The thing is you can't really say what the home user wants with certainty apart from they don't want corporate software and they want whatever they want to do to just work.
I wanted to put Linux on a second computer (a laptop). The main requirement was TV-out support to play full-screen videos on the telly and an idiot-proof way to let you choose the video you want to play. Note: I'm not a home user but what I want the second computer to do is so simple it we can argue it's for a home user.
You'd think that it's not too much of a demand in this age of Compiz and Beryl however Ubuntu/X11/the ATI driver couldn't deliver and after a weekend of tinkering I gave up and went back to Windows. I didn't even get chance to start on the idiot-proof way of launching videos as I was stuck on something much more low level, the TV output.
I think the main reason for all this is that the Linux world does very little end-user testing yet often claims it's ready for the end user. Until relatively recently both Gnome and KDE had several hundred fiddly options, until both moved to simplify things (probably in the wake of the success seen with OO and Firefox, which both also have two of three feet firmly placed in Mac and Windows land and do do a lot of end-user testing).
So what is this claim of readiness based on if there's relatively little end-user testing? Basically there are several applications which copy how it's done on Windows and Mac (mainly Windows) and the claim comes from that. Yet it looks like Linux distros still lack an overall coherent design and a sense of 'it just works' unlike other operating systems and these cracks show up if there's a problem such as this one where I was trying to convince three separate pieces of software (Ubuntu preferences, X11, and the ATI drivers) to co-operate.
Sorry, I misread IE as FF. As it affects both IE and FF you're probably coming up against a limit in Winsock, especially if you've noticed it over the past year and you upgraded to SP2 about a year ago.
It's to do with the maximum number of network connections that Firefox will have open at a time. Firefox 2 has this value set to 2 unless you change it in about:config. Further connections will stall until one of the two open connections are closed (or time out).
Solution: Close the tab which causes everything else to stall or up the number of connections to e.g. 6 in about:config.
I believe Firefox 3 has this value set to 6 by default, however if you import a profile from FF2 it may decide to use 2. Check about:config to make sure.
Unfortunately I can't rember the setting name. I'm fairly sure if you search for 'network' or 'connections' you'll find it.
... as an idiot-proof installer and let users download the drivers themselves, like the patcher which generates the ATI Mobility Radeon drivers from the normal ATI Radeon drivers (see here). This would probably be legal in most country with the inevitable exception of the US, but even then their complaint would be weaker as he's not distributing their IP.
But not many entities in the universe with cameras make a point of taking photos every few metres and fewer still make of a point of organising and putting the photos they've taken on several thousand distributed servers so they're always available to anyone with a connection to the Internet and cross-reference them with a map and street index so they can easily be found.
Then it's down to luck if you're a) captured for posterity and b) realise you're captured for posterity so you can do something about it (within the limits set by Google).
The only recent updates that have required a reboot on my computer are the graphics card firmware update, 10.4.11, a couple of QuickTime updates, and an iTunes update.
The first three are forgivable (QT also being the graphics manager), iTunes I'm not so sure about. But in my experience it seems to require a reboot less than my Windows work computer does and, when it does, it doesn't keep insisting on restoring the Windows update dialog box and bringing it to the front every 10 minutes. The icon bounces around in the dock but other than that it doesn't interfere.
If you think about it again you realise that each browser will have to know how to render pages in the same way as the browser(s) and version(s) specified in this new tag.
Should Opera 9 know how to render pages according Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, Safari 2 and Safari 3 as well as IE6 and IE7? No, it's impossible on cost grounds, prohibitively expensive to develop for.
Will MS obey tags for Opera, Firefox, and Safari? What do you think.
Result: Yet more MS lock in, increasing with each new version of IE.
It's for this reason we have standards, and as you can see it's pretty clear why MS wants to break them.
What does setting a price point the market will bear have to do with simplicity of design? If price were related to simplicity, Apple's stuff would be a third of the price it is now simply because they dump backwards compatibility with previous computer models after about 3 years whereas PCs are still backwards compatible with the first serial and parallel ports. Instead they charge a premium.
The advantage DVD recorders had over DVB/HD recorders was they existed, and that HD recorders only really started to appear with DVB (so on this point we will have to agree to differ).
DVB can be used for HD transmissions as well as SD ones, so in theory the FCC mandating that all stations must transmit in HD is neither here or there; if the viewer has an old SD TV plugged into a set-top box (as the majority will) everything's still going to look like it did before. Another thing to take into account is that most stations may not have much HD content (think of how many repeats there are) and be simply upscaling everything only for it to be downscaled at the other end.
I would say it's more due to the DVB rollout in Europe and the predominance of cable/analogue in the US.
In Europe DVD recorders (recording from analogue) came out first then combined DVB/HD recorders came out second when DVB was finally rolled out across several countries (it's much simpler to dump a MPEG2 signal to HD than it is to encode an analogue signal and record it and when one standard is rolled out across a continent you have economies of scale and a potential market that you don't have with one country).
Hence DVD recorders have spent more time on the market and have achieved more European sales, however combined DVB/HD recorders are probably rapidly catching up now (especially as they are cheaper and don't need you to constantly buy DVDs). Remember that in Europe cable and satellite are less popular than analogue and DVB and cable and satellite providers tie their recording devices (if they offer them, they may not) to their own service so this is why their devices barely show up as sales in comparison to DVD recorders and DVB/HD recorders.
In the US the Tivo came out at the same time as DVD recorders and given the choice between the two most people would go for a Tivo. However Tivo didn't exist in Europe at that time the next best thing was a DVD recorder.
Tivo have probably missed the boat in Europe now as it's a subscription service, and DVB/HD recorders can use the Electronic Programme Guide to achieve more-or-less the same effect.
Finally, with regards to the stupidity comment I'm morally obliged to point out that the sales figures for various different recording devices reflect the US's technological backwardness in yet another sector as Europe is all shiny and DVB and the US is not. Sort of like GSM/3G.:p
In addition the programs are a source of income for BBC Worldwide. The BBC sells rights to programs to foreign channels and DVDs, etc... Downloading bittorrents of BBC programs from pirate sites is still a fairly high barrier for many people whereas going to the BBC's website is a much lower barrier. The BBC are not going to jeopardise that income, at least not in the short term.
You can even get a N95 for free (Vodafone, on an 18 month contract) with a monthly subscription fee comparable to O2's monthly subscription, however without the initial £269 for the phone.
Really, Apple's pricing model doesn't work in the UK or most of continental Europe. Why tie yourself to a network, an 18 month contract, and an expensive tariff if you can buy an iPod Touch for the same price and stay with your current network, contract, and cheaper tariff.
Possibly, but most people's definition of beta software is software which has a release version come out afterwards, not software which timebombs so that a large part of its functionality becomes unusable.
(It looks like something's gone wrong with the reality distortion field driver on my Mac if I'm saying things like this.)
But only after the terrorism laws brought in after 11th September 2001 (the ones which widened the definition of terrorism, amongst other things). Before then there was terrorism by the IRA but for some reason they didn't fall into the same category.
It has to be done that way because if you have a phone with a one-button unlock floating around in a handbag it can unlock. It can even happen with a two-button unlock which is why Nokias allow an auto-relock after a certain amount of inactive time (e.g. a minute).
I assume Nokia's product design team have done this questioning (pockets vs handbags) which is why the auto-relock feature appeared about five years ago and hasn't disappeared since.
They're supposed to say they're not worried about it, that's if they don't want to have their customers running for the hills.
They said the same about Apple but are building touch-screen control into the next version.
If Google actually specify anything about their platform I'm sure they'll build that in too. I'm sure it'll be faster for them to do that than it will be for Google to implement all the basics properly that are already in Symbian.
Mine's in Tools > Settings > Display (6680). If you want to see a randomisation script in action, try Windows Mobile.
There are very few smartphone platforms out there. Apple's GUI might be arguably better but as a programmable platform it's left wanting (maybe in January we'll see something if Steve is kind enough to us mere mortals). Windows Mobile might have less hurdles with regards to certificates but the GUI is basically a 800x600 desktop crammed into a phone screen. There are Linux platforms but they seem to be one-off phones, I can't say I've seen manufacturers repeatedly churn out a range of Linux models. That leaves us with Google, which appears to be vapourware at the moment. I have no doubt that Google can churn out decent web apps, but there's a bit more to a mobile platform than that.
It come across as arrogant, but Symbian has succeeded for a reason where others failed. And what are else are Symbian supposed to say, that they worried?
I'm not sure that solutions on Android will be any more open than on Windows or Symbian.
There's no way you could modify the code, recompile the kernel and OS, and install a new version. No sane network give approval for devices which allow this.
Secondly, there's the virus problem. This implies some kind of sandbox and certificate (as on Symbian) or some as yet unknown way (as Jobs vaguely announced for the iPhone). This means you can't recompile user-space applications (e.g. remove Google's adverts from text messages or whatever they end up doing to squeeze cash out of the platform).
Finally they've chosen a licence which is similar to BSD. So this platform seems as open as Microsoft taking BSD Sockets and coming up with Winsock.
In Europe you get Club Nintendo Points when you buy consoles and games. You're supposed to be able to convert these to Wii Shop Points so you can buy Virtual Console games... only they still haven't got round to doing it yet.
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The thing is you can't really say what the home user wants with certainty apart from they don't want corporate software and they want whatever they want to do to just work.
I wanted to put Linux on a second computer (a laptop). The main requirement was TV-out support to play full-screen videos on the telly and an idiot-proof way to let you choose the video you want to play. Note: I'm not a home user but what I want the second computer to do is so simple it we can argue it's for a home user.
You'd think that it's not too much of a demand in this age of Compiz and Beryl however Ubuntu/X11/the ATI driver couldn't deliver and after a weekend of tinkering I gave up and went back to Windows. I didn't even get chance to start on the idiot-proof way of launching videos as I was stuck on something much more low level, the TV output.
I think the main reason for all this is that the Linux world does very little end-user testing yet often claims it's ready for the end user. Until relatively recently both Gnome and KDE had several hundred fiddly options, until both moved to simplify things (probably in the wake of the success seen with OO and Firefox, which both also have two of three feet firmly placed in Mac and Windows land and do do a lot of end-user testing).
So what is this claim of readiness based on if there's relatively little end-user testing? Basically there are several applications which copy how it's done on Windows and Mac (mainly Windows) and the claim comes from that. Yet it looks like Linux distros still lack an overall coherent design and a sense of 'it just works' unlike other operating systems and these cracks show up if there's a problem such as this one where I was trying to convince three separate pieces of software (Ubuntu preferences, X11, and the ATI drivers) to co-operate.
Unfortunately it's probably a fairly to fix.
Sorry, I misread IE as FF. As it affects both IE and FF you're probably coming up against a limit in Winsock, especially if you've noticed it over the past year and you upgraded to SP2 about a year ago.
This is what a quick search brought up.
If it's not that then I can't think of anything else...
It's to do with the maximum number of network connections that Firefox will have open at a time. Firefox 2 has this value set to 2 unless you change it in about:config. Further connections will stall until one of the two open connections are closed (or time out).
Solution: Close the tab which causes everything else to stall or up the number of connections to e.g. 6 in about:config.
I believe Firefox 3 has this value set to 6 by default, however if you import a profile from FF2 it may decide to use 2. Check about:config to make sure.
Unfortunately I can't rember the setting name. I'm fairly sure if you search for 'network' or 'connections' you'll find it.
... as an idiot-proof installer and let users download the drivers themselves, like the patcher which generates the ATI Mobility Radeon drivers from the normal ATI Radeon drivers (see here). This would probably be legal in most country with the inevitable exception of the US, but even then their complaint would be weaker as he's not distributing their IP.
Other countries' phones already kick ass. Or doesn't Symbian count any more?
But not many entities in the universe with cameras make a point of taking photos every few metres and fewer still make of a point of organising and putting the photos they've taken on several thousand distributed servers so they're always available to anyone with a connection to the Internet and cross-reference them with a map and street index so they can easily be found.
Then it's down to luck if you're a) captured for posterity and b) realise you're captured for posterity so you can do something about it (within the limits set by Google).
I can only assume you haven't had a look at the latest batch of Nokias (for example).
The only recent updates that have required a reboot on my computer are the graphics card firmware update, 10.4.11, a couple of QuickTime updates, and an iTunes update.
The first three are forgivable (QT also being the graphics manager), iTunes I'm not so sure about. But in my experience it seems to require a reboot less than my Windows work computer does and, when it does, it doesn't keep insisting on restoring the Windows update dialog box and bringing it to the front every 10 minutes. The icon bounces around in the dock but other than that it doesn't interfere.
If you think about it again you realise that each browser will have to know how to render pages in the same way as the browser(s) and version(s) specified in this new tag.
Should Opera 9 know how to render pages according Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, Safari 2 and Safari 3 as well as IE6 and IE7? No, it's impossible on cost grounds, prohibitively expensive to develop for.
Will MS obey tags for Opera, Firefox, and Safari? What do you think.
Result: Yet more MS lock in, increasing with each new version of IE.
It's for this reason we have standards, and as you can see it's pretty clear why MS wants to break them.
You still can in SeaMonkey...(!)
What does setting a price point the market will bear have to do with simplicity of design? If price were related to simplicity, Apple's stuff would be a third of the price it is now simply because they dump backwards compatibility with previous computer models after about 3 years whereas PCs are still backwards compatible with the first serial and parallel ports. Instead they charge a premium.
The advantage DVD recorders had over DVB/HD recorders was they existed, and that HD recorders only really started to appear with DVB (so on this point we will have to agree to differ).
DVB can be used for HD transmissions as well as SD ones, so in theory the FCC mandating that all stations must transmit in HD is neither here or there; if the viewer has an old SD TV plugged into a set-top box (as the majority will) everything's still going to look like it did before. Another thing to take into account is that most stations may not have much HD content (think of how many repeats there are) and be simply upscaling everything only for it to be downscaled at the other end.
I would say it's more due to the DVB rollout in Europe and the predominance of cable/analogue in the US.
In Europe DVD recorders (recording from analogue) came out first then combined DVB/HD recorders came out second when DVB was finally rolled out across several countries (it's much simpler to dump a MPEG2 signal to HD than it is to encode an analogue signal and record it and when one standard is rolled out across a continent you have economies of scale and a potential market that you don't have with one country).
Hence DVD recorders have spent more time on the market and have achieved more European sales, however combined DVB/HD recorders are probably rapidly catching up now (especially as they are cheaper and don't need you to constantly buy DVDs). Remember that in Europe cable and satellite are less popular than analogue and DVB and cable and satellite providers tie their recording devices (if they offer them, they may not) to their own service so this is why their devices barely show up as sales in comparison to DVD recorders and DVB/HD recorders.
In the US the Tivo came out at the same time as DVD recorders and given the choice between the two most people would go for a Tivo. However Tivo didn't exist in Europe at that time the next best thing was a DVD recorder.
Tivo have probably missed the boat in Europe now as it's a subscription service, and DVB/HD recorders can use the Electronic Programme Guide to achieve more-or-less the same effect.
Finally, with regards to the stupidity comment I'm morally obliged to point out that the sales figures for various different recording devices reflect the US's technological backwardness in yet another sector as Europe is all shiny and DVB and the US is not. Sort of like GSM/3G. :p
In addition the programs are a source of income for BBC Worldwide. The BBC sells rights to programs to foreign channels and DVDs, etc... Downloading bittorrents of BBC programs from pirate sites is still a fairly high barrier for many people whereas going to the BBC's website is a much lower barrier. The BBC are not going to jeopardise that income, at least not in the short term.
You can even get a N95 for free (Vodafone, on an 18 month contract) with a monthly subscription fee comparable to O2's monthly subscription, however without the initial £269 for the phone.
Really, Apple's pricing model doesn't work in the UK or most of continental Europe. Why tie yourself to a network, an 18 month contract, and an expensive tariff if you can buy an iPod Touch for the same price and stay with your current network, contract, and cheaper tariff.
Possibly, but most people's definition of beta software is software which has a release version come out afterwards, not software which timebombs so that a large part of its functionality becomes unusable.
(It looks like something's gone wrong with the reality distortion field driver on my Mac if I'm saying things like this.)
But only after the terrorism laws brought in after 11th September 2001 (the ones which widened the definition of terrorism, amongst other things). Before then there was terrorism by the IRA but for some reason they didn't fall into the same category.
Reference here.
It has to be done that way because if you have a phone with a one-button unlock floating around in a handbag it can unlock. It can even happen with a two-button unlock which is why Nokias allow an auto-relock after a certain amount of inactive time (e.g. a minute).
I assume Nokia's product design team have done this questioning (pockets vs handbags) which is why the auto-relock feature appeared about five years ago and hasn't disappeared since.
Their competitiors have to reply saying they're not worried. How else could they reply?
They're supposed to say they're not worried about it, that's if they don't want to have their customers running for the hills.
They said the same about Apple but are building touch-screen control into the next version.
If Google actually specify anything about their platform I'm sure they'll build that in too. I'm sure it'll be faster for them to do that than it will be for Google to implement all the basics properly that are already in Symbian.
Mine's in Tools > Settings > Display (6680). If you want to see a randomisation script in action, try Windows Mobile.
There are very few smartphone platforms out there. Apple's GUI might be arguably better but as a programmable platform it's left wanting (maybe in January we'll see something if Steve is kind enough to us mere mortals). Windows Mobile might have less hurdles with regards to certificates but the GUI is basically a 800x600 desktop crammed into a phone screen. There are Linux platforms but they seem to be one-off phones, I can't say I've seen manufacturers repeatedly churn out a range of Linux models. That leaves us with Google, which appears to be vapourware at the moment. I have no doubt that Google can churn out decent web apps, but there's a bit more to a mobile platform than that.
It come across as arrogant, but Symbian has succeeded for a reason where others failed. And what are else are Symbian supposed to say, that they worried?
I'm not sure that solutions on Android will be any more open than on Windows or Symbian.
There's no way you could modify the code, recompile the kernel and OS, and install a new version. No sane network give approval for devices which allow this.
Secondly, there's the virus problem. This implies some kind of sandbox and certificate (as on Symbian) or some as yet unknown way (as Jobs vaguely announced for the iPhone). This means you can't recompile user-space applications (e.g. remove Google's adverts from text messages or whatever they end up doing to squeeze cash out of the platform).
Finally they've chosen a licence which is similar to BSD. So this platform seems as open as Microsoft taking BSD Sockets and coming up with Winsock.
Try Witch, a freeware application downloadable from here. It gives you a fairly Windows-like alt-tab. I'm not sure if it works on 10.5.
There are also other shortcuts besides alt + tab like command + `.
In Europe you get Club Nintendo Points when you buy consoles and games. You're supposed to be able to convert these to Wii Shop Points so you can buy Virtual Console games... only they still haven't got round to doing it yet.
But they benefit from deliberately installing stuff on the computers of users who don't get pissed off.
Don't want people to download Firefox or Opera? Push IE7 as a critical update.
Don't want people to download Google Desktop? Push Windows Desktop Search as a critical update.
Probably the balance between pissed-off users and non-pissed-off users makes it worthwhile in the end.