Couldn't agree with you more. I'm surprised by all the negativity. And it seems to me this is innovative enough to have uses that no one here is thinking about right now.
The statement that Google Maps beat Mapquest because of preferential search treatment is hilarious. When google introduced the satellite view I recall reading (Wall street journal maybe?) that a mapquest executive had said he couldn't envision any need for the satellite view in a mapping service. (I just looked for the quote and couldn't find it. Too bad. Does this ring a bell with anyone? Bad as it sounded then, it sounds unbelievably idiotic now.) Mapquest just got beat by better technology.
Note the "latest-comm-1.9.1". If I use nightly/win32-xpi/ instead --- that's what seem like it *should* work --- the extension doesn't work. Go figure. All of this may change, I am not sure what the differences are in the different locations.
I know that this works because I just installed the release version of 3.0 and Lightning on my wife's laptop.
I am disappointed that the Lightning folks have made it so hard to find an extension that works with 3.0. This seems *very* important.
Glad to hear it, as my problems were pretty extreme with a pretty vanilla setup. At the same time, it was definitely the TB3 upgrade that fixed the problem. Must have been some weird combination of software.
I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.
I've been using Thunderbird 3 in beta for the last few months on an ubuntu system. TB 3 doesn't look dramatically different than TB 2, but the performance difference is *enormous*. TB 2 would crash frequently, it would periodically use all resources while it did heaven knows what, and Gmail IMAP was a disaster.
TB 3 is responsive, hardly ever crashes (perhaps twice in 3 months), search is *way* improved, and it finally feels like first-rate software. My hat is off to the Thunderbird team.
If you go to the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle (attached to the Experience Music Project), they have the pens Stephenson used to write (I seem to recall) the Baroque Cycle along with the original manuscript. It's quite a stack of paper!
What people don't get about Google's software is that they are not selling it. That's not where their revenue comes from. They can spend a lot of time getting the software right, refocusing it, tweaking it, getting comments. Microsoft by contrast has to come out with the big "impressive" release every few years to keep the company afloat. That's their business model. It's not Google's.
Look at Android. 18 months ago the cell phone execs were all saying that Google didn't understand how hard it is to create cellular phone software. The G1 got a lot of yawns. That reception would have been a disaster for Apple, but for Google it didn't matter, they just kept working on it. Today, Android is a serious competitor.
Whatever Chrome does or doesn't do can be changed. And maybe it will flop. That won't be a huge deal for Google as long as they get their advertising on the next generation of devices.
Thanks. I felt stupid after I saw someone else make the same comment. On the other hand, I complained to the clerk about the keyboard and apparently they had no idea it wasn't a real phone --- they didn't defend it.
I was surprised that it got modded funny. If you haven't found command line browsing useful it probably seems almost as hilarious as having to read the docs by typing "man" (except, as you point out, when there isn't a man file).
Thanks! When I switched to Linux a year ago I remembered Lynx and was pleasantly surprised to find it so useful. I never looked for alternatives, but it's clear from your comment and others that there is life beyond Lynx:-)
Just curious to know if I'm alone. As the web has gotten more bloated (not just firefox), I find I use lynx more for quick, routine checking of websites. And you can script it.
I like firefox a lot, but sometimes Lynx is better.
Couldn't agree with you more. I played with one also and the keyboard is dreadful. They should have ditched the keyboard and made a lighter, more-rounded phone. If this is the best Motorola can come up with, time to short the stock.
I own a myTouch3G and think it's a great phone. I was hoping to get a Droid for my wife. It wasn't even close.
I have a thinkpad with ubuntu so I use Openoffice (3.1) a lot. My daughter is very happy with it for high school homework, but I honestly can't recommend it to anyone doing anything "serious".
I find that OO crashes a lot (thankfully file recovery works well), and simple actions like cut and paste (7000 lines of text, each 30 characters) lead to hangups where OO pegs the processor and nothing happens for minutes. By contrast, the same action is very fast in Excel. Good luck viewing a non-trivial powerpoint file. (Regarding my cut and past: Yes, after you kill and restart OO you can just save the file from the text editor and import it, but for some reason the word processor insists on opening it if the extension is ".txt". Arrggh!)
I want to like OO, I really do, but in my experience it's not for everyone.
We pay by the unit for almost every thing, I've never understood why people think bandwidth should be different. It's a scarce resource, particularly at certain times of day. We pay more for heating fuels in the winter, we pay by the unit and by time of day for electricity, why not bandwidth?
The problem is that when companies like AT&T engage in tiered pricing, they typically try to price-discriminate, i.e., they charge more per unit to those who value the service more highly. This is why we get ridiculous charges for text messages and using data in Canada gets you hit with absurd prices per megabyte. This obnoxious behavior is why everyone reflexively tenses up when tiered pricing is raised. But it doesn't have to be like that. The price could be very low, and could vary by time of day, but could scale without limit. And if it were really a fair price, I think folks would be okay with that. And if we're going to have per unit pricing, the software should permit easy overnight downloads at a reduced rate (just like running your dishwasher at 3am to get a reduced electricity rate).
I looked at the G1 and found it too big and clumsy, For me, the Mytouch is a *much* nicer piece of hardware.
The MyTouch screen is 3.2", not 2.5.
The lack of a headphone jack is silly, but for me at any rate not a deal breaker (there's an adapter).
I'm thrilled with my MyTouch.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Could you (or someone else) elaborate on the UI differences, and why one would prefer one or the other? And how much of this is android issues as opposed to app-specific issues?
"There is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting": old adage.
I have written two books, and am quite familiar with the chapter 11 problem. I know people who can just write and their first draft is great. These are gifted and rare people; Few writers are like that. My advice is to just power through it and expect the result to be a first draft, not a final draft. The writing process typically reveals problems with your plan, and you will end up researching and rethinking while you write. The follow-up revision(s) can actually be quite satisfying and you may rip out a lot of what you've written. The problem is that often you don't know what to emphasize until you've put everything down on paper and can see how things flow and what is interesting once it's on paper.
The other advantage of powering through is that you will have something you can circulate for comments.
Common advice to PhD students is to write every day. I think it's great advice.
My understanding: Under the DMCA, you can be in trouble for possessing technologies that could be used to circumvent technological protections on copyrighted material So it's not that the technology itself is copyrighted, it's probably that it's part of a copyright protection scheme and thus falls under DMCA.
The EFF's account of the Skylarov case (which is instructive and chilling) is fully documented here.
You're correct that wireless is broken in 8.10 for *certain kinds* of connections and (I believe) certain kinds of wireless cards. To connect to my University's WPA2 wireless I typically have to run a simple command line script, after which it connects reliably. A number of folks have filed bug reports on this. I think this is a terrible bug, and very harmful to Ubuntu's reputation.
There were other necessary tweaks involving suspend and hibernate.
As someone else noted, the bottom line is that you don't want to upgrade unless you have to. The ease of upgrading Linux is both a blessing and a curse.
I started migrating over 10 years ago and I'm still working on it.
When beginning a large book project circa 1998 I decided to be platform independent and (having experienced binary file corruption) to use only robust, long-lived, file formats. These requirements led me to LaTeX, emacs, and Matlab. (Three fantastic choices.) But I still lived in a world requiring Word and Excel, and I used Ecco for calendaring and an address book. I still used windows as my primary OS.
Today I use Ubuntu, I run Ecco under Wine for a few things, I use Google Calendar, Openoffice and Octave in place of matlab. I still use LaTeX and Emacs. But I also still need to run XP under VirtualBox to have access to the real Word and Excel.
I expect that in another 10 years I'll have finished migrating...
You need to think about people who would perform 80% of a command with keystrokes, and then look to see which menu item they needed to select. Auditing in Excel drove this home for me. Tools|Audit used to get me to the list of things I could do. In 2007 it doesn't work at all, you need to complete the command to have the keystrokes work. It may not be an issue for you, it is for me.
Word has in theory been able to do these things for several versions, no? But my experience was that it simply didn't work well. Is Word 2007 better behaved? In the past, my every attempt to use auto-numbered and formatted section headings ended badly. In one case (don't recall if it was 2000 or 2003), inserting a table of contents stripped out my bulleted and enumerated lists and removed the formatting and numbering on all my headings. A web search revealed that there was a bug in normal.dot, but since I required a table of contents, I ended up having to manually reformat every bullet list, every section heading, etc. Based on my experience I simply don't trust Word.
Regarding the interface, this is certainly a matter of taste. I agree that Word has a superior interface for most people, but if you're a command line freak comfortable with Emacs/AucTeX, using Word feels like having skewers inserted into your eyeballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't agree with you more. I'm surprised by all the negativity. And it seems to me this is innovative enough to have uses that no one here is thinking about right now.
A lot of this article is sour grapes.
The statement that Google Maps beat Mapquest because of preferential search treatment is hilarious. When google introduced the satellite view I recall reading (Wall street journal maybe?) that a mapquest executive had said he couldn't envision any need for the satellite view in a mapping service. (I just looked for the quote and couldn't find it. Too bad. Does this ring a bell with anyone? Bad as it sounded then, it sounds unbelievably idiotic now.) Mapquest just got beat by better technology.
What has been working for me (no guarantees about the future!) is to use this exact path (for win32):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/win32-xpi/
Note the "latest-comm-1.9.1". If I use nightly/win32-xpi/ instead --- that's what seem like it *should* work --- the extension doesn't work. Go figure. All of this may change, I am not sure what the differences are in the different locations.
I know that this works because I just installed the release version of 3.0 and Lightning on my wife's laptop.
I am disappointed that the Lightning folks have made it so hard to find an extension that works with 3.0. This seems *very* important.
In my opinion the general problems with the UI are not fixed. There may be improvements I'm not aware of.
Glad to hear it, as my problems were pretty extreme with a pretty vanilla setup. At the same time, it was definitely the TB3 upgrade that fixed the problem. Must have been some weird combination of software.
You running on Ubuntu? It was fine for me under XP, but the linux version was terrible. That's why I emphasized Linux in my subject.
If you are running Linux, I'm impressed :-)
You should try one of these:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/
I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.
I've been using Thunderbird 3 in beta for the last few months on an ubuntu system. TB 3 doesn't look dramatically different than TB 2, but the performance difference is *enormous*. TB 2 would crash frequently, it would periodically use all resources while it did heaven knows what, and Gmail IMAP was a disaster.
TB 3 is responsive, hardly ever crashes (perhaps twice in 3 months), search is *way* improved, and it finally feels like first-rate software. My hat is off to the Thunderbird team.
If you go to the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle (attached to the Experience Music Project), they have the pens Stephenson used to write (I seem to recall) the Baroque Cycle along with the original manuscript. It's quite a stack of paper!
A cool museum, especially for the Slashdot crowd.
What people don't get about Google's software is that they are not selling it. That's not where their revenue comes from. They can spend a lot of time getting the software right, refocusing it, tweaking it, getting comments. Microsoft by contrast has to come out with the big "impressive" release every few years to keep the company afloat. That's their business model. It's not Google's.
Look at Android. 18 months ago the cell phone execs were all saying that Google didn't understand how hard it is to create cellular phone software. The G1 got a lot of yawns. That reception would have been a disaster for Apple, but for Google it didn't matter, they just kept working on it. Today, Android is a serious competitor.
Whatever Chrome does or doesn't do can be changed. And maybe it will flop. That won't be a huge deal for Google as long as they get their advertising on the next generation of devices.
Thanks. I felt stupid after I saw someone else make the same comment. On the other hand, I complained to the clerk about the keyboard and apparently they had no idea it wasn't a real phone --- they didn't defend it.
I was surprised that it got modded funny. If you haven't found command line browsing useful it probably seems almost as hilarious as having to read the docs by typing "man" (except, as you point out, when there isn't a man file).
Thanks! When I switched to Linux a year ago I remembered Lynx and was pleasantly surprised to find it so useful. I never looked for alternatives, but it's clear from your comment and others that there is life beyond Lynx :-)
Just curious to know if I'm alone. As the web has gotten more bloated (not just firefox), I find I use lynx more for quick, routine checking of websites. And you can script it.
I like firefox a lot, but sometimes Lynx is better.
Couldn't agree with you more. I played with one also and the keyboard is dreadful. They should have ditched the keyboard and made a lighter, more-rounded phone. If this is the best Motorola can come up with, time to short the stock.
I own a myTouch3G and think it's a great phone. I was hoping to get a Droid for my wife. It wasn't even close.
I have a thinkpad with ubuntu so I use Openoffice (3.1) a lot. My daughter is very happy with it for high school homework, but I honestly can't recommend it to anyone doing anything "serious".
I find that OO crashes a lot (thankfully file recovery works well), and simple actions like cut and paste (7000 lines of text, each 30 characters) lead to hangups where OO pegs the processor and nothing happens for minutes. By contrast, the same action is very fast in Excel. Good luck viewing a non-trivial powerpoint file. (Regarding my cut and past: Yes, after you kill and restart OO you can just save the file from the text editor and import it, but for some reason the word processor insists on opening it if the extension is ".txt". Arrggh!)
I want to like OO, I really do, but in my experience it's not for everyone.
We pay by the unit for almost every thing, I've never understood why people think bandwidth should be different. It's a scarce resource, particularly at certain times of day. We pay more for heating fuels in the winter, we pay by the unit and by time of day for electricity, why not bandwidth?
The problem is that when companies like AT&T engage in tiered pricing, they typically try to price-discriminate, i.e., they charge more per unit to those who value the service more highly. This is why we get ridiculous charges for text messages and using data in Canada gets you hit with absurd prices per megabyte. This obnoxious behavior is why everyone reflexively tenses up when tiered pricing is raised. But it doesn't have to be like that. The price could be very low, and could vary by time of day, but could scale without limit. And if it were really a fair price, I think folks would be okay with that. And if we're going to have per unit pricing, the software should permit easy overnight downloads at a reduced rate (just like running your dishwasher at 3am to get a reduced electricity rate).
However
I looked at the G1 and found it too big and clumsy, For me, the Mytouch is a *much* nicer piece of hardware.
The MyTouch screen is 3.2", not 2.5.
The lack of a headphone jack is silly, but for me at any rate not a deal breaker (there's an adapter).
I'm thrilled with my MyTouch.
Could you (or someone else) elaborate on the UI differences, and why one would prefer one or the other? And how much of this is android issues as opposed to app-specific issues?
"There is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting": old adage.
I have written two books, and am quite familiar with the chapter 11 problem. I know people who can just write and their first draft is great. These are gifted and rare people; Few writers are like that. My advice is to just power through it and expect the result to be a first draft, not a final draft. The writing process typically reveals problems with your plan, and you will end up researching and rethinking while you write. The follow-up revision(s) can actually be quite satisfying and you may rip out a lot of what you've written. The problem is that often you don't know what to emphasize until you've put everything down on paper and can see how things flow and what is interesting once it's on paper.
The other advantage of powering through is that you will have something you can circulate for comments.
Common advice to PhD students is to write every day. I think it's great advice.
My understanding: Under the DMCA, you can be in trouble for possessing technologies that could be used to circumvent technological protections on copyrighted material So it's not that the technology itself is copyrighted, it's probably that it's part of a copyright protection scheme and thus falls under DMCA.
The EFF's account of the Skylarov case (which is instructive and chilling) is fully documented here.
You're correct that wireless is broken in 8.10 for *certain kinds* of connections and (I believe) certain kinds of wireless cards. To connect to my University's WPA2 wireless I typically have to run a simple command line script, after which it connects reliably. A number of folks have filed bug reports on this. I think this is a terrible bug, and very harmful to Ubuntu's reputation.
There were other necessary tweaks involving suspend and hibernate.
As someone else noted, the bottom line is that you don't want to upgrade unless you have to. The ease of upgrading Linux is both a blessing and a curse.
I started migrating over 10 years ago and I'm still working on it.
When beginning a large book project circa 1998 I decided to be platform independent and (having experienced binary file corruption) to use only robust, long-lived, file formats. These requirements led me to LaTeX, emacs, and Matlab. (Three fantastic choices.) But I still lived in a world requiring Word and Excel, and I used Ecco for calendaring and an address book. I still used windows as my primary OS.
Today I use Ubuntu, I run Ecco under Wine for a few things, I use Google Calendar, Openoffice and Octave in place of matlab. I still use LaTeX and Emacs. But I also still need to run XP under VirtualBox to have access to the real Word and Excel.
I expect that in another 10 years I'll have finished migrating...
You need to think about people who would perform 80% of a command with keystrokes, and then look to see which menu item they needed to select. Auditing in Excel drove this home for me. Tools|Audit used to get me to the list of things I could do. In 2007 it doesn't work at all, you need to complete the command to have the keystrokes work. It may not be an issue for you, it is for me.
Word has in theory been able to do these things for several versions, no? But my experience was that it simply didn't work well. Is Word 2007 better behaved? In the past, my every attempt to use auto-numbered and formatted section headings ended badly. In one case (don't recall if it was 2000 or 2003), inserting a table of contents stripped out my bulleted and enumerated lists and removed the formatting and numbering on all my headings. A web search revealed that there was a bug in normal.dot, but since I required a table of contents, I ended up having to manually reformat every bullet list, every section heading, etc. Based on my experience I simply don't trust Word.
Regarding the interface, this is certainly a matter of taste. I agree that Word has a superior interface for most people, but if you're a command line freak comfortable with Emacs/AucTeX, using Word feels like having skewers inserted into your eyeballs.