So, a kneejerk anti-MS comment is modded as "insightful"? What were the mods smoking? I agree that Outlook+Exchange is a terrible product, but it's ubiquity has nothing at all to do with MS' monopolistic practices. It's all down to the lack of a credible competing product in that particular space.
The headline says "New Guinea" whereas the new species was discovered in an area known either as "West Papua" or "Irian Jaya". New Guinea shares the same island, but is a different country.
Call me a troll, but what the hell is up with slashdot these days? Seems every other story is old news. The article referred to here is over a week old. I read it last Thursday in PRINT for crying out loud.
... bit of a cheek calling it a "release" when there are no binaries. How is it different from what we could pull from the repository any other day of the week?
All I've heard about Flock is vague statements about how cool it's going to be, but no actual description of what it does. Their website is studiously uninformative. I guess the idea is that we're supposed to download it, try it and then we'll geddit. First one's free, right?
Having made several attempts to switch to Linux, I have come to the conclusion that Linux is already doing a brilliant job of stopping itself from gaining widespread adoption on the desktop.
Ubuntu is the closest I've seen to a cheap or free distro that "just works" and even that has severe deal breakers. For me the inability to configure WPA easily would stop me from deploying linux on laptops in a commercial environment - yeah I know about wpasupplicant and all, but why is not installed out-of-the-box in any distro? Home users would baulk at the inability to play DVDs without having to jump through several hoops to install "tainted" or downright illegal codecs. For both home and business users, OpenOffice 2 is the first version that comes even close to being a MS Office replacement and it's *still* in beta.
Commercial distros may be better, but if I'm going to shell out money, why not go with the market leader?
One of the real sticking points for linux on the desktop is the the desktop environment itself. You don't have to dive into Linux very deep before you get mired in the Gnome vs. KDE debate. Fact is they both blow chunks.
Last week's New Scientist contained an article by Kurzweil and was effectively an extract from, and plug for this book. It was the biggest steaming pile of self-serving drivel I have ever seen in 25 years of reading New Scientist. At one point he touts his book by saying "in my new book... I have over 50 graphs..." Hell, if I had known writing books was so easy, I'd have started long ago. I bet I can draw over a 100 graphs.
The article itself contains three graphs, presumably from the book. Each is more meaningless than the next. The crowning glory being a graph showing a straight line at roughly y=2x. At first glance it seems to be yet another graph showing the meteoric rise of technology. Then you notice that the X axis isn't labelled and the Y axis is labelled with dates, so it's a timeline and has no business being sexed up the way it has. Then you look at the actual events and they turn out to be a collection of prognostications by Kurzweil and his buddy du jour, Vernor Vinge - all of which have yet to come to pass.
Slashdot Mirror
So, a kneejerk anti-MS comment is modded as "insightful"? What were the mods smoking? I agree that Outlook+Exchange is a terrible product, but it's ubiquity has nothing at all to do with MS' monopolistic practices. It's all down to the lack of a credible competing product in that particular space.
.. there really is justification for people pimpin' their rides????
... except for all the other systems that have been tried.
.. on paper.
The headline says "New Guinea" whereas the new species was discovered in an area known either as "West Papua" or "Irian Jaya". New Guinea shares the same island, but is a different country.
.. is the stupid name and godawful logo.
Call me a troll, but what the hell is up with slashdot these days? Seems every other story is old news. The article referred to here is over a week old. I read it last Thursday in PRINT for crying out loud.
... bit of a cheek calling it a "release" when there are no binaries. How is it different from what we could pull from the repository any other day of the week?
All I've heard about Flock is vague statements about how cool it's going to be, but no actual description of what it does. Their website is studiously uninformative. I guess the idea is that we're supposed to download it, try it and then we'll geddit. First one's free, right?
Having made several attempts to switch to Linux, I have come to the conclusion that Linux is already doing a brilliant job of stopping itself from gaining widespread adoption on the desktop. Ubuntu is the closest I've seen to a cheap or free distro that "just works" and even that has severe deal breakers. For me the inability to configure WPA easily would stop me from deploying linux on laptops in a commercial environment - yeah I know about wpasupplicant and all, but why is not installed out-of-the-box in any distro? Home users would baulk at the inability to play DVDs without having to jump through several hoops to install "tainted" or downright illegal codecs. For both home and business users, OpenOffice 2 is the first version that comes even close to being a MS Office replacement and it's *still* in beta. Commercial distros may be better, but if I'm going to shell out money, why not go with the market leader? One of the real sticking points for linux on the desktop is the the desktop environment itself. You don't have to dive into Linux very deep before you get mired in the Gnome vs. KDE debate. Fact is they both blow chunks.
Last week's New Scientist contained an article by Kurzweil and was effectively an extract from, and plug for this book. It was the biggest steaming pile of self-serving drivel I have ever seen in 25 years of reading New Scientist. At one point he touts his book by saying "in my new book ... I have over 50 graphs ..." Hell, if I had known writing books was so easy, I'd have started long ago. I bet I can draw over a 100 graphs.
The article itself contains three graphs, presumably from the book. Each is more meaningless than the next. The crowning glory being a graph showing a straight line at roughly y=2x. At first glance it seems to be yet another graph showing the meteoric rise of technology. Then you notice that the X axis isn't labelled and the Y axis is labelled with dates, so it's a timeline and has no business being sexed up the way it has. Then you look at the actual events and they turn out to be a collection of prognostications by Kurzweil and his buddy du jour, Vernor Vinge - all of which have yet to come to pass.