Well, if you are going to pay the developers you might as well set up a corporation (it isn't that difficult) and hire the developers as employees(!) and then charge for the product. In case you'll feel guilty for some reason about actually building something and selling it(!), provide an outstanding product with outstanding support. The consumers will be happy because they've gotten something they couldn't have gotten any other place, and for an affordable price and with good support. Oh, and you, as the corporation, can pay your developers and they'll have money to feed their kids.
This sounds like a hell of a system doesn't it:) I heard this type of system thrived in the United States during the 1800's, but has all but vanished now.
Yeah, unforutnately you're in the wrong place brother. People don't talk about anything objectively here. If it is done to make a dollar or if it is Microsoft it sucks.
To read the posts here you would think that XP is an unusable pile of dung that won't even boot. That is why these arguments posted here carry no weight at all in the real world. These guys come off as hacker freaks who squint at sunlight and curse anything that isn't built by hackers. I've worked with people like the folks who post these things. They aren't successful people. It's the "my shit doesn't stink" because it is open source, yada yada yada.
These guys hurt the cause more than help it. Some M$ products do need help, just like any other software package. But when it is destructive instead of constructive, what good will it do?
Hmm... you think my mom will understand when I tell her to reload her box with Red Hat 9 but instead of just answering "yes", "yes"... etc. that she needs to tweak her install and only install and run fvwm?
Come to think of it, I'd probably have trouble with that too. These major distro installs are bloat-ware now. I think last time I loaded Mandrake I got like 5 web browsers? This goes beyond demonstrating open source availability. It gives the illusion that they think the only way a Linux distro would be worth anything is by cramming it full of everything imaginable to try to compensate for something.
IMHO OS X installs with a pretty close to perfect (for me anyway) set of apps. Although the preloaded iBook I just bought had some extra games loaded, I don't think it is part of the base OS X load.
One day soon will be known as "the day the music died."
It just won't be worth it anymore. There will be no legal way to listen to music at all. The radio stations will shut down, audio equipment will be taken off the market, and CD stores will close. All the musicians will move to San Francisco where bum payouts from the government are the highest.
P.S. If the nation's largest railroad also shuts down, a prophecy is being fufilled so watch out.
Sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged to me. It worked wonderfully well in the book, the whole world fell apart and the heros came back in after the fact and rebuilt things from the rubbish.
Really? Does software grow on trees now? Manufacturing of many items is a tiny slice of the cost of the research and design. Take a cancer drug that is in the works for 10 or 15 years. It finally comes out and it costs 10 cents a pill to physically make in the end. The company that developed the drug should just eat a half billion dollars in research and design and sell the drug at 10 cents a pill? Okay, that is a dumb question to ask here. A zillion people will respond that the moral thing to do is forget about the half billion in research. Best just to declare bankrupcy and publish the formula on the internet for the good of mankind.
Why do you need a choice on a $500 Dell? Dell makes a good box and if you can get one for $500 that is relatively modern and a good buy just for the hardware, the choice becomes fdisk and format. Just make sure you burn some ISO's first! If you get those two steps mixed up, an interm step of finding another machine to download and burn ISOs is required.
Intel also would intentionally cripple normal Pentium chips to sell them as Celerons. This is just the way software and even some hardware vendors work. I see nothing wrong with it at all.
You're right, upgrading wouldn't make any difference over time.
It is just like "recycling" those plastic grocery bags by using it for one more task before throwing it away. In most cases you haven't recycled jack because they are going to get thrown away anyway. And anyway, if we use up too much of something important, the price of the commodity will go up and people will find a way to use something else. It is like the gasoline argument. We won't (and shouldn't) see electric cars in mass use until oil starts becoming very scarce and the price hits the ceiling. Then everyone will give their left arm for an electric car and you can bet your ass every auto maker will build them and they'll become cheaper and better than the few that were forced into production today by government.
True, it is pretty obvious most folks here have never actually been in a corporate data center for a medium to large sized company.
When you see what these guys are doing with big boxes (Sun 6500's up to the 15K) you realize how much of apples and oranges this dicussion really is. Anyobody who thinks that Linux on Intel is a threat to this type of a market is crazy.
That being said, Linux is making a little ground on other architectures, but to be honest I haven't seen a single customer yet who is actually doing it in production- to spite all the IBM commercials on TV. I was working at a client site this week where they are trying to get Linux set up under Z OS on the 390 (runs under Z OS similar to how Unix System Services runs, I believe.) I don't think they'll go with this solution though since Websphere comes well integrated into Unix System Services and is a well maintained and supported platform-stable as hell and not a change management nightmare. The only advantage to running Linux up there is the fact that it apparently uses ASCII encoding instead of EBCDIC- which can cause a nightmare porting Unix apps to Unix System Services.
"Fleecing the sucker" is the dictionary definition of this situation
You're right.... free choice is overrated and unacceptable if it doesn't match the choices of others. That is what this is all about, isn't it? Most users decided they'd rather use Windows than DOS and Apple wasn't good enough at marketing to present anybody with a reasonable second choice. Most hard-core Linux geeks don't like this choice so they complain about it.
If what you said is true everyone here should be just as pissed about the fact that I bought a totally overpriced iBook and paid a Mac tax. Christ alive- I'm being dead serious when I say the iBook was a rip off by most peoples standards. It was probably twice the price of comparable Intel hardware and you can't make the argment that the extra $$$ is for the OS because it isn't- simple math can figure out that it is just overpriced hardware. An 800mhz laptop with a slow-motion bus for $1100? The BBB or ACLU or someone should get involved here at those rates. An old thinkpad with those specs from TigerDirect or somewhere running KDE with an Aqua theme should be around $600. Yet a lot of Slashdotters love Mac/OS X.
I think people just hate Microsoft and can't come to grips with the reasons why. I don't like XP that much but I don't go around telling everyone who runs it that they are brainwashed. The bottom line is that it provides a lot of easy to use functionality for an affordable price. People can't accept that. Sure it has some security issues but none of which are anywhere NEAR as bad as the spyware/adware laden apps that people install that aren't even really documented as spyware. Try installing the latest Morpheus and then run Spybot Search and Destroy. And Morpheus is free software. See where this logic takes you? I don't know what to say. "Down with free software"? Lets go find Stalin's heir and have him decide for us because we're clearly too dumb?
The purpose of capitalism isn't to produce great, working, innovative products.
Yeah, you're right. You can build the biggest fucking pile of shit and people will buy it under Capitalism. Because when people are given a free choice they will demand a big pile of shit for their money instead of something good.
I just got back from Starbucks and instead of tasty coffee, I had the college kid behind the counter take a big fucking shit in my cup because that is what I'd rather have.
And the people will demand- "Give me shit for my money- build bigger piles of shit that stink worse, and I'll give you more money." Damn dude, you are so right on the money. You know EXACTLY how Capitalism works. You completely predicted the fact that I was going to have the college kid shit in my cup.
Either you or your professor (or both) were clearly jerking off during macro economics.
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a single company which controls 96% of the desktop market, about 50% of the low- to mid-end server market, and has an awful security record (from the standpoint of evidence, not design) I don't see a wonderful example of capitalism in action.
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a brand new PC for sale for $199 and realize that this brings an unbelievable amount of value to someone who has nothing but a minimum wage job, I see an EXCELLENT example of capitalism is action.
Capitalism is the first and only system to ever return anything to the lowest paid members of society. Of course, Communism (i.e. the dicatorship for the poor) tried to do something for the "common man." Hopefully you are lucky enough to know of someone who lived in the former Soviet Union so he or she can explain the details of this to you.
If you don't like M$ and want to put them out of business, instead of bitching about it you might want to volunteer to help teach Linux to minimum wage workers so they can save money on the operating system. Or go to work for a small company where you can make a difference and sell them on the idea of Linux. But mere bitching about the success of some company isn't going to help your cause any.
Isn't one of the benefits of the internet it's access to everyone? Shouldn't we help bring such access to all of those in our country who otherwise might be cut off from it and who are willing to pay for it?
No. I should no more have to pay to subsidize a pig farmer's local telecom infrastructure than the pig farmer should have to pay to subsidize a pig farm outside my office building because I have an inclination to smell pig shit. As for schools, if you live in the country your kids take Ag and learn how to polish a cow or pig or horse. If you live in the city you don't have this luxury but as a consolation you have internet access. I don't know when it became an inalienable right to have the right to buy Internet access even where there is none. When I was a kid, all I had was 300 baud access to a local BBS run by people preaching the Gaia Hypothesis with a side theme on how to become a Druid.
If it isn't economically effective to do something it means it shouldn't be done. P.S. I used to smell pig shit every day but decided I'd rather live in civilization so I moved. Shouldn't everyone have that choice?
I remember paying long distance and the per-minute connection charge to Quantum. Man that got expensive. Back in those days there was no such thing as 2.9 cent a minute LD. Of course, I was used to paying LD to use the modem. There was only a couple BBS's in town and to fufill the 1:10 upload:download ratio, you had to dial to an out of town BBS to get new software to upload that neither of the local BBSs had. Luckily most of the out of town BBSs were really cool- if you were calling LD they waived the upload:download ratio.
BTW, those Commodore-based BBSs were SWEET! They all made great use of the extended character set (found on the fronts of the keys on the C-64) so you got a great color/graphics experience. Seemed much better than the use of mere ANSI on the old IBM boads like Wildcat! and others.
because people will think it's a bigger deal than it will end up being
Definately correct on that part. Anybody who tried to use the source code in any kind of fashion would have M$ lawyers coming down on them like a fat man on a Twinkie and it would end right there- as it should.
Well, Apple/Mac OS continues to have basically no market share of any meaning in the PC industry... just a few perecent.
Palm OS on the other hand has anywhere from 50-80% depending on which country you are talking about. That share may be going up or down, but it doesn't really matter. The cost of software development in most cases doesn't make it worth it to develop for alternate desktop operating systems with tiny market shares. It come down to this: If you spend $X building software and support and gain $Y in sales as a result and $X > $Y, it isn't worth it. This isn't communist Russia, you don't build things just for the welfare of your iBook carrying Comrade. You build things to make a profit. Now, I'm a one-man shareware company and I sell my wares for Linux, OS X and Win32. But, my stuff is written in Java and to spite all the laughing and skepticism I really do "write once, run anywhere" and I really don't care if people laugh because I'm the one taking the check to the bank every month. But Java probably wouldn't help for stuff like HotSync- I'm not sure.
That said, the burden to fix this is on Apple. They HAVE to figure out a way to gain more market share. They need to drop this elite bullshit. They have the best OS out there (I'm a loyal user) and their hardware and software has massive appeal if they can just make the right marketing decisions to become a realistic alternative to all the Dell Win32 type boxes that are sold. You can't tell me they don't want to sell more units. I view their BMW defense as a simple comeback to defend their low sales.
I've visited KSC several times as well as many other museums that have Apollo artifacts, capsules, etc. I think there is adequate tangible historical representation of the Apollo program to make sure that future generations do not forget this accomplishment. Some rusty launch tower isn't going to mean anything to anybody except perhaps a handful of geeks that have some other motive such as their direct involvement in the space program, etc.
My Earth to the Moon DVD box set means a hell of a lot more to me as a space geek than some rusty piece of crap. We could probably fish out the toilet paper the Apollo astronauts wiped with too but why would we?
The calendaring app on the handheld isn't too bad. But, it really doesn't have a lot of value for most people if they can't sync it reliably to a good calendaring app on their desktop. The Zaurus desktop suite has some major issues- it isn't nearly as refined as Palm Desktop and to me just doesn't seem professional (I could be a bit anal as I develop user interfaces for a living.) The Zaurus can only sync with their desktop software too and there is ample proof in newgroups that synching is unreliable and sometimes just won't work. Also, last I checked they had dropped support for a desktop client that would run on Linux. Imagine that, a Linux handheld that only synchronizes with Win32.
There is also a desktop client that lets you move files over to the device via the USB Cradle, but it turns out that the easiest way to deal with the device is to treat it like the real computer that it is- by setting up FTP and moving the files over that way.
I should also mention that while the plastic case of the 5500 is questionable in quality (I'd prefer aluminum or something), the keyboard is extremely nice. It has a great feel to it and really adds a lot of value to the device. You can fire up Gaim on the thing and IM using the keyboard quite nicely.
In summary- if you decide to buy- buy it for the device, not the synching or the desktop software.
I have owned a Zaurus and a Sony Clie (Palm OS 4).
They are two different beasts. The Clie is a great address book, calendar, etc. and has good desktop software that I like since i refuse to use Outlook for calendaring. It is a small device and great at the traditional PDA functions. Synching is very refined and works well with XP and OS X 10.3 using iSync. I can sync right to Address Book and iCal.
The Zaurus was excellent at web browsing, hacking, running Java, running a real pop3 mail client, etc. Plug in a cheap WiFi CF card and you are good to go. But here is the thing. It is horrible at calendaring, synching, etc. The desktop software is pathetic. You almost certainly have to consider the Zaurus a very small linux based PC that stands by itself and forget about the desktop integration part.
All that being said, I sold the Zaurus on E-Bay recently and kept the Clie. The Zaurus is by far the best "toy". However, having a handheld Internet connected device wasn't that useful (for me, anway) especially since I own a 12 inch iBook. Having a list of important phone numbers and my calendar with me at all times and available instantly is important though and Palm devices do that very well.
Depending on what you want and need, the Zaurus might be a great choice. I had no complaints. It was stable and overall really cool. There is just something cool about using a handheld as a web server. (but then you inevitably end up asking "WHY"!)
True, I noticed as well that the code thought it was a beta. However the text on the web site had warning that it was in fact an alpha release. I think there was some real haste to get 'something' out since Tiger was already late.
The version I grabbed today reports itself as b32c. Anyway, it is good to see it is out there now in plain view. I was really hoping they'd move to support anti-aliasing in native Swing components.. for such a major release I really see no value added to Swing at all. Heck, at least we got mouse wheel support when going to 1.4 from 1.3.1!
XP should go pretty quick post-login unless you have a bunch of TSRs or something. Most users have TSR overkill... a coworker's system tray is full of crap that all has some sort of background process tied to it. Totally unecessary shit too. Does a person need Winamp, Winzip and MS Office agents always running? I think not.
I guess you'd have to compare apples to apples. Assemble two boxes (XP and Linux) as closely as possible... i.e. DHCP workstations with a similar number of services. Part of the problem may be that the default install from most distros give you WAY too much crap. Sure you can turn it off but for novice users it would be nice to have a super-thin workstation option that just gives you a single browser, mail client, etc. Most non-developer/non techie folks won't need 5 web browsers. XP out of the box actually loads pretty thin. Its when you start adding apps that take over your system when the problems start.
Slashdot Mirror
Set up a foundation. Take pledges and donations.
:) I heard this type of system thrived in the United States during the 1800's, but has all but vanished now.
Well, if you are going to pay the developers you might as well set up a corporation (it isn't that difficult) and hire the developers as employees(!) and then charge for the product. In case you'll feel guilty for some reason about actually building something and selling it(!), provide an outstanding product with outstanding support. The consumers will be happy because they've gotten something they couldn't have gotten any other place, and for an affordable price and with good support. Oh, and you, as the corporation, can pay your developers and they'll have money to feed their kids.
This sounds like a hell of a system doesn't it
Yeah, unforutnately you're in the wrong place brother. People don't talk about anything objectively here. If it is done to make a dollar or if it is Microsoft it sucks.
To read the posts here you would think that XP is an unusable pile of dung that won't even boot. That is why these arguments posted here carry no weight at all in the real world. These guys come off as hacker freaks who squint at sunlight and curse anything that isn't built by hackers. I've worked with people like the folks who post these things. They aren't successful people. It's the "my shit doesn't stink" because it is open source, yada yada yada.
These guys hurt the cause more than help it. Some M$ products do need help, just like any other software package. But when it is destructive instead of constructive, what good will it do?
Hmm... you think my mom will understand when I tell her to reload her box with Red Hat 9 but instead of just answering "yes", "yes"... etc. that she needs to tweak her install and only install and run fvwm?
Come to think of it, I'd probably have trouble with that too. These major distro installs are bloat-ware now. I think last time I loaded Mandrake I got like 5 web browsers? This goes beyond demonstrating open source availability. It gives the illusion that they think the only way a Linux distro would be worth anything is by cramming it full of everything imaginable to try to compensate for something.
IMHO OS X installs with a pretty close to perfect (for me anyway) set of apps. Although the preloaded iBook I just bought had some extra games loaded, I don't think it is part of the base OS X load.
One day soon will be known as "the day the music died."
It just won't be worth it anymore. There will be no legal way to listen to music at all. The radio stations will shut down, audio equipment will be taken off the market, and CD stores will close. All the musicians will move to San Francisco where bum payouts from the government are the highest.
P.S. If the nation's largest railroad also shuts down, a prophecy is being fufilled so watch out.
Sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged to me. It worked wonderfully well in the book, the whole world fell apart and the heros came back in after the fact and rebuilt things from the rubbish.
having no manufacturing costs of your own
Really? Does software grow on trees now? Manufacturing of many items is a tiny slice of the cost of the research and design. Take a cancer drug that is in the works for 10 or 15 years. It finally comes out and it costs 10 cents a pill to physically make in the end. The company that developed the drug should just eat a half billion dollars in research and design and sell the drug at 10 cents a pill? Okay, that is a dumb question to ask here. A zillion people will respond that the moral thing to do is forget about the half billion in research. Best just to declare bankrupcy and publish the formula on the internet for the good of mankind.
Why do you need a choice on a $500 Dell? Dell makes a good box and if you can get one for $500 that is relatively modern and a good buy just for the hardware, the choice becomes fdisk and format. Just make sure you burn some ISO's first! If you get those two steps mixed up, an interm step of finding another machine to download and burn ISOs is required.
Intel also would intentionally cripple normal Pentium chips to sell them as Celerons. This is just the way software and even some hardware vendors work. I see nothing wrong with it at all.
You're right, upgrading wouldn't make any difference over time.
It is just like "recycling" those plastic grocery bags by using it for one more task before throwing it away. In most cases you haven't recycled jack because they are going to get thrown away anyway. And anyway, if we use up too much of something important, the price of the commodity will go up and people will find a way to use something else. It is like the gasoline argument. We won't (and shouldn't) see electric cars in mass use until oil starts becoming very scarce and the price hits the ceiling. Then everyone will give their left arm for an electric car and you can bet your ass every auto maker will build them and they'll become cheaper and better than the few that were forced into production today by government.
True, it is pretty obvious most folks here have never actually been in a corporate data center for a medium to large sized company.
When you see what these guys are doing with big boxes (Sun 6500's up to the 15K) you realize how much of apples and oranges this dicussion really is. Anyobody who thinks that Linux on Intel is a threat to this type of a market is crazy.
That being said, Linux is making a little ground on other architectures, but to be honest I haven't seen a single customer yet who is actually doing it in production- to spite all the IBM commercials on TV. I was working at a client site this week where they are trying to get Linux set up under Z OS on the 390 (runs under Z OS similar to how Unix System Services runs, I believe.) I don't think they'll go with this solution though since Websphere comes well integrated into Unix System Services and is a well maintained and supported platform-stable as hell and not a change management nightmare. The only advantage to running Linux up there is the fact that it apparently uses ASCII encoding instead of EBCDIC- which can cause a nightmare porting Unix apps to Unix System Services.
"Fleecing the sucker" is the dictionary definition of this situation
You're right.... free choice is overrated and unacceptable if it doesn't match the choices of others. That is what this is all about, isn't it? Most users decided they'd rather use Windows than DOS and Apple wasn't good enough at marketing to present anybody with a reasonable second choice. Most hard-core Linux geeks don't like this choice so they complain about it.
If what you said is true everyone here should be just as pissed about the fact that I bought a totally overpriced iBook and paid a Mac tax. Christ alive- I'm being dead serious when I say the iBook was a rip off by most peoples standards. It was probably twice the price of comparable Intel hardware and you can't make the argment that the extra $$$ is for the OS because it isn't- simple math can figure out that it is just overpriced hardware. An 800mhz laptop with a slow-motion bus for $1100? The BBB or ACLU or someone should get involved here at those rates. An old thinkpad with those specs from TigerDirect or somewhere running KDE with an Aqua theme should be around $600. Yet a lot of Slashdotters love Mac/OS X.
I think people just hate Microsoft and can't come to grips with the reasons why. I don't like XP that much but I don't go around telling everyone who runs it that they are brainwashed. The bottom line is that it provides a lot of easy to use functionality for an affordable price. People can't accept that. Sure it has some security issues but none of which are anywhere NEAR as bad as the spyware/adware laden apps that people install that aren't even really documented as spyware. Try installing the latest Morpheus and then run Spybot Search and Destroy. And Morpheus is free software. See where this logic takes you? I don't know what to say. "Down with free software"? Lets go find Stalin's heir and have him decide for us because we're clearly too dumb?
The purpose of capitalism isn't to produce great, working, innovative products.
Yeah, you're right. You can build the biggest fucking pile of shit and people will buy it under Capitalism. Because when people are given a free choice they will demand a big pile of shit for their money instead of something good.
I just got back from Starbucks and instead of tasty coffee, I had the college kid behind the counter take a big fucking shit in my cup because that is what I'd rather have.
And the people will demand- "Give me shit for my money- build bigger piles of shit that stink worse, and I'll give you more money." Damn dude, you are so right on the money. You know EXACTLY how Capitalism works. You completely predicted the fact that I was going to have the college kid shit in my cup.
Either you or your professor (or both) were clearly jerking off during macro economics.
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a single company which controls 96% of the desktop market, about 50% of the low- to mid-end server market, and has an awful security record (from the standpoint of evidence, not design) I don't see a wonderful example of capitalism in action.
I don't know about you guys, but when I see a brand new PC for sale for $199 and realize that this brings an unbelievable amount of value to someone who has nothing but a minimum wage job, I see an EXCELLENT example of capitalism is action.
Capitalism is the first and only system to ever return anything to the lowest paid members of society. Of course, Communism (i.e. the dicatorship for the poor) tried to do something for the "common man." Hopefully you are lucky enough to know of someone who lived in the former Soviet Union so he or she can explain the details of this to you.
If you don't like M$ and want to put them out of business, instead of bitching about it you might want to volunteer to help teach Linux to minimum wage workers so they can save money on the operating system. Or go to work for a small company where you can make a difference and sell them on the idea of Linux. But mere bitching about the success of some company isn't going to help your cause any.
Isn't one of the benefits of the internet it's access to everyone? Shouldn't we help bring such access to all of those in our country who otherwise might be cut off from it and who are willing to pay for it?
No. I should no more have to pay to subsidize a pig farmer's local telecom infrastructure than the pig farmer should have to pay to subsidize a pig farm outside my office building because I have an inclination to smell pig shit. As for schools, if you live in the country your kids take Ag and learn how to polish a cow or pig or horse. If you live in the city you don't have this luxury but as a consolation you have internet access. I don't know when it became an inalienable right to have the right to buy Internet access even where there is none. When I was a kid, all I had was 300 baud access to a local BBS run by people preaching the Gaia Hypothesis with a side theme on how to become a Druid.
If it isn't economically effective to do something it means it shouldn't be done. P.S. I used to smell pig shit every day but decided I'd rather live in civilization so I moved. Shouldn't everyone have that choice?
I remember paying long distance and the per-minute connection charge to Quantum. Man that got expensive. Back in those days there was no such thing as 2.9 cent a minute LD. Of course, I was used to paying LD to use the modem. There was only a couple BBS's in town and to fufill the 1:10 upload:download ratio, you had to dial to an out of town BBS to get new software to upload that neither of the local BBSs had. Luckily most of the out of town BBSs were really cool- if you were calling LD they waived the upload:download ratio.
BTW, those Commodore-based BBSs were SWEET! They all made great use of the extended character set (found on the fronts of the keys on the C-64) so you got a great color/graphics experience. Seemed much better than the use of mere ANSI on the old IBM boads like Wildcat! and others.
I had an nice little app called "Drive Music" that played a nice melody through the 1541. That wouldn't constitute abuse, would it?
because people will think it's a bigger deal than it will end up being
Definately correct on that part. Anybody who tried to use the source code in any kind of fashion would have M$ lawyers coming down on them like a fat man on a Twinkie and it would end right there- as it should.
Well, Apple/Mac OS continues to have basically no market share of any meaning in the PC industry... just a few perecent.
Palm OS on the other hand has anywhere from 50-80% depending on which country you are talking about. That share may be going up or down, but it doesn't really matter. The cost of software development in most cases doesn't make it worth it to develop for alternate desktop operating systems with tiny market shares. It come down to this: If you spend $X building software and support and gain $Y in sales as a result and $X > $Y, it isn't worth it. This isn't communist Russia, you don't build things just for the welfare of your iBook carrying Comrade. You build things to make a profit. Now, I'm a one-man shareware company and I sell my wares for Linux, OS X and Win32. But, my stuff is written in Java and to spite all the laughing and skepticism I really do "write once, run anywhere" and I really don't care if people laugh because I'm the one taking the check to the bank every month. But Java probably wouldn't help for stuff like HotSync- I'm not sure.
That said, the burden to fix this is on Apple. They HAVE to figure out a way to gain more market share. They need to drop this elite bullshit. They have the best OS out there (I'm a loyal user) and their hardware and software has massive appeal if they can just make the right marketing decisions to become a realistic alternative to all the Dell Win32 type boxes that are sold. You can't tell me they don't want to sell more units. I view their BMW defense as a simple comeback to defend their low sales.
Sounds like a job for...
Quantum Physics.
Hey, isn't IBM already on that one?
I agree.
I've visited KSC several times as well as many other museums that have Apollo artifacts, capsules, etc. I think there is adequate tangible historical representation of the Apollo program to make sure that future generations do not forget this accomplishment. Some rusty launch tower isn't going to mean anything to anybody except perhaps a handful of geeks that have some other motive such as their direct involvement in the space program, etc.
My Earth to the Moon DVD box set means a hell of a lot more to me as a space geek than some rusty piece of crap. We could probably fish out the toilet paper the Apollo astronauts wiped with too but why would we?
The calendaring app on the handheld isn't too bad. But, it really doesn't have a lot of value for most people if they can't sync it reliably to a good calendaring app on their desktop. The Zaurus desktop suite has some major issues- it isn't nearly as refined as Palm Desktop and to me just doesn't seem professional (I could be a bit anal as I develop user interfaces for a living.) The Zaurus can only sync with their desktop software too and there is ample proof in newgroups that synching is unreliable and sometimes just won't work. Also, last I checked they had dropped support for a desktop client that would run on Linux. Imagine that, a Linux handheld that only synchronizes with Win32.
There is also a desktop client that lets you move files over to the device via the USB Cradle, but it turns out that the easiest way to deal with the device is to treat it like the real computer that it is- by setting up FTP and moving the files over that way.
I should also mention that while the plastic case of the 5500 is questionable in quality (I'd prefer aluminum or something), the keyboard is extremely nice. It has a great feel to it and really adds a lot of value to the device. You can fire up Gaim on the thing and IM using the keyboard quite nicely.
In summary- if you decide to buy- buy it for the device, not the synching or the desktop software.
I have owned a Zaurus and a Sony Clie (Palm OS 4). They are two different beasts. The Clie is a great address book, calendar, etc. and has good desktop software that I like since i refuse to use Outlook for calendaring. It is a small device and great at the traditional PDA functions. Synching is very refined and works well with XP and OS X 10.3 using iSync. I can sync right to Address Book and iCal.
The Zaurus was excellent at web browsing, hacking, running Java, running a real pop3 mail client, etc. Plug in a cheap WiFi CF card and you are good to go. But here is the thing. It is horrible at calendaring, synching, etc. The desktop software is pathetic. You almost certainly have to consider the Zaurus a very small linux based PC that stands by itself and forget about the desktop integration part.
All that being said, I sold the Zaurus on E-Bay recently and kept the Clie. The Zaurus is by far the best "toy". However, having a handheld Internet connected device wasn't that useful (for me, anway) especially since I own a 12 inch iBook. Having a list of important phone numbers and my calendar with me at all times and available instantly is important though and Palm devices do that very well.
Depending on what you want and need, the Zaurus might be a great choice. I had no complaints. It was stable and overall really cool. There is just something cool about using a handheld as a web server. (but then you inevitably end up asking "WHY"!)
True, I noticed as well that the code thought it was a beta. However the text on the web site had warning that it was in fact an alpha release. I think there was some real haste to get 'something' out since Tiger was already late.
The version I grabbed today reports itself as b32c. Anyway, it is good to see it is out there now in plain view. I was really hoping they'd move to support anti-aliasing in native Swing components.. for such a major release I really see no value added to Swing at all. Heck, at least we got mouse wheel support when going to 1.4 from 1.3.1!
This is the first true Beta release. The release that showed up at the end of December/beginning of January was marked as an alpha release.
Prior to that some pieces of the JVM were available via the early access program but it was nowhere close to a complete J2SDK distribution.
XP should go pretty quick post-login unless you have a bunch of TSRs or something. Most users have TSR overkill... a coworker's system tray is full of crap that all has some sort of background process tied to it. Totally unecessary shit too. Does a person need Winamp, Winzip and MS Office agents always running? I think not.
I guess you'd have to compare apples to apples. Assemble two boxes (XP and Linux) as closely as possible... i.e. DHCP workstations with a similar number of services. Part of the problem may be that the default install from most distros give you WAY too much crap. Sure you can turn it off but for novice users it would be nice to have a super-thin workstation option that just gives you a single browser, mail client, etc. Most non-developer/non techie folks won't need 5 web browsers. XP out of the box actually loads pretty thin. Its when you start adding apps that take over your system when the problems start.