Apple has been Orwellian for the last 10 years. Is there any other explanation for devices in 2010 that can only connect over proprietary data cables, through proprietary software, that have no removable storage, no mass storage class driver support, and have to use a company mandated store to install any applications? Not to mention a smartphone that can't be used as a tethered modem? Their complete ban on all uncontrolled input and output is completely Orwellian, and it's no surprise that they treat their forums that way too.
As far as I know they started the Smartphone market. I had a Windows Mobile Smartphone 5 years ago that had fairly high speed CDMA internet, tethering, and quite a few handy applications (the HTC Apache). There were models around some years before that too.
The problem is, they had this massive lead over everyone else, but they were completely apathetic towards their own product. There were no great first party applications, and there was no organized way to find applications for the phone (not advocating a singular market entity, but having no means at all to find applications isn't good either). They also didn't market it to anybody. The only people who even knew were the ones who went looking for the capabilities on their own. The only company who wasn't completely apathetic towards the market was HTC, who went through a lot of trouble to make Windows Mobile usable, and later to even make it look nice.
Now Microsoft is completely shooting themselves in the face with Windows Mobile 7 - no backwards compatibility, no multi-tasking, no UI changes (and a bad looking UI from shots so far)... what the hell? So upgrading to a new Windows Mobile phone in the near future means I'm starting over from scratch?
I went ahead and switched to Android, though I stayed with HTC.
I do hope that Microsoft gets around to making a nice portable version of Office though, and that they have the decency to port it to all platforms (or at least Android, Documents To Go kind of sucks).
They used to pull this shit back in the 90s when I used them too. Back when System 7 was out, there were tons of freely available system extensions and control panels on the web, and small applications that added desktop gadgets and whatnot. Well, both System 7.5 and System 8 were nothing but Apple ripoffs of extensions and control panels stolen from the community and packaged into overpriced OS upgrades. Systems 7 and 7.5 even had compatible Finders (shells), there was practically nothing different about the OSs aside from the stolen extensions.
I put up with that behavior then since at the time Apple was years ahead of the rest of the personal computer market, but I jumped ship as soon as I could get a good alternative.
The puzzle is oddly cool, but have you looked at the poster? It's the stuff of nightmares.
The napkins are going to be randomly placed in restaurant napkin dispensers.
Bullshit - the dock on Mac didn't show up until 7.5, and it was stolen from a free (non-Apple) system extension then anyway (like almost every "upgrade" after System 7).
Neither of the Home editions has the rather important group policy snap-in to set up a local security policy. Neither will even allow it to be run if you get the file. Can't speak for the other editions, though I've heard its in Ultimate. Have been considering upgrading to Ultimate (I've the disc) if it will let me do a delta install and not format everything.
MMJB got bad around the same time its original programmer 'accidentally' drowned in a lake. Look it up sometime. It was already bad at the time it came with the iPod (of course, that generation of iPod was also a POS and iTunes was and is no better).
For that matter, www.live.com is providing more refined search results that Google lately, with less crap and more relevant links. I still cross-check stuff on Google sometimes, but it hasn't been my primary search for a few weeks.
It kind of scares me how Google's attitudes have been changing recently, since I love and am tightly bound to GMail, and I'm not sure how much longer I can trust it. And changing primary email addresses can be a ton of trouble, what with all of the people who can't remember where to mail me at anyway.
And for the record, you couldn't pay me to install Google Desktop Search. I'd rather have a virus.
I tend to write for IE so that I don't have to depend on the end-user's screen resolution, etc. One of the quirks of IE (the flawed box model) allows me to write web applications that use all available screen space by proportionally sizing all elements while still using fixed width margins and padding. I can't stand pages (much less applications) that are set in pathetic narrow columns, but under the correct W3C box model (which adds fixed margins and padding to the outside of the % width contents) the only way to preserve a layout without adding tons of extra markup is to fix content widths, which means narrow columns for the lowest common denominator resolution (or resizing all content objects with JS on load, but that is really sloppy).
Until the W3C fixes their box model to match the superior IE one, I'll keep coding to IE. Microsoft occasionally does things right, and its not as if everyone hasn't adopted one of their creations before (AJAX)...
I also can't stand that Firefox doesn't allow me to return false on the JS onselectstart handler, but that's a comparatively minor nuisance (false onselectstart is very useful in creating draggable objects from divs).
That's been going on for years with PC games. When Descent 3 came out, I don't think anybody could run it. I tend to wait a year or two before messing with PC games now, first because I can get killer video cards for them cheap, and second because the games are then cheap as well. Recently I've been playing Deus Ex: Invisible War (courtesy of Steam) and Jedi Knight 2, both of which look gorgeous with every bell and whistle turned on, on a roughly $400 computer (granted, I've had the DVD drive, LCD, case, and power supply for almost 6 years now and only replaced the innards).
Not that I'm especially frugal or anything though, I waste my money on console games, gun parts, and legos instead.
Cox Cable gave Gloucester, VA roughly the same treatment. They started promising cable internet when I was in high school, and didn't deliver until my last year of college (roughly a 6 year gap). Cox is alright comparitively though, the real bastard provider in VA is Adelphia out in the western bit.
I'm fairly certain that Quake 3 and UT on the Dreamcast were playable with a mouse and keyboard.
On that note, I find the mouse/keyboard combo very uncomfortable but nonetheless better for games that requires large directional changes and 360 degree response (like Quake 3), but I much prefer a gamepad for precision shooting (ghost recon, rainbow 6 types of games). If I precise shoot for a while with a mouse, my whole arm cramps up, similar to what happens if I'm doing pixel-editing/tweaking in photoshop for too long. The gamepad makes precise targeting feel a lot more natural, but I usually over-adjust if I try to make an accurate large turn or large vertical move with one.
Since consoles have been getting more and more competitive with the PC lately, I've almost quit playing PC games simply because I don't like my arms cramped (though I hate gamepad rumble, fortunately its easy to turn off).
Yea, but unfortunately gmail for mobile really, really sucks. Both the mobile web layout and the Java VM app suck. Fortunately, if you go directly to "http://mail.google.com/mail/h/" you can use the full gmail interface on almost any mobile browser and it won't try to auto-redirect you to their mobile interface (like the main site does). Ever notice that a lot of the useful (and distinctive) quirks of Google's search don't work on the pda view of their default page (things like unit and currency conversions, and movie time lookups)?
Their strange POP server doesn't even work with WM5's mail service (though SMTP seems to).
Frankly, Google's current support for mobile devices is very poor.
They may be turning around. Recently they released a new version of maps that actually runs native on WM5 with decent speed, and its fairly easy to use (except that there doesn't seem to be a way to zoom off-center, but that's just a UI quirk). The biggest problem with the new maps release (though it is a thousand times better than the last one) is that most of the easiest to access and prominent controls are for stupid crap like "find businesses near this location" rather than what one really needs in the application, which is a quick one handed way to input a road name, state and/or zip code to bring the map to that location. It also won't find US addresses if you follow them with ", USA", which I find sort of odd (this was a problem with looking up contacts, since most of them automatically had USA as a country, and I had to go through and remove them to make the contact lookup work).
I figure one more release and they might have a good program. Right now Windows Live maps beat Google Maps on accuracy, readability, and user interface but Google's is a LOT faster (roughly 4x). I've been switching back and forth between the two for the last few days.
When was this? I got a new passport mailed about two weeks ago, and now I'm curious if mine has that (I would check, but its at home... I glanced at it and put it back in the envelope for now).
Wow, that E90 looks like incredible hardware. Its even a mass storage class USB device. A shame there's no Windows Mobile version of it. Heck, with that amount of RAM, why not a full Windows 2000 version?
Ah, I'd only looked at the (empty) product site.
This actually looks really cumbersome, and nothing like an OQO. Speaking of the OQO, I just noticed they've got a shinier new model out now, but its still insanely overpriced. With 1GB of RAM, a warranty, and a dock its nearly $3k, which is absolutely terrible.
I dunno, it made me sell my iPod. I put up with the damned thing for about 4 weeks and couldn't take it anymore.
I think its the worst control interface for handheld electronics I've ever seen. An MP3 player is a device that should be operable blind, in a pocket, and with other stuff around it, as it is afterall a small pocketable device. It should be reasonably scratchproof and water-resistant, and immune to shock.
Compare it to one of the real revolutionary MP3 players, like the Rio. On the rio, every control was a button, and every button had a unique shape and feel (some were round, some oval, some convex, some concave, some on the front, and some on the side). Every button had exactly one function. You could have the Rio in your pocket and effortlessly change songs, pause, play, skip, etc with one hand and without having to remove it to stare moronically at its screen.
Fortunately small useful flash players are starting to make a comeback. Even apple's newest shuffle (the small metal square one) looks like it shows a lot of promise, but I'm not buying another Apple unless its also a mass-storage-class USB device with either a standard two-ended USB cable or a built-in USB jack (I would seriously consider the new shuffle if it met those standards, it is nice looking hardware otherwise). Granted the lack of MSC was a fault of the Rio as well, but there were some decent free applications that made it more accessible.
Having driven a metro for about 8 years, I absolutely love that idea. One change though: the explosives need to be in detachable side panels/bumpers that adhere to whatever hits you as the rest of the car escapes.
My metro died about a year and a half ago in a wreck, and it was a lot more durable than I thought it would be. It basically bounced off the car that hit me and went into a ditch. It was light enough that I hadn't actually thought it had much more than cosmetic damage (a mirror and some back left bumper parts), but it turned out that it hit the ditch in such a way as to slightly bend its front axle, and it would have cost far too much to repair it. So I finally got rid of it, which was shame since I really liked that car (it could drive around fine with its entire dashboard electronics shorted out, which was nice). Ended up getting a sunfire to replace it since they were so heavily rebated at the time, and its an OK car, but it doesn't handle as well as the metro.
I dunno about newer small cars, but it certainly wasn't a mobile tomb, it was more of a small tank. The large pickup that hit me took considerably more damage when it flipped on its side away from the impact (some curious mixture of high center of gravity, overreaction, and speed) and skidded off into the (fortunately grassy) median.
Huh, I'll have to mess with the charting stuff (I rarely, if ever make them). I'm sure that even if its acceptable (to me) its not going to be as robust... after all, with a little VBA you can modify Excel's charting to do all kinds of things (control charts, etc). I'm actually not certain if Calc supports any kind of scripting to add functions.
In any case, Excel is probably the hardest battle open source software will ever have to fight, as it is the best of all MS products.
I find Writer to infinitely superior to MS Word, but Calc is a little lacking compared to Excel. Impress is on par with Powerpoint. I prefer OO over MSO simply for Writer, since documents and spreadsheets are 90% of the 'office' files I deal with, and I can cope with the shortcomings of Calc.
Well, the annual license cost is smaller than purchasing the license. If I remember the figures right, over a 6 year period the cost of any ELA product is roughly retail. However, if a newer product comes out during those 6 years, the upgrade option is included without additional cost. And at the end, should the decide to abandon the ELA, they keep all license options they have and just don't ever accrue new ones. Sort of like buying software as an annuity. I do wish that the 6 year cost reflected a discount rate rather than retail though (maybe like an academic pricing annuity or something).
Well, I don't know about the whole government, but most of DoD uses Enterprise Licensing Agreements. These are contracts that provide access to classes of products rather than specific versions (say, 'desktop windows OS'). These run for multi-year periods before being renewed. Under an ELA, If you have XP, you are entitled to Vista IF you want it. Otherwise, you continue paying the license fee to keep the XP (OS) seat. This means that if no ELA customers adopt Vista, it doesn't effect MS at all, at least not until the ELA ends and is up for renewal.
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Apple has been Orwellian for the last 10 years. Is there any other explanation for devices in 2010 that can only connect over proprietary data cables, through proprietary software, that have no removable storage, no mass storage class driver support, and have to use a company mandated store to install any applications? Not to mention a smartphone that can't be used as a tethered modem? Their complete ban on all uncontrolled input and output is completely Orwellian, and it's no surprise that they treat their forums that way too.
As far as I know they started the Smartphone market. I had a Windows Mobile Smartphone 5 years ago that had fairly high speed CDMA internet, tethering, and quite a few handy applications (the HTC Apache). There were models around some years before that too. The problem is, they had this massive lead over everyone else, but they were completely apathetic towards their own product. There were no great first party applications, and there was no organized way to find applications for the phone (not advocating a singular market entity, but having no means at all to find applications isn't good either). They also didn't market it to anybody. The only people who even knew were the ones who went looking for the capabilities on their own. The only company who wasn't completely apathetic towards the market was HTC, who went through a lot of trouble to make Windows Mobile usable, and later to even make it look nice. Now Microsoft is completely shooting themselves in the face with Windows Mobile 7 - no backwards compatibility, no multi-tasking, no UI changes (and a bad looking UI from shots so far)... what the hell? So upgrading to a new Windows Mobile phone in the near future means I'm starting over from scratch? I went ahead and switched to Android, though I stayed with HTC. I do hope that Microsoft gets around to making a nice portable version of Office though, and that they have the decency to port it to all platforms (or at least Android, Documents To Go kind of sucks).
They used to pull this shit back in the 90s when I used them too. Back when System 7 was out, there were tons of freely available system extensions and control panels on the web, and small applications that added desktop gadgets and whatnot. Well, both System 7.5 and System 8 were nothing but Apple ripoffs of extensions and control panels stolen from the community and packaged into overpriced OS upgrades. Systems 7 and 7.5 even had compatible Finders (shells), there was practically nothing different about the OSs aside from the stolen extensions. I put up with that behavior then since at the time Apple was years ahead of the rest of the personal computer market, but I jumped ship as soon as I could get a good alternative.
The puzzle is oddly cool, but have you looked at the poster? It's the stuff of nightmares. The napkins are going to be randomly placed in restaurant napkin dispensers.
Bullshit - the dock on Mac didn't show up until 7.5, and it was stolen from a free (non-Apple) system extension then anyway (like almost every "upgrade" after System 7).
Neither of the Home editions has the rather important group policy snap-in to set up a local security policy. Neither will even allow it to be run if you get the file. Can't speak for the other editions, though I've heard its in Ultimate. Have been considering upgrading to Ultimate (I've the disc) if it will let me do a delta install and not format everything.
MMJB got bad around the same time its original programmer 'accidentally' drowned in a lake. Look it up sometime. It was already bad at the time it came with the iPod (of course, that generation of iPod was also a POS and iTunes was and is no better).
For that matter, www.live.com is providing more refined search results that Google lately, with less crap and more relevant links. I still cross-check stuff on Google sometimes, but it hasn't been my primary search for a few weeks.
It kind of scares me how Google's attitudes have been changing recently, since I love and am tightly bound to GMail, and I'm not sure how much longer I can trust it. And changing primary email addresses can be a ton of trouble, what with all of the people who can't remember where to mail me at anyway.
And for the record, you couldn't pay me to install Google Desktop Search. I'd rather have a virus.
Hey, Nixon was not a crook!
I tend to write for IE so that I don't have to depend on the end-user's screen resolution, etc. One of the quirks of IE (the flawed box model) allows me to write web applications that use all available screen space by proportionally sizing all elements while still using fixed width margins and padding. I can't stand pages (much less applications) that are set in pathetic narrow columns, but under the correct W3C box model (which adds fixed margins and padding to the outside of the % width contents) the only way to preserve a layout without adding tons of extra markup is to fix content widths, which means narrow columns for the lowest common denominator resolution (or resizing all content objects with JS on load, but that is really sloppy).
Until the W3C fixes their box model to match the superior IE one, I'll keep coding to IE. Microsoft occasionally does things right, and its not as if everyone hasn't adopted one of their creations before (AJAX)...
I also can't stand that Firefox doesn't allow me to return false on the JS onselectstart handler, but that's a comparatively minor nuisance (false onselectstart is very useful in creating draggable objects from divs).
That's been going on for years with PC games. When Descent 3 came out, I don't think anybody could run it. I tend to wait a year or two before messing with PC games now, first because I can get killer video cards for them cheap, and second because the games are then cheap as well. Recently I've been playing Deus Ex: Invisible War (courtesy of Steam) and Jedi Knight 2, both of which look gorgeous with every bell and whistle turned on, on a roughly $400 computer (granted, I've had the DVD drive, LCD, case, and power supply for almost 6 years now and only replaced the innards).
Not that I'm especially frugal or anything though, I waste my money on console games, gun parts, and legos instead.
Cox Cable gave Gloucester, VA roughly the same treatment. They started promising cable internet when I was in high school, and didn't deliver until my last year of college (roughly a 6 year gap). Cox is alright comparitively though, the real bastard provider in VA is Adelphia out in the western bit.
Its all I can say to people crashing while trying to type... until one gets me, then I'm gonna take home some spare hands.
I'm fairly certain that Quake 3 and UT on the Dreamcast were playable with a mouse and keyboard.
On that note, I find the mouse/keyboard combo very uncomfortable but nonetheless better for games that requires large directional changes and 360 degree response (like Quake 3), but I much prefer a gamepad for precision shooting (ghost recon, rainbow 6 types of games). If I precise shoot for a while with a mouse, my whole arm cramps up, similar to what happens if I'm doing pixel-editing/tweaking in photoshop for too long. The gamepad makes precise targeting feel a lot more natural, but I usually over-adjust if I try to make an accurate large turn or large vertical move with one.
Since consoles have been getting more and more competitive with the PC lately, I've almost quit playing PC games simply because I don't like my arms cramped (though I hate gamepad rumble, fortunately its easy to turn off).
Yea, but unfortunately gmail for mobile really, really sucks. Both the mobile web layout and the Java VM app suck. Fortunately, if you go directly to "http://mail.google.com/mail/h/" you can use the full gmail interface on almost any mobile browser and it won't try to auto-redirect you to their mobile interface (like the main site does). Ever notice that a lot of the useful (and distinctive) quirks of Google's search don't work on the pda view of their default page (things like unit and currency conversions, and movie time lookups)?
Their strange POP server doesn't even work with WM5's mail service (though SMTP seems to).
Frankly, Google's current support for mobile devices is very poor.
They may be turning around. Recently they released a new version of maps that actually runs native on WM5 with decent speed, and its fairly easy to use (except that there doesn't seem to be a way to zoom off-center, but that's just a UI quirk). The biggest problem with the new maps release (though it is a thousand times better than the last one) is that most of the easiest to access and prominent controls are for stupid crap like "find businesses near this location" rather than what one really needs in the application, which is a quick one handed way to input a road name, state and/or zip code to bring the map to that location. It also won't find US addresses if you follow them with ", USA", which I find sort of odd (this was a problem with looking up contacts, since most of them automatically had USA as a country, and I had to go through and remove them to make the contact lookup work).
I figure one more release and they might have a good program. Right now Windows Live maps beat Google Maps on accuracy, readability, and user interface but Google's is a LOT faster (roughly 4x). I've been switching back and forth between the two for the last few days.
When was this? I got a new passport mailed about two weeks ago, and now I'm curious if mine has that (I would check, but its at home... I glanced at it and put it back in the envelope for now).
Wow, that E90 looks like incredible hardware. Its even a mass storage class USB device. A shame there's no Windows Mobile version of it. Heck, with that amount of RAM, why not a full Windows 2000 version?
Ah, I'd only looked at the (empty) product site. This actually looks really cumbersome, and nothing like an OQO. Speaking of the OQO, I just noticed they've got a shinier new model out now, but its still insanely overpriced. With 1GB of RAM, a warranty, and a dock its nearly $3k, which is absolutely terrible.
Are there any pics of this thing anywhere? It sounds like an OQO.
I dunno, it made me sell my iPod. I put up with the damned thing for about 4 weeks and couldn't take it anymore. I think its the worst control interface for handheld electronics I've ever seen. An MP3 player is a device that should be operable blind, in a pocket, and with other stuff around it, as it is afterall a small pocketable device. It should be reasonably scratchproof and water-resistant, and immune to shock. Compare it to one of the real revolutionary MP3 players, like the Rio. On the rio, every control was a button, and every button had a unique shape and feel (some were round, some oval, some convex, some concave, some on the front, and some on the side). Every button had exactly one function. You could have the Rio in your pocket and effortlessly change songs, pause, play, skip, etc with one hand and without having to remove it to stare moronically at its screen. Fortunately small useful flash players are starting to make a comeback. Even apple's newest shuffle (the small metal square one) looks like it shows a lot of promise, but I'm not buying another Apple unless its also a mass-storage-class USB device with either a standard two-ended USB cable or a built-in USB jack (I would seriously consider the new shuffle if it met those standards, it is nice looking hardware otherwise). Granted the lack of MSC was a fault of the Rio as well, but there were some decent free applications that made it more accessible.
Having driven a metro for about 8 years, I absolutely love that idea. One change though: the explosives need to be in detachable side panels/bumpers that adhere to whatever hits you as the rest of the car escapes.
My metro died about a year and a half ago in a wreck, and it was a lot more durable than I thought it would be. It basically bounced off the car that hit me and went into a ditch. It was light enough that I hadn't actually thought it had much more than cosmetic damage (a mirror and some back left bumper parts), but it turned out that it hit the ditch in such a way as to slightly bend its front axle, and it would have cost far too much to repair it. So I finally got rid of it, which was shame since I really liked that car (it could drive around fine with its entire dashboard electronics shorted out, which was nice). Ended up getting a sunfire to replace it since they were so heavily rebated at the time, and its an OK car, but it doesn't handle as well as the metro.
I dunno about newer small cars, but it certainly wasn't a mobile tomb, it was more of a small tank. The large pickup that hit me took considerably more damage when it flipped on its side away from the impact (some curious mixture of high center of gravity, overreaction, and speed) and skidded off into the (fortunately grassy) median.
Huh, I'll have to mess with the charting stuff (I rarely, if ever make them). I'm sure that even if its acceptable (to me) its not going to be as robust... after all, with a little VBA you can modify Excel's charting to do all kinds of things (control charts, etc). I'm actually not certain if Calc supports any kind of scripting to add functions. In any case, Excel is probably the hardest battle open source software will ever have to fight, as it is the best of all MS products.
I find Writer to infinitely superior to MS Word, but Calc is a little lacking compared to Excel. Impress is on par with Powerpoint. I prefer OO over MSO simply for Writer, since documents and spreadsheets are 90% of the 'office' files I deal with, and I can cope with the shortcomings of Calc.
Well, the annual license cost is smaller than purchasing the license. If I remember the figures right, over a 6 year period the cost of any ELA product is roughly retail. However, if a newer product comes out during those 6 years, the upgrade option is included without additional cost. And at the end, should the decide to abandon the ELA, they keep all license options they have and just don't ever accrue new ones. Sort of like buying software as an annuity. I do wish that the 6 year cost reflected a discount rate rather than retail though (maybe like an academic pricing annuity or something).
Well, I don't know about the whole government, but most of DoD uses Enterprise Licensing Agreements. These are contracts that provide access to classes of products rather than specific versions (say, 'desktop windows OS'). These run for multi-year periods before being renewed. Under an ELA, If you have XP, you are entitled to Vista IF you want it. Otherwise, you continue paying the license fee to keep the XP (OS) seat. This means that if no ELA customers adopt Vista, it doesn't effect MS at all, at least not until the ELA ends and is up for renewal.