Let's face it, if you want mobile service in the US it's like choosing between three shit sandwiches.
I like that. I'm going to use it to break the ice at parties in future. Thank you.
While the UK mobile system is far better than the US system, it still has its flaws. For example, some providers have the habit of 'locking' a phone to its provider, and demanding an unlocking fee to unlock it. If you want to transfer your number from an old to a new SIM, you have to phone both providers and go through rather intrusive security checks.
For example, last month I switched providers from Tesco Mobile to 3, and wanted to transfer my mobile number over. I had to phone Tesco Mobile, tell them my postcode, the location, amount and date of the last top-up, and then tell them who I was moving to, why I was moving to them, and why I wasn't moving to Tesco's own Extra tariff before the lady on the other end of the phone would give me the PAC code.
(For those on the other side of the pond, over here Tesco is like Wal-Mart in its relative size, popularity and rubbishness. I only had the SIM because it was given to me someone else a few years ago.)
If the US's market is a choice between shit sandwiches, then the UK's market is like choosing between a pleasant, lightly toasted, warm bread-and-butter sandwich, or a sandwich made of cardboard and artificial margarine. The problem is that they're all hidden within opaque sealed boxes, á la Deal or No Deal.
There are contracts in the UK, but the cancellation fee is usually quite modest (around £30-50, which is equivalent at the present exchange rate to ~$60-100).
Actually ATT only even has sporadic 2G coverage in the US. They play games with their roaming agreements to keep their costs down and the end result is they've got, by a substantial margin, the worst coverage in the United States. (Other carriers have similar coverage but allow free roaming to other networks.)
ATT should be fixing their already nearly useless network before upgrading it. There's not a good excuse why you could lose ATT signals along any interstate highway in the US, or why there could be large parts of big cities like Boston or San Francisco with no coverage. Remember, though, that in comparison to other countries the USA is simply massive. We have trouble (sometimes) receiving even 2G signals in rural areas. However, in a massive country like the USA, I would expect coverage to be more patchy.
A great point: over in Great Britain 3G has been working (very quickly) for several years now, whilst O2 have only just started rolling out EDGE for the iPhone (mainly). When I tried using an iPhone in an O2 shop a few months ago, it was painfully slow under EDGE (but fine under Wi-Fi).
It turned out that after making the deal at $88,000 per annum, they'd sold the industry bosses their briefcase which contained $1,000,000. Oh well. We won't be seeing you next week on Deal or No Deal, because 24 is starting again! Yay!
The first open-source software was created around 13,700,000,000 years ago, and remains so stable that it runs to this day, and is expected to do so indefinitely. However, its creator, God, forgot to document it. Therefore we have to write universe-HOWTO.html ourselves.
Honestly, I'd say it's about 100x's more likely that OSX gains significant ground to the point where it makes sense for apple to source out OSX to third party system builders than it would that Linux gains any significant headground.
I highly doubt that will happen. Surely if OS X gains enough ground in this respect, there'll be little need for Apple to outsource OS X, as it will have been installed on the 10s of millions of Macs that they've shipped? Either way, it'll be better than Vista. By an order of magnitude.
You know, unless the Linux community understands and finally makes strides to make Linux a) look like a program you would actually go out and spend your hard earned money on and b) make the UI and naming convention on the included software logical.
Exactly. The problem with desktop Linux is that it seems to be designed by people who have trouble visualising what end users want and expect. Even though Ubuntu's install is better than most Linux OSes, it should be simplified for newer users. This is where it can get ahead of Windows, because at the moment if Windows breaks Joe Windows will go to his local IT guy to reinstall it. This is because he doesn't understand what 'partitions' and 'bootloaders' and 'MBRs' and 'partition tables' are, and is scared of a TUI installer where he can't use the mouse. Remember that Ubuntu has a fully graphical process, and if there was an automatic partitioning option (e.g. partition off 20% of the Windows/OS X partition) it would beat Windows hands down.
And the OSS community needs to stop claiming 'FOSS is so great because you can redistribute it, modify it and help create it for free'. They don't give a toss about that: all they care about is getting something that'll work and is easy to use. And they'll also like a freebie - although some people might be suspicious that it's a con(fidence trick, ie a scam), so then the 'community development' card can be played.
As I understand it, the first antivirus program ever to have existed (although not marketed as such at the time) was the UNIX rm command. This was followed by clones in other UNIXes, and in the popular DOS operating system in which it was invoked with del.
Used in conjunction with the killall command, it is a very powerful tool indeed. Beats Norton anyways.
If OS X was installed, vanilla, without ANY tweaking, the firewall would be down. With all the ports open.
Therefore I predict that will be hacked first, and the winner will simply be able to start the firewall and take it home. Linux would be a bit more difficult to break into and no-one would want to take home the Vista box.
MinWin's name suggests it may be a clone, or a similar OS to, Minix. It may just be because it's 'mini', but I'd like to think they're actually rewriting Windows, starting with the kernel.
Doesn't sound quite as bad as Independence Day, though. I mean, a PowerBook from 1997 connecting to the Internet on the move?
What's wrong with that? IIRC, I had a cellphone with a special port for use to connnect to a serial(?) port in 1997. You could use it as a modem to call an ISP. It wasn't EDGE technology that allowed it to be on the internet, but it was around.
Yes, but at the speed he was opening programs and web pages (very megabyte-intensive) I see no way it would work with that speed under a 56k landline modem, let alone a 14.4k cellular system, running through an RS232 on that pure bastion of stability, Mac OS 8.
Deep Impact - a progress meter saying "TRANSFERRING TO FLOPPY DISK"?
Well, was it transfering to a floppy? What's wrong here?
In my experience, progress meters always give the name of the device. IE: "Copying ASTEROID.JPG to A:/IMGS/*.*". It is ridiculously dumbed down.
The amount of science and computing howlers in modern films (and TV shows) irritates me beyond belief.
If those examples are what annoys you, what is wrong with you? I have no desire to watch someone use a command line interface to read e-mail. I also want the guns to have infinite magazines (except when running out of ammo is an interesting part of the story.) You can talk about the annoyance of bad science, and there are good examples (which slip my mind). But, just like I have no desire to see someone actaully fix a car's engine (yes, car analog, for the win) in a movie as opposed to play with a wrench for 10 seconds, I have no desire to watch someone go through the tedium of configuring a computer, or programming, or using PINE.
Perhaps I should explain. In my opinion, these errors remove a lot of the realism, making the film much less believable. I prefer things to be gritty and believable, not fantastic and unlikely.
I could actually see a plotline emerging from the boredom of tracking someone down with a computer. The government technician tries to tracert his way into some server which is sending out a worm for a DDoS attack against the Pentagon, the MOD, etc. However, it's taking too long, and the stupid bureaucrats throw him out and put Steve Ballamer on the job.
why can't we go back to the days when film-makers would have an enormous penchant for factual accuracy? The amount of science and computing howlers in modern films (and TV shows) irritates me beyond belief.
Doesn't sound quite as bad as Independence Day, though. I mean, a PowerBook from 1997 connecting to the Internet on the move? Deep Impact - a progress meter saying "TRANSFERRING TO FLOPPY DISK"? Retrieving E-mail with the command "open mail server" in the terminal, only to be confronted with such a terse error message as "server down"?
It may not be particularly noticeable to the average viewer, but to me it's intensely off-putting.
I'm sure many of us are aware... but let us not forget who Premier Election Solutions, really are. They are Diebold.
Changing the name was a sneaky move. Strange that while they offer flawed election 'solutions', they also make ATMs and cash deposit machines. HSBC banks here in the Free World use Diebold-badged machines, into which shopkeepers deposit their money every Friday. I dread to think what that may implicate if the ATMs are running similar software.
Diebold are going to have real trouble building their reputation back up after this; even though other machines may be vulnerable, the fact that this case has been so well publicised is seriously going to damage Diebold's public image.
I concur. While the MBA is very pretty and very thin, I don't necessarily need a laptop to fit in an envelope. What peeves me is that people will be able to get an (albeit not as pretty) ThinkPad with a very similar spec, which is only a little thinner. For an extra £100 or so, you could also, if you are that desperate to have an Apple machine, have a MacBook Pro, which is faster, has more ports, a bigger 15" screen, more RAM, a DVD-burning SuperDrive as standard, 10/100/1000 Ethernet as standard, better video capability and a similar aluminium case while still being one of the thinnest laptops in the world. There are plenty of similar computers to the MacBook Air, and I can see Apple having some stiff competition, both from the new ThinkPad and from itself if they can't justify the MBA's price and lack of features.
Apple's (NEXTSTEP's, really) dock is another solution. Single, flat list, everything immediately accessible. This system will eventually run into problems when the list gets too large, but the fact that items are distinguished by their (large enough to actually be distinguishable) icons makes it a bit better than a system based on text (which is long in one dimension). Compared to commands, it has the advantage that it's discoverable, and the disadvantage that it doesn't scale. I can fit about 40 icons along the bottom of my screen at usable size, whereas the shell lets me easily choose from over 2400 commands. But then again, most of the shell commands can't really sensibly be put in icons, and of those that can, I wouldn't be surprised if the number I used regularly were less than 40.
Another disadvantage of using a Dock is that you have to choose what to put on there. For example, I have 15 application icons for the Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat, Skype, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, TextEdit, Keynote, Pages, Numbers and System Preferences, along with icons for my external disk (the 'ANNEXE'), Documents, Pictures, Movies and the Trashcan. Those are a lot of links, but even now I find them insufficient when I need to run a whois: while it's not used frequently enough to warrant being Docked (I generally have a lot of minimised windows so space is at a premium on my crummy 1024*768 screen), I still find it irritating when I have to switch to the Finder, and then double-click three icons (Welchman HD>Applications>Utilities) to get to what I need.
Again, this is all due to the problem of scalability being difficult. I really don't mind voice or shell commmands as I know my way around both UNIX and Windows, but when designing with the novice in mind, it is difficult to strike a balance between allowing the user to have good usability, while at the same time giving him a fully-featured system and the ability to learn the system and discover new programs.
What would be interesting is if the computer could translate normal conversation into machine-friendly commands. For example, if I told my computer to let me write a letter to my friend John Smith, it would pick out the info from the address book, open a fresh Word/OOo Writer/Pages/whatever document, paste the information in, and tell you (possibly through TTS) that it's ready for you to start typing.
Combined with some simple AI, voice commanding could become a very powerful tool indeed. While I shan't imagine I'll be kissing goodbye to my keyboard any time soon (I would still find dictation annoying, even if it was perfect, due to the time it takes to correct mistakes) I'd like to stow my mouse away in a cupboard somewhere. Saying 'File/Save/Exit Microsoft Word' is far more efficient, in my opinion, than using a mouse and keyboard to do the same thing.
Simon can import dictionaries directly from wiktionary (a subproject of wikipedia)
No it's not - Wiktionary is a sister project of Wikipedia. Not a subproject.
However, I must concur that in my experience speech recognition has been extremely patchy. While using it to issue voice commands is OK (and can be a real time-saver as it avoids going into Start,/Applications, Programs menu etc), dictation tends to be pretty rubbish. Especially when you're demonstrating the new speech recognition abilities in Windows Vista and just happen to work for Microsoft. And be in a loud, echoey expo hall. And using a dodgy mike.
Pay to buy Vista separately? IMO I should be paid to buy Vista separately and install it. That said, I believe the fastest Vista laptop computer CNet (or maybe PC World?) has ever tested is, rather ironically, a MacBook Pro - that's when you know Apple is getting something right and Microsoft is getting something wrong.
You mean the cleaners and janitors? Most likely, but is there anyone influential there who believes that a big beardy man buried dinosaur skeletons to fuck with our minds?
What I'm worried about is that people who do believe that may already be in the White House, and may soon be. In particular, people like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee.
Honestly, if an MP (member of parliament) said evolution was a hoax in the UK, they'd be laughed out of Parliament for not having a basic grasp of GCSE science. But in the States - great! Fantastic! Let him in!
The same applies to gun control, abortion and global warming. The USA seems to have a weird perception of the world, probably from its strange Puritan origins. Over in Europe, people are far more moderate. True, you'll find the odd small community of Daily Mail readers who think that the BBC is run by hippies, Gordon Brown is allowing 400 million asylum seekers (who are, by the way, all murderers and paedophiles) into the UK every day, motorists are being persecuted and that all children are hoodie-wearing, brick-throwing yobs. However, in the UK we certainly don't pelt stones and housebricks on anyone who appears to be gay.
So, in short, in Europe people generally don't believe in creationism outright. Some believe that the Creation was simply a metaphor for evolution. Others might believe in creationism, but respectfully disagree with evolutionists. Thank God there are no museums like this Texas one in London - I'd consider emigrating to Alpha Centauri if there was one.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. IMO the article is anti-MS FUD submitted so we can have our daily dose of M$-bash fodder.
I like that. I'm going to use it to break the ice at parties in future. Thank you.
While the UK mobile system is far better than the US system, it still has its flaws. For example, some providers have the habit of 'locking' a phone to its provider, and demanding an unlocking fee to unlock it. If you want to transfer your number from an old to a new SIM, you have to phone both providers and go through rather intrusive security checks.
For example, last month I switched providers from Tesco Mobile to 3, and wanted to transfer my mobile number over. I had to phone Tesco Mobile, tell them my postcode, the location, amount and date of the last top-up, and then tell them who I was moving to, why I was moving to them, and why I wasn't moving to Tesco's own Extra tariff before the lady on the other end of the phone would give me the PAC code.
(For those on the other side of the pond, over here Tesco is like Wal-Mart in its relative size, popularity and rubbishness. I only had the SIM because it was given to me someone else a few years ago.)
If the US's market is a choice between shit sandwiches, then the UK's market is like choosing between a pleasant, lightly toasted, warm bread-and-butter sandwich, or a sandwich made of cardboard and artificial margarine. The problem is that they're all hidden within opaque sealed boxes, á la Deal or No Deal.
There are contracts in the UK, but the cancellation fee is usually quite modest (around £30-50, which is equivalent at the present exchange rate to ~$60-100).
I don't. I live in the Thames Valley in the UK.
ATT should be fixing their already nearly useless network before upgrading it. There's not a good excuse why you could lose ATT signals along any interstate highway in the US, or why there could be large parts of big cities like Boston or San Francisco with no coverage.
Remember, though, that in comparison to other countries the USA is simply massive. We have trouble (sometimes) receiving even 2G signals in rural areas. However, in a massive country like the USA, I would expect coverage to be more patchy.
A great point: over in Great Britain 3G has been working (very quickly) for several years now, whilst O2 have only just started rolling out EDGE for the iPhone (mainly). When I tried using an iPhone in an O2 shop a few months ago, it was painfully slow under EDGE (but fine under Wi-Fi).
It turned out that after making the deal at $88,000 per annum, they'd sold the industry bosses their briefcase which contained $1,000,000. Oh well. We won't be seeing you next week on Deal or No Deal, because 24 is starting again! Yay!
The first open-source software was created around 13,700,000,000 years ago, and remains so stable that it runs to this day, and is expected to do so indefinitely. However, its creator, God, forgot to document it. Therefore we have to write universe-HOWTO.html ourselves.
Vista includes IPv6 support. And so what? True, it should default to IPv4 if v6 doesn't work, but at least it supports IPv6!
I highly doubt that will happen. Surely if OS X gains enough ground in this respect, there'll be little need for Apple to outsource OS X, as it will have been installed on the 10s of millions of Macs that they've shipped? Either way, it'll be better than Vista. By an order of magnitude.
You know, unless the Linux community understands and finally makes strides to make Linux a) look like a program you would actually go out and spend your hard earned money on and b) make the UI and naming convention on the included software logical.Exactly. The problem with desktop Linux is that it seems to be designed by people who have trouble visualising what end users want and expect. Even though Ubuntu's install is better than most Linux OSes, it should be simplified for newer users. This is where it can get ahead of Windows, because at the moment if Windows breaks Joe Windows will go to his local IT guy to reinstall it. This is because he doesn't understand what 'partitions' and 'bootloaders' and 'MBRs' and 'partition tables' are, and is scared of a TUI installer where he can't use the mouse. Remember that Ubuntu has a fully graphical process, and if there was an automatic partitioning option (e.g. partition off 20% of the Windows/OS X partition) it would beat Windows hands down.
And the OSS community needs to stop claiming 'FOSS is so great because you can redistribute it, modify it and help create it for free'. They don't give a toss about that: all they care about is getting something that'll work and is easy to use. And they'll also like a freebie - although some people might be suspicious that it's a con(fidence trick, ie a scam), so then the 'community development' card can be played.
As I understand it, the first antivirus program ever to have existed (although not marketed as such at the time) was the UNIX rm command. This was followed by clones in other UNIXes, and in the popular DOS operating system in which it was invoked with del.
Used in conjunction with the killall command, it is a very powerful tool indeed. Beats Norton anyways.
If OS X was installed, vanilla, without ANY tweaking, the firewall would be down. With all the ports open.
Therefore I predict that will be hacked first, and the winner will simply be able to start the firewall and take it home. Linux would be a bit more difficult to break into and no-one would want to take home the Vista box.
Mrs White didit, with the candlestick, in the drawing room.
(Or perhaps it was Mr Putin, with the laptop computer, in the server room.
MinWin's name suggests it may be a clone, or a similar OS to, Minix. It may just be because it's 'mini', but I'd like to think they're actually rewriting Windows, starting with the kernel.
What's wrong with that? IIRC, I had a cellphone with a special port for use to connnect to a serial(?) port in 1997. You could use it as a modem to call an ISP. It wasn't EDGE technology that allowed it to be on the internet, but it was around.
Yes, but at the speed he was opening programs and web pages (very megabyte-intensive) I see no way it would work with that speed under a 56k landline modem, let alone a 14.4k cellular system, running through an RS232 on that pure bastion of stability, Mac OS 8. In my experience, progress meters always give the name of the device. IE: "Copying ASTEROID.JPG to A:/IMGS/*.*". It is ridiculously dumbed down.Perhaps I should explain. In my opinion, these errors remove a lot of the realism, making the film much less believable. I prefer things to be gritty and believable, not fantastic and unlikely.
I could actually see a plotline emerging from the boredom of tracking someone down with a computer. The government technician tries to tracert his way into some server which is sending out a worm for a DDoS attack against the Pentagon, the MOD, etc. However, it's taking too long, and the stupid bureaucrats throw him out and put Steve Ballamer on the job.
why can't we go back to the days when film-makers would have an enormous penchant for factual accuracy? The amount of science and computing howlers in modern films (and TV shows) irritates me beyond belief.
Doesn't sound quite as bad as Independence Day, though. I mean, a PowerBook from 1997 connecting to the Internet on the move? Deep Impact - a progress meter saying "TRANSFERRING TO FLOPPY DISK"? Retrieving E-mail with the command "open mail server" in the terminal, only to be confronted with such a terse error message as "server down"?
It may not be particularly noticeable to the average viewer, but to me it's intensely off-putting.
Changing the name was a sneaky move. Strange that while they offer flawed election 'solutions', they also make ATMs and cash deposit machines. HSBC banks here in the Free World use Diebold-badged machines, into which shopkeepers deposit their money every Friday. I dread to think what that may implicate if the ATMs are running similar software.
Just 'cause I'm feeling nice, I have tagged it as 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsensejustforyourecoveringhater'. Happy now...?
Diebold are going to have real trouble building their reputation back up after this; even though other machines may be vulnerable, the fact that this case has been so well publicised is seriously going to damage Diebold's public image.
I concur. While the MBA is very pretty and very thin, I don't necessarily need a laptop to fit in an envelope. What peeves me is that people will be able to get an (albeit not as pretty) ThinkPad with a very similar spec, which is only a little thinner. For an extra £100 or so, you could also, if you are that desperate to have an Apple machine, have a MacBook Pro, which is faster, has more ports, a bigger 15" screen, more RAM, a DVD-burning SuperDrive as standard, 10/100/1000 Ethernet as standard, better video capability and a similar aluminium case while still being one of the thinnest laptops in the world. There are plenty of similar computers to the MacBook Air, and I can see Apple having some stiff competition, both from the new ThinkPad and from itself if they can't justify the MBA's price and lack of features.
Another disadvantage of using a Dock is that you have to choose what to put on there. For example, I have 15 application icons for the Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat, Skype, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, TextEdit, Keynote, Pages, Numbers and System Preferences, along with icons for my external disk (the 'ANNEXE'), Documents, Pictures, Movies and the Trashcan. Those are a lot of links, but even now I find them insufficient when I need to run a whois: while it's not used frequently enough to warrant being Docked (I generally have a lot of minimised windows so space is at a premium on my crummy 1024*768 screen), I still find it irritating when I have to switch to the Finder, and then double-click three icons (Welchman HD>Applications>Utilities) to get to what I need.
Again, this is all due to the problem of scalability being difficult. I really don't mind voice or shell commmands as I know my way around both UNIX and Windows, but when designing with the novice in mind, it is difficult to strike a balance between allowing the user to have good usability, while at the same time giving him a fully-featured system and the ability to learn the system and discover new programs.
What would be interesting is if the computer could translate normal conversation into machine-friendly commands. For example, if I told my computer to let me write a letter to my friend John Smith, it would pick out the info from the address book, open a fresh Word/OOo Writer/Pages/whatever document, paste the information in, and tell you (possibly through TTS) that it's ready for you to start typing.
Combined with some simple AI, voice commanding could become a very powerful tool indeed. While I shan't imagine I'll be kissing goodbye to my keyboard any time soon (I would still find dictation annoying, even if it was perfect, due to the time it takes to correct mistakes) I'd like to stow my mouse away in a cupboard somewhere. Saying 'File/Save/Exit Microsoft Word' is far more efficient, in my opinion, than using a mouse and keyboard to do the same thing.
No it's not - Wiktionary is a sister project of Wikipedia. Not a subproject.
However, I must concur that in my experience speech recognition has been extremely patchy. While using it to issue voice commands is OK (and can be a real time-saver as it avoids going into Start, /Applications, Programs menu etc), dictation tends to be pretty rubbish. Especially when you're demonstrating the new speech recognition abilities in Windows Vista and just happen to work for Microsoft. And be in a loud, echoey expo hall. And using a dodgy mike.
Pay to buy Vista separately? IMO I should be paid to buy Vista separately and install it. That said, I believe the fastest Vista laptop computer CNet (or maybe PC World?) has ever tested is, rather ironically, a MacBook Pro - that's when you know Apple is getting something right and Microsoft is getting something wrong.
What I'm worried about is that people who do believe that may already be in the White House, and may soon be. In particular, people like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee.
Honestly, if an MP (member of parliament) said evolution was a hoax in the UK, they'd be laughed out of Parliament for not having a basic grasp of GCSE science. But in the States - great! Fantastic! Let him in!
The same applies to gun control, abortion and global warming. The USA seems to have a weird perception of the world, probably from its strange Puritan origins. Over in Europe, people are far more moderate. True, you'll find the odd small community of Daily Mail readers who think that the BBC is run by hippies, Gordon Brown is allowing 400 million asylum seekers (who are, by the way, all murderers and paedophiles) into the UK every day, motorists are being persecuted and that all children are hoodie-wearing, brick-throwing yobs. However, in the UK we certainly don't pelt stones and housebricks on anyone who appears to be gay.
So, in short, in Europe people generally don't believe in creationism outright. Some believe that the Creation was simply a metaphor for evolution. Others might believe in creationism, but respectfully disagree with evolutionists. Thank God there are no museums like this Texas one in London - I'd consider emigrating to Alpha Centauri if there was one.
Yes, that is a limitation of having people using Windows on the network...
...all the more reason to wipe Windows off it and install Fedora or Ubuntu...
VBA sucks anyways. And OS X users get AppleScript which is far more efficient than that awful mess in Office.