pre-alpha means it is possibly unstable, GUI may be changing - drastically, and features are unimplemented or partially implemented. Use at your own risk.
Alpha means the major GUI design has stabilized, major functionality is in place, but features may be added or deleted. It is usable but not recommended for production use. Features may not be frozen.
Beta means that features are fully implemented, presumed to be bug-free (aside from known defects indicated in release notes) and feature freeze has taken place. Development focuses on optimization, slight GUI refinements may take place (but generally not major changes), and while the application is expected to be stable it should not be considered suitable for production use.
Release candidates are fully implemented, no further changes beyond bug fixes are to be made, and are presumed to be free of fatal defects.
1. Quit downloading RIAA music 2. Do not share RIAA music (help prevent the spread of mindshare) (ugh, I hate buzzwords) 3. Do not buy RIAA music (or if you do, stick to back catalogues from USED CD/record stores) 4. Do not tune to new RIAA music on the radio so you can avoid being tempted to buy new product from RIAA
By doing so, RIAA members will eventually either go broke or go independent, and the independent labels will rise in popularity as their buying power increases beyond that of the dying RIAA cartel.
A good example of how a good idea can go wrong is Digg. It addresses one of the sore spots about Slashdot: the ability for anyone to submit news, and immediately have it viewable by others.
and senators (Sen. Kerry and Sen. Kennedy) and ask them to look into this issue.
Do you really think Kerry and Kennedy will do ANYTHING citizens of Massachusetts want? We keep reelecting them regardless of their pitiful performance in office.
Oh that's okay, we'll just genetically engineer honeybees so that they can handle the GM crops. When honey results in severe allergic reactions in humans, well, we have an answer for that as well - genetically engineer humans, resulting in a patent fee for every human conceived (whether or not carried to term), or better yet, since it would be more profitable, like soy and high-fructose corn syrup, get all the food manufacturers to use this highly-allergenic "food" ingredients in all "food" products and give the pharmaceutical companies a business opportunity to sell antidotes to the toxins in the GM honey. This way, everybody wins!
This has been my tongue-in-cheek crackpot theory of the day, brought to you by my frustration in trying to find soy-free foods.
'because of security issues with virtualization technology'
The only security issue I can see is from Microsoft's perspective: if Windows is merely a guest OS hosted on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, or other, it is obviously not the users' primary operating system. Since it is not their primary operating system it is clear they are either not a fan of Microsoft, or even worse, are loyal to a competitor's product, be it free/OSS or proprietary. Since the days are numbered for earning revenue from that customer, what better way to maximize profits from that customer by requiring them to buy the products with the highest profit margin, despite the fact that the customers do not need the eye candy and other non-features the premium versions provide?
It's all about short term gains. Rather than focusing on maintaining long-term growth (Microsoft has already grown as much as they can and they know it) Microsoft has turned from being one of the most customer-friendly companies around to being one of the most hostile; revoking your first sale doctrine rights (e.g., you cannot transfer a COMMODITY PRODUCT from an old PC to a new PC), spying on your computing activities (genuine advantage) and jacking up prices when the customer is receiving LESS value with the new OS (it hogs RAM and processor, boasts slower I/O AND is DRM-heavy). Also, they claim that F/OSS is bad because it does not come with a warranty or support. Well, have you ever read the Microsoft EULA? It comes with no support, and warranties and liabilities are EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED.
Where is the value in the backing of a big company again?
My company has developed custom software solutions for customers, one of which is an interesting software registration (Windows activation-like - well, more like Adobe CS's, but about three years before Adobe implemented theirs) architecture. We back these works for higher with a warranty, e.g., if a genuine bug is found, we fix it and issue the fix at no charge. Feature requests, of course, are billable (time/materials, basically the cost of doing business) but we don't waive warranty.
IMHO all software companies should back their products with support and bug fixes. Period. Microsoft doesn't; they downplay the impact of bugs (see yesterday's/. discussion on M$ office crashes NOT being security threats) or they take many, many months to fix really major security holes, while holes in DRM libraries get fixed and issued as Windows Updates releases in a DAY OR TWO, despite the negative impact on user experience is NIL.
Again, where is the value of Windows over F/OSS solutions?
Is it any shock they are requiring you to buy the high-end product to run as a guest OS? Of course not; Microsoft has nowhere to go but down, and they are fully aware of it so they are scramling to profiteer as much as they can before they collapse.
Price out some hot swap chassis then. You won't see any at Best Buy or CompUSA.
Joe Sixpack consumers who buy boards with Intel Matrix chipsets can hot swap, but will the chassis their systems are installed in make hot swap easy, or even possible, without laying a drive next to the chassis until powering down is convenient (I know, it's a home system, but hot swap is an advertised feature so bear with me)?
Even worse: is Microsoft NOT advertising hot swap based on Matrix or a similar RAID-equipped chipset, but software RAID? What about IDE drives? You're NOT going to hot swap IDE on a consumer board in a consumer chassis; you WILL fry components. That would be true of most server boards as well; you need something like this ( http://www.scsi4me.com/product_info.php?products_i d=1236 ) or this ( http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/1708 ) which basically puts a proprietary hotswap-aware controller in front of each drive, encased in a chassis, to work around IDE's limitations. The end cost is going to be more than SuperMicro's low-end hot swap SATA chassis (I LOVE those chassis, BTW, and if the fans weren't so darn loud I'd have gone supermicro on my new machine like I did on my old one). Wholesale pricing on quality hot swap chassis is over $400, unless you're prepared to buy in volume. NOT consumer hardware.
Worst: is this the software RAID Windows has had for years? Supporting hot swap now? If you're running a pure software RAID in Windows on a Matrix or similar hybrid chipset solution, you're a moron and deserve what comes with Windows' software RAID solution. I can understand running software RAID on a matrix board if you're running Linux or BSD (since neither kernel natively supports RAID for boot drives) but on Windows it's pure stupidity.
Back to the point: if RAID is an advertised feature, and consumer hardware doesn't support hotswap or makes it very difficult, parent's point is totally valid.
So what will the Home Server product be? Not having seen it (my MSDN subscriptions ran out LONG ago) all I can guess is that it will push advertising into the grey areas of legality just like the Vista sticker did: sure, it'll support hot swap RAID*
*But only if you have a hot swap chipset (figure $150 min for a quality board with Matrix) and hot swap chassis
In any case, this has been deliverable on Windows XP (a home OS) for years now, since most workstation boards supporting Hot Swap have supported Windows XP from the beginning.
There are a lot of general aviation pilots who fly planes which can exceed those altitudes, especially experimental aircraft (Long-EZ and derivatives, Lancair, and more recently, homebuilt jets like Viper and Maverick, although I think Maverick may be certified-only now). Not only that, between the "flying" height of 15,000' and the ground, there is a cable that will concern pilots at ANY flight level.
Taxes have never been about fairness, nor have they even been about supporting necessary services. They are all about social engineering.
If taxes were about fairness and supporting the infrastructure and not something more insidious, we would have had a flat tax for many decades now.
Re:PocketPC is better than Palm - well, until now
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 1
That may be true about the Palm now, but it definitely wasn't in 2001. They were still saying no one needs multimedia (that's one reason the PocketPC started to pick up share then). No one would want to listen to MP3s with a PDA (I do, I don't want to carry around 18 different devices) and certainly no one would want to watch a video on a PDA. If you were on PDA forums at the time you would know that both capabilities were in demand.
Also, at the time, Palm ignored everyone who wanted better input. They did NOT have handwriting recognition then; one had to learn graffiti. Okay, they've fixed that blunder since then, but only after dropping the ball for years.
Resolution on a Palm then was what, 160x120 or something nearly as poor, and very limited color only on the high end models, monochrome on the mainstream models, while quarter-VGA and even VGA was available on the PocketPC? Yeah, GPS worked REALLY well on the Palm then. Palm turned me off to their products to the point where people have GIVEN me Palm PDAs in the past and I don't bother exploring them. I either give them away or toss them out.
Now, this part is a response to GodfatherofSoul :
Have you ever used a PocketPC? It does not use a desktop Windows paradigm. WinCE on the handheld PCs did, but the PocketPC never has, unless one installed alternate GUIs, such as Resco Desktop. I do agree it does not work on a PDA very well, and that is precisely why Microsoft did not implement Explorer from the desktop on the PPC like it did on the HPCs which boasted trackpointers and keyboards.
As far as radio buttons go: it's perfectly acceptable on a PDA.
PocketPC is better than Palm - well, until now
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One product Microsoft really has gotten right is the PocketPC. I'm not saying it's perfect, but the Windows Mobile platform has F/OSS and commercial software available for it, is not crippled like Apple's iPhone, has excellent handwriting recognition based on work pioneered by Apple's Newton project, and offers excellent multimedia capabilities (in fact I rip most of my DVDs so I can play them on my PocketPC). Up to now, I've HATED Palms, dating back to the original Pilot. I've had Palm PDAs, and hated them. Palm dropped the ball on multimedia, downplaying it, saying customers don't want it. Microsoft, with PocketPC 2000, included full multimedis support (hell, there were even video capture and TV tuner accessories for PocketPCs then!). Palm forced you to learn Graffiti. Microsoft offered handwriting recognition, block character recognition (Graffiti compatibility), and an on-screen keyboard, as well as support for physical keyboards. Palm's sync software sucked, and Microsofts, although unstable at times, didn't suck nearly as much.
I've thought about installing Linux on my iPAQ 3670, since Compaq actually used to install Linux on the iPAQ for customers, but now that PocketPC is so old it's doubtful that I'd be able to get it up and running again if the flash fails, and the iPAQ oldtimers are not with HP/Compaq any more. Even though I never use the 3670 any more (I have an hx2795 now) it's nice to know that I have the option to use it if the new one fails.
The down sides of the PocketPC:
- Linux will not mount it as a mass storage device (I work around it by using ssh/SCP over Wifi but as you know SCP is slow)
- SynCE is a pain in the ass to set up
- It is not user-repairable (software-wise): HP's daylight savings time fix DID NOT WORK. Were it Linux, I'd be able to easily fix it myself.
- Microsoft still insists that a close/kill button is unnecessary
- The memory model is still lame
- Vendor support (for updates, bug fixes, etc.) is weak to nonexistent
if Palm switches to Linux, here is what it would require for me to buy it:
- Let me customise the desktop
- multimedia should meet or exceed the high end PocketPCs (such as the hx2795)
- Comply with the GPL. Release the source, let us modify it. Don't DRM the appliance so we can't make fixes.
- Make syncing with Linux a high priority
- Make it mountable as a mass storage device
- get Teletype or TomTom to port their GPS products (I know, TomTom appliances run Linux)
Multimedia and GPS are what attracted me to the PocketPC in the first place. Before then, people would GIVE me PDAs, and I wouldn't use them.
It'll take a lot to get me to buy a Linux PDA, because Microsoft has largely gotten it right. I hate desktop Windows, I hate server editions of Windows, and I hate Microsoft's anti-customer policies as of late, however, they got one thing almost completely right and that is the PocketPC. Every Linux PDA I've seen so far has been limited either by low volume (so little support), weak hardware, or really lame GUI designs and limited I/O options.
Sun spots are *cool* parts of the sun. If the sun is at a 1,000 year peak of sunspot activity, that means that it is at a 1,000 year *low* for temperature, as far as sunspots are concerned.
Does it? Sunspots are cool relative to the rest of the Sun's surface, right? Is it impossible for the sun to be WARMER during these periods, only with a less even surface temperature, resulting in more sunspots?
No, you look at the evidence with your own preconceived notion and arrive at a conclusion, rather than stepping back to ask: what is going on here? The truth is no one really knows yet.
Sure it will. I know that if I want to search/. for discussions about Vista, all I need to search for is "defectivebydesign" or if I want to find articles about Microsoft bugs, I just need to search for "haha"
So, don't try to tell me that the tags are not providing any benefit!
While you are at it, ban the group commentaries -- those truly suck. If someone has something to say, use all that space to put it on a separate track, or at least manage it like the excellent Bond Double Oh 7 editions do.
This is not a blanket rule; listen to the Futurama commentaries, for example.
Okay, so you're telling me there is no need to know IP addresses? So, I can nslookup a hostname before a zone is configured in bind for the new domain? One can use a hostname to test against a staging server before cutting over DNS without knowing the IP address to point the hosts file at it for testing? Wow, I'd love to learn how you do that. Somehow, you are suggesting that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary on the administration and development side.
The story about asus website doesn't suprise me a bit. It ain't that Asus ain't spending any money on it and it ain't that it is impossible to run a website like that well. Just that anyone who can, won't do windows. Someone at the asus management level probably said they wanted an Windows Website and nobody qualified will touch that.
For what it's worth I'd like to point out several things:
1. It is damn near impossible to find good PHP developers. Hacks are easy to find but we don't want hacks working on customer sites. Sloppy code is difficult to maintain, and sometimes difficult to deploy because hacks hard-code a lot of things they shouldn't. 2. Nearly every large E-Commerce site I see is running.aspx (asp.Net) on IIS. 3. We encourage clients to go with PHP/MySQL or php/Postgres for licensing, performance, and various other reasons, however some people WANT to run on Windows.
On the other hand, asp.Net may be more expensive to run (Licensing) but it's actually cheaper to find good asp.net developers, because practically everyone has used Visual Studio and are almost forced to use OOP principles and code cleanly from the get-go. Sure, there are plenty of hacks programming for Windows, but the availability of good Windows programmers is much greater than that of good PHP programmers.
Now, on the IT side; I have yet to have any clients embrace Linux for their servers. These are the type of customer who doesn't do backups, doesn't want to even THINK about the server, and yet want to run Windows. I try explaining to them that on Linux I can FULLY automate all maintenance, including backups of email, databases, and everything else, but they trust Windows because it comes in a glossy, full-color package and with a big company backing it. They refuse to accept that Windows comes with only installation support, and NO warranty. How is buying Windows from Microsoft better than buying or downloading Linux from Novell, Canonical, or Redhat again?
Either way you get pay-per-incident support and no warranty. On Linux you effectively get unlimited client access licenses, whereas Microsoft makes their licensing as difficult as possible to understand so that in the event that the client gets audited, they have to pay up big fines and buy more licenses at inflated prices because their reseller steered them wrong.
One great thing about Windows though, is shadowing. The "previous version" feature is a GREAT thing, and I haven't seen that on any desktop operating systems before. It was a feature of VMS I truly liked. I wish Linux filesystems supported file versioning.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO
pre-alpha means it is possibly unstable, GUI may be changing - drastically, and features are unimplemented or partially implemented. Use at your own risk.
Alpha means the major GUI design has stabilized, major functionality is in place, but features may be added or deleted. It is usable but not recommended for production use. Features may not be frozen.
Beta means that features are fully implemented, presumed to be bug-free (aside from known defects indicated in release notes) and feature freeze has taken place. Development focuses on optimization, slight GUI refinements may take place (but generally not major changes), and while the application is expected to be stable it should not be considered suitable for production use.
Release candidates are fully implemented, no further changes beyond bug fixes are to be made, and are presumed to be free of fatal defects.
By exposing yourself and your friends to new materials, you are still tempting yourself to purchase new material from the RIAA.
But, what happens once you reach Zesty Zebra?
1. Quit downloading RIAA music
2. Do not share RIAA music (help prevent the spread of mindshare) (ugh, I hate buzzwords)
3. Do not buy RIAA music (or if you do, stick to back catalogues from USED CD/record stores)
4. Do not tune to new RIAA music on the radio so you can avoid being tempted to buy new product from RIAA
By doing so, RIAA members will eventually either go broke or go independent, and the independent labels will rise in popularity as their buying power increases beyond that of the dying RIAA cartel.
No, "Linksys" broadcast over 802.11b/g is loosely translated as "free interweb"
OK
Detaining an innocent child for an hour's detention = a little lapse in judgement
Sending an innocent to JAIL for 12 days = a royal fuckup and a major violation of his civil rights
The same is true here: http://www.slashdot.org/firehose.pl -- although you do have to be logged in to access it.
Do you really think Kerry and Kennedy will do ANYTHING citizens of Massachusetts want? We keep reelecting them regardless of their pitiful performance in office.
There is supposed to be, but God help you if you have domains with RegisterFly or eNom and they expire.
Oh that's okay, we'll just genetically engineer honeybees so that they can handle the GM crops. When honey results in severe allergic reactions in humans, well, we have an answer for that as well - genetically engineer humans, resulting in a patent fee for every human conceived (whether or not carried to term), or better yet, since it would be more profitable, like soy and high-fructose corn syrup, get all the food manufacturers to use this highly-allergenic "food" ingredients in all "food" products and give the pharmaceutical companies a business opportunity to sell antidotes to the toxins in the GM honey. This way, everybody wins!
This has been my tongue-in-cheek crackpot theory of the day, brought to you by my frustration in trying to find soy-free foods.
The only security issue I can see is from Microsoft's perspective: if Windows is merely a guest OS hosted on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, or other, it is obviously not the users' primary operating system. Since it is not their primary operating system it is clear they are either not a fan of Microsoft, or even worse, are loyal to a competitor's product, be it free/OSS or proprietary. Since the days are numbered for earning revenue from that customer, what better way to maximize profits from that customer by requiring them to buy the products with the highest profit margin, despite the fact that the customers do not need the eye candy and other non-features the premium versions provide?
It's all about short term gains. Rather than focusing on maintaining long-term growth (Microsoft has already grown as much as they can and they know it) Microsoft has turned from being one of the most customer-friendly companies around to being one of the most hostile; revoking your first sale doctrine rights (e.g., you cannot transfer a COMMODITY PRODUCT from an old PC to a new PC), spying on your computing activities (genuine advantage) and jacking up prices when the customer is receiving LESS value with the new OS (it hogs RAM and processor, boasts slower I/O AND is DRM-heavy). Also, they claim that F/OSS is bad because it does not come with a warranty or support. Well, have you ever read the Microsoft EULA? It comes with no support, and warranties and liabilities are EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED.
Where is the value in the backing of a big company again?
My company has developed custom software solutions for customers, one of which is an interesting software registration (Windows activation-like - well, more like Adobe CS's, but about three years before Adobe implemented theirs) architecture. We back these works for higher with a warranty, e.g., if a genuine bug is found, we fix it and issue the fix at no charge. Feature requests, of course, are billable (time/materials, basically the cost of doing business) but we don't waive warranty.
IMHO all software companies should back their products with support and bug fixes. Period. Microsoft doesn't; they downplay the impact of bugs (see yesterday's
Again, where is the value of Windows over F/OSS solutions?
Is it any shock they are requiring you to buy the high-end product to run as a guest OS? Of course not; Microsoft has nowhere to go but down, and they are fully aware of it so they are scramling to profiteer as much as they can before they collapse.
Price out some hot swap chassis then.
i d=1236 ) or this ( http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/1708 ) which basically puts a proprietary hotswap-aware controller in front of each drive, encased in a chassis, to work around IDE's limitations. The end cost is going to be more than SuperMicro's low-end hot swap SATA chassis (I LOVE those chassis, BTW, and if the fans weren't so darn loud I'd have gone supermicro on my new machine like I did on my old one). Wholesale pricing on quality hot swap chassis is over $400, unless you're prepared to buy in volume. NOT consumer hardware.
You won't see any at Best Buy or CompUSA.
Joe Sixpack consumers who buy boards with Intel Matrix chipsets can hot swap, but will the chassis their systems are installed in make hot swap easy, or even possible, without laying a drive next to the chassis until powering down is convenient (I know, it's a home system, but hot swap is an advertised feature so bear with me)?
Even worse: is Microsoft NOT advertising hot swap based on Matrix or a similar RAID-equipped chipset, but software RAID? What about IDE drives? You're NOT going to hot swap IDE on a consumer board in a consumer chassis; you WILL fry components. That would be true of most server boards as well; you need something like this ( http://www.scsi4me.com/product_info.php?products_
Worst: is this the software RAID Windows has had for years? Supporting hot swap now? If you're running a pure software RAID in Windows on a Matrix or similar hybrid chipset solution, you're a moron and deserve what comes with Windows' software RAID solution. I can understand running software RAID on a matrix board if you're running Linux or BSD (since neither kernel natively supports RAID for boot drives) but on Windows it's pure stupidity.
Back to the point: if RAID is an advertised feature, and consumer hardware doesn't support hotswap or makes it very difficult, parent's point is totally valid.
So what will the Home Server product be? Not having seen it (my MSDN subscriptions ran out LONG ago) all I can guess is that it will push advertising into the grey areas of legality just like the Vista sticker did: sure, it'll support hot swap RAID*
*But only if you have a hot swap chipset (figure $150 min for a quality board with Matrix) and hot swap chassis
In any case, this has been deliverable on Windows XP (a home OS) for years now, since most workstation boards supporting Hot Swap have supported Windows XP from the beginning.
That's only because of mutations resulting from the Chernobyl accident.
There are a lot of general aviation pilots who fly planes which can exceed those altitudes, especially experimental aircraft (Long-EZ and derivatives, Lancair, and more recently, homebuilt jets like Viper and Maverick, although I think Maverick may be certified-only now). Not only that, between the "flying" height of 15,000' and the ground, there is a cable that will concern pilots at ANY flight level.
I'm more concerned about this development further endangering general aviation, on top of the states trying to tax private pilots to death.
Taxes have never been about fairness, nor have they even been about supporting necessary services. They are all about social engineering.
If taxes were about fairness and supporting the infrastructure and not something more insidious, we would have had a flat tax for many decades now.
That may be true about the Palm now, but it definitely wasn't in 2001. They were still saying no one needs multimedia (that's one reason the PocketPC started to pick up share then). No one would want to listen to MP3s with a PDA (I do, I don't want to carry around 18 different devices) and certainly no one would want to watch a video on a PDA. If you were on PDA forums at the time you would know that both capabilities were in demand.
Also, at the time, Palm ignored everyone who wanted better input. They did NOT have handwriting recognition then; one had to learn graffiti. Okay, they've fixed that blunder since then, but only after dropping the ball for years.
Resolution on a Palm then was what, 160x120 or something nearly as poor, and very limited color only on the high end models, monochrome on the mainstream models, while quarter-VGA and even VGA was available on the PocketPC? Yeah, GPS worked REALLY well on the Palm then. Palm turned me off to their products to the point where people have GIVEN me Palm PDAs in the past and I don't bother exploring them. I either give them away or toss them out.
Now, this part is a response to GodfatherofSoul :
Have you ever used a PocketPC? It does not use a desktop Windows paradigm. WinCE on the handheld PCs did, but the PocketPC never has, unless one installed alternate GUIs, such as Resco Desktop. I do agree it does not work on a PDA very well, and that is precisely why Microsoft did not implement Explorer from the desktop on the PPC like it did on the HPCs which boasted trackpointers and keyboards.
As far as radio buttons go: it's perfectly acceptable on a PDA.
One product Microsoft really has gotten right is the PocketPC. I'm not saying it's perfect, but the Windows Mobile platform has F/OSS and commercial software available for it, is not crippled like Apple's iPhone, has excellent handwriting recognition based on work pioneered by Apple's Newton project, and offers excellent multimedia capabilities (in fact I rip most of my DVDs so I can play them on my PocketPC). Up to now, I've HATED Palms, dating back to the original Pilot. I've had Palm PDAs, and hated them. Palm dropped the ball on multimedia, downplaying it, saying customers don't want it. Microsoft, with PocketPC 2000, included full multimedis support (hell, there were even video capture and TV tuner accessories for PocketPCs then!). Palm forced you to learn Graffiti. Microsoft offered handwriting recognition, block character recognition (Graffiti compatibility), and an on-screen keyboard, as well as support for physical keyboards. Palm's sync software sucked, and Microsofts, although unstable at times, didn't suck nearly as much.
I've thought about installing Linux on my iPAQ 3670, since Compaq actually used to install Linux on the iPAQ for customers, but now that PocketPC is so old it's doubtful that I'd be able to get it up and running again if the flash fails, and the iPAQ oldtimers are not with HP/Compaq any more. Even though I never use the 3670 any more (I have an hx2795 now) it's nice to know that I have the option to use it if the new one fails.
The down sides of the PocketPC:
- Linux will not mount it as a mass storage device (I work around it by using ssh/SCP over Wifi but as you know SCP is slow)
- SynCE is a pain in the ass to set up
- It is not user-repairable (software-wise): HP's daylight savings time fix DID NOT WORK. Were it Linux, I'd be able to easily fix it myself.
- Microsoft still insists that a close/kill button is unnecessary
- The memory model is still lame
- Vendor support (for updates, bug fixes, etc.) is weak to nonexistent
if Palm switches to Linux, here is what it would require for me to buy it:
- Let me customise the desktop
- multimedia should meet or exceed the high end PocketPCs (such as the hx2795)
- Comply with the GPL. Release the source, let us modify it. Don't DRM the appliance so we can't make fixes.
- Make syncing with Linux a high priority
- Make it mountable as a mass storage device
- get Teletype or TomTom to port their GPS products (I know, TomTom appliances run Linux)
Multimedia and GPS are what attracted me to the PocketPC in the first place. Before then, people would GIVE me PDAs, and I wouldn't use them.
It'll take a lot to get me to buy a Linux PDA, because Microsoft has largely gotten it right. I hate desktop Windows, I hate server editions of Windows, and I hate Microsoft's anti-customer policies as of late, however, they got one thing almost completely right and that is the PocketPC. Every Linux PDA I've seen so far has been limited either by low volume (so little support), weak hardware, or really lame GUI designs and limited I/O options.
Does it? Sunspots are cool relative to the rest of the Sun's surface, right? Is it impossible for the sun to be WARMER during these periods, only with a less even surface temperature, resulting in more sunspots?
No, you look at the evidence with your own preconceived notion and arrive at a conclusion, rather than stepping back to ask: what is going on here? The truth is no one really knows yet.
Sure it will. I know that if I want to search /. for discussions about Vista, all I need to search for is "defectivebydesign" or if I want to find articles about Microsoft bugs, I just need to search for "haha"
So, don't try to tell me that the tags are not providing any benefit!
This is not a blanket rule; listen to the Futurama commentaries, for example.
Okay, so you're telling me there is no need to know IP addresses? So, I can nslookup a hostname before a zone is configured in bind for the new domain? One can use a hostname to test against a staging server before cutting over DNS without knowing the IP address to point the hosts file at it for testing? Wow, I'd love to learn how you do that. Somehow, you are suggesting that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary on the administration and development side.
Evolution is a little buggy but the features are there.
People who need to configure DNS, DHCP, and apache servers, that's who.
For what it's worth I'd like to point out several things:
1. It is damn near impossible to find good PHP developers. Hacks are easy to find but we don't want hacks working on customer sites. Sloppy code is difficult to maintain, and sometimes difficult to deploy because hacks hard-code a lot of things they shouldn't.
2. Nearly every large E-Commerce site I see is running
3. We encourage clients to go with PHP/MySQL or php/Postgres for licensing, performance, and various other reasons, however some people WANT to run on Windows.
On the other hand, asp.Net may be more expensive to run (Licensing) but it's actually cheaper to find good asp.net developers, because practically everyone has used Visual Studio and are almost forced to use OOP principles and code cleanly from the get-go. Sure, there are plenty of hacks programming for Windows, but the availability of good Windows programmers is much greater than that of good PHP programmers.
Now, on the IT side; I have yet to have any clients embrace Linux for their servers. These are the type of customer who doesn't do backups, doesn't want to even THINK about the server, and yet want to run Windows. I try explaining to them that on Linux I can FULLY automate all maintenance, including backups of email, databases, and everything else, but they trust Windows because it comes in a glossy, full-color package and with a big company backing it. They refuse to accept that Windows comes with only installation support, and NO warranty. How is buying Windows from Microsoft better than buying or downloading Linux from Novell, Canonical, or Redhat again?
Either way you get pay-per-incident support and no warranty. On Linux you effectively get unlimited client access licenses, whereas Microsoft makes their licensing as difficult as possible to understand so that in the event that the client gets audited, they have to pay up big fines and buy more licenses at inflated prices because their reseller steered them wrong.
One great thing about Windows though, is shadowing. The "previous version" feature is a GREAT thing, and I haven't seen that on any desktop operating systems before. It was a feature of VMS I truly liked. I wish Linux filesystems supported file versioning.
To Hell with Microsoft.