Anyone else really hate online installers? I hate downloading a 20meg program, getting ready to install and use only to find out that you've then got to wait for the real 200meg program to download.
Some people like to start a download then go off and have lunch whilst something downloads, not to come back and find out it wants you to download some more stuff.
'The FreeRunner is based on a GNU/Linux, and it will initially ship with basic software to make calls, send and receive SMS, and manage contacts.'
Paying that much for a phone with a feature set not unlike a cheap phone from 10 years ago...
I fail to see the point of this phone for the general public, most people will never touch the OS source code and Windows mobile already has plenty of free and commercial aps around plus it's on much cheaper phones.
1:) with heavy usage, you do
2:) So the EeePC interface is just like most common desktop versions?
3:) WINE may be efficient but it'a not a good solution for an ultra portable with limited resources.
Linux doesn't have the applications I want to use.
Yes there are alternatives for popular applications but frankly, they're not as good. Open Office simply isn't up to MS Office, I don't like VLC and it's handling of things like subtitled MKVs are sketchy at best, I can't use CoreAVC which is pretty much the only way low powered laptops are going to handle HD videos for at least a couple of years if not longer.
Other than reasons of cost, there'd be no reason for me to want to use linux for a low powered system if MS optimises the next windows version to use fewer resources. I don't want to have to look up and learn command line functions , get used to interfaces that change from one distro to the next just so I can run software that's "almost as good as" the stuff I'm currently using.
I'm actually pretty interested in Windows 7. It looks like there's a big shift in focus in it's design, concentrating more on performance than glitz which is the opposite to vista. The 25mb customisable lightweight version looks designed to eat into Linux's increasing market share in low powered budget systems.
It's easy to forget that MS followed up Windows ME, possibly their worst ever OS with XP, their best ever OS. At least Vista doesn't BSOD unless you've major hardware/driver issues.
They're using an open source licence that has no qualms about integration with DRM measures.
OSS != free from DRM measures despite what some people would have you believe
Actually this licence seems much more DRM friendly and I get the impression that's why it's chosen. Having the biggest phone OS released on a non-GPL open source licence could be seen as a big "up yours" to the increasingly restrictive 'free' licence.
Given that it's thought this can create weak stable black holes, couldn't they be used to generate power? I was tought in physics that when a big object 'enters' a black hole, it ejects a narrow stream of energy through the back of the black hole. If you couple this with Hawking radiation (or if what I'm talking about IS hawking radiation), couldn't you use black holes as a powersource? Something with the ability to convert 100% (eventually) of mass to energy must have huge power generation potential.
Please don't tell me what I'm thinking of is a ZPM, damn stargate Deus Ex machina devices...
These same grown ups who've been whining "it's not fair" and stamping their feet whenever something didn't go their way? They certainly didn't wait for the courts to determine if it was above board or not.
The BSI deal with huge, rich multinationals on a daily basis. I've never heard of them being done for corruption in the past and they've had a pretty long history of being under public scrutiny. For them to throw their reputation away for this one thing seems unlikely.
The UK Unix Users Group may be respectable but with this lawsuit they've little to lose (especially compared to the BSI), especially if they sign on a no-win no-fee lawyer or a member who's a lawyer donates his time. The burden is on UKUUG to provide good solid proof. All they've released so far is hearsay and conspiricy theories. They may well have some solid evidence they're keeping mum about until the trial but if that is all they have, the trial won't even last a day.
As many other people who are posting have suggested. This whole situation is getting rather tiresome. The time spent campaigning to get ISO to change would be better spent coming up with APIs and utilities to enable developers to more easily create OOXML files. Neither format is going to go out of usage because of ISO's decision so the best solution for everyone is to support both formats as best as possible.
As for this civil action. I don't think they have a leg to stand on. What I know of the BSI (who are very well respected) is that they don't come to decisions lightly. There's no real evidence their process was flawed.
Yes in the past it's failed their criteria but that was because it didn't take into account ODF in the format. In a direct "pick ODF or OOXML" choice, it isn't fair to use "it isn't like ODF" as reasoning for not picking the format.
With regards to patents, all the defendants will do is say "there's no garentee that ODF is patent free either"
"How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?"
ISO changed the standard as part of the process. Of course Office 2007 doesn't meet it. Microsoft have said there's a patch coming that reflects the changes ISO made.
Actually, it would've resulted in far fewer laptops. People simply wouldn't pay that much for a laptop that, for western consumers is much more of a toy than the more practical EeePC.
In truth, you they would've been able to donate far more laptops if they'd done "give 0.1, get 1" and released it across the world. It would've driven costs down too. Negroponte's idealistic attitude for the project and complete lack of business sense has hurt this project greatly.
People were screaming out for this product and he refused to make it available for most western consumers, only making a limited number available at an expensive price and allowing a commercial project to come in and steal most of its thunder.
There are very few people who are legally without a TV licence. receiving any form of TV signal (satelite, cable etc.) means you have to pay it as does viewing BBC Video clips (either through iPlayer, bbc.co.uk or youtube).
This is going to be a replacement for the TV licence. This isn't going to be an additional tax and won't penalise people for having broadband. A Broadband fee (for the general public) rather than TV licence has been considered for a while now.
It also doesn't specifically say anywhere that ISPs are being singled out, it's pure speculation and fear mongering there. ISPs could even benefit, getting licence fee to ensure that they deliver online TV. It wouldn't make a huge amount of sense to financially penalise companies who already have their costs increased by things like the iplayer.
It's extremely stupid to say "omg MS is doomed" like people are doing.
Windows 7 does have a lot of buzz around, as evidenced by the frenzied reaction to Gates saying it'll be out in a year. As many people have said, MS messed up with ME but then created an extremely good OS with XP.
MinWin is one of the things I'm interested most about windows 7. very high compatibility with full windows yet uses much less resources.
I can't believe that around 80% of the posts here are trying to defend the chans or blame Scientology for this. Is it really surprising they'd do stuff like this? Site invasions of innocent groups for 'lulz' isn't exactly a radical change in behaviour for them.
So it may not be the same people taking part in the Scientology protests. I'm sure that makes the victims of these invasions feel so much better. When the chans decided to organise themselves under the banner of 'anonymous' the same as they do all their site invasions under, they chose to directly associate themselves with these activities. They're all part of the 4chan and 7chan userbase and without any attempt to prove they're different from any other group of chan users doing site invasions, why SHOULD they be seen as any different?
The chan's are filled with people who think the funniest thing in the world is to post child porn images and do crap like this. It reeks of desperation or naivety to call this a smear campaign
They were pretty powerful but they were incredibly slow to use. You had to put in the disk for the Word processor, load it into memory, change the disk for the printer software and load that into memory before you could work. The time it took to load some programs was pretty long. It'd usually be between 5-10 minutes before you were able to start doing stuff.
Oh god they had to bring up the Acorns. Horrible horrible machines that were forced on kids nationwide. May be interesting from a tech POV for having a RISC OS but these things were incredibly slow to use (the way you loaded programs into the memory was a pain). At least that's my memory of them as a kid.
Windows ME was perhaps the worst version of windows to be release. They followed it up with XP which is possibly the best.
Lots of people are hoping that Vista was just a stopgap and windows 7 will have all the cool stuff promised (virtual registry, WinFS and other stuff I'm sure other people can remember)
As the woman in the interview said, this isn't a probable method of widespread attack. It requires lengthy access to a chip and pin terminal to drill a hole in it and run a wire through. This wire would have to lead to a box or wireless transmitter. Takes a while to do, isn't easy to remove quickly and requires permanent evidence.
On the otherhand, you can attach a skimmer to a reader to copy the magnetic strip and set up a camera to capture the pin in 5 minutes and remove it in 20 seconds. Far easier method of attack.
Both of these methods are actually only possible because of insecure ATMs which don't read chips. At the moment there are so many countries that use outdated ATMs that it's not worth banks banning card use in countries where this type of fraud is possible.
I'd hardly describe that press release as being filled with half truths. Only point that's really debatable is the dialogue part but there's nothing especially wrong with asking for dialogue between lawyers, especially given the potentially legally complex nature of the post.
I always see these benchmarks and wonder "why does this matter?". The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy and then it'll probably throw up all sorts of warnings anyway. This is on any browser I've used and any system.
What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash (it's not really their responsibility but it is their problem) which often eats up 100% CPU from random flash objects or causes firefox to freeze. Another annoyance is Firefox being frankly poor at displaying large HTML files (when you go on websites with insanely large lists for instance). Where as IE and Opera display these as the page is downloaded. Firefox, for me, freezes, much like notepad will when you open a 2meg+ file . Sometimes it'll recover and display the page after a minute or so, sometimes I have to ctrl+alt+delete.
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Some people like to start a download then go off and have lunch whilst something downloads, not to come back and find out it wants you to download some more stuff.
Paying that much for a phone with a feature set not unlike a cheap phone from 10 years ago...
I fail to see the point of this phone for the general public, most people will never touch the OS source code and Windows mobile already has plenty of free and commercial aps around plus it's on much cheaper phones.
1:) with heavy usage, you do 2:) So the EeePC interface is just like most common desktop versions? 3:) WINE may be efficient but it'a not a good solution for an ultra portable with limited resources.
2K is not a consumer focused OS
Linux doesn't have the applications I want to use.
Yes there are alternatives for popular applications but frankly, they're not as good. Open Office simply isn't up to MS Office, I don't like VLC and it's handling of things like subtitled MKVs are sketchy at best, I can't use CoreAVC which is pretty much the only way low powered laptops are going to handle HD videos for at least a couple of years if not longer.
Other than reasons of cost, there'd be no reason for me to want to use linux for a low powered system if MS optimises the next windows version to use fewer resources. I don't want to have to look up and learn command line functions , get used to interfaces that change from one distro to the next just so I can run software that's "almost as good as" the stuff I'm currently using.
I'm actually pretty interested in Windows 7. It looks like there's a big shift in focus in it's design, concentrating more on performance than glitz which is the opposite to vista. The 25mb customisable lightweight version looks designed to eat into Linux's increasing market share in low powered budget systems.
It's easy to forget that MS followed up Windows ME, possibly their worst ever OS with XP, their best ever OS. At least Vista doesn't BSOD unless you've major hardware/driver issues.
They're using an open source licence that has no qualms about integration with DRM measures. OSS != free from DRM measures despite what some people would have you believe
Actually this licence seems much more DRM friendly and I get the impression that's why it's chosen. Having the biggest phone OS released on a non-GPL open source licence could be seen as a big "up yours" to the increasingly restrictive 'free' licence.
Given that it's thought this can create weak stable black holes, couldn't they be used to generate power? I was tought in physics that when a big object 'enters' a black hole, it ejects a narrow stream of energy through the back of the black hole. If you couple this with Hawking radiation (or if what I'm talking about IS hawking radiation), couldn't you use black holes as a powersource? Something with the ability to convert 100% (eventually) of mass to energy must have huge power generation potential.
Please don't tell me what I'm thinking of is a ZPM, damn stargate Deus Ex machina devices...
These same grown ups who've been whining "it's not fair" and stamping their feet whenever something didn't go their way? They certainly didn't wait for the courts to determine if it was above board or not.
The BSI deal with huge, rich multinationals on a daily basis. I've never heard of them being done for corruption in the past and they've had a pretty long history of being under public scrutiny. For them to throw their reputation away for this one thing seems unlikely.
The UK Unix Users Group may be respectable but with this lawsuit they've little to lose (especially compared to the BSI), especially if they sign on a no-win no-fee lawyer or a member who's a lawyer donates his time. The burden is on UKUUG to provide good solid proof. All they've released so far is hearsay and conspiricy theories. They may well have some solid evidence they're keeping mum about until the trial but if that is all they have, the trial won't even last a day.
As many other people who are posting have suggested. This whole situation is getting rather tiresome. The time spent campaigning to get ISO to change would be better spent coming up with APIs and utilities to enable developers to more easily create OOXML files. Neither format is going to go out of usage because of ISO's decision so the best solution for everyone is to support both formats as best as possible.
As for this civil action. I don't think they have a leg to stand on. What I know of the BSI (who are very well respected) is that they don't come to decisions lightly. There's no real evidence their process was flawed.
Yes in the past it's failed their criteria but that was because it didn't take into account ODF in the format. In a direct "pick ODF or OOXML" choice, it isn't fair to use "it isn't like ODF" as reasoning for not picking the format.
With regards to patents, all the defendants will do is say "there's no garentee that ODF is patent free either"
"How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?"
ISO changed the standard as part of the process. Of course Office 2007 doesn't meet it. Microsoft have said there's a patch coming that reflects the changes ISO made.
This is pure sensationalism
Actually, it would've resulted in far fewer laptops. People simply wouldn't pay that much for a laptop that, for western consumers is much more of a toy than the more practical EeePC.
In truth, you they would've been able to donate far more laptops if they'd done "give 0.1, get 1" and released it across the world. It would've driven costs down too. Negroponte's idealistic attitude for the project and complete lack of business sense has hurt this project greatly.
People were screaming out for this product and he refused to make it available for most western consumers, only making a limited number available at an expensive price and allowing a commercial project to come in and steal most of its thunder.
There are very few people who are legally without a TV licence. receiving any form of TV signal (satelite, cable etc.) means you have to pay it as does viewing BBC Video clips (either through iPlayer, bbc.co.uk or youtube).
This is going to be a replacement for the TV licence. This isn't going to be an additional tax and won't penalise people for having broadband. A Broadband fee (for the general public) rather than TV licence has been considered for a while now.
It also doesn't specifically say anywhere that ISPs are being singled out, it's pure speculation and fear mongering there. ISPs could even benefit, getting licence fee to ensure that they deliver online TV. It wouldn't make a huge amount of sense to financially penalise companies who already have their costs increased by things like the iplayer.
Windows 7 does have a lot of buzz around, as evidenced by the frenzied reaction to Gates saying it'll be out in a year. As many people have said, MS messed up with ME but then created an extremely good OS with XP.
MinWin is one of the things I'm interested most about windows 7. very high compatibility with full windows yet uses much less resources.
I can't believe that around 80% of the posts here are trying to defend the chans or blame Scientology for this. Is it really surprising they'd do stuff like this? Site invasions of innocent groups for 'lulz' isn't exactly a radical change in behaviour for them.
So it may not be the same people taking part in the Scientology protests. I'm sure that makes the victims of these invasions feel so much better. When the chans decided to organise themselves under the banner of 'anonymous' the same as they do all their site invasions under, they chose to directly associate themselves with these activities. They're all part of the 4chan and 7chan userbase and without any attempt to prove they're different from any other group of chan users doing site invasions, why SHOULD they be seen as any different?
The chan's are filled with people who think the funniest thing in the world is to post child porn images and do crap like this. It reeks of desperation or naivety to call this a smear campaign
They were pretty powerful but they were incredibly slow to use. You had to put in the disk for the Word processor, load it into memory, change the disk for the printer software and load that into memory before you could work. The time it took to load some programs was pretty long. It'd usually be between 5-10 minutes before you were able to start doing stuff.
Oh god they had to bring up the Acorns. Horrible horrible machines that were forced on kids nationwide. May be interesting from a tech POV for having a RISC OS but these things were incredibly slow to use (the way you loaded programs into the memory was a pain). At least that's my memory of them as a kid.
Windows ME was perhaps the worst version of windows to be release. They followed it up with XP which is possibly the best.
Lots of people are hoping that Vista was just a stopgap and windows 7 will have all the cool stuff promised (virtual registry, WinFS and other stuff I'm sure other people can remember)
surely game rules can be copyrighted much like the scenario behind movies can be?
Also, the board has the same layout and same points for each piece as scrabble, it's clearly a direct clone of the game.
As the woman in the interview said, this isn't a probable method of widespread attack. It requires lengthy access to a chip and pin terminal to drill a hole in it and run a wire through. This wire would have to lead to a box or wireless transmitter. Takes a while to do, isn't easy to remove quickly and requires permanent evidence.
On the otherhand, you can attach a skimmer to a reader to copy the magnetic strip and set up a camera to capture the pin in 5 minutes and remove it in 20 seconds. Far easier method of attack.
Both of these methods are actually only possible because of insecure ATMs which don't read chips. At the moment there are so many countries that use outdated ATMs that it's not worth banks banning card use in countries where this type of fraud is possible.
Jeremy Paxman is famed for being incredibly tough on his witnesses (and contestants on University Challenge)
I'd hardly describe that press release as being filled with half truths. Only point that's really debatable is the dialogue part but there's nothing especially wrong with asking for dialogue between lawyers, especially given the potentially legally complex nature of the post.
I always see these benchmarks and wonder "why does this matter?". The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy and then it'll probably throw up all sorts of warnings anyway. This is on any browser I've used and any system.
What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash (it's not really their responsibility but it is their problem) which often eats up 100% CPU from random flash objects or causes firefox to freeze. Another annoyance is Firefox being frankly poor at displaying large HTML files (when you go on websites with insanely large lists for instance). Where as IE and Opera display these as the page is downloaded. Firefox, for me, freezes, much like notepad will when you open a 2meg+ file . Sometimes it'll recover and display the page after a minute or so, sometimes I have to ctrl+alt+delete.