The N93 (and all the other N-Series phones for that matter) run Symbian OS (with the S60 UI). Currently Symbian OS outsells Windows Mobile by about a factor of 10 worldwide (note: in the US market it has a smaller presence, but pretty much everywhere else it dominates).
Even normal phones can record video clips, so that is nothing special in itself. The *new* thing about the N93 is that it is the first phone to record 640x480 @ 30fps - most current phones do a much lower res and rarely more than 15fps.
[...] and the URL remains "maps.google.com" instead of the meaningless string of letters and numbers you see at older sites like MapQuest
Don't get me wrong, I like Google Maps and AJAX is quite neat too (when used appropriately) but this lack of an updated query string is nothing to be proud of since it just means that users can't directly bookmark or link to the page they see once they've scrolled and zoomed around a bit. Yes, Google does provide a kind of permalink URL but it's labelled "link to this page" so the average Joe probably won't realise that that needs to be clicked before bookmarking too.
IE5.x on the Mac *does* have a different engine to its Windows counterpart. In some ways better (it supports PNG alpha and did a better job of CSS back in the day) and in some ways worse. However, for a few years now it has been out of date and other browsers (even IE on windows) have long surpassed it.
Several better and open-source browsers / HTML rendering engines exist and I really can't imagine there would be any fancy stuff in the code worth salvaging (no, there is no mapping of windows calls to mac os!).
IE5:Mac had it's day. Thanks to Tantek et al for producing what was at the time a nice browser. But please, just let it R.I.P. now!
As far as I could tell from experimenting with an old site of mine WBM tends to have multiple copies of sites from different times. If an image, page or any other object is missing from one of those archived copies it will redirect to the next most recent copy of that file in the WBM and so on. If the latest archived copy still doesn't have the file THEN it redirects to the actual website.
I've often noticed that WBM pages load very slowly and I suspect that this is partly due to all the chained redirects your browser goes through before it finally reaches a copy of an image or a definitive 404 error if it is gone.
Re:Speed up the interface a bit!
on
Just a Phone?
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· Score: 1
Not sure about other handset manufacturers, but AFAIK all Nokias have a had a similar feature for years - it's in the options menu when you read a text message (and I think it's called "Find numbers" or something like that)
My old-skool, black-and-white-screen 8210 and 8310 phones had it and so does my my current 6600 (which also has the option to find web and email addresses in messages)
Ok, AFAIK the specs for OpenOffice XML file formats are freely and openly available (from OASIS, I think), so why does no one write a new Office Suite from scratch (or update an existing one) that supports them and give a proper Aqua interface?
When rumors started spreading that Apple was making a new Office suite I was really really hoping they'd make it open and save using the standardised OpenOffice formats. Imagine - document compatible with OOo (which would have benefitted both Apple and OOo) yet a proper OS X interface! How sweet would that be?!? I'm so disappointed that they didn't do it! Likewise I think it's a shame that no other non-OOo programs (correct me here if I'm wrong!) fully support the OpenOffice formats.
OpenOffice is very nice, but like MS Office it has loads of features that I as a casual office app user rarely need. It would be great if I had a choice of office apps - some fast and basic ones for people like me, some feature rich ones like OOo for power users and maybe some inbetween too.
iWork, Abiword, K-Office, Gnumeric and of course OpenOffice/NeoOffice would all be so much more useful if they used compatible formats. And since OOo's formats have already been submitted to a standards organisation they seem a good one to use!
A few people mentioned that OO.org is good but quite clunky. That got me thinking... why don't the open office people do what the mozilla people did with the mozilla suite - break it up into seperate apps, make them lean and more focussed (as in Seamonkey -> Firefox & Thunderbird)?
And while they're at it they should make it integrate *prefectly* (file dialogs, UI conventions, drag'n'drop and all!) with different Window managers, desktops and OSes. (OpenOffice on MacOS X, for example, is quite horrible at the moment!)
I live in the UK and we've had video phones here for quite a while now. "Three" - the first 3G network here - has been around for about 2 years or so and had phones that let you make 2-way video calls right from the beginning - AFAIK these can also record and play short video clips.
Even my 2.5G Nokia 6600 which is nearly a year old now and is available for free on most tarifs can do video clips. Unfortunately it will only record up to 10 seconds out of the box (but newer models can do up to an hour and include software on the phone to edit your video clips and combine them to longer ones) - but it can play clips seemingly of any length. I have a 22 minute southpark episode on my phone and it plays perfectly! (next project - get lord of the rings on my phone! lol!)
Admittedly, the resolution and picture quality is a bit grainy on these 3GPP videos, but I recon newer phones will soon fix that. Megapixel cameras, MPEG-4 support in the hardware (which I believe NVidia is offering) and bigger memory cards (hell, you can get a 1gig SD card for just over 50quid these days!) ought to soon combine to provide decent video recording capabilities.
Of course phones will nevere rival professional cameras and video-cameras, but compared to an average camcorder that an average user uses today they'll easily hold their own I think.
Absolutely!
I totally agree! Although it may be unecessary in most cases the majority of users will blindly install ISP CDs. Getting Firefox on those CDs may well be more effective than getting it preinstalled on PCs.
Furthermore it might be easier to achieve too. Like some other posts pointed out - PC manufacturers have to worry about keeping MS happy so they continue to get good deals on windows. ISPs on the other hand have nothing to loose in that respect. What's MS gonna do to them if they bundle something other than IE?
I'm posting this idea up on Spreadfirefox! Thanks Rik!
Why oh why do they want cross platform uniformity??
One of the most basic principles of human-computer interaction is consistency. Windows users expect to see Windows-like apps, Mac OS X ppl expect native OS X looking apps and likewise for GNOME, KDE and whatever else.
Anything that breaks that (for example an OS X app that looks and/or behaves like a Windows app goes against the user's expections. And ultimately that makes the app harder for them to use and hence less appealing.
Granted there is a lot of similarity between the various desktop environments but they do each also have their own quirks. For example OS X apps have the toolbar along the top of the screen (not part of the app window) and have that little window-resizing thing in the bottom-right corner of a window (not part of the window's border). GNOME and KDE generally have different standard back, forward, reload etc icons for buttons that all apps should use rather than their own.
If you make Firefox look the same on every platform you will be breaking such little quirks and conventions on some (possibly all) platforms and the users will suffer.
I say make a different, native looking (and feeling) theme for each major platform and ship it as the default for that platform!
As for branding - you've got the name, you've got the firefox icon - they stay the same on every platform - surely that's all that's needed.
Personally I think that's a good thing too. I for one perceive it as really annoying and intrusive when I install an app that insists on planting it's icons all over my desktop, installing a pointless system tray icon and making itself the default player/browser/whatever (eg RealPlayer or QuickTime on Windows) - it feels like I get the branding forced down my throat and that does NOT make me a happy user! Apps that don't feel the need to do that are a breath of fresh air and it would be a real shame for Firefox to go down the road of excessive branding.
I think most slashdotters appreciate that SCO employees have to earn a living just like anyone else and can't necessarily afford to take the risk of quitting and looking for work elsewhere.
However, unless you know something we don't, it looks very much like the SCO board are going to ruin the company. If you just stand by and let them continue there is a very real risk that SCO go down the drain and you will loose your jobs.
I assume Darl and the other board members have plenty of money in their bank accounts. In the unlikely event that SCO wins the case they get a lot more, if SCO loses they may be out of a job but they will still have plenty to fall back on. In any case they won't end up not being able to pay the rent or put food on the table for the family.
I severely doubt that they are as concerned about your livelyhoods as you may think. If I was in your position I would not have much faith in the management. If you stand back and do as your told the chances are - regardless of whether you believe the whole case is right or wrong - that you will loose out.
Fine, you can't just get up and leave - but perhaps you'd be more helpful to SCO (and thus protecting your own jobs) by stopping this unfounded case and coming up with a genuine way to make money. If you can't make money off Unixware or Linux try something else. Be imaginative!
Let's face it, most people will go for looks and size over fancy features before they buy a phone. These are mobile phones after all - they need to fit in your pocket comfortably, have a long battery life and preferably look pretty too.
Now the Samsung phone looks quite nice but the form factor may limit its appeal. It's not that big, but the PDA design is an akward shape for your trouser pocket and looks a bit odd next to your face when making a phone call (I'm thinking of O2's XDA here for comparison).
As for the Motorola and the E28, is it just me or are they really ugly? I know looks are very subjective, but they can hardly count as sleek and stylish. The material looks cheap for a start - looks like the grey plastic with metal colour sprayed on that wears of on the edges in no time - like several of Motorolas older clamshell phones. They look quite chubby too.
Now don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of Linux on a phone and would love to own one someday, but unless they start producing more varied and more appealing designs I doubt they will be very successful. By comparison most current Symbian phones look nice and come in reasonable sizes. Even Motorala's MS Smarthphone thingy looks alright (looks ok, obviously you wouldn't want one because of the software).
That would mean people need to buy X-Boxes and that in turn means money being wasted on MS that could be better used elsewhere.
Apart from helping those poor souls who already have X-Boxes a Linux port would be a bit of a waste. IMO those people should sell their X-Boxes or get rid of them by other means anyway! (Publicly burning them might be quite novel!:P)
Everytime I read coments like this on MS products (XBox or others) people waste time bickering whether or not the MS product in question is good or bad or bad but set to get better. Who cares? Whichever it is we should NOT be supporting them in any case! I'll readily admit that Windows XP is an improvement over ME or that XBox has more power and better gfx/sound than the Gamecube but I'm never going to buy either of them out of principle!
It's no secret that MS just wants control and once it has it it exploits it no end. Like someone posted above the XBox is nothing more than a Trojan horse to get into peoples' living-rooms. MS doesn't really are about gamers and we of all people should know that! A brief look at the computer industry shows what a mess it could be if MS has their way and how hard it would be to get back out of their grip. I don't think any sane person would want that.
The solution? Boycott them 'till it hurts and support anything else (even if it is inferior now - because once MS is cut down to size there will be fair competition and products will improve far beyond what they would if only MS was controlling the development)! Governments (especially the current US one) will not stop companies like MS only customers can!
Another reason why Hollywood and Co. need to look into changing their business model is that sooner or later any copy-protection gets cracked. It may not be legal, it may not be right, but let's face it - it always happens! And when it does that copy-protection system is instantly worthless.
Apart from annoying open-source fans like us they are just wasting their own time and money developing these things!
I wonder sometimes if it has ever occured to them to combat piracy by just charging less for DVDs, CDs Videos etc. We all know it's costing them coppers to make so it's hardly surprising that people get tempted by pirate copies. If a brand new DVD was, say, 5 quid instead of 25 I think more people would go for that rather than a pirate copy which may still be cheaper but probably has inferior quality and lacks extras and a fancy cover.
It's not just deleting a few messages though. Think about the wasted bandwidth! I don't know anyone who wishes the internet couldn't be faster. Surely if you could cut most of the spam away it would speed up many a mailserver.
The next step would be to get rid of chain-mails, Flash intros and emails with DOC attachments...:P
Slashdot Mirror
The N93 (and all the other N-Series phones for that matter) run Symbian OS (with the S60 UI). Currently Symbian OS outsells Windows Mobile by about a factor of 10 worldwide (note: in the US market it has a smaller presence, but pretty much everywhere else it dominates).
Even normal phones can record video clips, so that is nothing special in itself. The *new* thing about the N93 is that it is the first phone to record 640x480 @ 30fps - most current phones do a much lower res and rarely more than 15fps.
Don't get me wrong, I like Google Maps and AJAX is quite neat too (when used appropriately) but this lack of an updated query string is nothing to be proud of since it just means that users can't directly bookmark or link to the page they see once they've scrolled and zoomed around a bit. Yes, Google does provide a kind of permalink URL but it's labelled "link to this page" so the average Joe probably won't realise that that needs to be clicked before bookmarking too.
I second that!
IE5.x on the Mac *does* have a different engine to its Windows counterpart. In some ways better (it supports PNG alpha and did a better job of CSS back in the day) and in some ways worse. However, for a few years now it has been out of date and other browsers (even IE on windows) have long surpassed it.
Several better and open-source browsers / HTML rendering engines exist and I really can't imagine there would be any fancy stuff in the code worth salvaging (no, there is no mapping of windows calls to mac os!).
IE5:Mac had it's day. Thanks to Tantek et al for producing what was at the time a nice browser. But please, just let it R.I.P. now!
What do you mean comeback? Last I heard, Symbian was by far the most successful smartphone OS so far (in terms of market share).
CONGRATULATIONS on finally switching to clean HTML+CSS!!! WELL DONE!!!
As far as I could tell from experimenting with an old site of mine WBM tends to have multiple copies of sites from different times. If an image, page or any other object is missing from one of those archived copies it will redirect to the next most recent copy of that file in the WBM and so on. If the latest archived copy still doesn't have the file THEN it redirects to the actual website.
I've often noticed that WBM pages load very slowly and I suspect that this is partly due to all the chained redirects your browser goes through before it finally reaches a copy of an image or a definitive 404 error if it is gone.
Not sure about other handset manufacturers, but AFAIK all Nokias have a had a similar feature for years - it's in the options menu when you read a text message (and I think it's called "Find numbers" or something like that) My old-skool, black-and-white-screen 8210 and 8310 phones had it and so does my my current 6600 (which also has the option to find web and email addresses in messages)
When rumors started spreading that Apple was making a new Office suite I was really really hoping they'd make it open and save using the standardised OpenOffice formats. Imagine - document compatible with OOo (which would have benefitted both Apple and OOo) yet a proper OS X interface! How sweet would that be?!? I'm so disappointed that they didn't do it! Likewise I think it's a shame that no other non-OOo programs (correct me here if I'm wrong!) fully support the OpenOffice formats.
OpenOffice is very nice, but like MS Office it has loads of features that I as a casual office app user rarely need. It would be great if I had a choice of office apps - some fast and basic ones for people like me, some feature rich ones like OOo for power users and maybe some inbetween too.
iWork, Abiword, K-Office, Gnumeric and of course OpenOffice/NeoOffice would all be so much more useful if they used compatible formats. And since OOo's formats have already been submitted to a standards organisation they seem a good one to use!
Ah well, one can dream....
And while they're at it they should make it integrate *prefectly* (file dialogs, UI conventions, drag'n'drop and all!) with different Window managers, desktops and OSes. (OpenOffice on MacOS X, for example, is quite horrible at the moment!)
So, how about it then? Bring on OfficeFox! :P
Even my 2.5G Nokia 6600 which is nearly a year old now and is available for free on most tarifs can do video clips. Unfortunately it will only record up to 10 seconds out of the box (but newer models can do up to an hour and include software on the phone to edit your video clips and combine them to longer ones) - but it can play clips seemingly of any length. I have a 22 minute southpark episode on my phone and it plays perfectly! (next project - get lord of the rings on my phone! lol!)
Admittedly, the resolution and picture quality is a bit grainy on these 3GPP videos, but I recon newer phones will soon fix that. Megapixel cameras, MPEG-4 support in the hardware (which I believe NVidia is offering) and bigger memory cards (hell, you can get a 1gig SD card for just over 50quid these days!) ought to soon combine to provide decent video recording capabilities. Of course phones will nevere rival professional cameras and video-cameras, but compared to an average camcorder that an average user uses today they'll easily hold their own I think.
Furthermore it might be easier to achieve too. Like some other posts pointed out - PC manufacturers have to worry about keeping MS happy so they continue to get good deals on windows. ISPs on the other hand have nothing to loose in that respect. What's MS gonna do to them if they bundle something other than IE? I'm posting this idea up on Spreadfirefox! Thanks Rik!
Why oh why do they want cross platform uniformity??
One of the most basic principles of human-computer interaction is consistency. Windows users expect to see Windows-like apps, Mac OS X ppl expect native OS X looking apps and likewise for GNOME, KDE and whatever else.
Anything that breaks that (for example an OS X app that looks and/or behaves like a Windows app goes against the user's expections. And ultimately that makes the app harder for them to use and hence less appealing.
Granted there is a lot of similarity between the various desktop environments but they do each also have their own quirks. For example OS X apps have the toolbar along the top of the screen (not part of the app window) and have that little window-resizing thing in the bottom-right corner of a window (not part of the window's border). GNOME and KDE generally have different standard back, forward, reload etc icons for buttons that all apps should use rather than their own.
If you make Firefox look the same on every platform you will be breaking such little quirks and conventions on some (possibly all) platforms and the users will suffer.
I say make a different, native looking (and feeling) theme for each major platform and ship it as the default for that platform!
As for branding - you've got the name, you've got the firefox icon - they stay the same on every platform - surely that's all that's needed.
Personally I think that's a good thing too. I for one perceive it as really annoying and intrusive when I install an app that insists on planting it's icons all over my desktop, installing a pointless system tray icon and making itself the default player/browser/whatever (eg RealPlayer or QuickTime on Windows) - it feels like I get the branding forced down my throat and that does NOT make me a happy user! Apps that don't feel the need to do that are a breath of fresh air and it would be a real shame for Firefox to go down the road of excessive branding.
However, unless you know something we don't, it looks very much like the SCO board are going to ruin the company. If you just stand by and let them continue there is a very real risk that SCO go down the drain and you will loose your jobs.
I assume Darl and the other board members have plenty of money in their bank accounts. In the unlikely event that SCO wins the case they get a lot more, if SCO loses they may be out of a job but they will still have plenty to fall back on. In any case they won't end up not being able to pay the rent or put food on the table for the family.
I severely doubt that they are as concerned about your livelyhoods as you may think. If I was in your position I would not have much faith in the management. If you stand back and do as your told the chances are - regardless of whether you believe the whole case is right or wrong - that you will loose out.
Fine, you can't just get up and leave - but perhaps you'd be more helpful to SCO (and thus protecting your own jobs) by stopping this unfounded case and coming up with a genuine way to make money. If you can't make money off Unixware or Linux try something else. Be imaginative!
Now the Samsung phone looks quite nice but the form factor may limit its appeal. It's not that big, but the PDA design is an akward shape for your trouser pocket and looks a bit odd next to your face when making a phone call (I'm thinking of O2's XDA here for comparison). As for the Motorola and the E28, is it just me or are they really ugly? I know looks are very subjective, but they can hardly count as sleek and stylish. The material looks cheap for a start - looks like the grey plastic with metal colour sprayed on that wears of on the edges in no time - like several of Motorolas older clamshell phones. They look quite chubby too.
Now don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of Linux on a phone and would love to own one someday, but unless they start producing more varied and more appealing designs I doubt they will be very successful. By comparison most current Symbian phones look nice and come in reasonable sizes. Even Motorala's MS Smarthphone thingy looks alright (looks ok, obviously you wouldn't want one because of the software).
That would mean people need to buy X-Boxes and that in turn means money being wasted on MS that could be better used elsewhere. :P)
Apart from helping those poor souls who already have X-Boxes a Linux port would be a bit of a waste. IMO those people should sell their X-Boxes or get rid of them by other means anyway! (Publicly burning them might be quite novel!
Everytime I read coments like this on MS products (XBox or others) people waste time bickering whether or not the MS product in question is good or bad or bad but set to get better. Who cares? Whichever it is we should NOT be supporting them in any case! I'll readily admit that Windows XP is an improvement over ME or that XBox has more power and better gfx/sound than the Gamecube but I'm never going to buy either of them out of principle!
It's no secret that MS just wants control and once it has it it exploits it no end. Like someone posted above the XBox is nothing more than a Trojan horse to get into peoples' living-rooms. MS doesn't really are about gamers and we of all people should know that! A brief look at the computer industry shows what a mess it could be if MS has their way and how hard it would be to get back out of their grip. I don't think any sane person would want that.
The solution? Boycott them 'till it hurts and support anything else (even if it is inferior now - because once MS is cut down to size there will be fair competition and products will improve far beyond what they would if only MS was controlling the development)! Governments (especially the current US one) will not stop companies like MS only customers can!
Another reason why Hollywood and Co. need to look into changing their business model is that sooner or later any copy-protection gets cracked. It may not be legal, it may not be right, but let's face it - it always happens! And when it does that copy-protection system is instantly worthless. Apart from annoying open-source fans like us they are just wasting their own time and money developing these things! I wonder sometimes if it has ever occured to them to combat piracy by just charging less for DVDs, CDs Videos etc. We all know it's costing them coppers to make so it's hardly surprising that people get tempted by pirate copies. If a brand new DVD was, say, 5 quid instead of 25 I think more people would go for that rather than a pirate copy which may still be cheaper but probably has inferior quality and lacks extras and a fancy cover.
Yeah of corse there are: www.microsoftsucks.org :)
It's not just deleting a few messages though. Think about the wasted bandwidth! I don't know anyone who wishes the internet couldn't be faster. Surely if you could cut most of the spam away it would speed up many a mailserver. The next step would be to get rid of chain-mails, Flash intros and emails with DOC attachments... :P