Flex was already open source.. They are just pushing the responsibility of maintaining it to the community. Now if they were open sourcing the Flash Player, I would commend them for that as it could ease the pain a little of those stuck relying on this legacy technology.
I almost lost several weeks worth of a project I was working on due to the drive crashing
It blows my mind when people running OS X don't use Time Machine.
My hard drive died a few weeks ago, and it was so easy to restore from Time Machine. I was right back where I left off when the drive died. In my case I bought a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Deskstar. I had heard that those tend to fail, but the price was right, and I have enough confidence in Time Machine and the off-site backups I make every few weeks (rotate external drives which have a complete backup of my entire system) that I can take that risk.
Using that logic, we should all be buying souped-up computer monitors that have computers built into them, as opposed to buying the monitor as an accessory to your computer.
You mean like an iMac (and countless other computers throughout the history of desktop computing)? I personally don't like the concept and wish it had died in the 80s, but the iMac is popular enough and PC vendors are trying to bring it back, too.
I had a similar experience with my TV buying. I bought a 58" Panasonic plasma TV in 2009 which works great, but it will never get Netflix support (they claim this is because the TV lacks some hardware for DRM), whereas the 2010 model did get a firmware update to give it Netflix support.
Have you run Windows 2000 recently? That shit is blazing fast compared to XP and later Windows. Windows 2000 was also faster than Windows 98 in my experience. I consider it the best Windows ever (not saying much, I know). If they had tacked on the remote desktop feature XP has (maybe you can have this with terminal services?) it would have been perfect and we would have never needed another Windows version (it runs great in a VM).
Today, the average user builds their own machine or knows about it and gets a geek friend to do it; "upgrading" still pretty much means getting a new PC, but now a custom-built machine is more common
Huh? I think the opposite is true, and I think the general trend is towards laptops and mobile devices where there is no assembly and very little upgrading. I think more people are using computers these days, leading to more people assembling their own computers and doing their own upgrades, but I think percentage-wise this is less so.
If you dislike Vista and 7, use something a different operating system. Don't pretend Microsoft should support 10 year old software.
I already run a different operating system, but have to use Windows in a VM for some software. My Windows 7 VM is much slower than my XP VM. Forget XP, I wish Windows 2000 was still supported for what I use Windows for (.Net development). Windows 2000 in a VM is blazing fast and doesn't need as much RAM.
CLI lovers may be welcome, but do they actually use it? Everybody I know who said that OS X was great because of the CLI has since switched to Linux.
Did these people switch from Windows to OS X? OS X happens to have a usable UNIX userland, which is good, but what makes it great is the combination of being a UNIX and the excellent GUI, commercial software availability and support, and no hassle with wifi / power management / multi-monitor support.
I'm a long time UNIX user (started using various proprietary UNIXes a few years before Linux existed) and a software developer. Of course I use the command line (BTW homebrew being my package manager of choice). I also use Microsoft Office, iTunes, commercial music apps (like Logic, GarageBand), commercial video editing software (Final Cut). I switched from Linux as my host OS (running Windows in VMWare), to OS X as my host OS (and needing a Windows VM a lot less; I don't use Windows at home at all anymore). OS X hits a sweet spot where it meets all of my needs, one of which happens to be a proper UNIX userland, even though Linux is better for that. It's the sum of the parts which is what makes OS X and Mac hardware nice.
I think Apple used to have a very expensive MacBook Pro that gave you a choice between glossy and matte but I don't think they have that choice anymore. No more Apple hardware for me.
While there was a short period of time where they didn't offer matte screens in any laptops (when the first 15" unibody MBP came out), you can get matte in either the high-res 15" MBP or the 17".
Streaming video is hardly a new use. During the dial-up days, I was doing video conferencing, and it worked perfectly well. Faster connections just mean higher quality, not new uses. YouTube could have existed in the days of dial-up, it just would have had lower quality video streams. No one would have complained, either, because we were used to those lower-quality streams.
Seriously, I used to hunt for pixels too, but after about 1280x1024 I stopped caring.
I don't like my desktop at much higher resolution than that, it becomes uncomfortable. I know gamers and drafters really want giant screens at massive resolutions, but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
May want to add programmers to those who want massive resolutions. I was actually offended when the company I work for bought us 1280x1024 LCDs (fortunately they made up for it later). I had been happily using 1600x1200 on my CRT before that (and occasionally bumping it up to 2048x1536). I can make use of all the pixels available to me. The thing is I want things to by immediately visible without having to switch apps or windows. The more area I have to display code, logs, documents, browser window, terminal, etc, the better. See multiple source files at once is essentially to my productivity. Vertical resolution is good for me, too, as it means less moving up and down a source file or document (and also I can tile things vertically).
I currently use a 1920x1200 monitor (actually two of them when I plug my laptop into a monitor) which I think is a good resolution that meets in the middle of what people want and how much they are willing to pay. What I hate is the proliferation of 1920x1080 computer monitors (which *IS* because of HDTV). Did they really have to remove 230k pixels? 1080P content displays fine on a 1920x1200 monitor with 1:1 pixel scaling.
What I really want (that is currently available) is one 2560x1600 30" display (but budget doesn't allow at the moment, and the options available are lacking features I want/need). The more text I can see on screen (with a comfortable font size) the better. The less swapping between applications just to read things the better. Though sometimes I just want a single app (such as Emacs, Eclipse, VS) to take up the whole screen, and multiple monitors just doesn't work well in most of these apps.
Those people coding on netbooks is what I call "crazy people." Many coders don't even know they liked higher resolutions until they got it. Maybe that's part of it, people just don't know what they are missing.
For gaming, I don't really care. Even the ~720P or often less resolution of most XBox 360 / PS3 games looks great to me on my 1080P plasma (I'm one of those who think LCD is inferior to plasma for gaming and video; if I ever get back into PC gaming, I'm getting a plasma display to hook up to my computer and will be happy with 1080P and the frame rates I get with it).
So I'd say the simple fact is SSD simply isn't needed on the desktop. Mobile is another story, with the non volatile nature of SSDs making them a good choice, but since most of my customers are simply doing the basics on their laptops (word processing, surfing) they really don't need anything bigger than the basic bottom of the line SSDs
I kinda see it the opposite, but I am not a typical user: on the desktop, you can easily have multiple drives, so having one SSD for the OS and apps, and having one or more HDDs (either internal or external) for general storage would do the trick. On most laptops, you can only have one drive, so better make it a big one.
Maybe you can get creative with your router configuration. Block update servers during the peak time, or set up your own bandwidth cap during that time. It could be tricky, and you may need something more than the Tomato firmware, maybe a full Linux or OpenBSD box (running on a lower power x86 machine) might be necessary, but seems like it should be doable.
Holy crap, why didn't you just talk to your neighbor to begin with? Talk about passive aggressive. The real moron here is the one who couldn't get the laptop to ignore a wifi network.
The iPhone is totally pants for gaming. I mean, yeah, it's fine for playing chess or a scrabble-clone, but for action games I just don't enjoy it. Games that use the accelerometer are especially atrocious.
Now if someone would create a proper game-controller add-on and games started to support it, then, and only then would the iPhone be a great gaming phone. Though, Apple would probably need to either create an official game controller or establish an API and standards for such an add-on for it to really take off.
Any keyboard that lacks home/page up/page down/delete/end in the proper place is worthless.
You're obviously not an Emacs user. OS X supports many Emacs shortcuts in text fields, and then on top of that you can use Butler to implement even more Emacs shortcuts. I don't miss home/pgup/pgdn/end at all because I use alt- instead and don't have to move my hands from the home row.
I so want to move to the Netherlands. Don't worry, I'm sure I can make my 58" plasma fit in a small apartment. It'll be nice to be able to consume marijuana and not get arrested.
My current working environment is actually not that bad, though, but it's not typical for the U.S. I very rarely work more than 40 hrs (and when I do, I get vacation time for the time I worked). I have 20 vacation days (not counting sick days). But it's many of the other aspects of American life that make me wish I lived in Europe.
When I first heard Apple was switching to it, I was ecstatic - aluminum and glass over plastic? Finally a laptop hat has some heft to it.
Aluminum does not give a laptop heft, quite the opposite. Aluminum is lightweight and bends easily.
I am typing this on a Macbook Pro that has some dents on it. Though I'm pretty happy with my MBP in most other respects, I wish Apple would make a more durable laptop that could take a beating (at least as well as IBM Thinkpads could).
Go look up XP torrents. Most come slipstreamed with IE7.
That may be true now, but a lot of the existing installations are pirate copies of XP with IE6, and they never do software updates. Last time I went to India (IE7 had been out for a year) it was exactly this scenario. All the internet cafes were running XP with IE6 and software updates were turned off, or Win2k (w/ IE6 or even IE5!). Same thing with machines sold to consumers (all my relatives who had bought machines had pirated XP installed).
The people running the internet cafes hadn't even heard of Firefox (or Linux for that matter).
For instance, a few months ago, I ordered PPV Gran Torino in 1080p for my wife and I to view one evening. Six hours later it was ready to view, but she was already in bed.
Let's remember, Vista wouldn't run on old equipment, while Win7 runs on anything over a gigahertz with a gig of memory. A lot of XP users COULDN'T upgrade to Vista!!
That's assuming your video/sound card are supported by Win7. I tried to install it on an old machine (1.4 GHz Athlon) and there were no Win7 drivers for either my video or sound card. Installed Ubuntu instead.
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
Why wouldn't you want it on the go? Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to decide before-hand what you want on your small laptop hard drive?
Personally the only reason I have a desktop machine is because I can load it up with hard drives (have 4TB in internal drives at the moment) and not have to fiddle around plugging in external drives like I would if I was using my laptop as a main machine. Of course I do some video editing, which takes up a ton of space. I would love it if my laptop could have that kind of storage space, then I'd only have one computer.
But I don't think they will catch up any time soon unless there is some huge breakthrough in storage technology. But it seems that the amount of space video takes up will continue to grow along with growing storage capacities.
As it stands, my desktop machine is my "media machine" - containing all my video and audio files (both of which may be original content as I do both video editing and audio recordings). My laptop I use for everything else (coding, web browsing, work). Storage space is the only thing that is forcing this division.
I also do all my reading on my laptop (and sometimes my iPhone), but I'm generally only reading programming books in which case its nice to be able to try things out as I go along. I've read non-programming books on a laptop, and while it was ok, if I was reading a lot of non-programming books I would much rather do it on something like a Kindle (I don't think I ever want to go back to paper books, though). There are even some programming books which I would've read on a Kindle (instead of my laptop) if I had one. But I read so few books of any kind that I can't justify the expense at its current price.
It's really the people who read tons of books who are going to buy products like the Kindle (at its current prices). They are the kind of people who would otherwise be reading dead tree and they don't want to read books on a computer screen.
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Flex was already open source.. They are just pushing the responsibility of maintaining it to the community. Now if they were open sourcing the Flash Player, I would commend them for that as it could ease the pain a little of those stuck relying on this legacy technology.
I almost lost several weeks worth of a project I was working on due to the drive crashing
It blows my mind when people running OS X don't use Time Machine.
My hard drive died a few weeks ago, and it was so easy to restore from Time Machine. I was right back where I left off when the drive died. In my case I bought a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Deskstar. I had heard that those tend to fail, but the price was right, and I have enough confidence in Time Machine and the off-site backups I make every few weeks (rotate external drives which have a complete backup of my entire system) that I can take that risk.
Using that logic, we should all be buying souped-up computer monitors that have computers built into them, as opposed to buying the monitor as an accessory to your computer.
You mean like an iMac (and countless other computers throughout the history of desktop computing)? I personally don't like the concept and wish it had died in the 80s, but the iMac is popular enough and PC vendors are trying to bring it back, too.
I had a similar experience with my TV buying. I bought a 58" Panasonic plasma TV in 2009 which works great, but it will never get Netflix support (they claim this is because the TV lacks some hardware for DRM), whereas the 2010 model did get a firmware update to give it Netflix support.
Have you run Windows 2000 recently? That shit is blazing fast compared to XP and later Windows. Windows 2000 was also faster than Windows 98 in my experience. I consider it the best Windows ever (not saying much, I know). If they had tacked on the remote desktop feature XP has (maybe you can have this with terminal services?) it would have been perfect and we would have never needed another Windows version (it runs great in a VM).
Today, the average user builds their own machine or knows about it and gets a geek friend to do it; "upgrading" still pretty much means getting a new PC, but now a custom-built machine is more common
Huh? I think the opposite is true, and I think the general trend is towards laptops and mobile devices where there is no assembly and very little upgrading. I think more people are using computers these days, leading to more people assembling their own computers and doing their own upgrades, but I think percentage-wise this is less so.
If you dislike Vista and 7, use something a different operating system. Don't pretend Microsoft should support 10 year old software.
I already run a different operating system, but have to use Windows in a VM for some software. My Windows 7 VM is much slower than my XP VM. Forget XP, I wish Windows 2000 was still supported for what I use Windows for (.Net development). Windows 2000 in a VM is blazing fast and doesn't need as much RAM.
CLI lovers may be welcome, but do they actually use it? Everybody I know who said that OS X was great because of the CLI has since switched to Linux.
Did these people switch from Windows to OS X? OS X happens to have a usable UNIX userland, which is good, but what makes it great is the combination of being a UNIX and the excellent GUI, commercial software availability and support, and no hassle with wifi / power management / multi-monitor support.
I'm a long time UNIX user (started using various proprietary UNIXes a few years before Linux existed) and a software developer. Of course I use the command line (BTW homebrew being my package manager of choice). I also use Microsoft Office, iTunes, commercial music apps (like Logic, GarageBand), commercial video editing software (Final Cut). I switched from Linux as my host OS (running Windows in VMWare), to OS X as my host OS (and needing a Windows VM a lot less; I don't use Windows at home at all anymore). OS X hits a sweet spot where it meets all of my needs, one of which happens to be a proper UNIX userland, even though Linux is better for that. It's the sum of the parts which is what makes OS X and Mac hardware nice.
I think Apple used to have a very expensive MacBook Pro that gave you a choice between glossy and matte but I don't think they have that choice anymore. No more Apple hardware for me.
While there was a short period of time where they didn't offer matte screens in any laptops (when the first 15" unibody MBP came out), you can get matte in either the high-res 15" MBP or the 17".
YouTube. Now was that so hard?
Streaming video is hardly a new use. During the dial-up days, I was doing video conferencing, and it worked perfectly well. Faster connections just mean higher quality, not new uses. YouTube could have existed in the days of dial-up, it just would have had lower quality video streams. No one would have complained, either, because we were used to those lower-quality streams.
Additionally:
If you don't what Cmd-H is for, GTFO.
Seriously, I used to hunt for pixels too, but after about 1280x1024 I stopped caring.
I don't like my desktop at much higher resolution than that, it becomes uncomfortable. I know gamers and drafters really want giant screens at massive resolutions, but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
May want to add programmers to those who want massive resolutions. I was actually offended when the company I work for bought us 1280x1024 LCDs (fortunately they made up for it later). I had been happily using 1600x1200 on my CRT before that (and occasionally bumping it up to 2048x1536). I can make use of all the pixels available to me. The thing is I want things to by immediately visible without having to switch apps or windows. The more area I have to display code, logs, documents, browser window, terminal, etc, the better. See multiple source files at once is essentially to my productivity. Vertical resolution is good for me, too, as it means less moving up and down a source file or document (and also I can tile things vertically).
I currently use a 1920x1200 monitor (actually two of them when I plug my laptop into a monitor) which I think is a good resolution that meets in the middle of what people want and how much they are willing to pay. What I hate is the proliferation of 1920x1080 computer monitors (which *IS* because of HDTV). Did they really have to remove 230k pixels? 1080P content displays fine on a 1920x1200 monitor with 1:1 pixel scaling.
What I really want (that is currently available) is one 2560x1600 30" display (but budget doesn't allow at the moment, and the options available are lacking features I want/need). The more text I can see on screen (with a comfortable font size) the better. The less swapping between applications just to read things the better. Though sometimes I just want a single app (such as Emacs, Eclipse, VS) to take up the whole screen, and multiple monitors just doesn't work well in most of these apps.
Those people coding on netbooks is what I call "crazy people." Many coders don't even know they liked higher resolutions until they got it. Maybe that's part of it, people just don't know what they are missing.
For gaming, I don't really care. Even the ~720P or often less resolution of most XBox 360 / PS3 games looks great to me on my 1080P plasma (I'm one of those who think LCD is inferior to plasma for gaming and video; if I ever get back into PC gaming, I'm getting a plasma display to hook up to my computer and will be happy with 1080P and the frame rates I get with it).
Something to the effect of "And the inferior multitouch support won't bother you nearly as much if you are always using your phone one-handed..."
I can pinch to zoom one handed, but sometimes I wish I had a simple + / - for zoom like the browser on Android does.
So I'd say the simple fact is SSD simply isn't needed on the desktop. Mobile is another story, with the non volatile nature of SSDs making them a good choice, but since most of my customers are simply doing the basics on their laptops (word processing, surfing) they really don't need anything bigger than the basic bottom of the line SSDs
I kinda see it the opposite, but I am not a typical user: on the desktop, you can easily have multiple drives, so having one SSD for the OS and apps, and having one or more HDDs (either internal or external) for general storage would do the trick. On most laptops, you can only have one drive, so better make it a big one.
Who (as an end user) needs any kind of storage medium for porn. Porn is in the "cloud" these days.
Maybe you can get creative with your router configuration. Block update servers during the peak time, or set up your own bandwidth cap during that time. It could be tricky, and you may need something more than the Tomato firmware, maybe a full Linux or OpenBSD box (running on a lower power x86 machine) might be necessary, but seems like it should be doable.
Holy crap, why didn't you just talk to your neighbor to begin with? Talk about passive aggressive. The real moron here is the one who couldn't get the laptop to ignore a wifi network.
The iPhone is totally pants for gaming. I mean, yeah, it's fine for playing chess or a scrabble-clone, but for action games I just don't enjoy it. Games that use the accelerometer are especially atrocious.
Now if someone would create a proper game-controller add-on and games started to support it, then, and only then would the iPhone be a great gaming phone. Though, Apple would probably need to either create an official game controller or establish an API and standards for such an add-on for it to really take off.
Any keyboard that lacks home/page up/page down/delete/end in the proper place is worthless.
You're obviously not an Emacs user. OS X supports many Emacs shortcuts in text fields, and then on top of that you can use Butler to implement even more Emacs shortcuts. I don't miss home/pgup/pgdn/end at all because I use alt- instead and don't have to move my hands from the home row.
I so want to move to the Netherlands. Don't worry, I'm sure I can make my 58" plasma fit in a small apartment. It'll be nice to be able to consume marijuana and not get arrested.
My current working environment is actually not that bad, though, but it's not typical for the U.S. I very rarely work more than 40 hrs (and when I do, I get vacation time for the time I worked). I have 20 vacation days (not counting sick days). But it's many of the other aspects of American life that make me wish I lived in Europe.
When I first heard Apple was switching to it, I was ecstatic - aluminum and glass over plastic? Finally a laptop hat has some heft to it.
Aluminum does not give a laptop heft, quite the opposite. Aluminum is lightweight and bends easily.
I am typing this on a Macbook Pro that has some dents on it. Though I'm pretty happy with my MBP in most other respects, I wish Apple would make a more durable laptop that could take a beating (at least as well as IBM Thinkpads could).
Go look up XP torrents. Most come slipstreamed with IE7.
That may be true now, but a lot of the existing installations are pirate copies of XP with IE6, and they never do software updates. Last time I went to India (IE7 had been out for a year) it was exactly this scenario. All the internet cafes were running XP with IE6 and software updates were turned off, or Win2k (w/ IE6 or even IE5!). Same thing with machines sold to consumers (all my relatives who had bought machines had pirated XP installed).
The people running the internet cafes hadn't even heard of Firefox (or Linux for that matter).
For instance, a few months ago, I ordered PPV Gran Torino in 1080p for my wife and I to view one evening. Six hours later it was ready to view, but she was already in bed.
The real WTF is why you rented Gran Torino.
Let's remember, Vista wouldn't run on old equipment, while Win7 runs on anything over a gigahertz with a gig of memory. A lot of XP users COULDN'T upgrade to Vista!!
That's assuming your video/sound card are supported by Win7. I tried to install it on an old machine (1.4 GHz Athlon) and there were no Win7 drivers for either my video or sound card. Installed Ubuntu instead.
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
Why wouldn't you want it on the go? Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to decide before-hand what you want on your small laptop hard drive?
Personally the only reason I have a desktop machine is because I can load it up with hard drives (have 4TB in internal drives at the moment) and not have to fiddle around plugging in external drives like I would if I was using my laptop as a main machine. Of course I do some video editing, which takes up a ton of space. I would love it if my laptop could have that kind of storage space, then I'd only have one computer.
But I don't think they will catch up any time soon unless there is some huge breakthrough in storage technology. But it seems that the amount of space video takes up will continue to grow along with growing storage capacities.
As it stands, my desktop machine is my "media machine" - containing all my video and audio files (both of which may be original content as I do both video editing and audio recordings). My laptop I use for everything else (coding, web browsing, work). Storage space is the only thing that is forcing this division.
You can't kill the Kindle without electronic paper.
I also do all my reading on my laptop (and sometimes my iPhone), but I'm generally only reading programming books in which case its nice to be able to try things out as I go along. I've read non-programming books on a laptop, and while it was ok, if I was reading a lot of non-programming books I would much rather do it on something like a Kindle (I don't think I ever want to go back to paper books, though). There are even some programming books which I would've read on a Kindle (instead of my laptop) if I had one. But I read so few books of any kind that I can't justify the expense at its current price.
It's really the people who read tons of books who are going to buy products like the Kindle (at its current prices). They are the kind of people who would otherwise be reading dead tree and they don't want to read books on a computer screen.