There is only so much we can do to secure any network from attack. There will always be ways to spoof identities, and commit illegal acts. Retooling the whole thing won't make a different in that regard. We may up the bar a little, but that won't last for long. People will think of new ways to work around what we can think of today.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind an overhaul on DNS and SMTP to slow some spammers and other jerks down.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere. Think about it, someone in Russia can do almost anything outside their country and not be prosecuted. In other places, we have parts of the Internet filtered because of some lame moral code.
I just wish these people who don't understand the spirit of the Internet would take their marbles and go home.
I got an old NeXTStation on ebay for $150 about two years ago. I bought a spare hard drive for it with the developer tools and OpenStep 4.2. I managed to get OpenSSH, lynx and WorldWideWeb (the first browser) working on it.
Here's a screenshot from it when I was running nextstep 3.2 (pardon the capitalization).
That was solved by raising the price of new releases. I've noticed that when a movie appears on DVD in stores, it's often $20 instead of 10-15. At one point, one only saw that for special editions, but since high def came out they are more expensive. I think it's to close the gap between blueray and DVD prices. I'm sure the cost of shipping the damn things to retailers is up with gas prices, but we shouldn't just be seeing that in the last 6 months.
I've been waiting on new films and buying older movies and Tv shows on DVD at the $7-15 price range lately.
This could very well be a local thing. I would love to know if this is widespread.
What chipset on the motherboard? I couldn't get Vista Ultimate x64 to work with 4GB of ram on an Intel DP965LT motherboard (obviously with a 965 chipset). I'd love to know the magic.
It's scary what his position is at Microsoft and he can't even pick out a computer that can really run Vista. If the employees can't get it, how does my Mother.
I wish all companies did this with their old games. For the brief stint on x64 vista, I had trouble playing some games because the copy protection was not patched for vista (64bit). For instance, you can't play age of empires II conquerers (expansion) in vista x64, but supposedly macrovision released an update for 32bit vista. It's very annoying that I have all these games and can't play them. I ended up going back to XP for this and other reasons.
I could get the game to install, just not run without crashing.
Not vista, but it would be helpful to buy a Mac pre-configured with bootcamp + Windows XP. I don't want it at home, but at work it would be quite nice. I could see small business customers loving it.
My boss and I make jokes about Apple, Inc. vs. Apple Computer, Inc. Dropping computer in the name was not just to aid in the sale of phones. I think Apple has lost some focus on their computers. Leopard has not been as big as they had hoped. We're putting off the upgrade at work as long as possible. Leopard reminds me of vista in many ways. I won't bother to argue that point again. I know some people love Leopard and I've even found one person at work who loves Vista. I'm still hoping for a patch to get rid of the memory leaks with their new garbage collection in Cocoa. Most "power" users I know can get about a day a gigabyte (RAM) out of Leopard. I get two to three days out of my old PowerMac with 1.75GB of RAM. A friend of mine has 3GB in a Mac Pro and he can get 3-4 days before a required reboot. My boss has 2GB in his iMac, and left it on during the holidays. He couldn't login to it to reboot when he got back after a week. There are problems with it.
I also seem problems with customer service. I pre-ordered Leopard. It came at 9AM on release day. I attempted to install it on my wife's Mac Pro. The DVD was damaged and I hadn't noticed. I skipped the disc check and prepared to install only to have the install die. I'm not blaming apple for having a non bootable Mac. That was my fault. However, I had to wait until 6PM to call them, wait on hold for 10 minutes to talk to someone, and then 50 more minutes to get a resolution. They didn't have 10.5 in their system yet to send me a replacement disc. The tech eventually arranged for me to go to the nearest apple store. He said I just needed the DVD and original package. I walked in to be harrassed by the Apple Store employees for not bringing a receipt. Had that Mac been my only system, I could not print it anyway! It wouldn't boot. The box only had a packing slip. I offered to bring it up on a demo system, but they didn't want that. Finally, they gave me a new Leopard box. I haven't been very fond of going to that apple store ever sense. The tech was nice, and I did realize it was a launch day. I didn't appreciate the shitty service at the apple store. It's not the first time I had problems in that store. I ordered online so I wouldn't have to go there. I had a friend who had to get his laptop fixed. They guy told him bootcamp was beta in Leopard! He also told him it was too unstable to use. WTF.
Microsoft may claim that Windows can address more RAM, but not really. If you look at their KB, you'll see a list of supported motherboards that can address 4GB or more of memory. Those boards are 3 intel chipsets. I have an Intel DP965LT motherboard. I recently bought 2 new 1GB chips to bring my board to 4GB total. I had 64bit vista. The system booted extremely slow, had data corruption on disk and took out my boot loader. An older ubuntu CD allowed me to test RAM, but the 7.10 CD freaked out too. BSD worked fine.
I would say Microsoft is not ready for 4GB+ memory configurations in consumer devices. It may work in servers, but it's not working on the desktop. Conversely, my wife upgraded her Mac from 1GB to 5GB for Leopard the same day. Her Mac Pro is working flawlessly.
DirectX compatibility maps memory from your video card into the 32bit address space which causes problems with windows. The more RAM your video card has, the less your system can have. Further, there is a bug in Vista that double maps it for DirectX 9 support. There is a patch available for that issue. My PC had an ATI x1900 with 512MB. The system is stable with 3GB but more causes problems. If this can happen with a supported chipset, what happens on other systems?
My motherboard claims to support 8GB of RAM. I tried several different versions of the BIOS. The Vista x64 ultimate installer doesn't even work right with 4GB in. I just decided to go back to XP Pro after that experience. The point of Vista is gone in my book.
I never claimed an iMac didn't ship with any specific minimum on ram, just that you can't run OS X on 32MB ram. Early iMacs did NOT ship with OS X as you noted. My first Mac was an iMac DV 400mhz that i believe shipped with 64MB ram and OS 9.0.4. (i'm sure about the OS) I went to 512MB ram so that I could run everything I needed on it. I had to buy the ram to run netscape so that's why I brought it up. IE would run, but I didn't like IE on the Mac that much.
I ran 10.1 on that iMac. I'm quite familiar with it. 10.2 was faster. Each OS release up to tiger was faster but consumed more RAM. Leopard is the first release that seems slower, but I have close to the bare minimum in CPU and it seems to use 40% cpu when idle most of the time. (dual 867mhz)
I wish you'd check your facts before saying someone else is wrong. You didn't even read my post correctly. As I recall, (not 100% certain) 10.1-10.3 "required" 128MB ram. I know my iBook G4 800mhz (academic) shipped with 128MB and I had to buy some more right away to run mail.app and safari concurrently. That had 10.3.x on it. That machine was sold recently due to leopards requirements. A iBook G3 300mhz 160MB RAM system could run 10.3 but with only 4GB of disk space there was no room left for apps or data.
Or Mac OS. Safari is one thing, but consider webkit. Things like help wouldn't work if you removed it. I don't see opera insisting that they can be shipped on iPhones or Macs. Many websites do not work with safari. Either is strict about standards or they have a buggy browser as well. Similarly, most linux distros and even some BSD systems ship with browsers. Most people consider it part of the OS these days. If it doesn't "do" the Internet, it's not a computer. Will Opera complain that Dells shipping with ubuntu must include Opera? How about freedos?
I was starting to buy into your comments until I read "OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram". This is simply not possible. Even in Mac OS 9, you needed 64MB ram to run Netscape 6. I don't see how you could start any applications with 32mb ram in OS X. You can run 10.3 on 128MB RAM but mail.app crashes on moderate imap access and you are limited to one app at a time if you want any performance at all. Also, touting apple after leopard is silly. Leopard is just as bad as Vista on memory usage. I'm using 1.15GB of RAM on a Dual 867 G4 right now. I have safari, intellij idea (java ide), Colloquy (irc client) and terminal open.
Even if this article is wrong, it still shows an improvement that Microsoft and Apple have not shown in their last major releases. I'm quite happy to see some developers caring about memory usage. Are you listing Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla?
The next question is how well did the KDE team test it? Microsoft and Apple have been failing on that front too.
You said "AFAIK, you can file a lawsuit for any reason. Look at SCO for instance. No proof at all, yet the whole thing managed to stay in court for years. You can bet they talked to lawyers before they filed it."
Thus the legal teams at big companies are busy fighting "random" lawsuits.
A jerk? You're telling people to fuck off. You've interpreted a smug attitude from my statements which does not exist. On the Internet, you can't always tell what people mean because you don't hear the tone of my voice or other telling signs. And this time I am giving you some captain obvious information. You don't understand how chat works. However, I can understand that fuck off is a rude comment. It's quite clear as there is no nice way to say that.
Just because everyone "knows" something doesn't mean they've thought about it. You seem to be fixated on my attitude and not the topic on hand. Your fuck offs on slashdot show that you can't communicate in a courteous manner.
You just made the same type of assumption. You assumed everyone feels like you do about DRM or that it's obvious that the pros and cons are identical to everyone. (i.e. they carry the same weight) I saw a pattern that posters assumed the kindle sucked for everyone. I was simply raising a counter point. If you can't participate in a logical discussion then please leave.
The cons do not outweigh the pros to me and to many people buying kindles on amazon. Apparently the whole world does not agree with your POV.
Why do you assume the lawyers are looking at everything the programmers or whoever they outsource to is doing? Maybe verizon contracted it to a consulting firm in the US or elsewhere and didn't bother to look at the license?
I can think of a lot of things Verizon's lawyers might be doing including dealing with RIAA lawsuits against their customers. Big companies don't always think. If lawyers checked everything, we would never see patent lawsuits either. Think about it.
If management even knew it had GPL code, I'd imagine lawsuits will only make companies stop using all open source code. They will not bother to research which licenses are "safe". Companies don't want to give away trade secrets and they don't realize GPL software forces them to do so.
I don't think people understand the appeal. My wife and I asked for one for Christmas from my mother-in-law. My wife loves books. However, we have 4 bookshelves full of them and no more room to store books along with our other media and ridiculous number of old computers.
This device can save storage space for books! That is the key selling feature to us. I agreed to it because I mostly buy computer books and Amazon actually has some. The sony product only has idiots and dummies books. It is limited to fiction effectively. I actually like the sony product design wise and cost better, but no books I like.
In my case, I can buy a lot of technology books that I don't necessarily need for quick reference. I wouldn't buy K & R on there, but many other books that I use rarely would fit nicely.
So, don't assume the product is useless to everyone. I see why many people would be turned off, but there are valid reasons to want a Kindle. I won't argue about the use of the word cult, but I find it interesting that Kindle fans and Apple fans are getting lumped together. Why is it that any small group on slashdot is bad except for Linux users? In reality, this site caters to a bunch of "cults". Is one more so wrong? I know I must be new here.
Yes, but it only takes one negative experience to wipe out the positive. I ran Windows Vista x64 Ultimate between January and last week. I decided to upgrade my PC to 4GB of RAM from 2.5GB. I figured I had a 64bit OS and my motherboard supports 8GB even according to Microsoft's KB on supported chipsets. So I put the RAM in. Next thing I know Vista takes 22 minutes to boot. I had random corruption and finally I lost my MBR, all the security permissions on the NTFS volume and about 10GB of data disappeared. Vista would not boot of course.
I tested the RAM. It's good. MidnightBSD (amd64) works fine with the RAM. An older 32bit ubuntu cd booted, but 7.10 did not. I have a feeling it's a combination of a screwy Intel bios not mapping memory right and a failure in vista. The motherboard is an Intel DP965LT.
Aside from software that would not run in Vista, I would say that my experience was mostly positive. However, since 64bit windows is not ready for additional memory (which is the whole point of 64bit) and there are no other advantages to vista aside from integrated media center for me, I went back to XP Pro (32bit). I can't get drivers for 64bit XP and I figured it wouldn't work either.
I haven't experienced a data loss of this magnitude from a windows install since Windows 98. Granted, you can blame me for trying to feed Vista's memory hungry environment with more RAM, but it is the first time I've ever seen a memory upgrade cause this level of damage. Coincidently my wife bought 4GB of RAM for her Mac Pro. Leopard was up in less than 30 minutes with 5GB of RAM and playing WoW.
Vista doesn't boot slowly if you have enough RAM. I had it working on a Pentium D 805 with 2.5GB of RAM, 250GB sata hdd and a 7300GS in January. I have since upgraded the cpu to a core 2 duo 2.13Ghz (forget the model.. 4MB cache version), ati x1900, and attempted a memory upgrade to 4GB.
Disaster struck with the memory upgrade. Vista got incredibly slow. It took 22minutes to get to the desktop! The CPU was constantly spiked and I couldn't find out what was using it. TrustedInstaller.exe and a svchost process were using one of the cores, but the other core was an unknown. I'm running x64 vista ultimate so it should be able to handle 4GB of ram on an intel DP965LT motherboard. (it's capable of 8GB max) The memory tested good after 10 hours using memtest. Vista froze up and upon reboot I had no boot sector. Using a vista DVD, i was able to repair the NTFS volume, but the OS is no longer bootable or repairable. At this very moment I'm copying my iTunes videos off the drive using an ubuntu live cd to a Mac running samba.
It's certainly possible something happened with the hard drive or ram, but midnightbsd and ubuntu are working fine so I doubt it's the ram.
I'm an unhappy Vista user. Then again I only bought it for gaming which sucks on it. I'm starting to understand the XP fanboys. (for gaming)
It's easier to budget for bigger expenses than little ones? I feel like I'm getting nickeled and dimed by doing the right thing and recycling instead of just throwing it in the trash and covering it up.
Open Office has it's problems. Try porting it to a new platform. All the bloat you see at the top is much worse at the bottom. In some ways, it's easier to get Firefox or Gnome working than Open Office. Linux people never notice because they don't have to compile Open Office or Java from source. They get official support just like Microsoft does. As a developer, I can tell you that Abiword and even koffice is easier to work with in terms of getting it to run on a new platform.
As a user, I find Open Office to have a very annoying UI. koffice is in some ways similar to Microsoft Office and it works as expected most of the time. Open Office tries to look like old versions of Microsoft Office but behaves much differently. Some things are out of the way. I have a large list of commercial and FOSS products in front of it.
Personally, I use koffice on my laptop to take notes in classes, Pages and Word (2004 or 2007 depending on os) to write papers, and Word (Mac) when I have to do things at school without my laptop. I've thought about switching to koffice all the time. It's not too bad.
You don't have to agree with me about Open Office. You just need to realize that no single word processor is going to make everyone happy. Most people can't even agree to use the same version of Microsoft Word. 2007 vs 97 has a big design and usability gap. What might be interesting is having a common backend and just have several different UIs for people who like different word processors in OSS. Say combine abiword, koffice and replace open office's backend with the new one. Then we have a working, smaller word processor with three different user interfaces.
We never buy Macs with minimum RAM at work. It doesn't matter if it's a desktop, laptop or server. The iMacs I referenced have 2GB of RAM. The system with the least RAM I've discussed is my wife's Mac Pro. She's smart enough to reset her video settings after an update. She showed me the difference. I'm 100% certain it's swap related. She did install the 10.5.1 update, but I do not know if that made any difference with her frame rate. I can tell that people saying it's faster are not using most of the new features. If I don't turn anything new on, it only consumes more memory without a huge drop in speed unless it has to swap out a lot. My wife is not using spaces, time machine or any other new features. It is totally swap based. I was careful not to speculate on the speed decrease beyond World of Warcraft because I can't quantify it with numbers. In fact, as we went through so much hell installing it I'm trying to not focus on that system. It's not because I'm dumb like some people have implied with their ridiculous statements about not letting it INDEX SPOTLIGHT. It does that automatically right after it's up. I always let it do that by itself. Plus that is a one time process and then it just updates as needed.As for speed decreases, time machine causes a lot of file copies between the primary disk and whatever secondary disk on a very frequent schedule by default with no way to change it. It's either on, off or you're doing it manually. Obviously like the swap issue, anything causing massive disk io is going to slow down an OS that has to swap on many systems during upgrading. I also realize that operating systems sometimes need more RAM when upgrading. However, it is not fair to say the new one runs faster if it needs more resources than the last one in a significant quantity. It is NOT faster on the SAME hardware. It needs more hardware just as Windows does. I'm sure this opinion could be debated. As a counter point, Linux and BSD rarely need to have double the RAM to run properly. I realize that Mac users were probably blow away by my Vista vs OS X comments. I feel that way and I can't help it. I don't hate apple, but I'm not in the reality distortion field any longer. Being treated like shit when you're trying to get a working Leopard disk didn't help me one bit. My boss was told that boot camp was still in beta in Leopard! Another person was told that apple wouldn't fix their laptop because they used bootcamp in Leopard on a new Mac that shipped with Leopard! Something is seriously wrong at the local apple stores. As for usability, I would say that OS X has gone backwards on the issue with Leopard. Transparency makes things harder to read. Many of the friendly system preferences are now buried. The firewall + services area used to have nice checkboxes, now it's impossible to enable/disable services in the firewall admin which moved to security. You can do an all or nothing block (minus critical services, see 10.5.1) or enable applications. I have to go CLI to actually configure ipfw. That is very annoying and while I am experienced configuring ipfw in FreeBSD and MidnightBSD, I'd rather have a nice GUI to do it in. Mac OS X server has a very nice interface for that. (tiger) Luckily the transparency is disabled on old Macs. The dock is harder to see what applications are running. I use mine on the left side with auto hide. The little white dots do not have good contrast anymore. Spotlight's new window that looks like finder is extremely annoying. Apple changed things to change things. They were obviously influenced by Vista and if you don't think so look again. Transparency is just one example. There is quite a bit of feature parity as well. I'm not the only person who's said it's slower at work. Every Mac user I know sees it. I realize some of you are flat out lying about the speed decrease because you love apple. Some of you might not be seeing it legitimately because the workflow you have is not going to trigger it. I work for the computer science department at a University; not like we're all idiots on a computer. There are some benefits to upgrading to Leopard. Spaces, Time Machine (if you can pay the price in sync times), and the new Terminal for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
There is only so much we can do to secure any network from attack. There will always be ways to spoof identities, and commit illegal acts. Retooling the whole thing won't make a different in that regard. We may up the bar a little, but that won't last for long. People will think of new ways to work around what we can think of today.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind an overhaul on DNS and SMTP to slow some spammers and other jerks down.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere. Think about it, someone in Russia can do almost anything outside their country and not be prosecuted. In other places, we have parts of the Internet filtered because of some lame moral code.
I just wish these people who don't understand the spirit of the Internet would take their marbles and go home.
That's a shame.
I got an old NeXTStation on ebay for $150 about two years ago. I bought a spare hard drive for it with the developer tools and OpenStep 4.2. I managed to get OpenSSH, lynx and WorldWideWeb (the first browser) working on it.
Here's a screenshot from it when I was running nextstep 3.2 (pardon the capitalization).
http://www.foolishgames.com/luke/firstbrowser.tiff
Apparently, you haven't used Leopard.
You recycled a NeXT? That seems wrong.
That was solved by raising the price of new releases. I've noticed that when a movie appears on DVD in stores, it's often $20 instead of 10-15. At one point, one only saw that for special editions, but since high def came out they are more expensive. I think it's to close the gap between blueray and DVD prices. I'm sure the cost of shipping the damn things to retailers is up with gas prices, but we shouldn't just be seeing that in the last 6 months.
I've been waiting on new films and buying older movies and Tv shows on DVD at the $7-15 price range lately.
This could very well be a local thing. I would love to know if this is widespread.
What chipset on the motherboard? I couldn't get Vista Ultimate x64 to work with 4GB of ram on an Intel DP965LT motherboard (obviously with a 965 chipset). I'd love to know the magic.
It's scary what his position is at Microsoft and he can't even pick out a computer that can really run Vista. If the employees can't get it, how does my Mother.
Warcraft III != World of Warcraft
I wish all companies did this with their old games. For the brief stint on x64 vista, I had trouble playing some games because the copy protection was not patched for vista (64bit). For instance, you can't play age of empires II conquerers (expansion) in vista x64, but supposedly macrovision released an update for 32bit vista. It's very annoying that I have all these games and can't play them. I ended up going back to XP for this and other reasons.
I could get the game to install, just not run without crashing.
Not vista, but it would be helpful to buy a Mac pre-configured with bootcamp + Windows XP. I don't want it at home, but at work it would be quite nice. I could see small business customers loving it.
My boss and I make jokes about Apple, Inc. vs. Apple Computer, Inc. Dropping computer in the name was not just to aid in the sale of phones. I think Apple has lost some focus on their computers. Leopard has not been as big as they had hoped. We're putting off the upgrade at work as long as possible. Leopard reminds me of vista in many ways. I won't bother to argue that point again. I know some people love Leopard and I've even found one person at work who loves Vista. I'm still hoping for a patch to get rid of the memory leaks with their new garbage collection in Cocoa. Most "power" users I know can get about a day a gigabyte (RAM) out of Leopard. I get two to three days out of my old PowerMac with 1.75GB of RAM. A friend of mine has 3GB in a Mac Pro and he can get 3-4 days before a required reboot. My boss has 2GB in his iMac, and left it on during the holidays. He couldn't login to it to reboot when he got back after a week. There are problems with it.
I also seem problems with customer service. I pre-ordered Leopard. It came at 9AM on release day. I attempted to install it on my wife's Mac Pro. The DVD was damaged and I hadn't noticed. I skipped the disc check and prepared to install only to have the install die. I'm not blaming apple for having a non bootable Mac. That was my fault. However, I had to wait until 6PM to call them, wait on hold for 10 minutes to talk to someone, and then 50 more minutes to get a resolution. They didn't have 10.5 in their system yet to send me a replacement disc. The tech eventually arranged for me to go to the nearest apple store. He said I just needed the DVD and original package. I walked in to be harrassed by the Apple Store employees for not bringing a receipt. Had that Mac been my only system, I could not print it anyway! It wouldn't boot. The box only had a packing slip. I offered to bring it up on a demo system, but they didn't want that. Finally, they gave me a new Leopard box. I haven't been very fond of going to that apple store ever sense. The tech was nice, and I did realize it was a launch day. I didn't appreciate the shitty service at the apple store. It's not the first time I had problems in that store. I ordered online so I wouldn't have to go there. I had a friend who had to get his laptop fixed. They guy told him bootcamp was beta in Leopard! He also told him it was too unstable to use. WTF.
Microsoft may claim that Windows can address more RAM, but not really. If you look at their KB, you'll see a list of supported motherboards that can address 4GB or more of memory. Those boards are 3 intel chipsets. I have an Intel DP965LT motherboard. I recently bought 2 new 1GB chips to bring my board to 4GB total. I had 64bit vista. The system booted extremely slow, had data corruption on disk and took out my boot loader. An older ubuntu CD allowed me to test RAM, but the 7.10 CD freaked out too. BSD worked fine.
I would say Microsoft is not ready for 4GB+ memory configurations in consumer devices. It may work in servers, but it's not working on the desktop. Conversely, my wife upgraded her Mac from 1GB to 5GB for Leopard the same day. Her Mac Pro is working flawlessly.
DirectX compatibility maps memory from your video card into the 32bit address space which causes problems with windows. The more RAM your video card has, the less your system can have. Further, there is a bug in Vista that double maps it for DirectX 9 support. There is a patch available for that issue. My PC had an ATI x1900 with 512MB. The system is stable with 3GB but more causes problems. If this can happen with a supported chipset, what happens on other systems?
My motherboard claims to support 8GB of RAM. I tried several different versions of the BIOS. The Vista x64 ultimate installer doesn't even work right with 4GB in. I just decided to go back to XP Pro after that experience. The point of Vista is gone in my book.
I never claimed an iMac didn't ship with any specific minimum on ram, just that you can't run OS X on 32MB ram. Early iMacs did NOT ship with OS X as you noted. My first Mac was an iMac DV 400mhz that i believe shipped with 64MB ram and OS 9.0.4. (i'm sure about the OS) I went to 512MB ram so that I could run everything I needed on it. I had to buy the ram to run netscape so that's why I brought it up. IE would run, but I didn't like IE on the Mac that much.
I ran 10.1 on that iMac. I'm quite familiar with it. 10.2 was faster. Each OS release up to tiger was faster but consumed more RAM. Leopard is the first release that seems slower, but I have close to the bare minimum in CPU and it seems to use 40% cpu when idle most of the time. (dual 867mhz)
I wish you'd check your facts before saying someone else is wrong. You didn't even read my post correctly. As I recall, (not 100% certain) 10.1-10.3 "required" 128MB ram. I know my iBook G4 800mhz (academic) shipped with 128MB and I had to buy some more right away to run mail.app and safari concurrently. That had 10.3.x on it. That machine was sold recently due to leopards requirements. A iBook G3 300mhz 160MB RAM system could run 10.3 but with only 4GB of disk space there was no room left for apps or data.
Or Mac OS. Safari is one thing, but consider webkit. Things like help wouldn't work if you removed it. I don't see opera insisting that they can be shipped on iPhones or Macs. Many websites do not work with safari. Either is strict about standards or they have a buggy browser as well. Similarly, most linux distros and even some BSD systems ship with browsers. Most people consider it part of the OS these days. If it doesn't "do" the Internet, it's not a computer. Will Opera complain that Dells shipping with ubuntu must include Opera? How about freedos?
What about Opera's dominance on the Nintendo Wii?
I was starting to buy into your comments until I read "OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram". This is simply not possible. Even in Mac OS 9, you needed 64MB ram to run Netscape 6. I don't see how you could start any applications with 32mb ram in OS X. You can run 10.3 on 128MB RAM but mail.app crashes on moderate imap access and you are limited to one app at a time if you want any performance at all. Also, touting apple after leopard is silly. Leopard is just as bad as Vista on memory usage. I'm using 1.15GB of RAM on a Dual 867 G4 right now. I have safari, intellij idea (java ide), Colloquy (irc client) and terminal open.
Even if this article is wrong, it still shows an improvement that Microsoft and Apple have not shown in their last major releases. I'm quite happy to see some developers caring about memory usage. Are you listing Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla?
The next question is how well did the KDE team test it? Microsoft and Apple have been failing on that front too.
Thanks for proving my point:
You said "AFAIK, you can file a lawsuit for any reason. Look at SCO for instance. No proof at all, yet the whole thing managed to stay in court for years. You can bet they talked to lawyers before they filed it."
Thus the legal teams at big companies are busy fighting "random" lawsuits.
A jerk? You're telling people to fuck off. You've interpreted a smug attitude from my statements which does not exist. On the Internet, you can't always tell what people mean because you don't hear the tone of my voice or other telling signs. And this time I am giving you some captain obvious information. You don't understand how chat works. However, I can understand that fuck off is a rude comment. It's quite clear as there is no nice way to say that.
Just because everyone "knows" something doesn't mean they've thought about it. You seem to be fixated on my attitude and not the topic on hand. Your fuck offs on slashdot show that you can't communicate in a courteous manner.
You just made the same type of assumption. You assumed everyone feels like you do about DRM or that it's obvious that the pros and cons are identical to everyone. (i.e. they carry the same weight) I saw a pattern that posters assumed the kindle sucked for everyone. I was simply raising a counter point. If you can't participate in a logical discussion then please leave.
The cons do not outweigh the pros to me and to many people buying kindles on amazon. Apparently the whole world does not agree with your POV.
Why do you assume the lawyers are looking at everything the programmers or whoever they outsource to is doing? Maybe verizon contracted it to a consulting firm in the US or elsewhere and didn't bother to look at the license?
I can think of a lot of things Verizon's lawyers might be doing including dealing with RIAA lawsuits against their customers. Big companies don't always think. If lawyers checked everything, we would never see patent lawsuits either. Think about it.
If management even knew it had GPL code, I'd imagine lawsuits will only make companies stop using all open source code. They will not bother to research which licenses are "safe". Companies don't want to give away trade secrets and they don't realize GPL software forces them to do so.
I don't think people understand the appeal. My wife and I asked for one for Christmas from my mother-in-law. My wife loves books. However, we have 4 bookshelves full of them and no more room to store books along with our other media and ridiculous number of old computers.
This device can save storage space for books! That is the key selling feature to us. I agreed to it because I mostly buy computer books and Amazon actually has some. The sony product only has idiots and dummies books. It is limited to fiction effectively. I actually like the sony product design wise and cost better, but no books I like.
In my case, I can buy a lot of technology books that I don't necessarily need for quick reference. I wouldn't buy K & R on there, but many other books that I use rarely would fit nicely.
So, don't assume the product is useless to everyone. I see why many people would be turned off, but there are valid reasons to want a Kindle. I won't argue about the use of the word cult, but I find it interesting that Kindle fans and Apple fans are getting lumped together. Why is it that any small group on slashdot is bad except for Linux users? In reality, this site caters to a bunch of "cults". Is one more so wrong? I know I must be new here.
Yes, but it only takes one negative experience to wipe out the positive. I ran Windows Vista x64 Ultimate between January and last week. I decided to upgrade my PC to 4GB of RAM from 2.5GB. I figured I had a 64bit OS and my motherboard supports 8GB even according to Microsoft's KB on supported chipsets. So I put the RAM in. Next thing I know Vista takes 22 minutes to boot. I had random corruption and finally I lost my MBR, all the security permissions on the NTFS volume and about 10GB of data disappeared. Vista would not boot of course.
I tested the RAM. It's good. MidnightBSD (amd64) works fine with the RAM. An older 32bit ubuntu cd booted, but 7.10 did not. I have a feeling it's a combination of a screwy Intel bios not mapping memory right and a failure in vista. The motherboard is an Intel DP965LT.
Aside from software that would not run in Vista, I would say that my experience was mostly positive. However, since 64bit windows is not ready for additional memory (which is the whole point of 64bit) and there are no other advantages to vista aside from integrated media center for me, I went back to XP Pro (32bit). I can't get drivers for 64bit XP and I figured it wouldn't work either.
I haven't experienced a data loss of this magnitude from a windows install since Windows 98. Granted, you can blame me for trying to feed Vista's memory hungry environment with more RAM, but it is the first time I've ever seen a memory upgrade cause this level of damage. Coincidently my wife bought 4GB of RAM for her Mac Pro. Leopard was up in less than 30 minutes with 5GB of RAM and playing WoW.
Vista doesn't boot slowly if you have enough RAM. I had it working on a Pentium D 805 with 2.5GB of RAM, 250GB sata hdd and a 7300GS in January. I have since upgraded the cpu to a core 2 duo 2.13Ghz (forget the model.. 4MB cache version), ati x1900, and attempted a memory upgrade to 4GB.
Disaster struck with the memory upgrade. Vista got incredibly slow. It took 22minutes to get to the desktop! The CPU was constantly spiked and I couldn't find out what was using it. TrustedInstaller.exe and a svchost process were using one of the cores, but the other core was an unknown. I'm running x64 vista ultimate so it should be able to handle 4GB of ram on an intel DP965LT motherboard. (it's capable of 8GB max) The memory tested good after 10 hours using memtest. Vista froze up and upon reboot I had no boot sector. Using a vista DVD, i was able to repair the NTFS volume, but the OS is no longer bootable or repairable. At this very moment I'm copying my iTunes videos off the drive using an ubuntu live cd to a Mac running samba.
It's certainly possible something happened with the hard drive or ram, but midnightbsd and ubuntu are working fine so I doubt it's the ram.
I'm an unhappy Vista user. Then again I only bought it for gaming which sucks on it. I'm starting to understand the XP fanboys. (for gaming)
It's easier to budget for bigger expenses than little ones? I feel like I'm getting nickeled and dimed by doing the right thing and recycling instead of just throwing it in the trash and covering it up.
Indirectly. I'm not against paying taxes for recycling. I just don't want to pay the day I need to get rid of something. I live in an apartment.
Open Office has it's problems. Try porting it to a new platform. All the bloat you see at the top is much worse at the bottom. In some ways, it's easier to get Firefox or Gnome working than Open Office. Linux people never notice because they don't have to compile Open Office or Java from source. They get official support just like Microsoft does. As a developer, I can tell you that Abiword and even koffice is easier to work with in terms of getting it to run on a new platform.
As a user, I find Open Office to have a very annoying UI. koffice is in some ways similar to Microsoft Office and it works as expected most of the time. Open Office tries to look like old versions of Microsoft Office but behaves much differently. Some things are out of the way. I have a large list of commercial and FOSS products in front of it.
Personally, I use koffice on my laptop to take notes in classes, Pages and Word (2004 or 2007 depending on os) to write papers, and Word (Mac) when I have to do things at school without my laptop. I've thought about switching to koffice all the time. It's not too bad.
You don't have to agree with me about Open Office. You just need to realize that no single word processor is going to make everyone happy. Most people can't even agree to use the same version of Microsoft Word. 2007 vs 97 has a big design and usability gap. What might be interesting is having a common backend and just have several different UIs for people who like different word processors in OSS. Say combine abiword, koffice and replace open office's backend with the new one. Then we have a working, smaller word processor with three different user interfaces.
We never buy Macs with minimum RAM at work. It doesn't matter if it's a desktop, laptop or server. The iMacs I referenced have 2GB of RAM. The system with the least RAM I've discussed is my wife's Mac Pro. She's smart enough to reset her video settings after an update. She showed me the difference. I'm 100% certain it's swap related. She did install the 10.5.1 update, but I do not know if that made any difference with her frame rate. I can tell that people saying it's faster are not using most of the new features. If I don't turn anything new on, it only consumes more memory without a huge drop in speed unless it has to swap out a lot. My wife is not using spaces, time machine or any other new features. It is totally swap based. I was careful not to speculate on the speed decrease beyond World of Warcraft because I can't quantify it with numbers. In fact, as we went through so much hell installing it I'm trying to not focus on that system. It's not because I'm dumb like some people have implied with their ridiculous statements about not letting it INDEX SPOTLIGHT. It does that automatically right after it's up. I always let it do that by itself. Plus that is a one time process and then it just updates as needed.As for speed decreases, time machine causes a lot of file copies between the primary disk and whatever secondary disk on a very frequent schedule by default with no way to change it. It's either on, off or you're doing it manually. Obviously like the swap issue, anything causing massive disk io is going to slow down an OS that has to swap on many systems during upgrading. I also realize that operating systems sometimes need more RAM when upgrading. However, it is not fair to say the new one runs faster if it needs more resources than the last one in a significant quantity. It is NOT faster on the SAME hardware. It needs more hardware just as Windows does. I'm sure this opinion could be debated. As a counter point, Linux and BSD rarely need to have double the RAM to run properly. I realize that Mac users were probably blow away by my Vista vs OS X comments. I feel that way and I can't help it. I don't hate apple, but I'm not in the reality distortion field any longer. Being treated like shit when you're trying to get a working Leopard disk didn't help me one bit. My boss was told that boot camp was still in beta in Leopard! Another person was told that apple wouldn't fix their laptop because they used bootcamp in Leopard on a new Mac that shipped with Leopard! Something is seriously wrong at the local apple stores. As for usability, I would say that OS X has gone backwards on the issue with Leopard. Transparency makes things harder to read. Many of the friendly system preferences are now buried. The firewall + services area used to have nice checkboxes, now it's impossible to enable/disable services in the firewall admin which moved to security. You can do an all or nothing block (minus critical services, see 10.5.1) or enable applications. I have to go CLI to actually configure ipfw. That is very annoying and while I am experienced configuring ipfw in FreeBSD and MidnightBSD, I'd rather have a nice GUI to do it in. Mac OS X server has a very nice interface for that. (tiger) Luckily the transparency is disabled on old Macs. The dock is harder to see what applications are running. I use mine on the left side with auto hide. The little white dots do not have good contrast anymore. Spotlight's new window that looks like finder is extremely annoying. Apple changed things to change things. They were obviously influenced by Vista and if you don't think so look again. Transparency is just one example. There is quite a bit of feature parity as well. I'm not the only person who's said it's slower at work. Every Mac user I know sees it. I realize some of you are flat out lying about the speed decrease because you love apple. Some of you might not be seeing it legitimately because the workflow you have is not going to trigger it. I work for the computer science department at a University; not like we're all idiots on a computer. There are some benefits to upgrading to Leopard. Spaces, Time Machine (if you can pay the price in sync times), and the new Terminal for instance.