Whereas the old building was rife with asbestos and mould, had heating pipes that broke and leaked, had no air conditioning or ventilation and wiring in the walls that was one step away from igniting the whole place. Oh, and it cost a fortune to keep it heated and running because of all the work-arounds.
Let me guess, the bill contains a provision that offers five times the fines if the media in question is in French? Or will the fines collected for infringement going to be split 50% for Quebec and 50% for everyone else?
Even better, I don't think it's fixed the bug in networkmanager that locks out any other user from being able to make network changes if one user is already logged in. Combined with user switching and this is a lot of fun: you end up not being able to do things like re-join a wifi network. It's been a bug since 8.10 at least. There are a lot of little bugs like this that persist through several releases. That shouldn't happen, especially not when there are LaunchPad postings with fixes
I like Ubuntu. I still use it, but I think the development teams are starting to drop out of sync with the user base. Paper cuts was a good start in fixing this, but I don't know if it really got the support it needed.
Another part of the problem is GNOME's reticence toward bug-fixing. Again, I like GNOME's general behaviour, but if Ubuntu can't just "be at their mercy", just noting that something is marked in an upstream bug and leaving it to rot is not good enough: if you can write panel applets for social networking, you can fix regular networking.
Who looks to their phone manufacturer for support?
Anyone who has bought a Blackberry, iPhone or Nokia E-Series. People who go to XDA et al do so out of desperation because the support from the manufacturer is crap.
This is the same logic Volkswagen service department abuse victims use: "Of course it's expensive? Who goes to a dealer for service?", never mind that, say, your average Honda owner doesn't go to the shop as often in the first place and isn't victimized when they do.
XDA is a symptom of the problem, the problem being piss-poor OEM quality on WM or Android.
The problem is that some of the problems aren't "day one" or even "day 30" bugs. They crop up after weeks or months of use, or when you try to use an application that depends on something that's broken. Sometimes they're related to security issues.
With Windows Mobile that was embarrassing: phones would ship with broken add-on apps that would leak memory or crash, problems like SMTP timing out would corrupt your mailbox, time zones being out of date, etc. For a personal user this might not be an issue: for a business it was really irritating. It was made even more galling because WM had an OTA update feature that, in all the phones I saw, was never, ever used, and outside of Symbol, Intermec and the like, the state of these handhelds software stability is terrible.
Even more amusing yet was how, even when your handheld saw an update, chances are your carrier wouldn't bother to deploy it. That was just so awesome.
Android is going exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reason: the same troglodytes are making and supporting the hardware. This is wholly different from RIM, Apple or (to some degree) Nokia.** If there's a bug in those platforms, those companies seem to have the will to get updates out in a timely manner and, generally, free from carrier reticence.
Complain as you will about Apple or RIM not being "open", but at least they seem to consider the end-users to be their actual customers. The reason the hacking communities are so strong in WM and Android circles is largely because the OEMs consider that carriers to be their customers; their offerings may as well be closed for the pathetic level of support they offer.
** Rogers in Canada, unfortunately, doesn't offer updates from Nokia's devices. This is why my E71 would have been stuck at an old and rather buggy firmware version, rather than any of the six or seven versions since that Nokia released
Nokia's method is pretty clear, generally: if it's an E-Series (business) phone, it will get updates; if it's an N-Series or "numbered" phone, it's a crapshoot.
Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over it's competitors
Apple would get crucified if they so much as tried to execute that kind of control, for one. For another, ARM isn't the only one who makes ARM-compatible CPUs: there's still Qualcomm, Samsung and more. This line is flamebait.
Apple is likely doing this to ensure consistent supply. It was depressingly common during the PowerPC era for Apple to suffer supply shortages whenever IBM or Motoroal botched estimates, diverted resources to it's own POWER machines (in IBM's case) and/or didn't feel like investing capital in manufacturing. When Apple is launching ARM-based products in half-million-in-one-week quantities, they probably don't want repeats of, say, what happened with many PPC G4,machines.
The market idea really could work, except that it requires a people who are both more noble and have a far stronger backbone than our general population.
People say the exact same thing about Communism: it could work if people were better.
If a system requires people to be better people, it's a broken system. Idealists (and ideologues) on both ends of the spectrum need to come to grips with that.
But if Canada is so much better than the US, why don't you see people crossing into Canada for health care, like you see people in Canada doing to the US.
This is such an easy argument to refute. Rich Canadians, like rich people anywhere, can go anywhere they like for treatment, and often choose the US because, if you're rich, or have very good insurance, the US has a good healthcare system.
If you're poor and have bad or no insurance, the US system is very bad. Poor Americans cannot cross the border into Canada and get free care.
In Canada, the rich have to get in line with everyone else. Yes, this means having to wait longer for non-critical procedures, which is why they queue-jump to the US. So yes, if you need hip replacement or suchlike, you need to wait. Tell me again what options are available to poor and middle-class Americans with no insurance? Other than debt or death?
Had you tried Songbird? I went through just about every music player available for Linux/'UNIX and Songbird had the lowest "barrier to entry" if you're like me and like to let your music app manage what goes on your iPod (eg, smart playlists based on frequency, etc) in a manner similar to iTunes.
This is par for the course with Nokia. Near as I can tell, they think that once the hardware is done, they can phone in the rest.
The result is a mapping application that adds extraneous street numbers to a street, mail clients that don't understand folders, push email that works about half the time, etc, etc. The hardware and core software is great, but the supplementary stuff is wretched. I can't believe how bad a job my E71 (ostensibly a business smartphone) does of email. There's no excuse, not since RIM has been doing it right for more than half a decade.
Nokia, I think, does not really "get" the smartphone market.
Lots of people screw up manual transmissions, too, generally by getting confused by which pedal does which. Panic is as panic does, and having a third pedal does not, as a stick-shift snobs are ought to think, automatically make you a better driver.
Most throttles are a simple cable system (or, at least, they used to be). Such a system doesn't break often and, when it does break, seems to be a gradual thing.
Not true. Mechanical throttles will (and do) stick suddenly, and do so with far more regularity that electronic throttles. A few posts up in this discussion is a myriad of recalls for just that for the last decade or two alone, and believe me there were more. Do you want to go back to the days of stuck throttles, carbs and cabling?
A throttle really needs to be designed with safety in mind: IE, under-working not over-working. In other words, the car doesn't "go", never mind not accelerating.
It is. There's multiple redundant sensors that feed the ECU and throttle, and a disagreement in any will put the car in limp-home mode (low revs, cut powerm less gears, etc). By the way, a cable-throttle car with a carb can't have a limp mode. The problem is that some parts of the system can't be made redunant, such as, eg, what happens if the pedal is stuck down.
This is why the first and most common cause was the floormats: the pedal gets physically obstructed. It's marginally more possible for this to happen in a Toyota, and it's also a bit of bad engineering, but it (and the worn spring in the CTS pedal that they're now pointing to as the other cause) have exactly nothing to do with electronics.
The brakes failed because the driver pumped them while travelling at speed, and the accelerator stuck (in that case) because the dealer had put the wrong floor mats in, atop the regular mats, and they jammed the pedal (the last renter was reported to have noted that, and complained to the dealer)
In neither case would manual systems have helped in any way. Direct hydraulic brakes still fade if you get them hot, and a mechanical throttle doesn't help you if something sticks the pedal down.
Oh, and the transmission is gated, not pushbutton, and neutral is easy to get to. What happened was pure driver panic.
"Objective reporting" never really was. The idea of the media being an objective reviewer is a relatively recent invention, and even then the "objectivity" angle was really an attempt to present what used to be blatant editorializing as news in hopes of gaining trust (and, thusly, eyeballs and revenue dollars).
The problem pseudo-objectivity has is that it's impossible to be objective on something that someone disagrees with you about, and thusly they won't listen to you. So someone else will pop up who's also claiming objectivity in order to cater to those people, but it's somehow different from your objective take. And then there's swaths of people who are, commercially speaking, worthless but who would view anything coming out of the various "objective" media outlets as biased.
I think we'd be better off if media agencies dropped any pretense of objectivity, and thusly the according "trust" that objectivity infers.
Maybe now that they're planning to make it free, it won't be so deplorably poor?
I have an E71 and I'd abandoned Nokia's mapping solutions because a) it seems impossible to search for anything and b) street numbers seem to have no relation to your physical position.
Nokia makes very good hardware and the operating system seems solid, but the software is incredibly half-baked. It's like the developers give when they've met the bare-minimum specifications and move on. In the case of GPS, I've yet to see another phone lock my position so quickly and use so little battery, just as I've yet to see a phone give me such a crash-proof and battery-friendly mail experience. But the GPS software is just wretched (even up to Maps 3.0), just as the various mail applications (Mail, MfE, Messaging) can't give the kind of email experience RIM nailed nearly a decade ago.
It's the kind of behaviour that will see Apple and Google eat them alive.
The system never actually runs out of memory, does it?
No, it just gets abominably slow and starts failing apps (eg, try using Maps' Traffic view on a G1: it will turn itself off almost immediately unless it's the only thing running. You can get around this by storing as much as possible on the SD card (or put off the problem by using a phone that isn't as hamstrung as the G1) but it's still foolish; doubly-so because it's making exactly the same mistake Windows Mobile did.
I hate to say it, but maybe Apple was right to make the iPhone most single-tasking?
But Windows Mobile is also getting smoked, for whatever reasons
It's getting smoked because, outside of the very specialized vertical-market stuff made by the likes of Intermec or Symbol (for warehouses, losgistics, medicine, etc, as you noted), the devices suck. Oh, sure, the hardware isn't too bad, but the user experience is generally wretched.
Android is actually making similar errors. TFA is right to note the fragmentation of the platform: unlike the iPhone (or, to a lesser degree, Symbian and Blackberry), you're having to deal with any number of permutations of screen, OS, installed applications, store restrictions, etc. Android has the benefit (over WM) of not being completely horrible to use, but it's still nowhere near as unified as the iPhone. It's pretty good, but when you can't even guarantee that email will work the same way on every device (let alone how different handset makers are bundling their own UIs), you've got problems.
And no, this isn't going to be a repeat of the "Mac vs. PC" wars of two decades ago, if for no other reason than customers today aren't as likely to be enthusiasts, and aren't going to put up with the inconsistent experience these devices provide. If Apple (and RIM, again to a lesser degree) has taught us anything, it's that interface polish matters int he consumer market: you can't shove half-baked technology at people and expect it to go well. You'd think Google would have noticed the bitch of a time Nokia is having because they're terminally incapable of making email work as well as RIM, or the pistolwhipping the iPhone is giving Windows Mobile. Near as I can figure out, it's because Apple and RIM a) recognizes it's customers are the people who buy the phones and b) set their priorities by what users need, rather than their developers preconceived notions.
Disclaimer: I actually use a Nokia E71 and really like it otherwise, but I can't believe a company like Nokia would be so foolish as to sell a business phone with such pitiful messaging features. Similarly, I can't believe a company like Google, which has made it's name offering a clean and consistent web presence would so badly fragment the experience on it's handheld.
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Whereas the old building was rife with asbestos and mould, had heating pipes that broke and leaked, had no air conditioning or ventilation and wiring in the walls that was one step away from igniting the whole place. Oh, and it cost a fortune to keep it heated and running because of all the work-arounds.
But it had "character"
Let me guess, the bill contains a provision that offers five times the fines if the media in question is in French? Or will the fines collected for infringement going to be split 50% for Quebec and 50% for everyone else?
Two solitudes in action.
Even better, I don't think it's fixed the bug in networkmanager that locks out any other user from being able to make network changes if one user is already logged in. Combined with user switching and this is a lot of fun: you end up not being able to do things like re-join a wifi network. It's been a bug since 8.10 at least. There are a lot of little bugs like this that persist through several releases. That shouldn't happen, especially not when there are LaunchPad postings with fixes
I like Ubuntu. I still use it, but I think the development teams are starting to drop out of sync with the user base. Paper cuts was a good start in fixing this, but I don't know if it really got the support it needed.
Another part of the problem is GNOME's reticence toward bug-fixing. Again, I like GNOME's general behaviour, but if Ubuntu can't just "be at their mercy", just noting that something is marked in an upstream bug and leaving it to rot is not good enough: if you can write panel applets for social networking, you can fix regular networking.
Anyone who has bought a Blackberry, iPhone or Nokia E-Series. People who go to XDA et al do so out of desperation because the support from the manufacturer is crap.
This is the same logic Volkswagen service department abuse victims use: "Of course it's expensive? Who goes to a dealer for service?", never mind that, say, your average Honda owner doesn't go to the shop as often in the first place and isn't victimized when they do.
XDA is a symptom of the problem, the problem being piss-poor OEM quality on WM or Android.
The problem is that some of the problems aren't "day one" or even "day 30" bugs. They crop up after weeks or months of use, or when you try to use an application that depends on something that's broken. Sometimes they're related to security issues.
With Windows Mobile that was embarrassing: phones would ship with broken add-on apps that would leak memory or crash, problems like SMTP timing out would corrupt your mailbox, time zones being out of date, etc. For a personal user this might not be an issue: for a business it was really irritating. It was made even more galling because WM had an OTA update feature that, in all the phones I saw, was never, ever used, and outside of Symbol, Intermec and the like, the state of these handhelds software stability is terrible.
Even more amusing yet was how, even when your handheld saw an update, chances are your carrier wouldn't bother to deploy it. That was just so awesome.
Android is going exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reason: the same troglodytes are making and supporting the hardware. This is wholly different from RIM, Apple or (to some degree) Nokia.** If there's a bug in those platforms, those companies seem to have the will to get updates out in a timely manner and, generally, free from carrier reticence.
Complain as you will about Apple or RIM not being "open", but at least they seem to consider the end-users to be their actual customers. The reason the hacking communities are so strong in WM and Android circles is largely because the OEMs consider that carriers to be their customers; their offerings may as well be closed for the pathetic level of support they offer.
** Rogers in Canada, unfortunately, doesn't offer updates from Nokia's devices. This is why my E71 would have been stuck at an old and rather buggy firmware version, rather than any of the six or seven versions since that Nokia released
Nokia's method is pretty clear, generally: if it's an E-Series (business) phone, it will get updates; if it's an N-Series or "numbered" phone, it's a crapshoot.
To achieve ultimate suck it will require Windows Mobile.
Apple would get crucified if they so much as tried to execute that kind of control, for one. For another, ARM isn't the only one who makes ARM-compatible CPUs: there's still Qualcomm, Samsung and more. This line is flamebait.
Apple is likely doing this to ensure consistent supply. It was depressingly common during the PowerPC era for Apple to suffer supply shortages whenever IBM or Motoroal botched estimates, diverted resources to it's own POWER machines (in IBM's case) and/or didn't feel like investing capital in manufacturing. When Apple is launching ARM-based products in half-million-in-one-week quantities, they probably don't want repeats of, say, what happened with many PPC G4 ,machines.
People say the exact same thing about Communism: it could work if people were better.
If a system requires people to be better people, it's a broken system. Idealists (and ideologues) on both ends of the spectrum need to come to grips with that.
Screw Ringworld, the cinema cries for Discworld.
And no, the one with Sean Astin as Twoflower doesn't count.
If no one has done so yet, this story needs to be tagged "Leshp"
This is such an easy argument to refute. Rich Canadians, like rich people anywhere, can go anywhere they like for treatment, and often choose the US because, if you're rich, or have very good insurance, the US has a good healthcare system.
If you're poor and have bad or no insurance, the US system is very bad. Poor Americans cannot cross the border into Canada and get free care.
In Canada, the rich have to get in line with everyone else. Yes, this means having to wait longer for non-critical procedures, which is why they queue-jump to the US. So yes, if you need hip replacement or suchlike, you need to wait. Tell me again what options are available to poor and middle-class Americans with no insurance? Other than debt or death?
I wonder if they fixed the bug that causes Pocket Outlook to corrupt your mailbox when you reset it?
Had you tried Songbird? I went through just about every music player available for Linux/'UNIX and Songbird had the lowest "barrier to entry" if you're like me and like to let your music app manage what goes on your iPod (eg, smart playlists based on frequency, etc) in a manner similar to iTunes.
Saturn was unionized (albeit with a slightly different contract at Spring Hill) and never made a profit the entire time it operated.
IBM's Lotus Symphony is based on the same code and has had that effort put into the UI. It's based on much older code, though, and suffers for it.
I would agree that OOo does tend to look a bit dated and lacking in the polish you see in MSO2003.
This is par for the course with Nokia. Near as I can tell, they think that once the hardware is done, they can phone in the rest.
The result is a mapping application that adds extraneous street numbers to a street, mail clients that don't understand folders, push email that works about half the time, etc, etc. The hardware and core software is great, but the supplementary stuff is wretched. I can't believe how bad a job my E71 (ostensibly a business smartphone) does of email. There's no excuse, not since RIM has been doing it right for more than half a decade.
Nokia, I think, does not really "get" the smartphone market.
Lots of people screw up manual transmissions, too, generally by getting confused by which pedal does which. Panic is as panic does, and having a third pedal does not, as a stick-shift snobs are ought to think, automatically make you a better driver.
Not true. Mechanical throttles will (and do) stick suddenly, and do so with far more regularity that electronic throttles. A few posts up in this discussion is a myriad of recalls for just that for the last decade or two alone, and believe me there were more. Do you want to go back to the days of stuck throttles, carbs and cabling?
It is. There's multiple redundant sensors that feed the ECU and throttle, and a disagreement in any will put the car in limp-home mode (low revs, cut powerm less gears, etc). By the way, a cable-throttle car with a carb can't have a limp mode. The problem is that some parts of the system can't be made redunant, such as, eg, what happens if the pedal is stuck down.
This is why the first and most common cause was the floormats: the pedal gets physically obstructed. It's marginally more possible for this to happen in a Toyota, and it's also a bit of bad engineering, but it (and the worn spring in the CTS pedal that they're now pointing to as the other cause) have exactly nothing to do with electronics.
The brakes failed because the driver pumped them while travelling at speed, and the accelerator stuck (in that case) because the dealer had put the wrong floor mats in, atop the regular mats, and they jammed the pedal (the last renter was reported to have noted that, and complained to the dealer)
In neither case would manual systems have helped in any way. Direct hydraulic brakes still fade if you get them hot, and a mechanical throttle doesn't help you if something sticks the pedal down.
Oh, and the transmission is gated, not pushbutton, and neutral is easy to get to. What happened was pure driver panic.
"Objective reporting" never really was. The idea of the media being an objective reviewer is a relatively recent invention, and even then the "objectivity" angle was really an attempt to present what used to be blatant editorializing as news in hopes of gaining trust (and, thusly, eyeballs and revenue dollars).
The problem pseudo-objectivity has is that it's impossible to be objective on something that someone disagrees with you about, and thusly they won't listen to you. So someone else will pop up who's also claiming objectivity in order to cater to those people, but it's somehow different from your objective take. And then there's swaths of people who are, commercially speaking, worthless but who would view anything coming out of the various "objective" media outlets as biased.
I think we'd be better off if media agencies dropped any pretense of objectivity, and thusly the according "trust" that objectivity infers.
Maybe now that they're planning to make it free, it won't be so deplorably poor?
I have an E71 and I'd abandoned Nokia's mapping solutions because a) it seems impossible to search for anything and b) street numbers seem to have no relation to your physical position.
Nokia makes very good hardware and the operating system seems solid, but the software is incredibly half-baked. It's like the developers give when they've met the bare-minimum specifications and move on. In the case of GPS, I've yet to see another phone lock my position so quickly and use so little battery, just as I've yet to see a phone give me such a crash-proof and battery-friendly mail experience. But the GPS software is just wretched (even up to Maps 3.0), just as the various mail applications (Mail, MfE, Messaging) can't give the kind of email experience RIM nailed nearly a decade ago.
It's the kind of behaviour that will see Apple and Google eat them alive.
The system never actually runs out of memory, does it?
No, it just gets abominably slow and starts failing apps (eg, try using Maps' Traffic view on a G1: it will turn itself off almost immediately unless it's the only thing running. You can get around this by storing as much as possible on the SD card (or put off the problem by using a phone that isn't as hamstrung as the G1) but it's still foolish; doubly-so because it's making exactly the same mistake Windows Mobile did.
I hate to say it, but maybe Apple was right to make the iPhone most single-tasking?
But Windows Mobile is also getting smoked, for whatever reasons
It's getting smoked because, outside of the very specialized vertical-market stuff made by the likes of Intermec or Symbol (for warehouses, losgistics, medicine, etc, as you noted), the devices suck. Oh, sure, the hardware isn't too bad, but the user experience is generally wretched.
Android is actually making similar errors. TFA is right to note the fragmentation of the platform: unlike the iPhone (or, to a lesser degree, Symbian and Blackberry), you're having to deal with any number of permutations of screen, OS, installed applications, store restrictions, etc. Android has the benefit (over WM) of not being completely horrible to use, but it's still nowhere near as unified as the iPhone. It's pretty good, but when you can't even guarantee that email will work the same way on every device (let alone how different handset makers are bundling their own UIs), you've got problems.
And no, this isn't going to be a repeat of the "Mac vs. PC" wars of two decades ago, if for no other reason than customers today aren't as likely to be enthusiasts, and aren't going to put up with the inconsistent experience these devices provide. If Apple (and RIM, again to a lesser degree) has taught us anything, it's that interface polish matters int he consumer market: you can't shove half-baked technology at people and expect it to go well. You'd think Google would have noticed the bitch of a time Nokia is having because they're terminally incapable of making email work as well as RIM, or the pistolwhipping the iPhone is giving Windows Mobile. Near as I can figure out, it's because Apple and RIM a) recognizes it's customers are the people who buy the phones and b) set their priorities by what users need, rather than their developers preconceived notions.
Disclaimer: I actually use a Nokia E71 and really like it otherwise, but I can't believe a company like Nokia would be so foolish as to sell a business phone with such pitiful messaging features. Similarly, I can't believe a company like Google, which has made it's name offering a clean and consistent web presence would so badly fragment the experience on it's handheld.
Repeat after me, there is no market in IPv4 addresses.
Tell that to the people who were calling my former employer, offering to buy portions of their /16 for substantial amounts of money.