That's a feature, which many people like about it. Actually the whole point of the phone. And how do you misspell "QWERTY" on a QWERTY keyboard anyway?
doesn't have a the possibility of getting third party developers
It does have third party developers. Only they are licensed. Much like the third-party developers for the Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, and DS are licensed. Heck, the developers for more cell phones are licensed, aren't they? It's quality control. End-users appreciate quality more than they appreciate being able to install random, ugly and buggy unauthorized software. I know it sucks for casual developers (of which I am one) but there is other hardware out there for you to tinker with.
...caught wearing a "hearing aid" which turned out to be a wireless receiver used for surreptitious communications.
They did that way back in an episode of Cheers when Sam played a game against Robin Colcord. Norm was in the office calling out moves on the computer. And Rebecca caught him and thought he was just trying to erase his beer tab.
It was an awesome game, but very challenging. I remember finally getting the hang of it after a few weeks. You really had to think fast to decide where to drive to next, around the city.
I remember the marshmallow man would show up, too... What did you have to do with him again? I think you had to place a bait somewhere so he didn't smash a building.
I also remember listening to the intro sequence for 30 mins straight, watching that bouncing ball. That was some fantastic C64 music!
No, I wanted pictures of the "high-end cellphone that looked very similar to the Apple iPhone". You know, the other part of that sentence you quoted. The part which it makes sense to take a picture of.
Anyway, another commenter provided some links. Looks like a cute phone actually. However, the Sun guy's blog lays it on a little thick for a company that's just shoe-horning a VM and some libs into an existing phone. Or whatever. Actually, it looks like it was already a whole existing phone-family platform before Sun modified it.
TFA says Sun has "debuted software for a high-end cellphone that looked very similar to the Apple iPhone" but there are no pictures. In fact, I combed the web for more stories about this and none seem to have any pictures.
Does it have a touchscreen or not? What kind of media playback? Visual voicemail? This story says they want to produce phones that can be sold for $30-$50, which pretty much means they'd be unlike the iPhone at all.
I guess what we have here is an iPhone name-drop with no meat to it. Which just adds to the iPhone buzz, really. Meanwhile, Sun's product (whether it's software or a specific phone) grabs a little attention, but goes back to being boring as soon as you're finished reading the article.
99% of it's features are useless to the average user.
Care to list any of those features that fall into the 99%? Personally, the thing that I find attractive about the iPhone is that I probably would use most of its features, and the UI looks very slick.
I like Vista. No, it's not "great". But one thing I like is that the UI is never stuck. You never see "invalid" window regions, you know, when you drag one window across another one that's frozen. (At least not in Aero.) I realize other OS'es worked that way first, though. I also like the new explorer interface. The glass theme is already starting to feel a bit old, but whatever. I'd like to see other effects besides glass. OS X has those cool slurping minimize/restore windows; I wouldn't say no to that.
I still wouldn't recommend anyone else to install it. The main reason to avoid it is backward compatibility. If a home user is currently entrenched in XP, they should wait another couple years. By then, more of their applications/peripherals are more likely to be compatible. Then they'll be fine. But if they're willing to make big changes right now, and not bug me for too much support (because I'm not familiar with it), I'd suggest they try Macs. I probably wouldn't recommend Ubuntu, just because if they were enough of a DIY type they'd probably already have tried it themselves. Anyway, just my gut feelings on the subject.
I don't know about notebook users, but when I purchased and installed Vista, Aero was not initially running. I had to go select it from the Themes area of the Display control panel.
So when they write the following:
When Aero is turned off, battery life is equal to or better than Windows XP systems. But with it turned on, battery life suffers compared with Windows XP.
Seems like more of an issue with educating users. Although, maybe someone will develop a miserly mobile GPU that's optimized for what Aero does.
Finally, this part of the article is a bit screwy:
Microsoft said it commissioned a study (click here for PDF) that found no difference in "responsiveness," or application load time, between a notebook with Aero disabled versus one running the fancy graphics: implying that Aero doesn't put too much of a load on the system.
I don't think the study implies that. It just says that application load time is unaffected. Aero's going to draw more power through the GPU even when applications are not being loaded...
Oops. The submitter was quoting the story and not trying to make a point. My bad! I retract my attack on him/her. Still, I think the comparison is weak, even in its correct context.
The submitter wants to compare UAC to sudo? Come on, genius. The "fancy display mechanism" is the entire point! One's a command-line utility for uber-nerds, the other is a prompt which just works. Man, if you're smart enough to run sudo, you should be smart enough to think like a casual person, and understand why one might easily benefit from UAC.
If I sound like a fanboy, I'm not. I'm just trying to stay objective, which is more than the submitter is doing. Use your head.
And Ballmer is right. That "insignificant" 3% market share of 1.3 billion handsets would translate to 39 million iPhones sold. Which translates to $19.5 billion in revenue. With a conservative 20% margin, that's $3.9 billion on the bottom line.
This gallery was hyper-lame. It's like they took the only mascots they could even think of, and said, "Oh ha ha, look it's a dog/bird/cat! So lame!" There was zero wit and zero entertainment value. I feel less funny having read it.
Seriously, this was lamer than a fart at a funeral.
Those links are about 5 months old. I bought Vista with the BFG 8800GTS OC 320MB last weekend, and everything is running smoothly. Got the Aero effects and ran some DX10-only demos. So far so good.
It's easy to discount someone as delusional when they don't fit in.
I didn't discount anybody. Maybe you missed where I wrote, "the majority of every person or thing alive has" the hallucination I wrote about. Do you think I'm just going to sit here and discount the entire world?
I was talking about the way people experience life, having a feeling that there is a "self", and there is "everything else", and therefore never quite feeling like you have a place, because you see yourself as something which, by definition, is separate. Pretty much everybody has this feeling. It leads to all sorts of consequences, like anxiety, or depression, or the desire for power/money/fame, or social posturing, or the decision to bomb other countries. We all have something in common with the guy who went nuts yesterday.
Maybe by recognizing that we have something in common with everybody else, we can actually empathize with them, rather than write them off.
And I'm calling this sense of self/other a "hallucination", because there is no real division in the world like that. Where does the self end and the outside world begin? At your skin? When does the self begin and end? In the womb, at conception, at birth, when your heart stops, after you've decomposed? No one can say, because there are no real division lines. All is one. So if you feel that there is a division, you're fooled. Maybe "hallucination" isn't the best word; delusion might be better. But I'm not discounting anybody, because I feel the same thing. That's the way it feels to be alive.
So when you called me an asshole, I think you misinterpreted my point, which is fine. I know what I wrote was pretty short, and I'm bringing up some ideas which are pretty far out there.
In all cases, the root cause is a hallucination where you perceive yourself to be a separate, isolated creature cut off from the rest of the world. You end up feeling like an alien who somehow came into the world, was left fending for its own survival while frustrated by the sense of never belonging anywhere. This is a very common hallucination, in fact, the majority of every person or thing alive has it. But people have it to different degrees. It depends how much they dwell on it.
Most people have computers only to use the Internet and maybe to write the odd letter, not for their "C++ compiler or GIMP or Photoshop or 3D Studio Max".
The question was, "Can Web Apps Ever Truly Replace Desktop Apps?" Even if web apps totally satisfy casual surfers and e-mailers, that's not quite a "true replacement".
We are seeing more and more articles appearing with the claim that everything we really need from an OS is available online.
That's because those articles are online, and the people who write online articles love being online.
You ask the guy without an Internet connection, or with a 56K whether he thinks web apps will replace desktop apps and he'd be all like "WTF?" Keep in mind that some huge fraction of Americans never intend to get an Internet connection. Don't just dismiss that many people as idiots, either.
And how would you like it if your C++ compiler or GIMP or Photoshop or 3D Studio Max was a web application? Has anybody thought it through? It's not even a matter of security, just plain utility.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a feature, which many people like about it. Actually the whole point of the phone. And how do you misspell "QWERTY" on a QWERTY keyboard anyway?
It does have third party developers. Only they are licensed. Much like the third-party developers for the Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, and DS are licensed. Heck, the developers for more cell phones are licensed, aren't they? It's quality control. End-users appreciate quality more than they appreciate being able to install random, ugly and buggy unauthorized software. I know it sucks for casual developers (of which I am one) but there is other hardware out there for you to tinker with.
They did that way back in an episode of Cheers when Sam played a game against Robin Colcord. Norm was in the office calling out moves on the computer. And Rebecca caught him and thought he was just trying to erase his beer tab.
One way programmers can become less frightening to women is by not explaining obvious jokes.
Here's a Youtube video for anyone who wants to relive old memories. :-)
It was an awesome game, but very challenging. I remember finally getting the hang of it after a few weeks. You really had to think fast to decide where to drive to next, around the city.
I remember the marshmallow man would show up, too... What did you have to do with him again? I think you had to place a bait somewhere so he didn't smash a building.
I also remember listening to the intro sequence for 30 mins straight, watching that bouncing ball. That was some fantastic C64 music!
No, I wanted pictures of the "high-end cellphone that looked very similar to the Apple iPhone". You know, the other part of that sentence you quoted. The part which it makes sense to take a picture of.
Anyway, another commenter provided some links. Looks like a cute phone actually. However, the Sun guy's blog lays it on a little thick for a company that's just shoe-horning a VM and some libs into an existing phone. Or whatever. Actually, it looks like it was already a whole existing phone-family platform before Sun modified it.
Because in 30 years it will be so much easier for a small group of people to control and legislate the entire Internet than it is now?
TFA says Sun has "debuted software for a high-end cellphone that looked very similar to the Apple iPhone" but there are no pictures. In fact, I combed the web for more stories about this and none seem to have any pictures.
Does it have a touchscreen or not? What kind of media playback? Visual voicemail? This story says they want to produce phones that can be sold for $30-$50, which pretty much means they'd be unlike the iPhone at all.
I guess what we have here is an iPhone name-drop with no meat to it. Which just adds to the iPhone buzz, really. Meanwhile, Sun's product (whether it's software or a specific phone) grabs a little attention, but goes back to being boring as soon as you're finished reading the article.
Care to list any of those features that fall into the 99%? Personally, the thing that I find attractive about the iPhone is that I probably would use most of its features, and the UI looks very slick.
Actually, word on Slashdot is that Scuttlemonkey posted that story!
This must be a story which hopes to achieve security through obscurity.
Damn, and I had just purchased a Core 2 Duo system with an NVIDIA 8800 GPU. And it disabled Aero. Kind of a slap in the face. :-) Oh well!
I like Vista. No, it's not "great". But one thing I like is that the UI is never stuck. You never see "invalid" window regions, you know, when you drag one window across another one that's frozen. (At least not in Aero.) I realize other OS'es worked that way first, though. I also like the new explorer interface. The glass theme is already starting to feel a bit old, but whatever. I'd like to see other effects besides glass. OS X has those cool slurping minimize/restore windows; I wouldn't say no to that.
I still wouldn't recommend anyone else to install it. The main reason to avoid it is backward compatibility. If a home user is currently entrenched in XP, they should wait another couple years. By then, more of their applications/peripherals are more likely to be compatible. Then they'll be fine. But if they're willing to make big changes right now, and not bug me for too much support (because I'm not familiar with it), I'd suggest they try Macs. I probably wouldn't recommend Ubuntu, just because if they were enough of a DIY type they'd probably already have tried it themselves. Anyway, just my gut feelings on the subject.
I don't know about notebook users, but when I purchased and installed Vista, Aero was not initially running. I had to go select it from the Themes area of the Display control panel.
So when they write the following:
Seems like more of an issue with educating users. Although, maybe someone will develop a miserly mobile GPU that's optimized for what Aero does.
Finally, this part of the article is a bit screwy:
I don't think the study implies that. It just says that application load time is unaffected. Aero's going to draw more power through the GPU even when applications are not being loaded...
Oops. The submitter was quoting the story and not trying to make a point. My bad! I retract my attack on him/her. Still, I think the comparison is weak, even in its correct context.
The submitter wants to compare UAC to sudo? Come on, genius. The "fancy display mechanism" is the entire point! One's a command-line utility for uber-nerds, the other is a prompt which just works. Man, if you're smart enough to run sudo, you should be smart enough to think like a casual person, and understand why one might easily benefit from UAC.
If I sound like a fanboy, I'm not. I'm just trying to stay objective, which is more than the submitter is doing. Use your head.
And Ballmer is right. That "insignificant" 3% market share of 1.3 billion handsets would translate to 39 million iPhones sold. Which translates to $19.5 billion in revenue. With a conservative 20% margin, that's $3.9 billion on the bottom line.
Isn't that the whole point of running a business?
This gallery was hyper-lame. It's like they took the only mascots they could even think of, and said, "Oh ha ha, look it's a dog/bird/cat! So lame!" There was zero wit and zero entertainment value. I feel less funny having read it.
Seriously, this was lamer than a fart at a funeral.
Yeah, you can. OpenGL extensions are already available.
Next, we need a way to enable cell-phone access in the shower. It's very important that I let my friends know what kind of shampoo I'm using.
Those links are about 5 months old. I bought Vista with the BFG 8800GTS OC 320MB last weekend, and everything is running smoothly. Got the Aero effects and ran some DX10-only demos. So far so good.
I didn't discount anybody. Maybe you missed where I wrote, "the majority of every person or thing alive has" the hallucination I wrote about. Do you think I'm just going to sit here and discount the entire world?
I was talking about the way people experience life, having a feeling that there is a "self", and there is "everything else", and therefore never quite feeling like you have a place, because you see yourself as something which, by definition, is separate. Pretty much everybody has this feeling. It leads to all sorts of consequences, like anxiety, or depression, or the desire for power/money/fame, or social posturing, or the decision to bomb other countries. We all have something in common with the guy who went nuts yesterday.
Maybe by recognizing that we have something in common with everybody else, we can actually empathize with them, rather than write them off.
And I'm calling this sense of self/other a "hallucination", because there is no real division in the world like that. Where does the self end and the outside world begin? At your skin? When does the self begin and end? In the womb, at conception, at birth, when your heart stops, after you've decomposed? No one can say, because there are no real division lines. All is one. So if you feel that there is a division, you're fooled. Maybe "hallucination" isn't the best word; delusion might be better. But I'm not discounting anybody, because I feel the same thing. That's the way it feels to be alive.
So when you called me an asshole, I think you misinterpreted my point, which is fine. I know what I wrote was pretty short, and I'm bringing up some ideas which are pretty far out there.
In all cases, the root cause is a hallucination where you perceive yourself to be a separate, isolated creature cut off from the rest of the world. You end up feeling like an alien who somehow came into the world, was left fending for its own survival while frustrated by the sense of never belonging anywhere. This is a very common hallucination, in fact, the majority of every person or thing alive has it. But people have it to different degrees. It depends how much they dwell on it.
Funny part is, it's just a hallucination.
The question was, "Can Web Apps Ever Truly Replace Desktop Apps?" Even if web apps totally satisfy casual surfers and e-mailers, that's not quite a "true replacement".
That's because those articles are online, and the people who write online articles love being online.
You ask the guy without an Internet connection, or with a 56K whether he thinks web apps will replace desktop apps and he'd be all like "WTF?" Keep in mind that some huge fraction of Americans never intend to get an Internet connection. Don't just dismiss that many people as idiots, either.
And how would you like it if your C++ compiler or GIMP or Photoshop or 3D Studio Max was a web application? Has anybody thought it through? It's not even a matter of security, just plain utility.