even then when I found a supported card, the hoops I had to jump through were absurd.
Last two laptops I've had, the "hoops" were as follows:
- Right click on the network manager icon.
- Click an available network.
With Intrepid, they've for some reason decided to follow Windows' annoying method, so it's instead:
- Right-click on the network manager icon.
- Click "New Connection"
- Click Wlan0
- Click an available network.
I didn't have to install any drivers. I didn't have to tweak any settings. It Just Worked. In fact, my mother's laptop, which has Windows 2000, has wireless which only works on open networks -- WEP, WPA, etc is completely broken. Boot a Kubuntu livecd on it, and those networks Just Work.
I realize the plural of anecdote is not data. But you can see why I might assume you had no idea what you were talking about -- your experience is so completely different than mine, and everyone I know, including plenty of not-very-tech-savvy people I see using Ubuntu.
The underbelly of an OS shouldn't be exposed to end users. Is this belief wrong or just subjective?
Well, from the wording, wrong...
I wouldn't suggest that the guts of the OS should be inaccessible to advanced users, thus hobbling their workflow, but that know-nothings like myself shouldn't have to see or interact with it.
Wouldn't it have to do some pretty fancy waveform analyzing though, or a database of all the waves?
I can't remember the name of it now, but I have seen software which can analyze a recording and split out individual instruments and notes. They had an example of taking a live recording, splitting it out, and changing the pitch of one note played by one instrument to correct it. Doesn't sound techno-ish, because it's a real recording, just slightly altered...
Anyway, such waveform analysis exists.
There are a ton of different recordings of this or that well-known music piece.
And I'm guessing you can get a score of all of it somewhere.
And you're getting really, really bad as far as legitimate user accessibility. You're going to require some sort of multimedia playback (probably Flash), versus a simple image and/or some javascript. And how many random people off the street could even recognize Beethoven's 5th?
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but while I would probably recognize that I had heard it before, and that it was good classical music, I probably would not even know it was Beethoven, let alone which symphony.
And I can tell you right away, that if you're going to require that, I very likely won't be back to your website, even if I did know it. It's getting too annoying.
If it's only interlaced, deinterlacing algorithms are easy to come by -- mplayer has four or five of them.
All this does is require more CPU, it won't significantly reduce accuracy of cracking. And remember, you can get armies of Windows zombies to do this for you.
Any CAPTCHA system can easily be cracked by building a large database with the inputs and outputs that was actually solved by humans and then saved into the database for lookup later....The only feasable way to stop this kind of caching of answers is to have no duplicate tests.
And that's true of most CAPTCHAs today.
For example, a large field of randomly colored circles that all vary in size and position and move slowly around, then tell the user to hover the mouse over the largest blue circle and then next have them move the mouse over the green triangle, etc.
We're already at a limit of annoyance for users. And, if you've been following robotics at all, following a differently-colored circle around is not difficult.
And either way, you still have the problem of humans solving it -- the common "porn" example being one solution, I would point to Amazon's Mechanical Turk as another.
I thought the ideal captcha would be worded questions presented in the same image-like format as current captchas, e.g. "Two and Two makes?" or "The opposite of day is..?"
That actually looks relatively easy to solve.
No, you couldn't necessarily make a general, out-of-the-box solution. However, if each one is unique, built by a human, then it's simply a dictionary. If it's not a finite number, then you're going to have patterns, and it could just refresh until it gets "[numberword] and [numberword] makes?", then do the calculation.
I'm not sure how, yet, but I want people to start thinking about it this way.
Just like DRM.
See, with DRM, start with the assumption that all DRM can and will be cracked, and that all software and media can and will be pirated. Your challenge, then, is to make the legitimate product provide at least the quality and value of the pirated copy (something most DRM'd solutions fail miserably at), and ideally make it desirable enough that your price starts to seem reasonable, even when the alternative is "free".
So, the same applies to CAPTCHAs. Start with the assumption that all CAPTCHAs can and will be cracked, even if "cracking" means "using Mechanical Turk and/or a real sweatshop to have humans crack it". Now, start thinking in terms of economics. Build a system which doesn't have sufficiently good payoff for cracking it for anyone to bother -- a system which, by its very nature, can't be spammed.
If you can at least get it to where the only waste is bandwidth and disk space, you're doing pretty good. That's about my current spam situation -- it's a statistical filter which operates on the entire message, but it works incredibly well.
Until then, an automated hack that seems to work well, at least to stop blog spam, is to require AJAX, and send a bit of programmatically generated (but always different) JavaScript, and verify that it was executed. This will stop most automated systems until they start specifically targeting you with embedded Javascript engines. Next: Make it computationally expensive, so that they have to use a botnet if they're to get any real results.
I've still never met a single person that uses Linux as their primary OS.
I have for the past seven years. Sometimes, for months at a time, as my only OS, until I need to boot XP for a game.
We brag about how its making inroads and how its impacting the marketplace but we rarely see it in person.
Asus EEE PC. The machine's very existence depended on Linux. Once Linux proved you could create something that cheaply, that small, with good battery life, everyone else rushed to get in on it, including Microsoft. But even if XP had really been an option when it was built, MIcrosoft wouldn't give them the price they wanted.
So, whether or not it actually makes it onto someone's desktop, the fact that it's there as an option changes the negotiation. If I need an operating system for something -- maybe I'm a Fortune 500 company with thousands of desktops, maybe I'm a Toshiba or a Sony and I'm building a new set top box or otherwise smart device -- I can now negotiate a much lower price for Windows, because Linux is a real option, whether or not I ever intended to use it.
until Linux gets a unified interface,
Name an OS which has one.
a sane way of installing applications
Package managers are stranger, but they are more secure, and they are, in fact, easier.
Among other things: Reinstalls are no longer something to be feared. Just back up your home directory, reinstall, then go to add/remove programs, check all programs you need, and click "apply".
Compare with your "sane" way which involves digging through old, possibly scratched and useless CDs, as well as browsing online through dozens of web pages, looking for installer programs -- which are essentially unverified executables, each one opening you up for a MITM attack.
and dealing with dependancies
I'll forgive this, since you clearly haven't dealt with Linux directly in years, if ever.
Dependencies are not an issue. They are so much not an issue it's not even funny anymore.
Remember what I said above, about "add/remove programs"? That's it. All the dependencies are taken care of automatically.
and manages some actual commercial support
I bought this laptop with Ubuntu, from Dell. That means I actually have support. I can actually call Canonical if I have a problem.
I can also buy software for Linux -- Canonical has a repository of commercial software. Then there's programs like Maya, etc.
There's also Linus, and a number of other kernel developers, who have their paychecks written by an organization which lives purely on donations from these guys -- in case you're too lazy to follow that link, that's HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Oracle, AMD, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Adobe, Dell, Mitsubishi... I could go on, just follow the link.
I would call that a significant amount of corporate support -- and that's not counting the developers these organizations often hire to work for them, but on Linux and open source.
I just don't see it appealing to the average consumer.
See, that's the more interesting question, and that's where the flamewars happen.
But often, it's a moot question. The rule of thumb I've found is that most people love Linux, when they give it a chance, and it will do 99% of what they want. But there's another 1% that they can't live without, that's different for everyone, that it won't do.
Many of these, there's really nothing the community can do to improve things, without destroying what makes Linux great. Consider: You complained about not having a "unified interface". If that meant enforcing human interface guidelines, it would kill some very interesting apps which explore some radically different ideas about human interfaces. If it meant just a
Except that if you're going to avoid lawsuits and possibly criminal prosecution, you're going to be obtaining them through legitimate channels.
And a legitimate copy of Ubuntu costs far less than a legitimate copy of Vista, even without factoring in the other crap you'll have to buy with Vista (antivirus, Office, etc).
I know very few companies that have "their own branded software platform based on Linux."
Pretty much every Linux netbook is branded, somehow -- the EEE PC in particular.
Of course, that's not saying much -- Windows ends up almost as "branded", for better or worse, usually worse. I'm going to go with the theory that this is probably happening much more with embedded devices -- if you have to develop pretty much the entire UI and application, Windows CE would have to really provide some kick-ass development tools for you to be willing to license it instead of starting with Linux, BSD, etc. And there's a reason Windows CE is often abbreviated as WinCE.
It seemed to me, after I'd addressed the issues of going to 64 bits, and adding a few processor cores, and all the RAM that the budget and new mainboard would allow, &C., that maybe the best place to improve performance is storage I/O.
It seems to me, at that point, it's probably a software problem. Not that faster storage would hurt...
That's closer, but still not quite what I was thinking. After all, why should we have to draw boundaries at an application, or at a process? Memory pressure should kill as much as it needs to, but it should be at a finer granularity than the application....More like Smalltalk VMs.
Alright, keep in mind, this is not how I'd build it, as it's very language-centric, but as an idea:
Suppose you had a language in which every single object had a means of being serialized. This is already done, to an extent, but suppose that in practice, everything was an object, and it was common courtesy to provide serialize methods that would work.
Suppose it's pervasive -- except for cases where you obviously cannot persist something (maybe it's a network socket, connected to something outside this machine), everything else can be serialized.
So from the point of view of the application developer, it's not just that the application code itself may or may not be in RAM -- we already have this, in that any part of the actual executable or library may be cached or not -- but it's also the case that the application state itself may or may not be in RAM, in a usable data structure, or serialized on disk.
Furthermore, follow the Smalltalk model where there is no concept of "saving" something -- every change is persisted as soon as it's convenient. There is no concept of a program "running" or "not running", nor, in Smalltalk, a meaningful difference between programming and metaprogramming. To program is to manually make changes to some small part of the overall program, where "overall program" refers to the entire VM, and it's expected that a given user will only be running the one VM.
This would give us "instant-on", if the hardware is there, as there's no requirement that certain things be loaded or initialized before others -- everything is already loaded and running, and need only be pulled into RAM when needed, and our disks are fast enough that this isn't a big deal....I could go on, but to get a sense of this, just play around with Smalltalk sometime. I really get the sense that this is where we want to be in terms of UI. There's certainly a lot of it that needs to be rethought -- the original Smalltalk VMs were very specifically optimized for 32-bit architectures, and could not easily be made 64-bit; Erlang is probably closer to the mark in terms of concurrency, and Ruby in terms of syntax...
I think Android is trying to present that UI, as is the iPhone. But I think it would be nice if that was also reflected under the hood.
First of all, I really don't see how that's opposed to what you suggested. After all, you can click on a PDF, and it opens.
So what are they good for?
System tray icon is good for letting me know it's running crap in the background, so I can kill it. The crap in the background is useful for updating Reader.
The others are useful for running Adobe Reader if I've made something else the default application.
Either way, I don't see your point. Why would they object to having yet another way of branding -- by integrating into the file manager (with Adobe logos everywhere)?
People moaning that smartphones would be great if they were only open platforms generally forget that the great majority over the years were, yet that wasn't enough to set the world on fire.
I'm not suggesting that it's automatically enough to make them great. I'm only suggesting that the newer, better class of smartphones would be much better if they were open -- and there is no reason the iPhone couldn't be.
Apple wanted a friendly way to distribute applications on the platform
Look at Android. It has an App Store, too. It also allows third-party development and distribution, if you don't like their App Store. And I'm guessing their App Store doesn't have rules like "Thou Shalt Not Port a Scripting Language".
and their network partner needed a way to ensure that they can continue to charge ridiculous rates for SMS and laptop pairing.
Guess again. Jailbreaking is relatively easy, so if people were really interested in pirating iPhone apps, they'd have done so by now.
The goal of DRM is to make it uneasy for users to break it; not impossible.
Which is why DRM will always fail -- it only takes one person to break it, then everyone can just download it. And if it's even moderately popular, it will be broken, just a matter of time.
Blu-Ray's BD+ looks a hell of a lot harder than anything Apple's done, and it's been broken.
That's why you never see anyone except Dan Glickman making that argument about DRM anymore. Instead, people argue that with games, DRM at least makes it so that it takes a week or more to crack it, because apparently that first week is important enough to offset the backlash of treating their customers like criminals.
But again, and inevitably, it will be cracked and available on BitTorrent, probably within a month of release.
If what you say is really true, that would presume they've actually tried it, because you never know.
I email my grandmother from time to time. She's almost completely deaf now, so phone conversations are difficult. In person, she can read lips, but it's still not easy.
But email works fine.
My brother is a foreign exchange student in Taiwan. I gave him a laptop before he left. Since then, we've had quite a few skype calls -- video chat between me and my parents here, and him and his host family.
Yes, broadband can be addicting. Anything can be addicting, and broadband cannot be physically addicting. So, if you're addicted to it, I think that says more about you, and something you need to work on, than it does about the Internet. Maybe it is right for you to cut yourself off.
But it's been my experience that many people who don't want Internet are people who don't know what can be done with it, and how it truly can enrich their lives.
Watching retarded YouTube videos and other crap isn't an essential part of life.
Nor is reading books, or watching movies. YouTube is, however, part of our culture. Not "essential", but certainly not as useless as you're suggesting.
And that's assuming everything on YouTube is "crap" according to you -- not true, seems whitehouse.gov is using it as well these days.
If your only use for the Internet is email and browsing Wikipedia you can get by just fine with dialup.
Even just Wikipedia is improved by having images load instantly, rather than line by line. Yet the article points to 19 percent of dialup users who would never upgrade, no matter what the price.
A lot of older people, especially the elderly, have no need or desire for the internet.
I thought the article was specifically about broadband, not just Internet? For example, this part, I really don't get (quote from TFA):
19 percent of dial-up users, for example, say that "nothing" would get them to upgrade, not even lower prices.
I can understand not wanting Internet at all, but if you've got dialup, why wouldn't you want something faster, even if it cost less than your dialup?
I suspect that when I am in my eighties, I will have much less desire to communicate with the world or check the news on a minute by minute basis.
I suspect when I am in my eighties, I will have grandchildren I want to stay in touch with. Just as my grandparents like to use email to stay in touch with me.
The reason why you would not do that with i.E. music is that Finder does not browse music folders all that well. In OS/2 an application could/should provide a plug in for the Workplace Shell (the Finder equivalent) to make browsing easy.
To some extent, this is done.
I think the main reason this isn't done now is, an application can be organized and built around a task, or set of tasks. That's more than just looking for documents, or thinking in terms of documents.
For example, iTunes is not built around documents. It's built around songs, albums, artists, etc.
this won't happen ever - and for vanity reasons. Vanity? - Yes: Have you ever noticed how many icons the Acrobat-Reader installs on a Windows system?
Are you seriously suggesting this won't happen because Adobe is so vain about the number of icons they use? I must be missing something.
If the App store didn't exist the iPhone wouldn't be as popular as it is.
True.
By having total control of the app store, Apple can ensure applications on the store are up to their standards,
Fixed that for you.
This ultimately provides a higher quality app selection (in theory).
In practice, it also provides exactly the quality, style, and kind of app selection that Apple wants, which is not always what the customer wants.
Just look at every single slackening of their rules, and see an instant mad gold rush, with consumers eating it up. For example: Apple relaxed the vulgarity rules, and people rushed to buy fart apps.
Don't you think it would be even more popular if you could do anything you want with it, not just anything Apple wants you to do?
This is slightly different to the usual "well if Microsoft did this, everyone would moan!" and you're right - they have tried, and very few people bought smartphones (compared to the prevalence of the iPhone).
Actually, no, Microsoft didn't try this. Ever.
Microsoft treated the Windows Mobile platform like any other Windows -- you can install whatever software you want on it, and it doesn't really matter how you get it there. It has a browser, so you can just download apps that way, from any website, no restriction.
Contrast with the iPhone, and... you get the idea.
The advantage of Android is, it's probably much friendlier to use than Windows Mobile, much of it is open source, and the preferred method of development is in a VM, making the transition to a new CPU architecture (which may well be necessary, in a mobile device, to keep power consumption down) is completely automatic for most apps.
Apple can choose to lock it down as much as they like - either people will buy it or they won't.
Yes, they can. It's completely within their rights to do so.
It's still a shitty thing for them to do. It's anti-consumer, it slows progress, it's even anticompetitive (so many patented features, so many exclusive deals)...
So far, it is selling almost faster than they can make it,
The fact that something is successful doesn't make it good.
Case in point: Windows. Microsoft could get it wrong for ten years in a row -- which they have -- and still have over 90% marketshare. Does that imply Windows is good?
I hate the fact that the iPhone is restricted to the App Store. I don't mind that it exists -- surely, that is a good thing all around. But I don't like that there is no alternative, and that Apple is using it to censor and control what does and doesn't get on the iPhone.
And yes, their customers are letting them do it. And yes, it is successful. But I think I'm very justified in my hatred of it.
Slashdot Mirror
even then when I found a supported card, the hoops I had to jump through were absurd.
Last two laptops I've had, the "hoops" were as follows:
- Right click on the network manager icon.
- Click an available network.
With Intrepid, they've for some reason decided to follow Windows' annoying method, so it's instead:
- Right-click on the network manager icon.
- Click "New Connection"
- Click Wlan0
- Click an available network.
I didn't have to install any drivers. I didn't have to tweak any settings. It Just Worked. In fact, my mother's laptop, which has Windows 2000, has wireless which only works on open networks -- WEP, WPA, etc is completely broken. Boot a Kubuntu livecd on it, and those networks Just Work.
I realize the plural of anecdote is not data. But you can see why I might assume you had no idea what you were talking about -- your experience is so completely different than mine, and everyone I know, including plenty of not-very-tech-savvy people I see using Ubuntu.
The underbelly of an OS shouldn't be exposed to end users. Is this belief wrong or just subjective?
Well, from the wording, wrong...
I wouldn't suggest that the guts of the OS should be inaccessible to advanced users, thus hobbling their workflow, but that know-nothings like myself shouldn't have to see or interact with it.
That, I can agree with.
I know about Ben Franklin. I've heard of Evil Knievel, but I don't know what he looks like.
Even if all that was settled, what are the chances you're going to find enough pictures of each that people would recognize, and computers wouldn't?
Wouldn't it have to do some pretty fancy waveform analyzing though, or a database of all the waves?
I can't remember the name of it now, but I have seen software which can analyze a recording and split out individual instruments and notes. They had an example of taking a live recording, splitting it out, and changing the pitch of one note played by one instrument to correct it. Doesn't sound techno-ish, because it's a real recording, just slightly altered...
Anyway, such waveform analysis exists.
There are a ton of different recordings of this or that well-known music piece.
And I'm guessing you can get a score of all of it somewhere.
And you're getting really, really bad as far as legitimate user accessibility. You're going to require some sort of multimedia playback (probably Flash), versus a simple image and/or some javascript. And how many random people off the street could even recognize Beethoven's 5th?
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but while I would probably recognize that I had heard it before, and that it was good classical music, I probably would not even know it was Beethoven, let alone which symphony.
And I can tell you right away, that if you're going to require that, I very likely won't be back to your website, even if I did know it. It's getting too annoying.
If it's only interlaced, deinterlacing algorithms are easy to come by -- mplayer has four or five of them.
All this does is require more CPU, it won't significantly reduce accuracy of cracking. And remember, you can get armies of Windows zombies to do this for you.
Any CAPTCHA system can easily be cracked by building a large database with the inputs and outputs that was actually solved by humans and then saved into the database for lookup later....The only feasable way to stop this kind of caching of answers is to have no duplicate tests.
And that's true of most CAPTCHAs today.
For example, a large field of randomly colored circles that all vary in size and position and move slowly around, then tell the user to hover the mouse over the largest blue circle and then next have them move the mouse over the green triangle, etc.
We're already at a limit of annoyance for users. And, if you've been following robotics at all, following a differently-colored circle around is not difficult.
And either way, you still have the problem of humans solving it -- the common "porn" example being one solution, I would point to Amazon's Mechanical Turk as another.
I thought the ideal captcha would be worded questions presented in the same image-like format as current captchas, e.g. "Two and Two makes?" or "The opposite of day is..?"
That actually looks relatively easy to solve.
No, you couldn't necessarily make a general, out-of-the-box solution. However, if each one is unique, built by a human, then it's simply a dictionary. If it's not a finite number, then you're going to have patterns, and it could just refresh until it gets "[numberword] and [numberword] makes?", then do the calculation.
I'm not sure how, yet, but I want people to start thinking about it this way.
Just like DRM.
See, with DRM, start with the assumption that all DRM can and will be cracked, and that all software and media can and will be pirated. Your challenge, then, is to make the legitimate product provide at least the quality and value of the pirated copy (something most DRM'd solutions fail miserably at), and ideally make it desirable enough that your price starts to seem reasonable, even when the alternative is "free".
So, the same applies to CAPTCHAs. Start with the assumption that all CAPTCHAs can and will be cracked, even if "cracking" means "using Mechanical Turk and/or a real sweatshop to have humans crack it". Now, start thinking in terms of economics. Build a system which doesn't have sufficiently good payoff for cracking it for anyone to bother -- a system which, by its very nature, can't be spammed.
If you can at least get it to where the only waste is bandwidth and disk space, you're doing pretty good. That's about my current spam situation -- it's a statistical filter which operates on the entire message, but it works incredibly well.
Until then, an automated hack that seems to work well, at least to stop blog spam, is to require AJAX, and send a bit of programmatically generated (but always different) JavaScript, and verify that it was executed. This will stop most automated systems until they start specifically targeting you with embedded Javascript engines. Next: Make it computationally expensive, so that they have to use a botnet if they're to get any real results.
Multimedia. There are so many back-ends to choose from, each with problems of their own.
And last I checked, each has an interface to the other -- or, at least, all of them have an interface to ffmpeg (they'd be stupid not to).
The associated front-ends are even worse both in functionality and bloat.
VLC is bloated? Really?
2: Polish. It seams that by default, Linux distros are less polished by default. In fact, I can say they are ugly by default. This does not help.
Specific suggestions welcome.
3: Bloat. KDE is wonderful but suffers from bloat.
Huh. I hadn't noticed. It seems positively lightweight to me.
GNOME is kind of OK, but it's interface looks ancient and lacks the functionality of modern systems.
Like what?
And you know these are skinnable, right?
I've still never met a single person that uses Linux as their primary OS.
I have for the past seven years. Sometimes, for months at a time, as my only OS, until I need to boot XP for a game.
We brag about how its making inroads and how its impacting the marketplace but we rarely see it in person.
Asus EEE PC. The machine's very existence depended on Linux. Once Linux proved you could create something that cheaply, that small, with good battery life, everyone else rushed to get in on it, including Microsoft. But even if XP had really been an option when it was built, MIcrosoft wouldn't give them the price they wanted.
So, whether or not it actually makes it onto someone's desktop, the fact that it's there as an option changes the negotiation. If I need an operating system for something -- maybe I'm a Fortune 500 company with thousands of desktops, maybe I'm a Toshiba or a Sony and I'm building a new set top box or otherwise smart device -- I can now negotiate a much lower price for Windows, because Linux is a real option, whether or not I ever intended to use it.
until Linux gets a unified interface,
Name an OS which has one.
a sane way of installing applications
Package managers are stranger, but they are more secure, and they are, in fact, easier.
Among other things: Reinstalls are no longer something to be feared. Just back up your home directory, reinstall, then go to add/remove programs, check all programs you need, and click "apply".
Compare with your "sane" way which involves digging through old, possibly scratched and useless CDs, as well as browsing online through dozens of web pages, looking for installer programs -- which are essentially unverified executables, each one opening you up for a MITM attack.
and dealing with dependancies
I'll forgive this, since you clearly haven't dealt with Linux directly in years, if ever.
Dependencies are not an issue. They are so much not an issue it's not even funny anymore.
Remember what I said above, about "add/remove programs"? That's it. All the dependencies are taken care of automatically.
and manages some actual commercial support
I bought this laptop with Ubuntu, from Dell. That means I actually have support. I can actually call Canonical if I have a problem.
I can also buy software for Linux -- Canonical has a repository of commercial software. Then there's programs like Maya, etc.
There's also Linus, and a number of other kernel developers, who have their paychecks written by an organization which lives purely on donations from these guys -- in case you're too lazy to follow that link, that's HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Oracle, AMD, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Adobe, Dell, Mitsubishi... I could go on, just follow the link.
I would call that a significant amount of corporate support -- and that's not counting the developers these organizations often hire to work for them, but on Linux and open source.
I just don't see it appealing to the average consumer.
See, that's the more interesting question, and that's where the flamewars happen.
But often, it's a moot question. The rule of thumb I've found is that most people love Linux, when they give it a chance, and it will do 99% of what they want. But there's another 1% that they can't live without, that's different for everyone, that it won't do.
Many of these, there's really nothing the community can do to improve things, without destroying what makes Linux great. Consider: You complained about not having a "unified interface". If that meant enforcing human interface guidelines, it would kill some very interesting apps which explore some radically different ideas about human interfaces. If it meant just a
Except that if you're going to avoid lawsuits and possibly criminal prosecution, you're going to be obtaining them through legitimate channels.
And a legitimate copy of Ubuntu costs far less than a legitimate copy of Vista, even without factoring in the other crap you'll have to buy with Vista (antivirus, Office, etc).
I know very few companies that have "their own branded software platform based on Linux."
Pretty much every Linux netbook is branded, somehow -- the EEE PC in particular.
Of course, that's not saying much -- Windows ends up almost as "branded", for better or worse, usually worse. I'm going to go with the theory that this is probably happening much more with embedded devices -- if you have to develop pretty much the entire UI and application, Windows CE would have to really provide some kick-ass development tools for you to be willing to license it instead of starting with Linux, BSD, etc. And there's a reason Windows CE is often abbreviated as WinCE.
now that our president is a chimp in a business suit.
I wasn't even in a trollbiting mood, but this just made me laugh.
Eight years of misunderestimating the nukeyoular policies of a man who even looks simian, and you think this president is the chimp?
It seemed to me, after I'd addressed the issues of going to 64 bits, and adding a few processor cores, and all the RAM that the budget and new mainboard would allow, &C., that maybe the best place to improve performance is storage I/O.
It seems to me, at that point, it's probably a software problem. Not that faster storage would hurt...
Aye. I didn't mention it 'cause HTML5 isn't yet supported in a stable release of any browser that I know of.
Safari.
That's closer, but still not quite what I was thinking. After all, why should we have to draw boundaries at an application, or at a process? Memory pressure should kill as much as it needs to, but it should be at a finer granularity than the application. ...More like Smalltalk VMs.
Alright, keep in mind, this is not how I'd build it, as it's very language-centric, but as an idea:
Suppose you had a language in which every single object had a means of being serialized. This is already done, to an extent, but suppose that in practice, everything was an object, and it was common courtesy to provide serialize methods that would work.
Suppose it's pervasive -- except for cases where you obviously cannot persist something (maybe it's a network socket, connected to something outside this machine), everything else can be serialized.
So from the point of view of the application developer, it's not just that the application code itself may or may not be in RAM -- we already have this, in that any part of the actual executable or library may be cached or not -- but it's also the case that the application state itself may or may not be in RAM, in a usable data structure, or serialized on disk.
Furthermore, follow the Smalltalk model where there is no concept of "saving" something -- every change is persisted as soon as it's convenient. There is no concept of a program "running" or "not running", nor, in Smalltalk, a meaningful difference between programming and metaprogramming. To program is to manually make changes to some small part of the overall program, where "overall program" refers to the entire VM, and it's expected that a given user will only be running the one VM.
This would give us "instant-on", if the hardware is there, as there's no requirement that certain things be loaded or initialized before others -- everything is already loaded and running, and need only be pulled into RAM when needed, and our disks are fast enough that this isn't a big deal. ...I could go on, but to get a sense of this, just play around with Smalltalk sometime. I really get the sense that this is where we want to be in terms of UI. There's certainly a lot of it that needs to be rethought -- the original Smalltalk VMs were very specifically optimized for 32-bit architectures, and could not easily be made 64-bit; Erlang is probably closer to the mark in terms of concurrency, and Ruby in terms of syntax...
I think Android is trying to present that UI, as is the iPhone. But I think it would be nice if that was also reflected under the hood.
I don't know about that. If an app is running, its icon will be in the doc and it will have blue dot under it.
I know. I'm commenting on the fact that in Tiger, it was a black arrow, and much more noticeable than that pale, fuzzy blue dot.
First of all, I really don't see how that's opposed to what you suggested. After all, you can click on a PDF, and it opens.
So what are they good for?
System tray icon is good for letting me know it's running crap in the background, so I can kill it. The crap in the background is useful for updating Reader.
The others are useful for running Adobe Reader if I've made something else the default application.
Either way, I don't see your point. Why would they object to having yet another way of branding -- by integrating into the file manager (with Adobe logos everywhere)?
People moaning that smartphones would be great if they were only open platforms generally forget that the great majority over the years were, yet that wasn't enough to set the world on fire.
I'm not suggesting that it's automatically enough to make them great. I'm only suggesting that the newer, better class of smartphones would be much better if they were open -- and there is no reason the iPhone couldn't be.
Apple wanted a friendly way to distribute applications on the platform
Look at Android. It has an App Store, too. It also allows third-party development and distribution, if you don't like their App Store. And I'm guessing their App Store doesn't have rules like "Thou Shalt Not Port a Scripting Language".
and their network partner needed a way to ensure that they can continue to charge ridiculous rates for SMS and laptop pairing.
There you go. That's the real reason.
It'd also open the gates to massive piracy.
Guess again. Jailbreaking is relatively easy, so if people were really interested in pirating iPhone apps, they'd have done so by now.
The goal of DRM is to make it uneasy for users to break it; not impossible.
Which is why DRM will always fail -- it only takes one person to break it, then everyone can just download it. And if it's even moderately popular, it will be broken, just a matter of time.
Blu-Ray's BD+ looks a hell of a lot harder than anything Apple's done, and it's been broken.
That's why you never see anyone except Dan Glickman making that argument about DRM anymore. Instead, people argue that with games, DRM at least makes it so that it takes a week or more to crack it, because apparently that first week is important enough to offset the backlash of treating their customers like criminals.
But again, and inevitably, it will be cracked and available on BitTorrent, probably within a month of release.
If what you say is really true, that would presume they've actually tried it, because you never know.
I email my grandmother from time to time. She's almost completely deaf now, so phone conversations are difficult. In person, she can read lips, but it's still not easy.
But email works fine.
My brother is a foreign exchange student in Taiwan. I gave him a laptop before he left. Since then, we've had quite a few skype calls -- video chat between me and my parents here, and him and his host family.
Yes, broadband can be addicting. Anything can be addicting, and broadband cannot be physically addicting. So, if you're addicted to it, I think that says more about you, and something you need to work on, than it does about the Internet. Maybe it is right for you to cut yourself off.
But it's been my experience that many people who don't want Internet are people who don't know what can be done with it, and how it truly can enrich their lives.
Watching retarded YouTube videos and other crap isn't an essential part of life.
Nor is reading books, or watching movies. YouTube is, however, part of our culture. Not "essential", but certainly not as useless as you're suggesting.
And that's assuming everything on YouTube is "crap" according to you -- not true, seems whitehouse.gov is using it as well these days.
If your only use for the Internet is email and browsing Wikipedia you can get by just fine with dialup.
Even just Wikipedia is improved by having images load instantly, rather than line by line. Yet the article points to 19 percent of dialup users who would never upgrade, no matter what the price.
A lot of older people, especially the elderly, have no need or desire for the internet.
I thought the article was specifically about broadband, not just Internet? For example, this part, I really don't get (quote from TFA):
19 percent of dial-up users, for example, say that "nothing" would get them to upgrade, not even lower prices.
I can understand not wanting Internet at all, but if you've got dialup, why wouldn't you want something faster, even if it cost less than your dialup?
I suspect that when I am in my eighties, I will have much less desire to communicate with the world or check the news on a minute by minute basis.
I suspect when I am in my eighties, I will have grandchildren I want to stay in touch with. Just as my grandparents like to use email to stay in touch with me.
The reason why you would not do that with i.E. music is that Finder does not browse music folders all that well. In OS/2 an application could/should provide a plug in for the Workplace Shell (the Finder equivalent) to make browsing easy.
To some extent, this is done.
I think the main reason this isn't done now is, an application can be organized and built around a task, or set of tasks. That's more than just looking for documents, or thinking in terms of documents.
For example, iTunes is not built around documents. It's built around songs, albums, artists, etc.
this won't happen ever - and for vanity reasons. Vanity? - Yes: Have you ever noticed how many icons the Acrobat-Reader installs on a Windows system?
Are you seriously suggesting this won't happen because Adobe is so vain about the number of icons they use? I must be missing something.
If the App store didn't exist the iPhone wouldn't be as popular as it is.
True.
By having total control of the app store, Apple can ensure applications on the store are up to their standards,
Fixed that for you.
This ultimately provides a higher quality app selection (in theory).
In practice, it also provides exactly the quality, style, and kind of app selection that Apple wants, which is not always what the customer wants.
Just look at every single slackening of their rules, and see an instant mad gold rush, with consumers eating it up. For example: Apple relaxed the vulgarity rules, and people rushed to buy fart apps.
Don't you think it would be even more popular if you could do anything you want with it, not just anything Apple wants you to do?
This is slightly different to the usual "well if Microsoft did this, everyone would moan!" and you're right - they have tried, and very few people bought smartphones (compared to the prevalence of the iPhone).
Actually, no, Microsoft didn't try this. Ever.
Microsoft treated the Windows Mobile platform like any other Windows -- you can install whatever software you want on it, and it doesn't really matter how you get it there. It has a browser, so you can just download apps that way, from any website, no restriction.
Contrast with the iPhone, and... you get the idea.
The advantage of Android is, it's probably much friendlier to use than Windows Mobile, much of it is open source, and the preferred method of development is in a VM, making the transition to a new CPU architecture (which may well be necessary, in a mobile device, to keep power consumption down) is completely automatic for most apps.
Apple can choose to lock it down as much as they like - either people will buy it or they won't.
Yes, they can. It's completely within their rights to do so.
It's still a shitty thing for them to do. It's anti-consumer, it slows progress, it's even anticompetitive (so many patented features, so many exclusive deals)...
So far, it is selling almost faster than they can make it,
The fact that something is successful doesn't make it good.
Case in point: Windows. Microsoft could get it wrong for ten years in a row -- which they have -- and still have over 90% marketshare. Does that imply Windows is good?
I hate the fact that the iPhone is restricted to the App Store. I don't mind that it exists -- surely, that is a good thing all around. But I don't like that there is no alternative, and that Apple is using it to censor and control what does and doesn't get on the iPhone.
And yes, their customers are letting them do it. And yes, it is successful. But I think I'm very justified in my hatred of it.