocols out there these days... There really is no good reason to use FTP anymore.
Windows mobile suffers from the same issue as android, in that they don't control the hardware... But android can be more easily tailored by the hardware manufacturer to their hardware.
RIM has a good product in itself, but it's too proprietary for my liking, you need to run their closed source server side app, and connect it to one of a small set of supported mail systems. Their consumer oriented offering is lousy, and it seems artificially crippled so as not to cannibalise sales of the proprietary server based solution... They also suffer from being dependant on microsoft products, it's never a good idea to be dependant on one of your biggest competitors.
Fully agreed about windows mobile feeling like a desktop os shoehorned into a phone, and aside from that it's windows only by name, it isn't even source level compatible with desktop windows apps, unlike osx or linux based phones where some things will port simply by recompiling. Calling it windows really just misleads potential customers.
Games are the most popular things for running in wine, because they are the biggest thing generally missing on the systems that run wine...
For most other types of app there are linux native versions which run better than alien binaries running under wine.
NT4 ran on the PowerPC, tho there weren't really many apps for it and support was dropped fairly quickly...
Bittorrent will transfer the differences too, if you make a new file overwrite an old one, it will replace any chunks which are different.
Pirates still prefer FTP, it seems all of the big warez groups are still pushing files around using FTP...
The free software community has not implemented it, and neither have the proprietary software vendors...
MS has promised support for it in 2010, but we all know about deadlines...
Ofcourse, there is another XML open standard, OpenDocument, which has been around for several years longer, already has multiple implementations and MS has promised to support it in 2009 (again, we know what happens with deadlines but it's still scheduled to happen first), pretty much every other vendor already has support for it.
Yeah, alternative pdf readers need to get more promotion...
A lot of people think pdf is a terrible format, because of how lousy adobe's default reader is, and many corporates only supply this horrendous program, configured with all the addons enabled so it takes twice as long to start up.
OSX comes with a nice pdf reader by default, KDE has a good one, and with a good reader the format becomes extremely useful.
What benefits does it offer over PDF or Postscript, other than that you're using MS tools which intentionally only support their format to force people to use it?
It seems ridiculous to create a new format which replicates part of the functionality of one which already exists with an open spec and a large number of existing implementations. All this does it create extra hassle for developers who now end up being forced to support multiple formats.
Then it's your job to prove that the extra productivity is worth it, and that those who don't know how to use latex should learn...
That's insane, in university settings latex is generally the preferred tool... They could at the very least demand submissions in PDF format...
And if they are promoting OO.o, why not ask for ODF instead?
Submitting as pdf is generally a far more sensible idea anyway...
If you submit it as a word file, people seem to forget that word has inherent compatibility problems anyway, openoffice is just a convenient target to blame but even if both sender and recipient use word there is no guarantee of compatibility...
Different versions have compatibility problems, the mac version has significant compatibility issues with the windows version, patch levels can break things and even the way it's configured (like available font set and default printer) can break things, mostly formatting, in horrible ways.
All in all openoffice does a rather good job for the most part.
Incidentally, if you are submitting PDF files containing math, have you considered latex? It generates very nice pdf files...
I've seen all kinds of clunky stuff, like tables with a ghost column added and colored white as a really half assed way of indenting the table...
And openoffice shows your page margins by default, word does not, i have encountered thousands of word files where people place stuff outside of the defined margins.
Sun make a plugin for word to support opendocument files, microsoft also make such a plugin but it doesnt work anywhere near as well, and finally microsoft are supposedly going to implement opendocument support some time next year in a service pack.
It's not uncommon to lose the code, or to find yourself far from home when you need to enter the code, and have to drive home in silence...
The code will come on a small piece of paper that you file away with all the other documentation about the car, and either lose it completely or spend a long time trying to find it when you need it.
Honda may do that, not all manufacturers do.
Assuming you believe the lie about DRM being to prevent piracy...
That's not what it's about at all, pirates will just watch a lower quality version (DVD, even a camera rip) or wait for the drm to be cracked, they're not gonna suddenly go out and buy an expensive drm'd version just because it hasn't been cracked yet.
The only people hurt by DRM are legitimate consumers, who want to do perfectly reasonable things like put the movie on a media server, make a backup copy so that their kids don't scratch the original and convert the media to play on a portable device like an ipod. The purpose of DRM is to force these people into buying multiple copies of the same media, ie screwing more money out of existing paying customers.
For the obligatory car analogy, consider the codes common on car stereos, if the battery power is lost you have to enter a code... Thieves already know how to bypass or reset these codes, but a law abiding user who lets his battery drain or disconnects it, now has to go to the dealer and pay money to have the code reset. I have been in this situation myself, but luckily i knew a "thief" who would unlock the radio for half as much as the dealer.
Yes, these tax writeoffs are a scam, there should be a cap on how much they can write off based on a percentage of the actual cost to them. Companies should not be able to set their own arbitrary prices, and then claim tax benefits for donating goods as if they had been sold at this arbitrary price.
Yes, which is extremely disturbing..
What sets humans apart from animals, is our ability to understand how and why something works, rather than memorizing repetitive actions which is how you train animals.
When pascal and AppleII were taught in school, such systems were used outside of schools too...
By the time kids currently in school leave school, what's in use today will have been replaced by something else.
So teach them general concepts that they can adapt to anything, rather than specific applications.
We had a portable, it consisted of a desktop pc and a crt monitor on a trolley, portable because you could unplug it and push it around. It actually had a UPS on the trolley so it could continue running as you moved it too.
MSOffice 2007 is also substantially different from 2003 and all previous versions...
And companies run a variety of versions, schools are also likely to have older equipment running older software...
And by the time these kids finish school, MSOffice 2007 will be horrendously outdated and replaced with something else in many organizations.
So you can either teach the current version of MSOffice, which by the time kids enter the workplace will be obsolete and replaced with something different...
Or you can teach the current version of OpenOffice, which by the time kids enter the workplace will be obsolete and kids will be using something different...
You have the same issue either way, but OpenOffice is considerably cheaper to obtain, cheaper to maintain license compliance, and places less demands on what you can run it on.
Also in my experience of using both suites, i would not say MSO is better at all... Admittedly, most of my usage is restricted to the word processing components of each, i have found OO (since version 2, i didn't like version 1) to be more robust especially at opening damaged files, have better pdf creating capability (its there by default, and creates a proper index etc), have better macro capabilities (you can reuse your existing knowledge of existing languages, dont have to learn a new specific language), have better regex find/replace, have a more sensible file format that is easier to manipulate using external tools, have the ability to export to latex, and generally seem to have a more sensible layout of options (changing the paper size is under format/page for instance)...
I don't like either of the spreadsheet apps, as whenever i've used them they came up with (the same) inaccurate/incorrect results, i can only imagine OO is trying to copy MS bugs for the sake of compatibility... Gnumeric has fared much better for me and is a lot less resource hungry.
As you would with many other devices...
TV equipment, particularly the devices connecting to tvs often have different interfaces like cable boxes and dvd players etc, microwaves often have different interfaces, cars can have different interfaces...
All of these devices and many more can have lots of different interfaces to achieve the same thing, tho there is usually still some level of commonality between them.
I have very rarely seen any closed source applications which didn't require patches, support for when things break and training in how to use it...
On the other hand, with open source the authors are less concerned about controlling distribution, so patching is easier (use a centralized repository, downloads easily obtained), and with closed source i have often had the additional burden of dealing with license compliance, sometimes license servers need to be set up and managed and sometimes codes have to be stored and entered into each installation.
There are two sides to every coin, some smaller open source apps have fairly flakey or highly manual install procedures, but for the most part things are fairly slick. A lot of OSS will actually come preinstalled with a linux distro, or on ready to run virtual images etc.
While most closed source is harder to obtain (cant just wget a url or apt-get install) harder to install (often has its own binary installer instead of using package management) harder to remove (same reason) and a whole heap of other problems...
You also have issues, at least on linux and bsd, where precompiled binaries from another system may not run at all, which often makes closed source apps an even bigger hassle, open source apps can be recompiled if there isnt a binary available with your distro.
Yes, it is perfectly possible to run Linux on the older large-box PS2 or PS3...
But it's not advertised as a feature, not provided by default, and not made trivial for people to use...
Linux should come with the default PS3, and should come with a simple frontend like those on netbooks... And there should be some literature explaining how to use it and links to some websites containing more information. Most people who have PS3 consoles are not even aware that it has these capabilities, or are afraid of trying to install linux on it for fear of breaking it.