When I still custom-built my boxes I had the spare parts. Hardware failure did not factor in as a reason to buy boxes. Problems with debian also did not factor in. It's fine, when it's up and running. What did factor in was the time investment necessary for that custom-built box. I figure buying a mac instead of custom-building a debian box saves me about two weeks of personal time per box. Two weeks is worth it to me.
Some of the stuff I lost time on when I still custom-built debian boxes: - reviewing and selecting hardware parts - solving conflicts with hardware parts (real life example: all-quality parts bought at different places, no overheating, no power issues, no driver issues, one crash every three days regardless of OS). - assembling the box (admittedly, it's only a few hours, but it has to be mentioned) - installing debian and getting all hardware to function fully on it - configuring debian to not be a PITA when it comes to a daily workflow (it's the best of the non-OS X operating systems, but imho it still sucks a hell of a lot more than mac os unless you tinker a LOT with it) - configuring the themeing of my desktop environment of choice (and all the apps that ran in it) to be uniform across all toolkits and to not be ugly and cluttered (kde, what can I say, those guys love their toolbar buttons) - keeping up to date with the state of unstable so I didn't accidentally apt-get upgrade my way into a broken package system when all I needed was the newest release of some development tool. - many, many things that can be done with less time wasted and less man page reading on the mac and windows (linux application usability was generally sucky, and I have yet to see anything that convinces me things have improved)
Now, to be fair, linux is more powerful, and my custom-built boxes were better suited to my ideal workflow. I moved to the mac not because it had a better workflow, but because it had a good enough workflow without having to spend evening after evening setting one up. I get to spend more time with my girlfriend, and on slashdot. Anything that lets me combine those is worth its weight in gold;)
Perhaps we have different usage patterns. I tend not to have many tabs open. Admittedly, opening a lot of tabs makes firefox slow down much more on the mini than on the P4.
The reason I spent so damn fucking much on a computer, is so I wouldn't have to deal with it.
I know your pain. I used to home-build all my machines, and I ran debian on them. I invested a LOT of my personal time to get these boxes up to the level where they could serve their purpose. In the end, I got tired of tinkering, and I got a mac. I can get straight to work now. No tinkering necessary just for the sake of getting a running machine.
One man's polish is another man's useless eye candy... Some of us enjoy having a simple, uncluttered, low color, high contrast GUI. And a terminal.
Exactly, and that's where OS X delivers. The KDE GUI is extremely cluttered, loaded with busy toolbars and lengthy menu's. Mac gui's are simpler, cleaner, and yet they're just as powerful (imho, your mileage may vary).
And remember, underneath OS X is BSD (even if Terminal is a somewhat sucky terminal).
Well, my 1Ghz, 768M iBook struggles to keep up with more than a couple of tabs in Safari, Thunderbird and a couple of Terminals open to my standards of responsiveness.
Ah, safari. Yes, it is slow. All I can say is that my mini isn't sluggish. The firefox performance is roughly in the same class as my work machine, and that's a 3.4 ghz P4 with 2 gigs of ram and a fast disk.
UAC: Vista can raise (and presumably lower) program permissions while running.
This isn't such a good thing. From what I've read UAC asks for permission quite often. If we take a look at history, people will end up automatically clicking on allow, just to not have to think about it. A well-designed system takes into account the human factor so that it does not ask to change permissions (roadblock-style security, which leads to automatic response by the human user), but instead allows to user to change permissions levels by explicitly requesting it (fork in the road security, which requires the user to explicitly leave the main road).
Firefox never asks for permissions, because it was designed in such a way as to inform you of how you can give additional permissions to the sites that need it, and generally operates just fine without elevated permissions. OS X rarely has to ask for permissions, because when you want to change a system-wide setting you first have to explicitly unlock the system preferences dialog.
I agree that UAC will reduce the amount of malware. But I haven't read anything about it that made me think it was any better (or even the equal of) OS X's security mechanisms when it comes to actual daily use.
You need a G5 with a gig or more of RAM to get anything approaching decent performance out of OS X, except under trivial load. This is quite comparable with the level of hardware you need to get a similar Vista 'experience'. OS X is an absolute pig compared to any other mainstream platform (although it's been getting faster - but from that slow there isn't anywhere to go but up).
I call BS. My main desktop machine (at home) is a mac mini G4 1.2 ghz with 1 gig of ram, running a fully up-to-date OS 10.4. It's quite capable as a development workstation, and rarely bogs down. I ran it for a year with 512 megs and even that was quite workable, as long as I didn't try to run netbeans and photoshop at the same time. I haven't had to worry about how much stuff is taking up memory since the upgrade to 1 gig.
Because your average technical journo who writes the articles in question is too hooked on the freebies MS provide him with in the way of free booze to risk fucking that up.
No, the freebies actually don't change things that much. What does change things is who pays for the advertisements. Most technical journals do not have enough subscribers to break even, let alone make a profit. The only way for them to turn a profit is to be advertiser-funded. Microsoft is one of the largest magazine ad buyers in the computer business, apple isn't, and ibm never pushed os/2 in ads all that much. Result: windows gets glowing reviews, mac os gets honorable mentions.
No. Why? They just add it and release it, they wouldn't even have to open their player at all, open specs would be enough to help people like the ones writing Gnash
Having the specs is not an issue. These have already been reverse-engineered, and haxe already can output flash 9 movies, with the entire featureset. What's keeping gnash back is gnash, not any external force.
My guess is that they want to sell players to the mobile phone manufacturers (considering that mobiles being all the rage at the moment, not surprising).
Bingo. Like I said, they expect that open sourcing the player would lose them money, not make them money, and they're probably not wrong. If it made business sense, they'd open source it. You can debate the ethics of the thing, but you can't debate the reality. I don't actually disagree with you that they should open source the player though, I just don't think they will.
But like I said, there's nothing holding anyone back from building an open source player. The file format is fully known in the open source flash community. And flash 9 is a wonderful development platform, so there's all the more incentive for someone to step up to the plate.
However, with that said, I don't understand why an application that just allows you to view files (rather than create or edit them) ever needs to be closed source anyway
Remember that the player is what determines what you can produce with the flash authoring application. If adobe were to open source it they'd have to go through the community each time they wanted to add a feature to the player, without really getting anything of value (to them) in return. The way I see it is that from their perspective open-sourcing the player could only lose them money, not make them money.
The irony is that the entire flash development toolchain can be replaced by open source components now. There are even several capable open source flash IDE's. At work I still use a licensed copy of flash, but at home I use the open source tools. The only part that is still proprietary is the player.
Is because I have a huge ass screen and a very fast connection. My phone can't match either of those.
Try map24 mobile, it is quite usable as a mobile mapping solution, with route planning, 3D 3rd person perspective while following a route and access to the bookmarks you make in the desktop version. Quite convenient when you need to know how to get from A to B, and you lack a map. It's definitely a lot better than the java version of google maps.
You can't solve usability issues by changing to a different theme. it's a common mistake in open source crowds to think you can. Usability relates to the fundamental structure of a gui, not to it's style. Trying to solve usability issues in kde by using a mac theme is like trying to solve the acceleration issues in a yugo by painting it neon blue and sticking a "turbo" sticker on the back.
Apple, apparently in a concession to the music industry, obfuscates the file names of mp3s as it transfers songs to the device. "James McMurtry--Iolanthe.mp3" will become OTKO.mp3 on the device, stored in the folder F47 (and yes, there is an F01-F46), all with the express purpose of making it difficult (though not impossible) for you to find a song and copy it back by hooking up your iPod like a hard disk.
You can get the files back onto the desktop and into a sensible naming structure quite easily using itunes. Just copy the ipod's music folder (which can be accessed if you show hidden and system files and mount the ipod as a disk drive) to the desktop, and import it into itunes, with the itunes option to reorder the library to its own format enabled. Instructions can be found here.
I once read an interview with someone who worked on the ipod (no idea where or when), who claimed that the renaming and folder structure has nothing to do with the recording industry, but rather with the limitations of the early hardware and the requirement that playlists of thousands of files "open" instantaneous. Limitating filename lengths and the number of files in a folder apparently helped, as did storing the files' information in a central database. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds reasonable.
Many web pages depend on GIF's all-or-nothing transparancy rendering. Fixing the pages that weren't designed with GIF's limitations in mind would break those that were.
It's the task of the web developer/designer to make the site pretty. The browser shouldn't try to second-guess them by modifying images to disobey what the image spec specifies. Not by default anyway. I have no beef with this feature being an extension.
I pplayed a lot of bushido blade, but tekken 3 I felt was better crafted. It didn't have the "show" or sudden death factor of bushido blade, but I've never seen a martial arts combat game that had a better design when it came to character move variety and balance.
One other thought -- just as the user shouldn't be telling the *developer* what to implement, it's also more useful to solicit feedback as "capability requests" rather than "feature requests." The distinction is that a feature request implies (to me, anyway) something like "I want to click here and here and then type "blah blah" and it's done." This is usually too detailed. Instead, the feedback should be "I need to accomplish XYZ rapidly" and the architect should be free to design a solution to this that's consistent with the existing design.
Exactly. Being able to ask a user what task they want to be able to accomplish is important, being told what it is before you even get to think about asking is even better.
One of the apps I've built is a floorplan viewer. I didn't have much in the way of guidance or feedback during the design and development phases, so I mostly did it all myself, trying to figure out what a user would need. I ended up making a few design blunders that seemed perfectly sensible at the time. Like, floorplan printing. My idea was "print exactly what the user sees, scaled to the dimensions of the page, including any whitespace". That sounded reasonable, but it doesn't apply to the most common case of printing floorplans: print the entire floorplan, without extraneous whitespace.
Talking with the user about the task they're trying to accomplish is very important.
There are so many amazing tools and code examples about this type of application "skinning" that its really VERY easy to at least offer some basic functionality in this respect. In fact there are a number for 3-rd party controls which support this type of application "styling" without the developers even having to think about it or add a single line of code depending how far they want to go with it.
If you're talking about how programmers shouldn't restrict the designers in what interfaces they can build using the tools that the programmers deliver, I'm in total agreement.
However, if you're talking about making your UI skinnable so the end user can pick or design the interface that's most suited to him, I don't agree. Developers shouldn't shove the hard problems like good defaults in interface design to the userbase. The aim of a software development project should be to deliver the user something that solves his problem, and not to require any more effort from the user than is absolutely necessary. The most usable applications I've seen generally don't support much in the way of skinning. The most unusable applications have all been skinnable. Draw your own conclusions.
Redhat has never told me to 'fuck off'. And for all the OS people that have, I've never been paying them for support.
Bad example. Redhat makes money selling proprietary software and services, and only uses OSS as a leveraging tool to gain technology and mindshare. When you look at pure OSS projects, that aren't trying to sell people something, the user focus just isn't the same.
Personally, having grown up with the C64 and the Apple][ and all the rest... man, I HATED BASIC.
I started out on a C64/C128 as well. Basic is not a good first language.
Frankly, if I wanted to teach my child programming, I'd start with javascript. Here's why: - It's extremely easy to get started in. You can do a lot with one-liners, and unlike perl you can explain the one-liners to a neophyte. There are many excellent beginner's books. - On-screen graphical feedback is instantaneous, and you don't have to restrict yourself to console output. - Every single web-enabled PC has the development tools right there. They don't have to do complicated installs, and they can show off their 1337 skills on their friend's computer. - And best of all, if you give them a simple hosting account they can place their javascript programs online for all their friends to see.
The problem is that people would like to see specialization in Debian. Debian is not for specialization. It's for everybody to make what they want. Taking that away from Debian compromises the entire goal of the project...
The problem with debian is not that there is too much choice, it's that there is too much required choice. You HAVE to put in all the effort of selecting what you want from the package database. And you HAVE to mix and match apps, themes and add-ons until you get a consistent and usable desktop experience.
Choice does not conflict with good defaults. Debian lacks good defaults (for the desktop), and that's why it has such low usability in the default install. This isn't just a debian problem, it is very common in the OSS world, but debian is imho very representative of it.
MS is not FORCING any Europeans to use their tools, if you don't like the tools they have and the fact that they don't run on the platform of your choice then thats your problem. Stop using the damn software then.
How about the opposite argument? MSFT is not forced to sell their products in the EU. The EU has placed restrictions on them, which as lawmakers they are perfectly entitled to do. If MSFT doesn't like it, there's nobody forcing them to sell their products in the EU.
MSFT however is not entitled to refuse to follow EU regulations without suffering the consequences.
The EU also needs to make things more clear for them, from what I have heard I agree with MS that the EU has not been clear.
Funny, I've looked at the documents the EU has given microsoft describing their restrictions, and they seemed pretty clear to me. I suppose it's a matter of willingness to see it one way or the other.
In any case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I find it difficult to accept that the "Debian Way" is broken when the project is so old, so well regarded, and so successful.
Speaking as a disgruntled ex-debian user, I can assure you that a lot of people only consider the project old, not well regarded or successful. I consider it a niche OS that will remain a niche OS until it gets its act together.
The failings of the debian project that made me move away from it were numerous but revolved around a lack of direction. The project came across as a collection of developers that solved their own pet problems, instead of a community focused on a clearly defined central goal, led by knowledgeable leaders. What I wanted out of debian was first of all for it to be up-to-date (something it never succeeded in, despite many attempts to "fix" the system), and for it to be well-suited both as a server OS and as a desktop OS. It was well-suited as a server OS, but only if you didn't need to run anything too new, and only if you weren't afraid of the command-line. The only way to make it usable as a desktop OS was endless tinkering.
It's no mystery why the most successful OSS projects have strong central leadership. Vision can't be parallellized. You can maintain a piece of software in cooperative fashion, but if you try to apply direction to it you need one or a few people who have the authority on what that direction is, or your ship will just sail in circles.
Oh, bull. Li-ion/lipoly will handle that sort of charge just fine. So will NiCd and NiMH and lead-acid batteries, for that matter.
As I understood li-ion it was sensitive to charge/discharge cycles. In practice, you will not be laying your phone out for 4 days straight in sunlight, you'd be charging it a half hour here, an hour there, and so on. This would mean constant charge/discharge cycles. I confess my knowledge about how li-ion works is not that in-depth, but I understood it as not supporting such a charging behavior without rapid deterioration.
Then go for the windows mobile smartphones. They're more or less normal phones, except that they have a somewhat bigger screen and a lot more horsepower. There's a free app called pmrecorder that archives all your phonecalls to an external storage card.
Slashdot Mirror
When I still custom-built my boxes I had the spare parts. Hardware failure did not factor in as a reason to buy boxes. Problems with debian also did not factor in. It's fine, when it's up and running. What did factor in was the time investment necessary for that custom-built box. I figure buying a mac instead of custom-building a debian box saves me about two weeks of personal time per box. Two weeks is worth it to me.
;)
Some of the stuff I lost time on when I still custom-built debian boxes:
- reviewing and selecting hardware parts
- solving conflicts with hardware parts (real life example: all-quality parts bought at different places, no overheating, no power issues, no driver issues, one crash every three days regardless of OS).
- assembling the box (admittedly, it's only a few hours, but it has to be mentioned)
- installing debian and getting all hardware to function fully on it
- configuring debian to not be a PITA when it comes to a daily workflow (it's the best of the non-OS X operating systems, but imho it still sucks a hell of a lot more than mac os unless you tinker a LOT with it)
- configuring the themeing of my desktop environment of choice (and all the apps that ran in it) to be uniform across all toolkits and to not be ugly and cluttered (kde, what can I say, those guys love their toolbar buttons)
- keeping up to date with the state of unstable so I didn't accidentally apt-get upgrade my way into a broken package system when all I needed was the newest release of some development tool.
- many, many things that can be done with less time wasted and less man page reading on the mac and windows (linux application usability was generally sucky, and I have yet to see anything that convinces me things have improved)
Now, to be fair, linux is more powerful, and my custom-built boxes were better suited to my ideal workflow. I moved to the mac not because it had a better workflow, but because it had a good enough workflow without having to spend evening after evening setting one up. I get to spend more time with my girlfriend, and on slashdot. Anything that lets me combine those is worth its weight in gold
Perhaps we have different usage patterns. I tend not to have many tabs open. Admittedly, opening a lot of tabs makes firefox slow down much more on the mini than on the P4.
The reason I spent so damn fucking much on a computer, is so I wouldn't have to deal with it.
I know your pain. I used to home-build all my machines, and I ran debian on them. I invested a LOT of my personal time to get these boxes up to the level where they could serve their purpose. In the end, I got tired of tinkering, and I got a mac. I can get straight to work now. No tinkering necessary just for the sake of getting a running machine.
One man's polish is another man's useless eye candy... Some of us enjoy having a simple, uncluttered, low color, high contrast GUI. And a terminal.
Exactly, and that's where OS X delivers. The KDE GUI is extremely cluttered, loaded with busy toolbars and lengthy menu's. Mac gui's are simpler, cleaner, and yet they're just as powerful (imho, your mileage may vary).
And remember, underneath OS X is BSD (even if Terminal is a somewhat sucky terminal).
Well, my 1Ghz, 768M iBook struggles to keep up with more than a couple of tabs in Safari, Thunderbird and a couple of Terminals open to my standards of responsiveness.
Ah, safari. Yes, it is slow. All I can say is that my mini isn't sluggish. The firefox performance is roughly in the same class as my work machine, and that's a 3.4 ghz P4 with 2 gigs of ram and a fast disk.
Funny, I was just pondering how completely Microsoft is missing the point of the features in KDE and Gnome.
I have a hard time imagining them actually caring much about KDE or GNOME.
UAC: Vista can raise (and presumably lower) program permissions while running.
This isn't such a good thing. From what I've read UAC asks for permission quite often. If we take a look at history, people will end up automatically clicking on allow, just to not have to think about it. A well-designed system takes into account the human factor so that it does not ask to change permissions (roadblock-style security, which leads to automatic response by the human user), but instead allows to user to change permissions levels by explicitly requesting it (fork in the road security, which requires the user to explicitly leave the main road).
Firefox never asks for permissions, because it was designed in such a way as to inform you of how you can give additional permissions to the sites that need it, and generally operates just fine without elevated permissions. OS X rarely has to ask for permissions, because when you want to change a system-wide setting you first have to explicitly unlock the system preferences dialog.
I agree that UAC will reduce the amount of malware. But I haven't read anything about it that made me think it was any better (or even the equal of) OS X's security mechanisms when it comes to actual daily use.
You need a G5 with a gig or more of RAM to get anything approaching decent performance out of OS X, except under trivial load. This is quite comparable with the level of hardware you need to get a similar Vista 'experience'. OS X is an absolute pig compared to any other mainstream platform (although it's been getting faster - but from that slow there isn't anywhere to go but up).
I call BS. My main desktop machine (at home) is a mac mini G4 1.2 ghz with 1 gig of ram, running a fully up-to-date OS 10.4. It's quite capable as a development workstation, and rarely bogs down. I ran it for a year with 512 megs and even that was quite workable, as long as I didn't try to run netbeans and photoshop at the same time. I haven't had to worry about how much stuff is taking up memory since the upgrade to 1 gig.
I highly doubt you're actually a mac user.
Because your average technical journo who writes the articles in question is too hooked on the freebies MS provide him with in the way of free booze to risk fucking that up.
No, the freebies actually don't change things that much. What does change things is who pays for the advertisements. Most technical journals do not have enough subscribers to break even, let alone make a profit. The only way for them to turn a profit is to be advertiser-funded. Microsoft is one of the largest magazine ad buyers in the computer business, apple isn't, and ibm never pushed os/2 in ads all that much. Result: windows gets glowing reviews, mac os gets honorable mentions.
No. Why? They just add it and release it, they wouldn't even have to open their player at all, open specs would be enough to help people like the ones writing Gnash
Having the specs is not an issue. These have already been reverse-engineered, and haxe already can output flash 9 movies, with the entire featureset. What's keeping gnash back is gnash, not any external force.
My guess is that they want to sell players to the mobile phone manufacturers (considering that mobiles being all the rage at the moment, not surprising).
Bingo. Like I said, they expect that open sourcing the player would lose them money, not make them money, and they're probably not wrong. If it made business sense, they'd open source it. You can debate the ethics of the thing, but you can't debate the reality. I don't actually disagree with you that they should open source the player though, I just don't think they will.
But like I said, there's nothing holding anyone back from building an open source player. The file format is fully known in the open source flash community. And flash 9 is a wonderful development platform, so there's all the more incentive for someone to step up to the plate.
However, with that said, I don't understand why an application that just allows you to view files (rather than create or edit them) ever needs to be closed source anyway
Remember that the player is what determines what you can produce with the flash authoring application. If adobe were to open source it they'd have to go through the community each time they wanted to add a feature to the player, without really getting anything of value (to them) in return. The way I see it is that from their perspective open-sourcing the player could only lose them money, not make them money.
The irony is that the entire flash development toolchain can be replaced by open source components now. There are even several capable open source flash IDE's. At work I still use a licensed copy of flash, but at home I use the open source tools. The only part that is still proprietary is the player.
Is because I have a huge ass screen and a very fast connection. My phone can't match either of those.
Try map24 mobile, it is quite usable as a mobile mapping solution, with route planning, 3D 3rd person perspective while following a route and access to the bookmarks you make in the desktop version. Quite convenient when you need to know how to get from A to B, and you lack a map. It's definitely a lot better than the java version of google maps.
You can't solve usability issues by changing to a different theme. it's a common mistake in open source crowds to think you can. Usability relates to the fundamental structure of a gui, not to it's style. Trying to solve usability issues in kde by using a mac theme is like trying to solve the acceleration issues in a yugo by painting it neon blue and sticking a "turbo" sticker on the back.
Apple, apparently in a concession to the music industry, obfuscates the file names of mp3s as it transfers songs to the device. "James McMurtry--Iolanthe.mp3" will become OTKO.mp3 on the device, stored in the folder F47 (and yes, there is an F01-F46), all with the express purpose of making it difficult (though not impossible) for you to find a song and copy it back by hooking up your iPod like a hard disk.
You can get the files back onto the desktop and into a sensible naming structure quite easily using itunes. Just copy the ipod's music folder (which can be accessed if you show hidden and system files and mount the ipod as a disk drive) to the desktop, and import it into itunes, with the itunes option to reorder the library to its own format enabled. Instructions can be found here.
I once read an interview with someone who worked on the ipod (no idea where or when), who claimed that the renaming and folder structure has nothing to do with the recording industry, but rather with the limitations of the early hardware and the requirement that playlists of thousands of files "open" instantaneous. Limitating filename lengths and the number of files in a folder apparently helped, as did storing the files' information in a central database. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds reasonable.
Many web pages depend on GIF's all-or-nothing transparancy rendering. Fixing the pages that weren't designed with GIF's limitations in mind would break those that were.
It's the task of the web developer/designer to make the site pretty. The browser shouldn't try to second-guess them by modifying images to disobey what the image spec specifies. Not by default anyway. I have no beef with this feature being an extension.
I pplayed a lot of bushido blade, but tekken 3 I felt was better crafted. It didn't have the "show" or sudden death factor of bushido blade, but I've never seen a martial arts combat game that had a better design when it came to character move variety and balance.
One other thought -- just as the user shouldn't be telling the *developer* what to implement, it's also more useful to solicit feedback as "capability requests" rather than "feature requests." The distinction is that a feature request implies (to me, anyway) something like "I want to click here and here and then type "blah blah" and it's done." This is usually too detailed. Instead, the feedback should be "I need to accomplish XYZ rapidly" and the architect should be free to design a solution to this that's consistent with the existing design.
Exactly. Being able to ask a user what task they want to be able to accomplish is important, being told what it is before you even get to think about asking is even better.
One of the apps I've built is a floorplan viewer. I didn't have much in the way of guidance or feedback during the design and development phases, so I mostly did it all myself, trying to figure out what a user would need. I ended up making a few design blunders that seemed perfectly sensible at the time. Like, floorplan printing. My idea was "print exactly what the user sees, scaled to the dimensions of the page, including any whitespace". That sounded reasonable, but it doesn't apply to the most common case of printing floorplans: print the entire floorplan, without extraneous whitespace.
Talking with the user about the task they're trying to accomplish is very important.
There are so many amazing tools and code examples about this type of application "skinning" that its really VERY easy to at least offer some basic functionality in this respect. In fact there are a number for 3-rd party controls which support this type of application "styling" without the developers even having to think about it or add a single line of code depending how far they want to go with it.
If you're talking about how programmers shouldn't restrict the designers in what interfaces they can build using the tools that the programmers deliver, I'm in total agreement.
However, if you're talking about making your UI skinnable so the end user can pick or design the interface that's most suited to him, I don't agree. Developers shouldn't shove the hard problems like good defaults in interface design to the userbase. The aim of a software development project should be to deliver the user something that solves his problem, and not to require any more effort from the user than is absolutely necessary. The most usable applications I've seen generally don't support much in the way of skinning. The most unusable applications have all been skinnable. Draw your own conclusions.
Redhat has never told me to 'fuck off'. And for all the OS people that have, I've never been paying them for support.
Bad example. Redhat makes money selling proprietary software and services, and only uses OSS as a leveraging tool to gain technology and mindshare. When you look at pure OSS projects, that aren't trying to sell people something, the user focus just isn't the same.
Personally, having grown up with the C64 and the Apple][ and all the rest... man, I HATED BASIC.
I started out on a C64/C128 as well. Basic is not a good first language.
Frankly, if I wanted to teach my child programming, I'd start with javascript. Here's why:
- It's extremely easy to get started in. You can do a lot with one-liners, and unlike perl you can explain the one-liners to a neophyte. There are many excellent beginner's books.
- On-screen graphical feedback is instantaneous, and you don't have to restrict yourself to console output.
- Every single web-enabled PC has the development tools right there. They don't have to do complicated installs, and they can show off their 1337 skills on their friend's computer.
- And best of all, if you give them a simple hosting account they can place their javascript programs online for all their friends to see.
The problem is that people would like to see specialization in Debian. Debian is not for specialization. It's for everybody to make what they want. Taking that away from Debian compromises the entire goal of the project...
The problem with debian is not that there is too much choice, it's that there is too much required choice. You HAVE to put in all the effort of selecting what you want from the package database. And you HAVE to mix and match apps, themes and add-ons until you get a consistent and usable desktop experience.
Choice does not conflict with good defaults. Debian lacks good defaults (for the desktop), and that's why it has such low usability in the default install. This isn't just a debian problem, it is very common in the OSS world, but debian is imho very representative of it.
MS is not FORCING any Europeans to use their tools, if you don't like the tools they have and the fact that they don't run on the platform of your choice then thats your problem. Stop using the damn software then.
How about the opposite argument? MSFT is not forced to sell their products in the EU. The EU has placed restrictions on them, which as lawmakers they are perfectly entitled to do. If MSFT doesn't like it, there's nobody forcing them to sell their products in the EU.
MSFT however is not entitled to refuse to follow EU regulations without suffering the consequences.
The EU also needs to make things more clear for them, from what I have heard I agree with MS that the EU has not been clear.
Funny, I've looked at the documents the EU has given microsoft describing their restrictions, and they seemed pretty clear to me. I suppose it's a matter of willingness to see it one way or the other.
In any case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I find it difficult to accept that the "Debian Way" is broken when the project is so old, so well regarded, and so successful.
Speaking as a disgruntled ex-debian user, I can assure you that a lot of people only consider the project old, not well regarded or successful. I consider it a niche OS that will remain a niche OS until it gets its act together.
The failings of the debian project that made me move away from it were numerous but revolved around a lack of direction. The project came across as a collection of developers that solved their own pet problems, instead of a community focused on a clearly defined central goal, led by knowledgeable leaders. What I wanted out of debian was first of all for it to be up-to-date (something it never succeeded in, despite many attempts to "fix" the system), and for it to be well-suited both as a server OS and as a desktop OS. It was well-suited as a server OS, but only if you didn't need to run anything too new, and only if you weren't afraid of the command-line. The only way to make it usable as a desktop OS was endless tinkering.
It's no mystery why the most successful OSS projects have strong central leadership. Vision can't be parallellized. You can maintain a piece of software in cooperative fashion, but if you try to apply direction to it you need one or a few people who have the authority on what that direction is, or your ship will just sail in circles.
Oh, bull. Li-ion/lipoly will handle that sort of charge just fine. So will NiCd and NiMH and lead-acid batteries, for that matter.
As I understood li-ion it was sensitive to charge/discharge cycles. In practice, you will not be laying your phone out for 4 days straight in sunlight, you'd be charging it a half hour here, an hour there, and so on. This would mean constant charge/discharge cycles. I confess my knowledge about how li-ion works is not that in-depth, but I understood it as not supporting such a charging behavior without rapid deterioration.
Then go for the windows mobile smartphones. They're more or less normal phones, except that they have a somewhat bigger screen and a lot more horsepower. There's a free app called pmrecorder that archives all your phonecalls to an external storage card.