blah blah blah. What you say is scientifically proven statistics not facts. Not everyone who gets on a cell phone while driving will pose a grave threat to mankind. I personally make sure to use a hands-free set and if perhaps I am making a especially interesting maneuver I will tell the person I'm talking to, to hold on a sec while I do my driving. No ifs ands or buts. Driving and talking on a cell phone isn't illegal in my state so I'm well within my rights to do so. I know you hate it when you see some asshat cut you off when he's talking on a cell phone and you really want someone to blame. Everybody does.
Really this is like if someone is to cross the street in the middle of the block(Jay walking). If they started walking and they happened to do it in front of you, that would be dangerous and it really is illegal to do so. However what if noone was there and that same person decided to jay walk. It would be ridiculous to punish that person for something that was quite innocent. Same thing here. Jay walking as a law is insane though, you're not really harming anybodies rights. You shouldn't be punished for something you may do, only be punished if you actually do something that harmed someone.
But then again it's a phone! I hate iTunes(for damn serious) but thankfully I can use Winamp to sync my current iPod. But I don't want to sync it everday. I only sync maybe once a month. I don't want to have to sync everyday because there's a new security threat to it. It's a phone for pete's sake. And once again I hate iTunes, please don't make me use it.
But it does make it quieter. Just like making other components of the computer use heat pipes. The idea is that whether or not you use heat pipes your computer is still going to need intake and exhaust fans. Preferably large quiet fans. These fans will take the hot air produced by the heat pipes and shove it out. You still have the noise of the intake and the exhaust but you don't have the noise of the accessory fans. If you have a heat pipes on your cpu and gpu then those are 2 less fans to maintain and worry about the noise for. Without those fans your normal computer would be quite a bit quieter. Not silent but less noisy.
Just wanted to say that you might just need a new PSP battery. I use my PSP similar to you media wise. On every trip to New York (I live in California) I have had no problems with it dying in the middle of the flight. One charge and I'm good from take off to touchdown, generally leading to roughly 5.5 hours of play time. Or maybe it's just the different way we are encoding video, but you can get really good battery life out of the PSP.
You're right it is a design choice. But it's simpler to think of it the way Apple really wants you to think of it. They aren't selling a phone or an mp3 player or a portable internet device. They are selling you an experience. From the moment you open the box to the moment it blinks out, they want you to have this feeling that it was a good ride. Once the ride is over they'll sell you a new experience that keeps that good feeling that made you want first device. It's an integrated unit so that you do not think about the separate parts, but the experience as a whole.
Yeah... and I had to order a very overpriced (and underpowered) replacement power supply for a dead one in an HP Pavilion, on several occasions... and a proprietary Gateway power supply in one of their slim form-factor PCs, and one in an eMachines tower once..... Oh and don't forget the Dells that had what LOOKED like a standard ATX power supply, except with power leads swapped so the motherboard got fried when you used a regular ATX power supply in place of the original. Had one of those too.....
It's funny how "vendor lock-in" is used as though it's a unique reason to avoid Apple products, yet I see examples of it rampant with ALL the major PC vendors.
But on the other side of the coin can I make my own computer using off the shelf hardware and transfer the os and existing software to my new computer? Or how bout just having the self built hardware and buying a Apple supported OS X? What if down the road I just want to replace the power supply in my self built computer with something that just came out and is twice as awesome. Can I reasonably do that? Of course I can do that, because I built it in the first place. But Apple won't support me.
For some people Apple is just not good enough. Don't take offense to it, just realize that some people like playing with their computer hardware as much as they do with the software. I personally have a Apple Macbook, a Win XP desktop and 2 Linux notebooks(Mandriva and Ubuntu) and a spare Linux desktop. There is a difference between all the different hardware but I like what I can do with it all.
While this is all logical to an extent, it doesn't allow for one possibility. There is still a way to believe in some sort of God and worship him. That is to allow for the possibility that God is not perfect and yet still worthy of worship. The idea is that while he isn't absolutely perfect he is still perfect enough to create our universe and our physics that allowed us beings to exist. No he did not have to create us 4000 years ago. We don't need to actually have a human being really called Adam and his partner Eve. All we really need to know is that He is just and that He created our ability to become what we are today. I believe in a God but only because I don't believe in absolutes.
Nobody needs to watch everything. Sometimes it's better if you don't - if you don't have the time or don't want to put in an effort. Just because you have read the 40-pages condensed version, don't think that you have actually read the novel or play. You have not.
Just because sometimes it's better doesn't mean sometimes it's not. Just because I have never read Moby Dick doesn't mean that sometimes I want to know what my friends are talking about when they mention it. Sure I wouldn't get the same flavor and context as someone who has actually read the book but sometimes I don't need it, or have the time to get it. This is the life we lead today. We are entirely too busy with our lives trying to make enough money to be comfortable and yet try to keep up with everybody else. And better yet these little tidbits often just show us what we're really missing by not really reading the book/watching the show. Personally I've never taken to actually reading these condensed books/shows but I can see where they hold appeal.
Btw for those of you really are crammed with work/school/life, try DailyLit.com . They let you read entire books very conveniently. You pick a book(generally they hold the classics, I just finished The Art of War) and they send you bite sized text that should take 5 minutes to read, either through email or RSS. Some of the books are rather long and it might take you a year to get through but you'll get through it even with the most hectic schedules.
And it was tasty and refreshing, thank you very much.
I'm glad the Kool-Aid you bought for $599 plus a contract to keep drinking Kool-Aid for 2 years was tasty and refreshing, cause otherwise I would have said you got scammed. But thats just me, I never was much into Kool-Aid.
Bah humbug. Who the hell said that if you use a 3G capable phone you wouldn't be able to get good battery life. I would expect that if you were paying 600 dollars for a phone and getting raped on the service you'd think they'd at least spring for the ability to use 3G. For example take a look at the Sony Ericsson W850i. It has both UMTS capability and a talk time of 11.5 hours. I would call that excellent by anyone's standards.
Btw the iPhone will demand you increase your internet usage. Gigabytes? I dunno maybe. But the reason you get an iPhone is because of the capabilities of the machine. You wanna use Google maps, you need the internet. Want to use widgets... more internet. Youtube, email, safari... these are the things that you'd use if you want the iPhone to be anything more than a pretty phone. I really don't know anybody uses their phone but the only time I want to use my phone to do those other things(I have a macbook for wifi usage) is when I'm away from starbucks or home or anywhere else. So yes in the iPhones case 3G is a requirement if they are gonna charge you an arm and leg for it.
What you said about the different devices not working is exactly what happened to me... except switch the os's around. I was given 3 computers(1 desktop, 2 notebooks) and I decided to install Ubuntu on all of them. They were mostly underpowered and I wanted every advantage I could give them.
On the first notebook I tried installing Ubuntu on, I tried getting the Live CD to work only to be confronted with a strip of corrupted video right down the middle of the screen. The other parts of the screen was fine, just the middle of the screen. After a while of fiddling around I got sick of it and just installed Mandriva which worked just fine "out of the box." The desktop installed perfectly after I figured out that one of the hard drives went bad somewhere in the process. My last notebook though... gah. Sound was a bitch to figure out. Ubuntu installed fine but sound was not coming out no matter how many Ubuntu helpful hints were thrown my way. I finally had to install Windows (which installed perfectly) to figure out the exact model of sound card was in the system so that I could do some more specific troubleshooting. I finally figured out that Ubuntu actually blacklists the driver that I needed for my card. After commenting out that section and reconfiguring Alsa it worked. Honestly if I was hard up for time to get these machines working I would have just left Windows on there and said to hell with it.
So really this idea that Ubuntu is the cure all doesn't work in all cases. It depends on your hardware configuration and your willingness to deal with the unexpected glitches that can and probably will happen every once in a while. If you have the right hardware your golden. If not I wish you godspeed.
I wouldn't call it that lame. Most of the people who have the money and are willing to buy an iPhone live in tech affluent cities. It's not like if you don't have 3G service in your area your phone will stop working. If you don't have 3G then it will just drop down to EDGE. No big deal, unless your phone doesn't support 3G at all.
As far as I've seen the speed of 3G actually depends on the device your using. If your phone has a bad implementation then you will not see the crazy awesome speeds that the carriers are touting as the thing you must have. But there are a few phones that do as promised and in big cities like San Francisco get good speed.
Now the real question to all of this is(not to the poster but to everybody)... Which of these do you really care about. My phone works works perfectly with my macbook, no 3rd party software needed. I don't use iTunes so nothing lost there. It has a 2 megapixel camera of great quality. I don't need a 3" screen, I just use it for calls, music and the occasional google maps(looking up phone numbers not directions), so 3" is far bigger than I need. I currently have 4 GB of memory and since it accepts flash cards I can expand it to whatever my little heart desires. Again I don't need WiFi on my phone. It's neat but unless I can skype from it there is little use for it in my little world. I personally have never needed an 8 hour talk time but I wouldn't be surprised if my current phone couldn't do that(and I can replace the battery at will). And because I don't need a 3" screen I don't need all those pixels. My current phone is good enough in that regard. Sooooo all in all... Do I want an iPhone. Hell yes I do, it's cool. Am I going to get one. No bloody way. Way too much for something I wouldn't use half the functions for.
The Proximity sensor and ambient light sensor btw, are not just something that they tossed in there to be cool. They are requirements as if you tried to do the things that it can without those sensors you'd get a shitload of mess. Just try putting the iPhone in your pants pocket without those sensors and customers would come back screaming.
Give me a 2 MP cam with good photosensitive silicon rather than a 5 MP with cheap third-rate silicon.
I actually have a SE(sony ericsson) w810i. It has a 2MP cam with "good photosensitive silicon." Actually it's borders on great. I have seen some really good pictures come from other SE phones too mostly in the "K" series phones. So if this is any indication, would you rather have a 5MP cam that most likely will turn out very good pictures or a 2MP cam of unknown quality at best.
Bleh. I'm gonna go with bleh. Honestly I can't stand iTunes and brushed metal theme. It doesn't work the way I want it to and doesn't support the formats that I use. It's good for some, but I and most of my friends who have seen iTunes choose to use another audio player(either Winamp or Foobar). To me it's just far more usable and even works perfect with my iPod. To iTunes, Quicktime and now Safari I say goodbye and good riddance.
You obviously never used an SE phone before. I actually own a w810i and I gotta tell you, it's everything I could want and more. Bluetooth is in no way crippled. I can transfer files as complete OBEX ability is built in. I can sync the calender and notes perfectly. And to top it off it even allows me to use it as a bluetooth remote control(actually useful for my macbook). And then there is the camera. It's very decent for a phone camera and I do actually use it as my main camera since its so convenient to carry around all the time.
I can transfer the files using bluetooth(as I stated before) connect the phone to my computer with the included usb cable and use their software or connect as just a plain external drive. Simple as drag and drop. And lastly the last thing I use my phone for is music. I manage it using Winamp and it Just Works. Odds are they see the winning combination that they have now and just expand it as the new technology comes up.
This reminds me of something I keep telling my friends. With they way the drive, I keep telling them that one day they are going to kill me(fall off a bridge, run into a telephone pole, etc). They keep telling me they haven't killed me so far so I shouldn't worry. And yet I have to keep reminding them that they only have to do it once. Only as long as you believe that Google will never ever, even on accident, reveal your secret info, then you are good to go.
You know what I absolutely hate. When people talk like there is no good freeware(or close enough) on every single platform that ever existed.
On my Win XP box I use Trillian(IM), MIRC(IRC), Notepad++(text editor), uTorrent(torrent client), SmartFTP(FTP), IrfanView(image viewer), blah blah blah. All of them very nice and all of them more configurable than I'd be able to handle but it's nice that it's there. Then there's my linux box. More blah blah. On OS X I have most of the ones you have but I'd like to have a nice free file management replacement for Finder. Finder is craptacular. Even Windows Explorer is a far better fit as file manager. But thanks for Xee. I've been looking for a replacement for Preview. Xee seems to fit the bill nicely.
You know when it works, it works beautifully. But when it doesn't, holy crap it's your own little slice of hell. I have 2 notebooks that I've been trying to install Ubuntu on. 1 booted to a corrupted live desktop. Couldn't get into any of the menus(couldn't see through the corruption), rendering it useless. Switched to Mandriva and installed beautifully. Everything worked except sound, but all I had to do was enable it in the Preferences(why it isn't that done automatically I'll never know). Great, 1 down.
Next notebook got Ubuntu installed good(once I realized that I needed just the text installer, it only has 128MB of RAM), and again everything but the sound works. But this time Preferences isn't going to save me. And no, no amount of Add/Remove Programs|Synaptic playing will help me. Even when I download the ALSA package it's not as easy as./configure;make;make install. I WILL have to edit cryptic text files under sudo. Not exactly what I call a walk in the park.
Unfortunately anything MS Office is exempt from this argument because there isn't a soul alive who doesn't know what these are. You can thank the big budgets at the marketing office in Redmond for that. Email in Windows has been changed from Outlook Express to Windows Mail, which is indeed more intuitive. While I can't speak to Acrobat Reader(to read PDF's) I can say that Windows Media Player is a good description of what it does.
The argument is that Linux doesn't have the marketing that the big boys have so we need to be user friendly down to the very names of the programs. It doesn't really matter what MS and Apple names their stuff because they are big enough that they can get the names of each program embedded into each conscience user. Lets take GIMP. The example was that a normal non-Linux person would think of it as a handicapped person, and they don't want their applications to be handicapped. Try to come up with the image from the name Outlook Express. Even if you don't know what it is you can guess by the Icon right next to it that it's a email application. At the very least you didn't get a bad feeling from it from it's name.
If you design an "inherently safe" scripting language, on ethat does not provide any hooks from *within* the documentto even requests the ability to modify mor ethan the document itself, then any security holes are bugs and can be patched without inconveniencing users. More powerful tools should always be run or installed from outside the document, explicitly under user control, and preferably from a version of the application that doesn't include a mechanism to access remote documents and is not ever invoked from a browser or mail program... or any other application intended to work with untrusted documents.
"Inherently safe" scripting is the problem though. Scripting is only useful because it allows you to automate things that you do repetitively. Lets see some of the things you might do repetitively... You might need to open a lot of Word documents one after another. But that means you have to open files on the filesystem. You might have the script add stuff to these files and save it. But then you'd need to be able to save files to the filesystem. And then what if you want to use data from a file that isn't a Word document. Well then you'd need to be able to open a read/write any file regardless if it's a Word document or not. And finally what if after processing these documents you want to start an external program that does some other function with the files. Well then... you'd need to execute programs.
Again scripting is only useful if you are allowed to automate processing of many files, not just the one you are working on. Speak what you want about VBA, but it's a decent automation platform, security issues set aside. We're talking about an office here, take a look at the common applications that an office would use. Word processor, email program, spreadsheets, internet browser. And you want to make your work as easy as possible. Any automation platform needs to be able to integrate the things you use and be able to do with it what any regular person can do. Unfortunately it does mean that we have to deal with security issues, but that's the cost of being more efficient with our time.
I agree with everything you stated. I work literally 12 hours a day. I love both Lost and Heroes but just can't find it in my schedule to watch the shows when it's aired on cable. Downloading them allows me to watch these on Saturday and Sunday, when I have the most time. Or reformatting them so that I can watch them on my PSP. Or watching them when I'm using my computer or through my XBMC'd XBox. Convenience is where it's at now and as easy as Tivo is, it's just not enough. I even use CBS's Innertube to watch some stuff. It's about as equitable as it's gonna get for me for now.
You are close but no cigar. If you have paid for your XBox360 and have modified it there is nothing Microsoft can do to dissuade you. They aren't coming to your house demanding you return the Xbox360. You still have a modified console. But Live is their service. They can and will not let anyone with modified consoles onto their service. Both are separate. I don't see the problem with this. If you want to make backups use modified firmware. If you want to use Live make sure you don't have modified firmware loaded. All the modchip type mods I've seen allow you to return the firmware back to stock so that you can use Live whenever you want. But this way you limit the number of cheaters on the system. Really it's nothing but good.
Last I checked, the major networks (CBS, ABC, AOL, etc.) were using tech that relied on Windows Media Puke to play
When exactly was the last time you checked? For the last few months I've been using CBS's Innertube to watch Jericho just fine on my Macbook. It uses Realplayer and about all the software you need. It can use Windows Media player if you have it but it doesn't need it.
Slashdot Mirror
blah blah blah. What you say is scientifically proven statistics not facts. Not everyone who gets on a cell phone while driving will pose a grave threat to mankind. I personally make sure to use a hands-free set and if perhaps I am making a especially interesting maneuver I will tell the person I'm talking to, to hold on a sec while I do my driving. No ifs ands or buts. Driving and talking on a cell phone isn't illegal in my state so I'm well within my rights to do so. I know you hate it when you see some asshat cut you off when he's talking on a cell phone and you really want someone to blame. Everybody does.
Really this is like if someone is to cross the street in the middle of the block(Jay walking). If they started walking and they happened to do it in front of you, that would be dangerous and it really is illegal to do so. However what if noone was there and that same person decided to jay walk. It would be ridiculous to punish that person for something that was quite innocent. Same thing here. Jay walking as a law is insane though, you're not really harming anybodies rights. You shouldn't be punished for something you may do, only be punished if you actually do something that harmed someone.
But then again it's a phone! I hate iTunes(for damn serious) but thankfully I can use Winamp to sync my current iPod. But I don't want to sync it everday. I only sync maybe once a month. I don't want to have to sync everyday because there's a new security threat to it. It's a phone for pete's sake. And once again I hate iTunes, please don't make me use it.
But it does make it quieter. Just like making other components of the computer use heat pipes. The idea is that whether or not you use heat pipes your computer is still going to need intake and exhaust fans. Preferably large quiet fans. These fans will take the hot air produced by the heat pipes and shove it out. You still have the noise of the intake and the exhaust but you don't have the noise of the accessory fans. If you have a heat pipes on your cpu and gpu then those are 2 less fans to maintain and worry about the noise for. Without those fans your normal computer would be quite a bit quieter. Not silent but less noisy.
Just wanted to say that you might just need a new PSP battery. I use my PSP similar to you media wise. On every trip to New York (I live in California) I have had no problems with it dying in the middle of the flight. One charge and I'm good from take off to touchdown, generally leading to roughly 5.5 hours of play time. Or maybe it's just the different way we are encoding video, but you can get really good battery life out of the PSP.
And someday Apple fanbois will learn that you can get ease of use without Apple.
You're right it is a design choice. But it's simpler to think of it the way Apple really wants you to think of it. They aren't selling a phone or an mp3 player or a portable internet device. They are selling you an experience. From the moment you open the box to the moment it blinks out, they want you to have this feeling that it was a good ride. Once the ride is over they'll sell you a new experience that keeps that good feeling that made you want first device. It's an integrated unit so that you do not think about the separate parts, but the experience as a whole.
For some people Apple is just not good enough. Don't take offense to it, just realize that some people like playing with their computer hardware as much as they do with the software. I personally have a Apple Macbook, a Win XP desktop and 2 Linux notebooks(Mandriva and Ubuntu) and a spare Linux desktop. There is a difference between all the different hardware but I like what I can do with it all.
While this is all logical to an extent, it doesn't allow for one possibility. There is still a way to believe in some sort of God and worship him. That is to allow for the possibility that God is not perfect and yet still worthy of worship. The idea is that while he isn't absolutely perfect he is still perfect enough to create our universe and our physics that allowed us beings to exist. No he did not have to create us 4000 years ago. We don't need to actually have a human being really called Adam and his partner Eve. All we really need to know is that He is just and that He created our ability to become what we are today. I believe in a God but only because I don't believe in absolutes.
Btw for those of you really are crammed with work/school/life, try DailyLit.com . They let you read entire books very conveniently. You pick a book(generally they hold the classics, I just finished The Art of War) and they send you bite sized text that should take 5 minutes to read, either through email or RSS. Some of the books are rather long and it might take you a year to get through but you'll get through it even with the most hectic schedules.
Bah humbug. Who the hell said that if you use a 3G capable phone you wouldn't be able to get good battery life. I would expect that if you were paying 600 dollars for a phone and getting raped on the service you'd think they'd at least spring for the ability to use 3G. For example take a look at the Sony Ericsson W850i. It has both UMTS capability and a talk time of 11.5 hours. I would call that excellent by anyone's standards.
Btw the iPhone will demand you increase your internet usage. Gigabytes? I dunno maybe. But the reason you get an iPhone is because of the capabilities of the machine. You wanna use Google maps, you need the internet. Want to use widgets... more internet. Youtube, email, safari... these are the things that you'd use if you want the iPhone to be anything more than a pretty phone. I really don't know anybody uses their phone but the only time I want to use my phone to do those other things(I have a macbook for wifi usage) is when I'm away from starbucks or home or anywhere else. So yes in the iPhones case 3G is a requirement if they are gonna charge you an arm and leg for it.
What you said about the different devices not working is exactly what happened to me... except switch the os's around. I was given 3 computers(1 desktop, 2 notebooks) and I decided to install Ubuntu on all of them. They were mostly underpowered and I wanted every advantage I could give them.
On the first notebook I tried installing Ubuntu on, I tried getting the Live CD to work only to be confronted with a strip of corrupted video right down the middle of the screen. The other parts of the screen was fine, just the middle of the screen. After a while of fiddling around I got sick of it and just installed Mandriva which worked just fine "out of the box." The desktop installed perfectly after I figured out that one of the hard drives went bad somewhere in the process. My last notebook though... gah. Sound was a bitch to figure out. Ubuntu installed fine but sound was not coming out no matter how many Ubuntu helpful hints were thrown my way. I finally had to install Windows (which installed perfectly) to figure out the exact model of sound card was in the system so that I could do some more specific troubleshooting. I finally figured out that Ubuntu actually blacklists the driver that I needed for my card. After commenting out that section and reconfiguring Alsa it worked. Honestly if I was hard up for time to get these machines working I would have just left Windows on there and said to hell with it.
So really this idea that Ubuntu is the cure all doesn't work in all cases. It depends on your hardware configuration and your willingness to deal with the unexpected glitches that can and probably will happen every once in a while. If you have the right hardware your golden. If not I wish you godspeed.
I wouldn't call it that lame. Most of the people who have the money and are willing to buy an iPhone live in tech affluent cities. It's not like if you don't have 3G service in your area your phone will stop working. If you don't have 3G then it will just drop down to EDGE. No big deal, unless your phone doesn't support 3G at all.
As far as I've seen the speed of 3G actually depends on the device your using. If your phone has a bad implementation then you will not see the crazy awesome speeds that the carriers are touting as the thing you must have. But there are a few phones that do as promised and in big cities like San Francisco get good speed.
Now the real question to all of this is(not to the poster but to everybody)... Which of these do you really care about. My phone works works perfectly with my macbook, no 3rd party software needed. I don't use iTunes so nothing lost there. It has a 2 megapixel camera of great quality. I don't need a 3" screen, I just use it for calls, music and the occasional google maps(looking up phone numbers not directions), so 3" is far bigger than I need. I currently have 4 GB of memory and since it accepts flash cards I can expand it to whatever my little heart desires. Again I don't need WiFi on my phone. It's neat but unless I can skype from it there is little use for it in my little world. I personally have never needed an 8 hour talk time but I wouldn't be surprised if my current phone couldn't do that(and I can replace the battery at will). And because I don't need a 3" screen I don't need all those pixels. My current phone is good enough in that regard. Sooooo all in all... Do I want an iPhone. Hell yes I do, it's cool. Am I going to get one. No bloody way. Way too much for something I wouldn't use half the functions for.
The Proximity sensor and ambient light sensor btw, are not just something that they tossed in there to be cool. They are requirements as if you tried to do the things that it can without those sensors you'd get a shitload of mess. Just try putting the iPhone in your pants pocket without those sensors and customers would come back screaming.
Bleh. I'm gonna go with bleh. Honestly I can't stand iTunes and brushed metal theme. It doesn't work the way I want it to and doesn't support the formats that I use. It's good for some, but I and most of my friends who have seen iTunes choose to use another audio player(either Winamp or Foobar). To me it's just far more usable and even works perfect with my iPod. To iTunes, Quicktime and now Safari I say goodbye and good riddance.
You obviously never used an SE phone before. I actually own a w810i and I gotta tell you, it's everything I could want and more. Bluetooth is in no way crippled. I can transfer files as complete OBEX ability is built in. I can sync the calender and notes perfectly. And to top it off it even allows me to use it as a bluetooth remote control(actually useful for my macbook). And then there is the camera. It's very decent for a phone camera and I do actually use it as my main camera since its so convenient to carry around all the time.
I can transfer the files using bluetooth(as I stated before) connect the phone to my computer with the included usb cable and use their software or connect as just a plain external drive. Simple as drag and drop. And lastly the last thing I use my phone for is music. I manage it using Winamp and it Just Works. Odds are they see the winning combination that they have now and just expand it as the new technology comes up.
This reminds me of something I keep telling my friends. With they way the drive, I keep telling them that one day they are going to kill me(fall off a bridge, run into a telephone pole, etc). They keep telling me they haven't killed me so far so I shouldn't worry. And yet I have to keep reminding them that they only have to do it once. Only as long as you believe that Google will never ever , even on accident, reveal your secret info, then you are good to go.
You know what I absolutely hate. When people talk like there is no good freeware(or close enough) on every single platform that ever existed.
On my Win XP box I use Trillian(IM), MIRC(IRC), Notepad++(text editor), uTorrent(torrent client), SmartFTP(FTP), IrfanView(image viewer), blah blah blah. All of them very nice and all of them more configurable than I'd be able to handle but it's nice that it's there. Then there's my linux box. More blah blah. On OS X I have most of the ones you have but I'd like to have a nice free file management replacement for Finder. Finder is craptacular. Even Windows Explorer is a far better fit as file manager. But thanks for Xee. I've been looking for a replacement for Preview. Xee seems to fit the bill nicely.
You know when it works, it works beautifully. But when it doesn't, holy crap it's your own little slice of hell. I have 2 notebooks that I've been trying to install Ubuntu on. 1 booted to a corrupted live desktop. Couldn't get into any of the menus(couldn't see through the corruption), rendering it useless. Switched to Mandriva and installed beautifully. Everything worked except sound, but all I had to do was enable it in the Preferences(why it isn't that done automatically I'll never know). Great, 1 down.
./configure;make;make install. I WILL have to edit cryptic text files under sudo. Not exactly what I call a walk in the park.
Next notebook got Ubuntu installed good(once I realized that I needed just the text installer, it only has 128MB of RAM), and again everything but the sound works. But this time Preferences isn't going to save me. And no, no amount of Add/Remove Programs|Synaptic playing will help me. Even when I download the ALSA package it's not as easy as
Unfortunately anything MS Office is exempt from this argument because there isn't a soul alive who doesn't know what these are. You can thank the big budgets at the marketing office in Redmond for that. Email in Windows has been changed from Outlook Express to Windows Mail, which is indeed more intuitive. While I can't speak to Acrobat Reader(to read PDF's) I can say that Windows Media Player is a good description of what it does.
The argument is that Linux doesn't have the marketing that the big boys have so we need to be user friendly down to the very names of the programs. It doesn't really matter what MS and Apple names their stuff because they are big enough that they can get the names of each program embedded into each conscience user. Lets take GIMP. The example was that a normal non-Linux person would think of it as a handicapped person, and they don't want their applications to be handicapped. Try to come up with the image from the name Outlook Express. Even if you don't know what it is you can guess by the Icon right next to it that it's a email application. At the very least you didn't get a bad feeling from it from it's name.
Again scripting is only useful if you are allowed to automate processing of many files, not just the one you are working on. Speak what you want about VBA, but it's a decent automation platform, security issues set aside. We're talking about an office here, take a look at the common applications that an office would use. Word processor, email program, spreadsheets, internet browser. And you want to make your work as easy as possible. Any automation platform needs to be able to integrate the things you use and be able to do with it what any regular person can do. Unfortunately it does mean that we have to deal with security issues, but that's the cost of being more efficient with our time.
I agree with everything you stated. I work literally 12 hours a day. I love both Lost and Heroes but just can't find it in my schedule to watch the shows when it's aired on cable. Downloading them allows me to watch these on Saturday and Sunday, when I have the most time. Or reformatting them so that I can watch them on my PSP. Or watching them when I'm using my computer or through my XBMC'd XBox. Convenience is where it's at now and as easy as Tivo is, it's just not enough. I even use CBS's Innertube to watch some stuff. It's about as equitable as it's gonna get for me for now.
You are close but no cigar. If you have paid for your XBox360 and have modified it there is nothing Microsoft can do to dissuade you. They aren't coming to your house demanding you return the Xbox360. You still have a modified console. But Live is their service. They can and will not let anyone with modified consoles onto their service. Both are separate. I don't see the problem with this. If you want to make backups use modified firmware. If you want to use Live make sure you don't have modified firmware loaded. All the modchip type mods I've seen allow you to return the firmware back to stock so that you can use Live whenever you want. But this way you limit the number of cheaters on the system. Really it's nothing but good.