My initial installations involved importing mail from OE, and I give TBird a pretty good work out with POP, IMAP, NNTP and RSS used in each install and apart from the occasional hang checking RSS feeds I've never had a problem with it.
The real question is, is Joe Windows Vista User going to go to nvidia.com to download the latest drivers for his new videocard and find that there's now a surcharge for the file, ostensibly to cover the cost of signing the driver? Or is this expenditure going to be integrated into the cost of the hardware, artificially raising the price?
It's always so entertaining reading the latest conspriacy theories that get thrown for things like this. Hello, NVIDIA and all major H/W suppliers have been signing drivers for years so no, they aren't going to start charging customers for new versions of drivers, sheesh!
In Vista 64-bit, you have to jump through hoops to use an unsigned driver, in Vista-32 it functions just like it did in XP, i.e. you get a warning, but can continue to install that's what you want to do.
Strange, I've been using TBird as my primary e-mail client at work and home for almost two years now. I've never had a problem with lost mail, index corruption or anything else for that matter. I would have to suspect that the end-user is doing something out of the ordinary for this to occur with such frequency.
My experience of VCs is that they are definitely more conservative before than before the nuclear winter post-2000. But that's because an awful lot of VCs got really badly burned by the type of funding deals they did in the boom years. So yes they are more conservative, but in my experience they are conservative across the board, not just with more exotic ideas. Back in the day companies did $50-60M rounds quite frequently, today I would say that $15M is big funding round.
No, these are just general repositories of software. I was thinking of something more along the lines of four or five menu items, say:
Anti Virus
Office
Image editing
Email & Web
MP3 & Sound Tools
Each would list 2-3 mature applications that are freely available. Part of the problem with free software is that there is so much of it that it's bewildering to the average user, but guide them to a few choices that work well and they may be willing to give it a try.
You vastly over estimate the ease with which people find what they are looking for on Sourceforge, it's a marvelllous repository of software, but only if you have a pretty good idea of what you want in the first place or can spend your time browsing through the hundreds of packages with cryptic descriptions and varying levels of maturity to find what you want.
If you really want to get people hooked on free/open source software then you need to make it REALLY easy for Joe Public to find it.
>Then why don't they just use free alternatives from the
>internet. Open source or just plain freeware?
Because the vast majority of people wouldn't know where to look for such software if you gave 'em a map, and a high percentage of those who did find "free" software would manage to download all sorts of spyware and other crap in the process.
Perhaps Sourceforge should put up a "PC Essentials" list with the more mature free/open source products list on it, today I defy defy the average PC user who doesn't know specifically what they are looking for to find safe free sources of software and get what they need without spending a lot of time and effort.
MS wanted to include native support for PDF in Office 2007 but Adobe wouldn't let them do that either. Adobe isn't doing this to protect all those people out their using LINUX and OSX, it's doing it to protect the Adobe Acrobat Pro market, nothing more, nothing less.
Personally I feel deeply sorry for anybody who loads Acrobat (Free or Pro) on the system regardless of their OS choice.
> and supports every chunk of hardware sitting out there on boxes that old.
Actually, I wouldn't bet on that, a lot of the remaining Win98 boxes are doing fairly esoteric things controlling devices that are light years away from mainstream, the reason they stay on Win98 is because it's the only box that does support the devices they are using, take a look at:
The point I'm trying to make is that there is almost an expectation that software on LINUX is free, which doesn't exactly endear to commercial software developers who want to *SELL* something!
Funny, different strokes, for different folks. I love my 5G IPOD, beautiful of engineering, and very reliable for me. But IHMO iTunes is the most overrated piece of crap I've ever installed on my PC, horrible UI, slow, difficult to navigate, the list goes on. Personally I use Redchair's Anapod and never fire up iTunes. That said, I'm no big fan of MediaPlayer 10 (or 11 for that matter) either.
> The best thing for all these companies is to move to Apple and OSS (particularly Linux).
Not really, a 5 percent market share on the Windows platform beats 100% share on OSX/LINUX, and the LINUX market is still hampered by the stigma of being the platform that people associate with free software. Seriously, how many of the folks here running LINUX have spent a $200 bucks on a software package?
1. Graphics configuration beyond the most basic things is real PITA, just getting it to allow to have 1280x1024 was a trip, and then I made the mistake of changing the monitor from a CRT to an LCD and had to go thorugh the whole thing again because X refused to fire up at all!
2. Generally poor hardware support for things scanners, cameras, latest/greatest chipsets...
3. Generally flaky install even on relatively old (3+years) hardware, multiple failed attempts to partition the drive, etc, etc
4. Real PITA to run mainstream commercial software, yes WINE sort of works
5. Good package manager, but package descriptions written by geeks for geeks, god help my sister understanding the if she was looking for a package to perform a particular task
This is all based on my experience with the most recent Ubuntu release. Seriously anybody who thinks LINUX is ready for the average desktop user is smoking some really strong stuff!
Absolutely sure, the I can't quite remember the name of the firm that Sky/Murdoch/DirecTV owns, but it's a completel software hardware solution, and I'd bet money that it's running an embedded LINUX kernel. But it's stil not TIVO, and having experienced the UI on my sisters box in the UK, it's a long way from being competition to TIVO from a usability standpoint.
Like others, if DirecTV persists in this decision to go it alone I'll be looking for another supplier for my TV in the future, meanwhile they have to rpize my 10-250 from cold dead hands before I accept their ersatz TIVO.
While I agree with the sentiments, the facts about the DTV non-TIVO are just plain wrong, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft, it was developed by a UK company that is own by the Rupert Murdoch machine. So no need for the Microsoft-conspiracy bit;-)
Whether we like it or not, companies like Microsoft have to maintain good relationships with organizations like the RIAA if they want services like Urge to have an content for users to buy. Microsoft obviously sees that entire market as important, hence the desire to launch an MS branded competitor to IPOD.
> Does anyone know if the DRM/encryption in BD/HD has been cracked yet? Is DVD Jon working hard on this?
It will not be as simple as DeCSS, the schemes used in HD & BL discs allow the vendors to update encryption keys over the network, so if someone cracks a particular key it can be invalidated for future use.
> Linux and MacOS X are both capable of having both IPv6 and IPv4 stacks, and in many cases
> this is active by default. Why would Vista cause any more problems?
Just a wild guess here, but if (and that's a big if) Vista causes a problem it will be because millions of systems will be using it, vs. much, much, much smaller numbers for LINUX and OSX combined.
>In any major city in the USA, if you drive 20 minutes you're in the middle of no where.
I'd like to see you try getting to the "middle of no where" 20 mins from downtown Manhattan, you luck if you can get a cab that quickly some times of day:-)
If distance was the problem with getting higher speed broadband in the US, then how come it led the world in rolling out lower speed broadband for so long? I had cable in 1998 in Huntsville Al, my sister in Essex in England didn't get broadband as an option till 2003. Today, I still live with pretty much the same download speeds I could get in 1998, (i.e. about 1.5Mbits from DSL) my sister has an 8Mbit connection and she pays a lot less for it as well.
The Telco/Cable duopoly seems to have no interest in rolling out faster connections at any speed in the US, quite why that is is a good question.
In terms of getting Firefox to run on Vista, I'm not sure what the big deal is, I've running FireFox (and Thunderbird) on Vista for the best of a year. Only that I've had real problems with is getting Macormedia flash to install and work (then again, I'm not sure I regard that as a problem:-)
> No one has still replied to my request for an explanation of
>what non-final core components mean. Is this the same as bugs?
Just a guess, but I would suspect that somewhere in the process of going from RC candidate to RTM somebody screwed up so that the final version passed by QA and the version that went to manufacturing were not the same. So probably means that it's a few builds short of what should have gone to manufacturing and reflects the product at a very late stage in the release process.
What's different is that this device supports the new MPEG4 sattelites which is how DirecTV will deliver new HD content and give you access to local stations HD feeds without requiring OTA. The TIVO based DVR only supports the older DTV sattelites and cannot be upgraded because of the change from MPEG2 to MPEG4 encoding with the new sattelites.
I'm going to wait and see whether DTV offers new HD channels that I actually care about before I make any change as I can get all my locals in HD already and the HD content available on the sattelites is rather underwhelming at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
My initial installations involved importing mail from OE, and I give TBird a pretty good work out with POP, IMAP, NNTP and RSS used in each install and apart from the occasional hang checking RSS feeds I've never had a problem with it.
In Vista 64-bit, you have to jump through hoops to use an unsigned driver, in Vista-32 it functions just like it did in XP, i.e. you get a warning, but can continue to install that's what you want to do.
Strange, I've been using TBird as my primary e-mail client at work and home for almost two years now. I've never had a problem with lost mail, index corruption or anything else for that matter. I would have to suspect that the end-user is doing something out of the ordinary for this to occur with such frequency.
My experience of VCs is that they are definitely more conservative before than before the nuclear winter post-2000. But that's because an awful lot of VCs got really badly burned by the type of funding deals they did in the boom years. So yes they are more conservative, but in my experience they are conservative across the board, not just with more exotic ideas. Back in the day companies did $50-60M rounds quite frequently, today I would say that $15M is big funding round.
Anti Virus
Office
Image editing
Email & Web
MP3 & Sound Tools
Each would list 2-3 mature applications that are freely available. Part of the problem with free software is that there is so much of it that it's bewildering to the average user, but guide them to a few choices that work well and they may be willing to give it a try.
You vastly over estimate the ease with which people find what they are looking for on Sourceforge, it's a marvelllous repository of software, but only if you have a pretty good idea of what you want in the first place or can spend your time browsing through the hundreds of packages with cryptic descriptions and varying levels of maturity to find what you want.
If you really want to get people hooked on free/open source software then you need to make it REALLY easy for Joe Public to find it.
>internet. Open source or just plain freeware?
Because the vast majority of people wouldn't know where to look for such software if you gave 'em a map, and a high percentage of those who did find "free" software would manage to download all sorts of spyware and other crap in the process.
Perhaps Sourceforge should put up a "PC Essentials" list with the more mature free/open source products list on it, today I defy defy the average PC user who doesn't know specifically what they are looking for to find safe free sources of software and get what they need without spending a lot of time and effort.
MS wanted to include native support for PDF in Office 2007 but Adobe wouldn't let them do that either. Adobe isn't doing this to protect all those people out their using LINUX and OSX, it's doing it to protect the Adobe Acrobat Pro market, nothing more, nothing less. Personally I feel deeply sorry for anybody who loads Acrobat (Free or Pro) on the system regardless of their OS choice.
> and supports every chunk of hardware sitting out there on boxes that old.
s p?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000610
Actually, I wouldn't bet on that, a lot of the remaining Win98 boxes are doing fairly esoteric things controlling devices that are light years away from mainstream, the reason they stay on Win98 is because it's the only box that does support the devices they are using, take a look at:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2017830,00.a
For some discussion on just this issue.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is almost an expectation that software on LINUX is free, which doesn't exactly endear to commercial software developers who want to *SELL* something!
Funny, different strokes, for different folks. I love my 5G IPOD, beautiful of engineering, and very reliable for me. But IHMO iTunes is the most overrated piece of crap I've ever installed on my PC, horrible UI, slow, difficult to navigate, the list goes on. Personally I use Redchair's Anapod and never fire up iTunes. That said, I'm no big fan of MediaPlayer 10 (or 11 for that matter) either.
> The best thing for all these companies is to move to Apple and OSS (particularly Linux).
Not really, a 5 percent market share on the Windows platform beats 100% share on OSX/LINUX, and the LINUX market is still hampered by the stigma of being the platform that people associate with free software. Seriously, how many of the folks here running LINUX have spent a $200 bucks on a software package?
And let's not forget
1. Graphics configuration beyond the most basic things is real PITA, just getting it to allow to have 1280x1024 was a trip, and then I made the mistake of changing the monitor from a CRT to an LCD and had to go thorugh the whole thing again because X refused to fire up at all!
2. Generally poor hardware support for things scanners, cameras, latest/greatest chipsets...
3. Generally flaky install even on relatively old (3+years) hardware, multiple failed attempts to partition the drive, etc, etc
4. Real PITA to run mainstream commercial software, yes WINE sort of works
5. Good package manager, but package descriptions written by geeks for geeks, god help my sister understanding the if she was looking for a package to perform a particular task
This is all based on my experience with the most recent Ubuntu release. Seriously anybody who thinks LINUX is ready for the average desktop user is smoking some really strong stuff!
Just tracked down a USA Today article that names the company as NDS. Article URL isg y/2004-11-29-dvr_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolo
Company URL is
http://www.nds.com/personal_tv/personal_tv.html
Absolutely sure, the I can't quite remember the name of the firm that Sky/Murdoch/DirecTV owns, but it's a completel software hardware solution, and I'd bet money that it's running an embedded LINUX kernel. But it's stil not TIVO, and having experienced the UI on my sisters box in the UK, it's a long way from being competition to TIVO from a usability standpoint. Like others, if DirecTV persists in this decision to go it alone I'll be looking for another supplier for my TV in the future, meanwhile they have to rpize my 10-250 from cold dead hands before I accept their ersatz TIVO.
While I agree with the sentiments, the facts about the DTV non-TIVO are just plain wrong, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft, it was developed by a UK company that is own by the Rupert Murdoch machine. So no need for the Microsoft-conspiracy bit ;-)
Whether we like it or not, companies like Microsoft have to maintain good relationships with organizations like the RIAA if they want services like Urge to have an content for users to buy. Microsoft obviously sees that entire market as important, hence the desire to launch an MS branded competitor to IPOD.
> Does anyone know if the DRM/encryption in BD/HD has been cracked yet? Is DVD Jon working hard on this?
It will not be as simple as DeCSS, the schemes used in HD & BL discs allow the vendors to update encryption keys over the network, so if someone cracks a particular key it can be invalidated for future use.
> this is active by default. Why would Vista cause any more problems?
Just a wild guess here, but if (and that's a big if) Vista causes a problem it will be because millions of systems will be using it, vs. much, much, much smaller numbers for LINUX and OSX combined.
> and a complete cessation of brain function is a characteristic of death.
Are you calling GWB a Zombie?
>In any major city in the USA, if you drive 20 minutes you're in the middle of no where. I'd like to see you try getting to the "middle of no where" 20 mins from downtown Manhattan, you luck if you can get a cab that quickly some times of day :-)
If distance was the problem with getting higher speed broadband in the US, then how come it led the world in rolling out lower speed broadband for so long? I had cable in 1998 in Huntsville Al, my sister in Essex in England didn't get broadband as an option till 2003. Today, I still live with pretty much the same download speeds I could get in 1998, (i.e. about 1.5Mbits from DSL) my sister has an 8Mbit connection and she pays a lot less for it as well.
The Telco/Cable duopoly seems to have no interest in rolling out faster connections at any speed in the US, quite why that is is a good question.
In terms of getting Firefox to run on Vista, I'm not sure what the big deal is, I've running FireFox (and Thunderbird) on Vista for the best of a year. Only that I've had real problems with is getting Macormedia flash to install and work (then again, I'm not sure I regard that as a problem :-)
> No one has still replied to my request for an explanation of >what non-final core components mean. Is this the same as bugs? Just a guess, but I would suspect that somewhere in the process of going from RC candidate to RTM somebody screwed up so that the final version passed by QA and the version that went to manufacturing were not the same. So probably means that it's a few builds short of what should have gone to manufacturing and reflects the product at a very late stage in the release process.
What's different is that this device supports the new MPEG4 sattelites which is how DirecTV will deliver new HD content and give you access to local stations HD feeds without requiring OTA. The TIVO based DVR only supports the older DTV sattelites and cannot be upgraded because of the change from MPEG2 to MPEG4 encoding with the new sattelites. I'm going to wait and see whether DTV offers new HD channels that I actually care about before I make any change as I can get all my locals in HD already and the HD content available on the sattelites is rather underwhelming at the moment.