You said "MS Office". Are you referring to the desktop silo'd version or the online version? I'll assume you mean the one you have to use on your desktop PC.
Four problems.
It costs too much when the competition is free. Of course my problem solving didn't fail. I successfully moved us to Google Docs.
Office doesn't have real time collaborative editing. Google Docs does. We save real money when people can work together faster. If I tried to pitch Office to my boss after he's seen how much more gets done with Google Docs, he'd throw me out on my head.
When we create documents, we like them automatically shared and accessible from any other computer anywhere. Google Docs does this automatically and instantly. Office does not.
Google Docs works on the boss's iPad. MS Office does not.
You can't have multiple people editing a word document anymore than you can have multiple people driving a car on their way to the office.
To make such a far reaching statement, I assume you've actually tried it, right?
Well, I have and i find it works surprisingly well. We have two women where I work; one works mostly on the internet side and the other mostly on the b&m side. They both have to collaborate on creating things like custom order forms and promotional literature, etc. to send out to new clients.
Before I got there, one would start something in Excel or Word and make it a little ways, then email it to the other who would do some more work then email it back. They would do this however many times it took until they were satisfied.
The first thing I did was get them off of Office, then I showed them how to use Google Docs and the collaborative editing features. I've never seen two happier women over a word processor in my life. Now, what used to take days takes less than an hour. It's amazing. The little green cursor pops up on one screen and the red one on another and away they go.
The simultaneous editing of documents, in my opinion, makes up for any lack of features that Google Docs may suffer from in comparison to Office. It's unbelievable how much more productive people are when they take the time actually try it out and get used to it.
People have been running ARM Debian / Ubuntu on their Android devices for some time
True. I've been running Ubuntu Lucid on my Droid for a while now. It works great for things like rtorrent and many other cli tools that are just an apt-get away.
The thing is, and I hope the device the submission is about might solve this is: no X server on Android so you have to run a vnc server and viewer killing any hope of video acceleration. You end up with choppy browsing in Midori, choppy video playback, etc. And no sound. Forget using mplayer to listen to your mp3's if that's your thing. It's a mixed bag. You definitely have true dyed in the wool Ubuntu, Debian, whatever on your Droid but it's a bit limited in its utility if I may say so myself.
That's part of the appeal of the Tab. As far as I know, it's the very first device anywhere near the form factor of a phone that allows data without voice so affordably. I'm actually glad the US version doesn't have voice. If it did, the carriers would probably require it.
Heh, I use my tab as a phone everyday. And hold it right up to my ear like, "What?". I just run skype and google voice and away I go. The speaker at the bottom turned down is no louder than a phone earpiece and the mic is conveniently located right on the side. All this for 20 bucks a month for data and ~5 for skype number. And it makes a great machine to make posts on Slashdot talking about it to boot!
Right now, I'm setting up a system for a guy that involves a Galaxy Tab, a Droid, a couple of computers and an iPhone. What he wants is to make calls and text messages as cheaply as possible all using the same number. I signed him up with Google Voice for texts and call routing and Skype to actually carry the voice.
Now, the system works. The tablet has the internet connection. One GB per month for 20 bucks plus ~5 dollars for skype withb a dial out number. So, he's happy. Tether the phones to the tablet and he's off to the races.
Of course, now I'm sitting here with egg on my face since skype took a shit all day yesterday and no calls could be made. I've looked into using something else through sipdroid but, the level of setup and complexity to end up with what I pay 5 bucks a month for seems a bit, uh, daunting. Can you point me to a how-to or something that can get me up and running without pulling my hair out?
About the only thing my Acer Aspire One can do that my Galaxy Tab can't (and that I actually care about), is run Eclipse and the ADT plugin to... drum-roll please... write apps to run on my tablet.
Does it also magically make 10 hard drives appear as one, so you don't have to move files between drives to make enough free space for one bigger file?
Er, you're either confused or you don't understand the concept of things being useful for different purposes.
Windows also has that - it's called RAID and can be used with a hardware controller or in software. Neither version works if the hard drives are not identical (I have drives from 100GB up to 750GB), on different computers and were not bought (or installed) at the same time, but oer the years as I ran out of space.
Awesome. So does every other operating system under the sun. Oh, and with Linux, the drives don't have to be the same, only the partition size depending on your desired configuration.
So, on Windows it's C:\, D:\, E:\,... Z:\, on Linux it would be/mnt/hda1,/mnt/hdb1,/mnt/smb1,.../mnt/smb5
(and/mnt/hda1 is longer than C:\)
Not necessarily, Say my media player always looks in/home/oakgrove/Music for my mp3's and I have a separate drive that I always store my music on.
# mount/dev/sda2/home/oakgrove/Music
Now, all of my music seamlessly shows up where I want it. Same thing with vmware images, videos, whatever you want. If I put all of my drives in a RAID, I lose the flexibility of being able to yank the drive out and mount it in another machine. Of course, there are times when RAID is what you want, there are other times when it isn't.
2) Tab completion. I don't think I've ever typed more than 5 letters of a filename, of any length.
Which is good, but still less useful as GUI. A very common problem to me is that I want to download or copy some big file and while I have enough free space combines, none of the drives has enough space for that file, so I need to move some smaller files to make enough space for the big one. I can use "dir" to see the files in each folder, find the ones I can move then use "dir" multiple times to find out which drive has enough free space for those files then move them.
Or, I can open "My Computer" and see the free space of each drive, then go to some folder to look for files that can be moved or use some GUI tool like SpaceMonger to see what are the largest files and folder in the whole drive at once. This way is much less typing and much faster.
Sometimes a GUI is easier for very simple operations like you mention, however, as others have exemplified further up and down the thread, when complexity is added, the CLI is much faster and easier.
6 words into your post and you already resort to name calling.
If you would have bothered to read the parent post the iTroll was the one throwing insults
He didn't insult you. He accused you of talking out of your ass. Because you were.
The revisionist version of what you said:
And if you weren't lying and had actually bothered to read my previous posts regarding Apple I have said many times "If you don't mind paying a premium, have NO desire to use the device in any way not already approved by Apple, and at the end of the day want a "plug and play" device where it just does what is advertised, buy Apple. with the exception of the latest iPhone they really make good kit". Yep, that sounds like a bunch of "hate and antagonism "" against Apple users there.
What you actually said:
I'd say the odds are pretty good they are buying them for the bling bling factor.
I would say a BIG reason the iStuff sells is the "me too, I got money too!" demographic.
In a way the whole hullabaloo over the iStuff reminds me of that stupid $1000 "I have Money!" app
I could go on with the antagonistic hateful quotes but I'll just stop there. I wonder, does your head hurt from talking out of both sides of your mouth so much?
You see, unlike those that worship the iSteve or have drank the Redmond or Linus Koolaid, I frankly don't give a shit WHICH product you use
Bull. If you really didn't care what people used, you wouldn't have wasted countless hours through the years writing posts on here doling out your worthless drivel about the minutia of:
Apple-Control freak for a CEO, likes DRM WAAAAY too much, but has really nice designs and his products tend to last. MSFT-Ballmer wants to be Jobs so bad it hurts, wasting time with crap outside their core business like Zune, but at least listens to customers, see replacing Vista with 7. Linux- runs to CLI at the first sign of problems, waaaay too many fanatics that take the pointing out of any problem as an insult, lack of a stable driver ABI and troubleshooting GUIs make it hard for the average Joe, but it rocks on servers.
most of which is either flat out wrong, out of date or just plain biased to the point of caricature. There's a reason I foed you long ago and keep you permanently at -1 so I don't have to read your oral excrement unless I'm bored and just slumming around with the appropriately low threshold.
and have watched dumbfounded when guys can tell you to the penny what their iStuff cost, but can't give a reasonable answer as to what makes it better than product y. I even watched two college students nearly get to blows over which was better, the Mac Air or the Mac Pro, and pretty much the entire argument was over price and which one was more "exclusive".
Sure, dude. Whatever.
So you can pretend their aren't average Joes that are buying these based on high price, but I've seen plenty of them with my own eyes. Don't get me wrong, Apple makes some nice designs, but if they dropped their prices to Acer levels you'd watch their sales plummet. Same thing happened to Porsche BTW when they tried to offer an entry level boxer for under 30k. Humans like to feel "better" than their fellow man, and being able to outspend him makes one better, at least in the "keep up with the Joneses" types.
*Sigh* I feel sorry for your father having to put up with you. Anyone who views the same world as the rest of us yet reaches these kinds of ridiculously negative conclusions is only to be pitied. The Boxster failed to sell because it wasn't that great. It was seen as a "poseur's" car. Too similar to the 911 in appearance yet lacking everywhere else. If the 911 suddenly dropped in price to sub
Why is it that you feel the need to spread hate and antagonism against certain people just because their tastes in computers differs from your own? Does it make you feel smug and superior? Is it sexual? I've read many of your posts here and many stand out as being the products of a very unhappy and hateful person. I feel sorry for you.
What you're saying is that Linux is totally bulletproof, as long as you run it as much as possible like an iPhone -- trusting only applications that your OS provider says are okay, and that it's not reasonable to examine it in a situation where that's not the case.
How is installing applications from the repos anything like using an iPhone? With Linux, I can install any application I want from anywhere I want as long as it's compatible (just like most other OS's). I can compile from source, write and run my own code on it, whatever floats my boat. I and most other Linux users get most of our software from the repositories because 99 percent of anything you'd want to install is in there and the packages in the repos are generally well tested to work with the system you are using. It would be foolish to not use them. With the iPhone, unless you jailbreak it, you're locked in. That's a walled garden. No Linux distro I've ever used has worked like that at all.
My point is that running an installer to view a web site is a psychological hurdle for end users and one especially difficult for end users who aren't in the Administrators group.
People clicking on "installers" on web sites with reckless abandon is what keeps me in beer money. If anything, it's people with a clue that have the psychological hurdles to jump over before installing yet another plugin.
Other than the fact that the Chrome Frame installer, the Flash Player installer, and the Silverlight installer are all executable programs that the end user needs to download and then have an administrator run?
Yeah, and they all run on a computer and are composed of long strings of ones and zeroes. Are you writing a patent application or do you have an actual point?
Do you also get annoyed when Ubuntu pops up its Update Manager?
Only mildly. The difference is when the Update Manager in Ubuntu runs it updates the entire system so it's a one shot deal and I'm done. The annoyance cranks up when I'm on a customer's system and bespoke updater after bespoke updater pops up one after the other stealing focus. And you're proposing yet another one.
Would you still be in favor of rendering SWF to WebM if someone were to increase the file size of everything you upload or download by a factor of ten and then bill you for overages? Satellite Internet access in the United States still has a monthly cap of 5 to 10 GB.
I'm in agreement with you on this. That's what I meant by "This."
Google Chrome Frame, the HTML5 viewer for Internet Explorer, is just as much a plugin as Flash Player or Silverlight.
"Plugin" is just a word. Chrome Frame is really nothing like Flash or Silverlight.
n that case, the answer is not eliminating Flash Player or Silverlight but instead automatic updates.
I only use Windows when I'm charging someone to fix their broken virus-ridden install of it. If there is one thing that annoys me about it the most, it's the onslaught of Adobe Updater, iTunes Updater, Java Updater pop-ups that I have to endure upon logging into the user account. I guess we could always just add Silverlight to the list. What's one more, right?
How do you recommend making a vector animated series like Homestar Runner without Flash? Making it in Flash and then rendering the SWF to WebM for public distribution just bloats the file size by a factor of ten.
Here's my take on the whole netbook spec creep question. The original vision of what a netbook was was a miniature laptop that had just enough capability to get you on the web and do a few other basic things. They were small, light and very portable compared to regular laptops. Continuing that vision today would involve not adding bulk, size, and consequently price but by actually reducing those things. Instead of an "an Atom 330 with nVidia's ION", how about a Snapdragon and a PowerVR? No active cooling necessary, very little heat, much longer battery life with the same size battery, cheaper, and now it's even more portable. But that's just an example. The idea is to take the original vision and refine it with newer and newer technologies. Not take the original vision and try to shoehorn it into mini-laptop territory.
But, really, whatever dude. If you think this is a netbook, then so be it. Have a nice day.
But I do want easy access (no code digging) to see what information is being collected
Ask and ye shall receive
$ cat/etc/cron.daily/send-census
#!/bin/bash
# Send an "I am alive" ping to Canonical. This is used for surveying how many
# original OEM installs are still existing on real machines. Note that this
# does not send any user specific data; it only transmits the operating system
# version (/var/lib/ubuntu_dist_channel), the machine product name, and a
# counter how many pings were sent.
#
# (C) 2010 Canonical Ltd.
# License: GPL v2 or later
I responded with "And yet the UI pales compared to a closed-source project like iOS, and it's still a single company driving development, unlike your average OSS project, so it's not even that good an example."
Do you get it now? Do I need to use smaller words?
Why use small words when I can sum up my thoughts in 2 letters? Here they are:
bs
This is just pure FUD.
No it's not. I invoked no fear, created no uncertainty, nor implied any doubt.
Yawn. You said Android isn't an open source project. It is. Look up the word uncertainty.
Aside from the kernel (which has fuck-all to do with the UI), does android have a large community of volunteer developers?
Unbelievable. Yeah, aside from that kernel that has been continuously developed and refined for almost 2 decades and has had billions of dollars pumped into it, Android is just pure Google. I'm sure it took much more effort to come up with the DalvikVM and bionic than that one little kernel. It's just out of the kindness of their hearts that they decided to go with Linux rather than just whip up their own in their spare time.
No. It's no different than, say, Java: virtually all development is done by a single, commercial organization, that then releases their work for free.
See my previous statement.
Now, please, Android-fanboy, leave me alone.
Wow. Name calling. Your arguments just get better and better.
Anyone who's seen $PREMIUM_PRODUCT and $MASS_MARKET_PRODUCT side-by-side will tell you that the $MASS_MARKET_PRODUCT, while okay, pales beside the $PREMIUM_PRODUCT. The latter is just far cleaner and smoother.
People like choice. There is room in the market for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and the list goes on. I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make. And the GP was not even talking about the iPhone. You were apparently trying to argue over his comment about people liking Android's user interface. Personally, I like it. And, yes, I've used it and an iPhone side by side.
Besides which, Android, while its source is open, is not what I would call an open source project.
This is just pure FUD.
It's developed primarily by a single company paying their developers to build Android full time.
So, Google is developing the Linux kernel now? Somebody better let Torvalds know so he can quit wasting his time.
And yet it's still behind iOS in terms of usability.
Debatable. But even if it is, it must be ahead in other areas if sales are anything to go by.
According to this review, the iPad can loop a movie continuously for 11 hours and 25 minutes while connected to wi-fi. I can't imagine that using a full on netbook with a larger battery and an arm processor won't be able to duplicate this feat.
You almost had a worthy point until you ruined it by acting like an obnoxious jackass. That's right about the time I lost interest in whatever else you had to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Four problems.
You can't have multiple people editing a word document anymore than you can have multiple people driving a car on their way to the office.
To make such a far reaching statement, I assume you've actually tried it, right?
Well, I have and i find it works surprisingly well. We have two women where I work; one works mostly on the internet side and the other mostly on the b&m side. They both have to collaborate on creating things like custom order forms and promotional literature, etc. to send out to new clients.
Before I got there, one would start something in Excel or Word and make it a little ways, then email it to the other who would do some more work then email it back. They would do this however many times it took until they were satisfied.
The first thing I did was get them off of Office, then I showed them how to use Google Docs and the collaborative editing features. I've never seen two happier women over a word processor in my life. Now, what used to take days takes less than an hour. It's amazing. The little green cursor pops up on one screen and the red one on another and away they go.
The simultaneous editing of documents, in my opinion, makes up for any lack of features that Google Docs may suffer from in comparison to Office. It's unbelievable how much more productive people are when they take the time actually try it out and get used to it.
People have been running ARM Debian / Ubuntu on their Android devices for some time
True. I've been running Ubuntu Lucid on my Droid for a while now. It works great for things like rtorrent and many other cli tools that are just an apt-get away.
The thing is, and I hope the device the submission is about might solve this is: no X server on Android so you have to run a vnc server and viewer killing any hope of video acceleration. You end up with choppy browsing in Midori, choppy video playback, etc. And no sound. Forget using mplayer to listen to your mp3's if that's your thing. It's a mixed bag. You definitely have true dyed in the wool Ubuntu, Debian, whatever on your Droid but it's a bit limited in its utility if I may say so myself.
That's part of the appeal of the Tab. As far as I know, it's the very first device anywhere near the form factor of a phone that allows data without voice so affordably. I'm actually glad the US version doesn't have voice. If it did, the carriers would probably require it.
Heh, I use my tab as a phone everyday. And hold it right up to my ear like, "What?". I just run skype and google voice and away I go. The speaker at the bottom turned down is no louder than a phone earpiece and the mic is conveniently located right on the side. All this for 20 bucks a month for data and ~5 for skype number. And it makes a great machine to make posts on Slashdot talking about it to boot!
Now, the system works. The tablet has the internet connection. One GB per month for 20 bucks plus ~5 dollars for skype withb a dial out number. So, he's happy. Tether the phones to the tablet and he's off to the races.
Of course, now I'm sitting here with egg on my face since skype took a shit all day yesterday and no calls could be made. I've looked into using something else through sipdroid but, the level of setup and complexity to end up with what I pay 5 bucks a month for seems a bit, uh, daunting. Can you point me to a how-to or something that can get me up and running without pulling my hair out?
About the only thing my Acer Aspire One can do that my Galaxy Tab can't (and that I actually care about), is run Eclipse and the ADT plugin to... drum-roll please... write apps to run on my tablet.
Go figure.
Does it also magically make 10 hard drives appear as one, so you don't have to move files between drives to make enough free space for one bigger file?
Er, you're either confused or you don't understand the concept of things being useful for different purposes.
Windows also has that - it's called RAID and can be used with a hardware controller or in software. Neither version works if the hard drives are not identical (I have drives from 100GB up to 750GB), on different computers and were not bought (or installed) at the same time, but oer the years as I ran out of space.
Awesome. So does every other operating system under the sun. Oh, and with Linux, the drives don't have to be the same, only the partition size depending on your desired configuration.
So, on Windows it's C:\, D:\, E:\, ... Z:\, on Linux it would be /mnt/hda1, /mnt/hdb1, /mnt/smb1, ... /mnt/smb5
(and /mnt/hda1 is longer than C:\)
Not necessarily, Say my media player always looks in /home/oakgrove/Music for my mp3's and I have a separate drive that I always store my music on.
# mount /dev/sda2 /home/oakgrove/Music
Now, all of my music seamlessly shows up where I want it. Same thing with vmware images, videos, whatever you want. If I put all of my drives in a RAID, I lose the flexibility of being able to yank the drive out and mount it in another machine. Of course, there are times when RAID is what you want, there are other times when it isn't.
2) Tab completion. I don't think I've ever typed more than 5 letters of a filename, of any length.
Which is good, but still less useful as GUI. A very common problem to me is that I want to download or copy some big file and while I have enough free space combines, none of the drives has enough space for that file, so I need to move some smaller files to make enough space for the big one. I can use "dir" to see the files in each folder, find the ones I can move then use "dir" multiple times to find out which drive has enough free space for those files then move them.
Or, I can open "My Computer" and see the free space of each drive, then go to some folder to look for files that can be moved or use some GUI tool like SpaceMonger to see what are the largest files and folder in the whole drive at once. This way is much less typing and much faster.
Sometimes a GUI is easier for very simple operations like you mention, however, as others have exemplified further up and down the thread, when complexity is added, the CLI is much faster and easier.
Hey, nice to see you iTrolls
6 words into your post and you already resort to name calling.
If you would have bothered to read the parent post the iTroll was the one throwing insults
He didn't insult you. He accused you of talking out of your ass. Because you were.
The revisionist version of what you said:
And if you weren't lying and had actually bothered to read my previous posts regarding Apple I have said many times "If you don't mind paying a premium, have NO desire to use the device in any way not already approved by Apple, and at the end of the day want a "plug and play" device where it just does what is advertised, buy Apple. with the exception of the latest iPhone they really make good kit". Yep, that sounds like a bunch of "hate and antagonism "" against Apple users there.
What you actually said:
I'd say the odds are pretty good they are buying them for the bling bling factor.
I would say a BIG reason the iStuff sells is the "me too, I got money too!" demographic.
In a way the whole hullabaloo over the iStuff reminds me of that stupid $1000 "I have Money!" app
I could go on with the antagonistic hateful quotes but I'll just stop there. I wonder, does your head hurt from talking out of both sides of your mouth so much?
You see, unlike those that worship the iSteve or have drank the Redmond or Linus Koolaid, I frankly don't give a shit WHICH product you use
Bull. If you really didn't care what people used, you wouldn't have wasted countless hours through the years writing posts on here doling out your worthless drivel about the minutia of:
Apple-Control freak for a CEO, likes DRM WAAAAY too much, but has really nice designs and his products tend to last. MSFT-Ballmer wants to be Jobs so bad it hurts, wasting time with crap outside their core business like Zune, but at least listens to customers, see replacing Vista with 7. Linux- runs to CLI at the first sign of problems, waaaay too many fanatics that take the pointing out of any problem as an insult, lack of a stable driver ABI and troubleshooting GUIs make it hard for the average Joe, but it rocks on servers.
most of which is either flat out wrong, out of date or just plain biased to the point of caricature. There's a reason I foed you long ago and keep you permanently at -1 so I don't have to read your oral excrement unless I'm bored and just slumming around with the appropriately low threshold.
and have watched dumbfounded when guys can tell you to the penny what their iStuff cost, but can't give a reasonable answer as to what makes it better than product y. I even watched two college students nearly get to blows over which was better, the Mac Air or the Mac Pro, and pretty much the entire argument was over price and which one was more "exclusive".
Sure, dude. Whatever.
So you can pretend their aren't average Joes that are buying these based on high price, but I've seen plenty of them with my own eyes. Don't get me wrong, Apple makes some nice designs, but if they dropped their prices to Acer levels you'd watch their sales plummet. Same thing happened to Porsche BTW when they tried to offer an entry level boxer for under 30k. Humans like to feel "better" than their fellow man, and being able to outspend him makes one better, at least in the "keep up with the Joneses" types.
*Sigh* I feel sorry for your father having to put up with you. Anyone who views the same world as the rest of us yet reaches these kinds of ridiculously negative conclusions is only to be pitied. The Boxster failed to sell because it wasn't that great. It was seen as a "poseur's" car. Too similar to the 911 in appearance yet lacking everywhere else. If the 911 suddenly dropped in price to sub
Why is it that you feel the need to spread hate and antagonism against certain people just because their tastes in computers differs from your own? Does it make you feel smug and superior? Is it sexual? I've read many of your posts here and many stand out as being the products of a very unhappy and hateful person. I feel sorry for you.
What you're saying is that Linux is totally bulletproof, as long as you run it as much as possible like an iPhone -- trusting only applications that your OS provider says are okay, and that it's not reasonable to examine it in a situation where that's not the case.
How is installing applications from the repos anything like using an iPhone? With Linux, I can install any application I want from anywhere I want as long as it's compatible (just like most other OS's). I can compile from source, write and run my own code on it, whatever floats my boat. I and most other Linux users get most of our software from the repositories because 99 percent of anything you'd want to install is in there and the packages in the repos are generally well tested to work with the system you are using. It would be foolish to not use them. With the iPhone, unless you jailbreak it, you're locked in. That's a walled garden. No Linux distro I've ever used has worked like that at all.
My point is that running an installer to view a web site is a psychological hurdle for end users and one especially difficult for end users who aren't in the Administrators group.
People clicking on "installers" on web sites with reckless abandon is what keeps me in beer money. If anything, it's people with a clue that have the psychological hurdles to jump over before installing yet another plugin.
Other than the fact that the Chrome Frame installer, the Flash Player installer, and the Silverlight installer are all executable programs that the end user needs to download and then have an administrator run?
Yeah, and they all run on a computer and are composed of long strings of ones and zeroes. Are you writing a patent application or do you have an actual point?
Do you also get annoyed when Ubuntu pops up its Update Manager?
Only mildly. The difference is when the Update Manager in Ubuntu runs it updates the entire system so it's a one shot deal and I'm done. The annoyance cranks up when I'm on a customer's system and bespoke updater after bespoke updater pops up one after the other stealing focus. And you're proposing yet another one.
Would you still be in favor of rendering SWF to WebM if someone were to increase the file size of everything you upload or download by a factor of ten and then bill you for overages? Satellite Internet access in the United States still has a monthly cap of 5 to 10 GB.
I'm in agreement with you on this. That's what I meant by "This."
Google Chrome Frame, the HTML5 viewer for Internet Explorer, is just as much a plugin as Flash Player or Silverlight.
"Plugin" is just a word. Chrome Frame is really nothing like Flash or Silverlight.
n that case, the answer is not eliminating Flash Player or Silverlight but instead automatic updates.
I only use Windows when I'm charging someone to fix their broken virus-ridden install of it. If there is one thing that annoys me about it the most, it's the onslaught of Adobe Updater, iTunes Updater, Java Updater pop-ups that I have to endure upon logging into the user account. I guess we could always just add Silverlight to the list. What's one more, right?
How do you recommend making a vector animated series like Homestar Runner without Flash? Making it in Flash and then rendering the SWF to WebM for public distribution just bloats the file size by a factor of ten.
This.
It's (relatively) easy to develop a game that can run on a Windows box, on an XBox, and on a WP7
And to think people say that writing apps for Android is difficult due to hardware and OS fragmentation.
Here's my take on the whole netbook spec creep question. The original vision of what a netbook was was a miniature laptop that had just enough capability to get you on the web and do a few other basic things. They were small, light and very portable compared to regular laptops. Continuing that vision today would involve not adding bulk, size, and consequently price but by actually reducing those things. Instead of an "an Atom 330 with nVidia's ION", how about a Snapdragon and a PowerVR? No active cooling necessary, very little heat, much longer battery life with the same size battery, cheaper, and now it's even more portable. But that's just an example. The idea is to take the original vision and refine it with newer and newer technologies. Not take the original vision and try to shoehorn it into mini-laptop territory.
But, really, whatever dude. If you think this is a netbook, then so be it. Have a nice day.
Really big netbook==laptop.
Oh, and you are talking about two different things and trying to draw a direct parallel. It usually doesn't work that way.
On an Atom 330 with nVidia's ION, Windows 7 is more than usable.
Sure, if you keep upping the specs of what a "netbook" is, anything will run on it. Point is, the major OEMs stopped making netbooks a long time ago.
But I do want easy access (no code digging) to see what information is being collected
Ask and ye shall receive
$ cat /etc/cron.daily/send-census
#!/bin/bash
# Send an "I am alive" ping to Canonical. This is used for surveying how many
# original OEM installs are still existing on real machines. Note that this
# does not send any user specific data; it only transmits the operating system
# version (/var/lib/ubuntu_dist_channel), the machine product name, and a
# counter how many pings were sent.
#
# (C) 2010 Canonical Ltd.
# License: GPL v2 or later
set -e
COUNTFILE=/var/lib/send-install-count/counter
DCD=/var/lib/ubuntu_dist_channel
SCRIPT=http://census.canonical.com/submit
[ -e $DCD ] || exit 0
# read release info /etc/lsb-release || :
.
# get current count
if [ -e $COUNTFILE ]; then
cur=$( else
cur=0
fi
# get DCD
channel=$(sed -n '/^[[:alnum:]]/ { p; q}' $DCD)
# get machine product name
product=$( product=${product/% *}
# report in /dev/null -q "$SCRIPT?
if ! wget -O
count=$cur&dcd=$channel&product=$product&release=$DISTRIB_RELEASE"; then #echo "failed"
exit 0
fi
# update counter
((cur=cur+1))
mkdir -p $(dirname $COUNTFILE)
echo $cur > $COUNTFILE
FOSS. It's like drinking water from some unspoiled rainforest stream - it is both free and better than the commercial alternative.
Dude, that's sig worthy.
Either way, I'm done with you. You're clearly incapable of remaining focused on the actual topic at hand.
Yeah, it must be terrible when people won't play into your trolling.
I responded with "And yet the UI pales compared to a closed-source project like iOS, and it's still a single company driving development, unlike your average OSS project, so it's not even that good an example."
Do you get it now? Do I need to use smaller words?
Why use small words when I can sum up my thoughts in 2 letters? Here they are:
bs
This is just pure FUD.
No it's not. I invoked no fear, created no uncertainty, nor implied any doubt.
Yawn. You said Android isn't an open source project. It is. Look up the word uncertainty.
Aside from the kernel (which has fuck-all to do with the UI), does android have a large community of volunteer developers?
Unbelievable. Yeah, aside from that kernel that has been continuously developed and refined for almost 2 decades and has had billions of dollars pumped into it, Android is just pure Google. I'm sure it took much more effort to come up with the DalvikVM and bionic than that one little kernel. It's just out of the kindness of their hearts that they decided to go with Linux rather than just whip up their own in their spare time.
No. It's no different than, say, Java: virtually all development is done by a single, commercial organization, that then releases their work for free.
See my previous statement.
Now, please, Android-fanboy, leave me alone.
Wow. Name calling. Your arguments just get better and better.
Anyone who's seen $PREMIUM_PRODUCT and $MASS_MARKET_PRODUCT side-by-side will tell you that the $MASS_MARKET_PRODUCT, while okay, pales beside the $PREMIUM_PRODUCT. The latter is just far cleaner and smoother.
People like choice. There is room in the market for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and the list goes on. I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make. And the GP was not even talking about the iPhone. You were apparently trying to argue over his comment about people liking Android's user interface. Personally, I like it. And, yes, I've used it and an iPhone side by side.
Besides which, Android, while its source is open, is not what I would call an open source project.
This is just pure FUD.
It's developed primarily by a single company paying their developers to build Android full time.
So, Google is developing the Linux kernel now? Somebody better let Torvalds know so he can quit wasting his time.
And yet it's still behind iOS in terms of usability.
Debatable. But even if it is, it must be ahead in other areas if sales are anything to go by.
According to this review, the iPad can loop a movie continuously for 11 hours and 25 minutes while connected to wi-fi. I can't imagine that using a full on netbook with a larger battery and an arm processor won't be able to duplicate this feat.
You almost had a worthy point until you ruined it by acting like an obnoxious jackass. That's right about the time I lost interest in whatever else you had to say.