There are plenty of webmail systems which support PGP, squirrelmail, horde-imp etc... Just that none of the free webmail providers support it, but there are paid ones which do... I can even provide such accounts fairly cheap, bert64@sdp.firenzee.com
I believe the poor scheduling on single core is a side effect, apple don't even sell single core machines anymore so it does make sense for their OS to take advantage of the dual core chips, this has the side effect of inferior performance on single core chips. The X11 component is open source i believe, it could well be fixed by third parties.
Which are the proprietary file formats your thinking of? The ipod uses AAC (an openly documented standard) and MPEG4 (also openly documented) with optional DRM, and you can blame the riaa/mpaa for the drm. Lack of hardware support is more the fault of third party vendors, remember microsoft don't support a huge amount of hardware themselves either, hardware vendors have to write their own drivers.
The interface is a matter of personal choice, i prefer it to windows but there are several X11 window managers i prefer over OSX too. Apple should take a similar approach to unix, and allow window managers to be swapped in and out. That said, Leopard is going to finally introduce multiple workspaces, the lack of which is my biggest gripe (i absoloutely depend on multiple workspaces on unix and have for years)
licensing - yes, but still better than most commercial software (the os is relatively cheap, the kernel and some other components are open, you can get family packs for 5 systems and there is no activation/productcode/genuine advantage check etc...
poor customer service, i have yet to deal with a consumer computer company with decent service, apple is one of the least terrible ones...
memory requirement - yeah, osx is a big bloated pig, unfortunately linux is heading that way too and vista seems to have leapfrogged apple
hardware - my macs have been pretty stable, but i never buy cutting edge, i buy stuff a little behind the curve so it's cheaper and the bugs are ironed out.
Dont forget that macos is commercial software, so the goal isn't to make it the best OS it can possibly be, the goal is to make it just good enough to sell, and not any better than that for fear of reducing sales of future versions.
I used WordWorth on the Amiga... Earlier versions had spell check as you type (rather unuseable if running from floppy) variable width fonts and such, and would run on an A500+ (same cpu as A500, newer OS and 1MB ram by default). Newer versions would still run in 2mb, but required a hard drive. And all versions were capable of running in 1600x1200 if you had a powerfull videocard (or the default amiga 500+ and upwards could do 1280x512)
The extra features alone do not justify the size difference.
Ouch... Could you not modify the startup procedure so that, instead of detecting this problem and dropping you to single user, it fixes the problem and reboots?
Asterisk is also a far more powerfull program than Skype, and therefore more difficult to use. Alternatively, you could use voipcheap (www.voipcheap.co.uk) which comes with an easy to use client similar to skype, and supports SIP so you can connect asterisk to it (Which i do, since i have proper hardware ip phones). More SIP providers should do this, catering to the lowest level of users by providing a client, and supporting standard SIP for the benefit of more advanced users.
Anti aliasing is for screen fonts, not for printer fonts... Most printers use dithering, which is about the opposite of anti-aliasing. Printers can usually obtain a much higher resolution than any screen anyway.
I know several people who do exactly that, use backups... A lot of people buy games consoles for kids, and kids are very good at destroying or losing flimsy media like DVDs... So you make them a copy they can destroy, then you only have to worry about the machine itself.
Copy protection is there to increase sales, not through preventing serious piracy, but through casual copying (we used to copy amiga games when i was at school) and through lost/damaged media, or people with 2 or more consoles in the house who want to play multiplayer with their kids etc. They will never stop the serious warez groups, or the organised warez vendors in places like china.
Nowadays the average schoolkid has very few games, and if he wants to play multiplayer with his friends at school each of them has to buy the game seperately... When i was in school, us poor kids pooled our resources so i had many more games than I would have otherwise.
What you have to consider when looking at charitable donations is:
How much is actual cash, and how much is given away as products (remember microsoft's products cost them virtually nothing to reproduce).
What kick-back do they get in the form of tax breaks? (when donating products, assuming the tax break is based on the retail cost, they can still make huge profits purely from that because the reproduction cost is so minimal).
How much is the PR worth? Donating to charity is simply a form of marketing, how cost effective is it compared to other forms of marketing?
Choice yes... But not the freedom to choose to remove the freedom of choice from others. IE is designed to encourage lock-in, and by using it you are helping contribute to that. The less people use other browsers, the greater the number of people will design sites only for IE. With other browsers it's different, there's a much greater level of compatibility between them due to standards compliance, and any deviation from standards is seen as a bug rather than a crowbar to force users onto your non-standard implementation.
Yes, they refuse existing standards like MathML and SVG instead of reinventing the wheel. If there already exists a standard that is capable of performing some of the functions you require, why not use it? This means that people who have already written code to support these functions won't have wasted their effort, and people implementing OpenDocument will be able to find existing code and expertise to implement several parts of the standard rather than having to write it themselves.
The format is so long, because they created new methods of storing data when there are already standard formats in existence, for instance images... MSXML defines an internal way of storing images, while opendocument specifies the use of external formats (png, jpeg etc) the documentation for which is already publicly available, and widely implemented.
No... windows update only really updates what comes bundled with the os, and not any additional apps, even if those additional apps came from microsoft
Even other microsoft products will fail badly... The mac versions of word have many compatibility problems with the windows versions, and just try loading/saving word documents with ms publisher (publisher even comes bundled with the more expensive versions of office)
Actually, the problem this guy has is actually microsoft's fault... He can't get linux to interoperate with exchange fully, exchange is designed this way - to sell more copies of outlook. Even the mac equivalent (entourage) doesn't connect to exchange in the same way as outlook does, and doesn't support all the same features. Microsoft do not publish documentation on how to interoperate with exchange, people have to reverse engineer it every time there's an update, which is a very time consuming process. Also, the protocol must be very difficult to implement because microsoft haven't even bothered fully implementing it into their own products (entourage). Perhaps they don't even have full documentation for it themselves, and outlook is relying on a lot of undocumented legacy code to talk to exchange.
If this guy had been using standard methods of doing the same things, he would have had no problems using it with linux, there are standard ways to share folders, access mail and share calendars etc.
If microsoft were forced to open up their protocols and file formats, open source software would implement them pretty fast and all the problems this guy had would disappear overnight. Similarly, if he wasn't already dangerously locked in to microsoft, this problem wouldn't exist. This is why vendor lockin is dangerous, this guy is effectively being blackmailed into continuing to buy microsoft products "keep using our products everywhere or you'l need to replace EVERYTHING at once and lose access to all your data"
I could play MP3s just fine on a 100mhz MIPS R4600, the 4600 being a stripped down version of the R4400 which was available at speeds upto 250MHz... Later came the R8000 available only at speeds of 75 and 90mhz i believe (or somewhere around that) which was faster than any R4400, so i'm sure a 75mhz R8000 could easily play any mp3s you could throw at it. I also used to play MP3s on my Amiga, 33mhz 68040 needed to have the options turned down but a 50mhz 68060 could play them just fine in full quality.
That's assuming your an idiot who doesn't know when it's safe to drive fast and when it's not. What's so unsafe about driving fast down a straight and wide highway where there's little or no other traffic? Surely going down that highway at 90mph is safer than travelling down a crowded road at 55.
Well, Gentoo will continually evolve as you update packages, and it's really not that much maintenance if you update it every day. Still, you pay with some of your time rather than a subscription fee.
I found similar effects, it mostly seems to be the MS apps that do most of the crashing on OSX. Tho i also have lots of crashes with VLC. I don't have photoshop so i can't comment there, and i much prefer apple's preview to acrobat reader.
I've had several OSX macs, an iBook G4, a Macbook and an old dual G4 tower... Of these, only the G4 tower has ever crashed, once due to defective ram and once due to msword (which has since been removed). In the 2 or so years since the ram was replaced and word removed, this machine has _NEVER_ crashed and my 2 laptops have never crashed either (the only unintended downtime has been due to lack of battery power). I have had a few applications crash, safari tends to crash about once a week for instance, and VLC seems to crash whenever i try to play anything but nothing that takes the OS down.
Most people who have used both Linux and Windows long enough to get used to them tend to prefer linux, unless they play a lot of games. OSX on the other hand, has it's fair share of people who prefer it over linux. This is based on a proper comparison, as in people who have used multiple os's enough to get used to them properly as opposed to people who have only briefly looked at a different OS. Most windows users have either, never used another OS recently, or not for a long enough period to get used to it, or are forced to use windows by some form of vendor lock-in.
That's very true... If you help someone with a computer problem, regardless of what OS they use, they will ask for more help. If they're using windows, then trying to debug their problem over the phone. Describing the icon to click on, guiding them through actually finding it, and assuming theyre even following your instructions correctly because you can't always be sure theyre clicking on what they say they are. It's a huge pain in the ass, and consumes a _LOT_ of time. With Linux on the other hand, you have them open a text terminal, and then you read commands back and forth, so long as the person your helping can read and write you'l get there. A commandline is far more like a conversation than a gui, so it's a lot easier to explain over the phone. Plus, i can SSH in from wherever i am and take a look at things if necessary. Plus if you give someone Linux, you'l get no more calls for support removing spyware or viruses from the machine.
But you pay for cable service... More than you would have otherwise. And those people running linux and using the same cable service are paying more for nothing.
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There are plenty of webmail systems which support PGP, squirrelmail, horde-imp etc... Just that none of the free webmail providers support it, but there are paid ones which do...
I can even provide such accounts fairly cheap, bert64@sdp.firenzee.com
I believe the poor scheduling on single core is a side effect, apple don't even sell single core machines anymore so it does make sense for their OS to take advantage of the dual core chips, this has the side effect of inferior performance on single core chips.
The X11 component is open source i believe, it could well be fixed by third parties.
Which are the proprietary file formats your thinking of? The ipod uses AAC (an openly documented standard) and MPEG4 (also openly documented) with optional DRM, and you can blame the riaa/mpaa for the drm.
Lack of hardware support is more the fault of third party vendors, remember microsoft don't support a huge amount of hardware themselves either, hardware vendors have to write their own drivers.
The interface is a matter of personal choice, i prefer it to windows but there are several X11 window managers i prefer over OSX too. Apple should take a similar approach to unix, and allow window managers to be swapped in and out. That said, Leopard is going to finally introduce multiple workspaces, the lack of which is my biggest gripe (i absoloutely depend on multiple workspaces on unix and have for years)
licensing - yes, but still better than most commercial software (the os is relatively cheap, the kernel and some other components are open, you can get family packs for 5 systems and there is no activation/productcode/genuine advantage check etc...
poor customer service, i have yet to deal with a consumer computer company with decent service, apple is one of the least terrible ones...
memory requirement - yeah, osx is a big bloated pig, unfortunately linux is heading that way too and vista seems to have leapfrogged apple
hardware - my macs have been pretty stable, but i never buy cutting edge, i buy stuff a little behind the curve so it's cheaper and the bugs are ironed out.
Dont forget that macos is commercial software, so the goal isn't to make it the best OS it can possibly be, the goal is to make it just good enough to sell, and not any better than that for fear of reducing sales of future versions.
I used WordWorth on the Amiga...
Earlier versions had spell check as you type (rather unuseable if running from floppy) variable width fonts and such, and would run on an A500+ (same cpu as A500, newer OS and 1MB ram by default).
Newer versions would still run in 2mb, but required a hard drive.
And all versions were capable of running in 1600x1200 if you had a powerfull videocard (or the default amiga 500+ and upwards could do 1280x512)
The extra features alone do not justify the size difference.
Aparrently, a lot of their critical back end stuff runs on Solaris and the like... Only the frontend stuff runs windows (for show, mostly).
You can also get fully supported linux distributions complete with HCLs and support, never heard of redhat or suse?
Ouch...
Could you not modify the startup procedure so that, instead of detecting this problem and dropping you to single user, it fixes the problem and reboots?
Asterisk is also a far more powerfull program than Skype, and therefore more difficult to use.
Alternatively, you could use voipcheap (www.voipcheap.co.uk) which comes with an easy to use client similar to skype, and supports SIP so you can connect asterisk to it (Which i do, since i have proper hardware ip phones).
More SIP providers should do this, catering to the lowest level of users by providing a client, and supporting standard SIP for the benefit of more advanced users.
Anti aliasing is for screen fonts, not for printer fonts... Most printers use dithering, which is about the opposite of anti-aliasing. Printers can usually obtain a much higher resolution than any screen anyway.
I know several people who do exactly that, use backups...
A lot of people buy games consoles for kids, and kids are very good at destroying or losing flimsy media like DVDs... So you make them a copy they can destroy, then you only have to worry about the machine itself.
Copy protection is there to increase sales, not through preventing serious piracy, but through casual copying (we used to copy amiga games when i was at school) and through lost/damaged media, or people with 2 or more consoles in the house who want to play multiplayer with their kids etc. They will never stop the serious warez groups, or the organised warez vendors in places like china.
Nowadays the average schoolkid has very few games, and if he wants to play multiplayer with his friends at school each of them has to buy the game seperately... When i was in school, us poor kids pooled our resources so i had many more games than I would have otherwise.
What you have to consider when looking at charitable donations is:
How much is actual cash, and how much is given away as products (remember microsoft's products cost them virtually nothing to reproduce).
What kick-back do they get in the form of tax breaks? (when donating products, assuming the tax break is based on the retail cost, they can still make huge profits purely from that because the reproduction cost is so minimal).
How much is the PR worth? Donating to charity is simply a form of marketing, how cost effective is it compared to other forms of marketing?
Choice yes...
But not the freedom to choose to remove the freedom of choice from others. IE is designed to encourage lock-in, and by using it you are helping contribute to that. The less people use other browsers, the greater the number of people will design sites only for IE.
With other browsers it's different, there's a much greater level of compatibility between them due to standards compliance, and any deviation from standards is seen as a bug rather than a crowbar to force users onto your non-standard implementation.
Yes, they refuse existing standards like MathML and SVG instead of reinventing the wheel.
If there already exists a standard that is capable of performing some of the functions you require, why not use it? This means that people who have already written code to support these functions won't have wasted their effort, and people implementing OpenDocument will be able to find existing code and expertise to implement several parts of the standard rather than having to write it themselves.
The format is so long, because they created new methods of storing data when there are already standard formats in existence, for instance images... MSXML defines an internal way of storing images, while opendocument specifies the use of external formats (png, jpeg etc) the documentation for which is already publicly available, and widely implemented.
No...
windows update only really updates what comes bundled with the os, and not any additional apps, even if those additional apps came from microsoft
Even other microsoft products will fail badly...
The mac versions of word have many compatibility problems with the windows versions, and just try loading/saving word documents with ms publisher (publisher even comes bundled with the more expensive versions of office)
Actually, the problem this guy has is actually microsoft's fault...
He can't get linux to interoperate with exchange fully, exchange is designed this way - to sell more copies of outlook. Even the mac equivalent (entourage) doesn't connect to exchange in the same way as outlook does, and doesn't support all the same features.
Microsoft do not publish documentation on how to interoperate with exchange, people have to reverse engineer it every time there's an update, which is a very time consuming process. Also, the protocol must be very difficult to implement because microsoft haven't even bothered fully implementing it into their own products (entourage). Perhaps they don't even have full documentation for it themselves, and outlook is relying on a lot of undocumented legacy code to talk to exchange.
If this guy had been using standard methods of doing the same things, he would have had no problems using it with linux, there are standard ways to share folders, access mail and share calendars etc.
If microsoft were forced to open up their protocols and file formats, open source software would implement them pretty fast and all the problems this guy had would disappear overnight. Similarly, if he wasn't already dangerously locked in to microsoft, this problem wouldn't exist. This is why vendor lockin is dangerous, this guy is effectively being blackmailed into continuing to buy microsoft products "keep using our products everywhere or you'l need to replace EVERYTHING at once and lose access to all your data"
I could play MP3s just fine on a 100mhz MIPS R4600, the 4600 being a stripped down version of the R4400 which was available at speeds upto 250MHz... Later came the R8000 available only at speeds of 75 and 90mhz i believe (or somewhere around that) which was faster than any R4400, so i'm sure a 75mhz R8000 could easily play any mp3s you could throw at it.
I also used to play MP3s on my Amiga, 33mhz 68040 needed to have the options turned down but a 50mhz 68060 could play them just fine in full quality.
That's assuming your an idiot who doesn't know when it's safe to drive fast and when it's not.
What's so unsafe about driving fast down a straight and wide highway where there's little or no other traffic? Surely going down that highway at 90mph is safer than travelling down a crowded road at 55.
I don't know, you could probably find a hooker for $79 if you looked hard enough.
Well, Gentoo will continually evolve as you update packages, and it's really not that much maintenance if you update it every day. Still, you pay with some of your time rather than a subscription fee.
I found similar effects, it mostly seems to be the MS apps that do most of the crashing on OSX. Tho i also have lots of crashes with VLC. I don't have photoshop so i can't comment there, and i much prefer apple's preview to acrobat reader.
I've had several OSX macs, an iBook G4, a Macbook and an old dual G4 tower... Of these, only the G4 tower has ever crashed, once due to defective ram and once due to msword (which has since been removed). In the 2 or so years since the ram was replaced and word removed, this machine has _NEVER_ crashed and my 2 laptops have never crashed either (the only unintended downtime has been due to lack of battery power). I have had a few applications crash, safari tends to crash about once a week for instance, and VLC seems to crash whenever i try to play anything but nothing that takes the OS down.
Most people who have used both Linux and Windows long enough to get used to them tend to prefer linux, unless they play a lot of games. OSX on the other hand, has it's fair share of people who prefer it over linux. This is based on a proper comparison, as in people who have used multiple os's enough to get used to them properly as opposed to people who have only briefly looked at a different OS.
Most windows users have either, never used another OS recently, or not for a long enough period to get used to it, or are forced to use windows by some form of vendor lock-in.
That's very true...
If you help someone with a computer problem, regardless of what OS they use, they will ask for more help.
If they're using windows, then trying to debug their problem over the phone. Describing the icon to click on, guiding them through actually finding it, and assuming theyre even following your instructions correctly because you can't always be sure theyre clicking on what they say they are. It's a huge pain in the ass, and consumes a _LOT_ of time.
With Linux on the other hand, you have them open a text terminal, and then you read commands back and forth, so long as the person your helping can read and write you'l get there. A commandline is far more like a conversation than a gui, so it's a lot easier to explain over the phone. Plus, i can SSH in from wherever i am and take a look at things if necessary.
Plus if you give someone Linux, you'l get no more calls for support removing spyware or viruses from the machine.
But you pay for cable service... More than you would have otherwise.
And those people running linux and using the same cable service are paying more for nothing.