Mac OS X can do this as well, in fact you can map any of the modifier keys to any other modifier key or no action. You also can map the function keys as straight function keys or as the media, expose, screen&keyboard dimming keys on the newer keyboards.
I've never had stability problems with Vista but my big gripe with it is that it's kind of slow. My 5 year old dual 2.7 GHz G5 at work seems to respond and run anything but graphics more rapidly than my brand new PC at home running a dual core 2 duo, 3.24 GHz. I find it incredibly strange, I feel relieved that I only require Vista for games and the rest of the time I'm running a very snappy e17 with the ecomorph composite manager.
According to this, Jobs does more than just act as cheerleader, at least while he was at NeXT:
Just as with the Macintosh, Jobs devoted most of his attention to the user interface and physical design of the case, probably because he wasn't a trained engineer. Jobs designed the Macintosh as a personal information appliance.
If you look at those patents in TFA, they're mostly related to design. It is not stretch of the imagination that Jobs actually designed the cases for those patents while working at Apple the second time.
Jobs might charm smart people, etc., but there is substantial evidence that Jobs does more than that. Yes, it actually looks like he works for a living sometimes.
And just how do you know this? Or are you just making assumptions?
He doesn't. He's just trolling (otherwise, he would show us the proof, or at least back up his statements some sort of evidence). Unfortunately these days on slashdot it's fashionable to make totally unfounded deragatory assertions about Apple, but if you say one word about Vista or the Office ribbons really aren't all that great, you get modded flamebait or troll.
Yes, it seems like Jobs wants to have his name on stuff for the cool factor. 'Look what I did.' Even when he didn't do all that much.
Okaaayyy.... all those who were founding partners of a computer company that has captured 10% usage share, please raise their hands. Those people are allowed to make snarky comments about how little Steve Jobs knows. Everyone else, STFU. Unless you have worked with the man personally or have a reasonable assurance that he acts this way, what you've asserted is completely unfounded. The same goes for Ballmer and Gates (even though Ballmer didn't get in until 1980).
You're right that is was slower before I turned all that stuff off, but before I did that, it was slow to the point of being unusable -- now, it's just sort of slow. Case in point: why is it that it takes a second or two to load up all the icons on the control panel on Vista 64 bit on a core duo 2 at 3.24 GHz with 4 GB of ram? Are you really trying to tell me that an OS that takes a second to load 20 or so icons on brand new hardware is fast? Really???
One could make the argument that by refusing to acknowledge what nearly every average user can tell after using Vista for a few days, i.e., that it's sub-par, you expert windows users could be dooming yourselves to mediocre software for the foreseeable future because MS will never learn its lesson and write better software. My only complaint is that I have to use it with you when necessary. But then again, MS seems to have realized that users are reluctant to buy slow software and are trying to speed things up with Windows 7 so maybe there's hope yet. This is not a troll, this is a fact, MS is losing usage share and has been doing so ever since Vista was released. This should be telling you something, and it's not just marketing or a bad rap: most people really aren't all that happy with Vista.
I can't speak to what it's like on Vista, but on XP two things are true:
Indexing beats your system up, and the indexer is NOT good about letting you have it back.
I have Vista SP1 installed for playing games the hard drive was thrashing so much it was actually causing stutter in my fps games sometimes until I turned the indexer and the superfetch services off (I actually had to turn off superfetch twice as it ignored me the first time). I don't seem to remember ever having to deal with that sort of issue on XP, so my guess is vista is probably worse for this sort of thing. It would be nice if SP2 alleviated this, but I'm not holding my breath. Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer. On the other hand, with any fresh linux install I also go around removing a lot of the default desktop packages that I don't want, only it seems a lot easier and more transparent in linux, but maybe I'm just used to the linux way and not the windows way.
It's not, to me, about it being an Apple product, it's about art, talent, and the progress of technology.
I'm not trolling here, but why does it seem like the buzz is often about apple products then? I don't see much about people creating art with their blackberry or their palm. Or is there a lot of this going on and I just missed it?
If someone asked me, I would say that it's a combination of Apple products marketed well and that they make pretty good products to begin (e.g. easy to use) -- I don't think that success for a new technological product is really probably without both of these things.
Sure, but you ever drive an american car? They're so bad we americans even quit buying them. Here we are in the "perfect capitalist society" and we still get crap products sometimes, or else why would the two of the three main U.S. auto makers be requiring subsidies from the U.S. government in order to stay in business?
And one more thing, saying that linux sucks for backwards compability unless you use open source software is the equivalent of saying that windows sucks for games unless you use directX. While technically true, you're negating the best, best feature of the OS in that arena. In any case, it's still not true for linux, as I point out above because you can use whatever libraries you wish using modules.
Set up an old Linux system (RH 6.2, to throw something out there), run Nethack on it, and then try to run the same binary on a new system. It won't work.
You can do that just fine, you have to install module software first though, e.g. this, and the package you need to run it. It allows you to change to whatever runtime environment you want. Want to run an the old libc6 from redhat 6.2? Go right ahead. Want to use a different gcc library? No problem. This type of software is used on large supercomputer clusters to ensure that everyone can run all the software they want, e.g. there was a big break between mpich and mpich2, but thanks to modules, you can have both installed and run binary code requiring one or the other without having to uninstall anything.
I don't dispute that most apps designed for older versions of windows run okay on newer versions, but you haven't given any evidence at all as to why this might be true. Just to play devil's advocate, linux runs any X11 app and that goes back decades and decades (e.g., nethack is from 1985). Also, often apps that runs on OS X can run on any version of OS X but there were some changes between point releases but I don't know of an app that fails to run on new versions. Also, the X11 server lets you run any linux or unix program that uses that as well. If you have an app that runs on OS 9, you can run that in classic mode (which I believe they stopped including for leopard, but I'm not sure), and that takes us back to 1999. Finally, I have all kinds of DOS or windows 3.11 apps that don't run well or at all on windows any more, even in emulation mode. We also used to have some kind of VB app that only ran on windows 95 and refused to run on anything else. Most of these are scientific software packages for driving instruments or interfacing with specific hardware, but not always.
I know you windows fanboys hate to hear it, but contrary to being perfect, windows does break backwards compatibility sometimes with new releases, AND there are other operating systems that achieve similar or greater (in the case of linux) backwards compatibility to their predecessors.
They don't warn people about it, but they do consider anyone running or develping for openoffice eligible to be sued. Here's a news article from 2004 about the settlement between Sun and MS over staroffice that states:
In the document, it is stated that Microsoft agrees not to sue Sun for commercial distribution of StarOffice, which is based on OpenOffice.org, but that Microsoft can still seek damages from OpenOffice users or distributors for any copy installed after April 1, 2004.
Watch what happens if openoffice makes any kind of real dent in office's market share. It'll be just like the RIAA going after downloaders...
Thanks for the link. I found this comment very interesting:
Intel recently turned over control of the project to the Linux Foundation with the aim of making it even more open to other contributors. The long-term goal is to turn Moblin into the nexus of mobile Linux development and make it the de facto standard Linux platform for portable devices.
So, it's more than just that Intel is releasing this. It's Intel, working with the Linux Foundation in an attempt to create a new standard. Isn't this pretty much the ideal case for we've been asking for in open source? A propietary hardware manufacturer working with an open source consortium to create and release open source software. I'll view this collaboration as successful if we start seeing netbooks for sale from major OEMs with this OS installed.
Oh, and some other random stuff I saw that I liked: -standard X11 window server and can run most linux apps -the clutter organizational scheme looks intriguing but I'd have to use it for awhile before I could tell you if I liked it or not. -It's using the gecko HTML rendering engine. What's interesting here is it is not using webkit. -Lastly, I'd like to see something on how well the wireless network device works and changing networks. The article was a bit short on this aspect. Has anybody used it? How is it?
Then he starts getting emails from Paypal about charges from his skype account for phone calls to somewhere in eastern Europe.
I had this happen to me as well about a year ago. It looks like somebody is running a big scam in Eastern Europe. The strange thing is that I don't have a skype account, nor did I think I had a paypal account. In the end, I found out that at one point I bought an ELER t-shirt where the guy required that I create a paypal account and then I forgot I had created that. It took a frustratingly long time to get my paypal account canceled, and skype is still bugging me about returning their e-mails about getting my "skype account" (which never existed) straightened out. The nice thing about this whole shenanigan was that my credit card company immediately contacted me and in short order created a different account number for me. I'll think twice before ever creating either a skype or a paypal account ever again though, that's for sure.
Those things are all important, but even though she was currently working at Langley, she was still considered as an undercover operative. From the wiki I linked to above:
On March 16, 2007, at these hearings about the disclosure, Waxman read a statement about Plame's CIA career that had been cleared by CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden and the CIA, stating that she was undercover and that her employment status with the CIA was classified information prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958.
Note that at the time she was exposed, she was still considered an undercover operative.
And here's another source:
...whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer.
She was still active duty, she could have gone undercover when a new assignment came up, and Cheney and Co. leaked her name anyway to the press for political purposes. And yet somehow my comment above is getting flamebait and troll mods for pointing this out. The words "double standards" come to mind. When Republicans lie and cheat and steal, it's for our protection, when Democrats do it, it's because they're traitorous liberals who hate america. Hypocrisy.
Heh, yeah I guess you're right.:) Let me rephrase that: Between this and the Adamo ads, Dell is destroying any chance they had of developing desirability or panache.
On top of that even if a lot of women are interested in cooking and recipes it comes out in very bad taste when you release your laptop for women as an extension or helper of domestic chores.
It's not just that. Let's say hypothetically that Dell's marketing department has decided that in order to reach the male demographic better, they're going to start putting sports news on their web-site. Now, does anyone really think that putting sports news on their web-site is a good idea? No, of course not, it's totally irrelevant to the process of buying a computer, if I want sports news, I'll go to espn or something. Dell would pretty quickly get a reputation for being complete idiots doing this. It's one thing to try and appeal to the female demographic by targeted marketing, but it's another to do it badly, which is what Dell did here. Just like nobody wants sports while buying computers, nobody wants recipes either.
Between this and the Adamo ads, I think that Dell is rapidly destroying any desirability or panache they ever had (think Apple products). But then again, they never really got much after those "Dude, you're getting a Dell" commercials, I myself just kind of forgot about it. I think they're pretty much doomed to stay the mundane computer manufacturer like this though.
Well, considering that the kindle is already powered by linux, it's completely idiotic to assert that he's "shoving your pet OS down your throat" because you're already running linux on the Kindle.
Also, there is a text-to-speech is a standard package in one of the most common desktop managers for linux. I use the text-to-speech sometimes while I'm doing the dishes, etc. It does about as well as most text-to-speech programs do. You don't have to use kde to do it, ktts is just the front-end, it uses the festival synthesis system, so a front end might be out there can use a less full-featured OS than kde, which might be faster and hence more suitable for an e-book reader device. I wonder if it's possible to get the festival speech synthesis system running on it and bypass amazon's DRMed solution all together.
At first I thought it was this movie (soundtrack here), and I thought, wow a video game about an 80s ski movie with break dancing. That would be funny in a kitschy sort of way -- I can see it now, EA sports presents Fire and Ice, win races and get your character's hair perm to twice as frizzy, or add some new break dancing moves to your characters repertoire.
You mean like this? That's San Francisco in google maps. Here's Atlanta, same thing. All the buildings are 3-D representations. Granted, that's not quite what you describe, which is more like William Gibson's version of the internet. But, between this and street view, I bet this is not outside the realm of possibility.
The ribbons are as counter-intuitive now as they were before.
You know what I find interesting? Every single real human being that I've talked to has hated the ribbons. This includes people who are barely computer literate and hard-core linux users who write code for a living. Yet, on slashdot, I consistently see comments like the grand-parent modded up, e.g. some story about how after a while of using the ribbons they get used to it and have at least "twice the productivity" (whatever that means). Either, a) I'm talking to too small of a sample size of real humans to get meaningful data (probably about 5 people total, I'm not in the polling business), b) slashdot users are different from most other users, or c) slashdot is filled with MS astroturfers. I'm guessing it's a combination of all three.
Another thing I see a lot on slashdot is that a lot of people who makes a comment critical of Windows here, or favorable towards Apple, get at least one troll mod. or if at least an overrated mod (even at a base moderation score). I guess I shouldn't be surprised that uou can't actually trust any of the moderators (and hence readers) to even try to be unbiased but still, for a site that started as a linux-favorable site, it's drifted pretty far towards a pro-MS site. It pretty much sucks actually, because I don't ever get mod points any more because I make some of these "controversial" posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X can do this as well, in fact you can map any of the modifier keys to any other modifier key or no action. You also can map the function keys as straight function keys or as the media, expose, screen&keyboard dimming keys on the newer keyboards.
Think of the shared memory bus. Won't somebody please think of the shared memory bus!?! It's going to get clogged with so many cores.
I've never had stability problems with Vista but my big gripe with it is that it's kind of slow. My 5 year old dual 2.7 GHz G5 at work seems to respond and run anything but graphics more rapidly than my brand new PC at home running a dual core 2 duo, 3.24 GHz. I find it incredibly strange, I feel relieved that I only require Vista for games and the rest of the time I'm running a very snappy e17 with the ecomorph composite manager.
If you look at those patents in TFA, they're mostly related to design. It is not stretch of the imagination that Jobs actually designed the cases for those patents while working at Apple the second time.
Jobs might charm smart people, etc., but there is substantial evidence that Jobs does more than that. Yes, it actually looks like he works for a living sometimes.
He doesn't. He's just trolling (otherwise, he would show us the proof, or at least back up his statements some sort of evidence). Unfortunately these days on slashdot it's fashionable to make totally unfounded deragatory assertions about Apple, but if you say one word about Vista or the Office ribbons really aren't all that great, you get modded flamebait or troll.
Okaaayyy.... all those who were founding partners of a computer company that has captured 10% usage share, please raise their hands. Those people are allowed to make snarky comments about how little Steve Jobs knows. Everyone else, STFU. Unless you have worked with the man personally or have a reasonable assurance that he acts this way, what you've asserted is completely unfounded. The same goes for Ballmer and Gates (even though Ballmer didn't get in until 1980).
You're right that is was slower before I turned all that stuff off, but before I did that, it was slow to the point of being unusable -- now, it's just sort of slow. Case in point: why is it that it takes a second or two to load up all the icons on the control panel on Vista 64 bit on a core duo 2 at 3.24 GHz with 4 GB of ram? Are you really trying to tell me that an OS that takes a second to load 20 or so icons on brand new hardware is fast? Really???
One could make the argument that by refusing to acknowledge what nearly every average user can tell after using Vista for a few days, i.e., that it's sub-par, you expert windows users could be dooming yourselves to mediocre software for the foreseeable future because MS will never learn its lesson and write better software. My only complaint is that I have to use it with you when necessary. But then again, MS seems to have realized that users are reluctant to buy slow software and are trying to speed things up with Windows 7 so maybe there's hope yet. This is not a troll, this is a fact, MS is losing usage share and has been doing so ever since Vista was released. This should be telling you something, and it's not just marketing or a bad rap: most people really aren't all that happy with Vista.
I have Vista SP1 installed for playing games the hard drive was thrashing so much it was actually causing stutter in my fps games sometimes until I turned the indexer and the superfetch services off (I actually had to turn off superfetch twice as it ignored me the first time). I don't seem to remember ever having to deal with that sort of issue on XP, so my guess is vista is probably worse for this sort of thing. It would be nice if SP2 alleviated this, but I'm not holding my breath. Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer. On the other hand, with any fresh linux install I also go around removing a lot of the default desktop packages that I don't want, only it seems a lot easier and more transparent in linux, but maybe I'm just used to the linux way and not the windows way.
I'm not trolling here, but why does it seem like the buzz is often about apple products then? I don't see much about people creating art with their blackberry or their palm. Or is there a lot of this going on and I just missed it?
If someone asked me, I would say that it's a combination of Apple products marketed well and that they make pretty good products to begin (e.g. easy to use) -- I don't think that success for a new technological product is really probably without both of these things.
Sure, but you ever drive an american car? They're so bad we americans even quit buying them. Here we are in the "perfect capitalist society" and we still get crap products sometimes, or else why would the two of the three main U.S. auto makers be requiring subsidies from the U.S. government in order to stay in business?
And one more thing, saying that linux sucks for backwards compability unless you use open source software is the equivalent of saying that windows sucks for games unless you use directX. While technically true, you're negating the best, best feature of the OS in that arena. In any case, it's still not true for linux, as I point out above because you can use whatever libraries you wish using modules.
You can do that just fine, you have to install module software first though, e.g. this, and the package you need to run it. It allows you to change to whatever runtime environment you want. Want to run an the old libc6 from redhat 6.2? Go right ahead. Want to use a different gcc library? No problem. This type of software is used on large supercomputer clusters to ensure that everyone can run all the software they want, e.g. there was a big break between mpich and mpich2, but thanks to modules, you can have both installed and run binary code requiring one or the other without having to uninstall anything.
I don't dispute that most apps designed for older versions of windows run okay on newer versions, but you haven't given any evidence at all as to why this might be true. Just to play devil's advocate, linux runs any X11 app and that goes back decades and decades (e.g., nethack is from 1985). Also, often apps that runs on OS X can run on any version of OS X but there were some changes between point releases but I don't know of an app that fails to run on new versions. Also, the X11 server lets you run any linux or unix program that uses that as well. If you have an app that runs on OS 9, you can run that in classic mode (which I believe they stopped including for leopard, but I'm not sure), and that takes us back to 1999. Finally, I have all kinds of DOS or windows 3.11 apps that don't run well or at all on windows any more, even in emulation mode. We also used to have some kind of VB app that only ran on windows 95 and refused to run on anything else. Most of these are scientific software packages for driving instruments or interfacing with specific hardware, but not always.
I know you windows fanboys hate to hear it, but contrary to being perfect, windows does break backwards compatibility sometimes with new releases, AND there are other operating systems that achieve similar or greater (in the case of linux) backwards compatibility to their predecessors.
Watch what happens if openoffice makes any kind of real dent in office's market share. It'll be just like the RIAA going after downloaders...
So, it's more than just that Intel is releasing this. It's Intel, working with the Linux Foundation in an attempt to create a new standard. Isn't this pretty much the ideal case for we've been asking for in open source? A propietary hardware manufacturer working with an open source consortium to create and release open source software. I'll view this collaboration as successful if we start seeing netbooks for sale from major OEMs with this OS installed.
Oh, and some other random stuff I saw that I liked:
-standard X11 window server and can run most linux apps
-the clutter organizational scheme looks intriguing but I'd have to use it for awhile before I could tell you if I liked it or not.
-It's using the gecko HTML rendering engine. What's interesting here is it is not using webkit.
-Lastly, I'd like to see something on how well the wireless network device works and changing networks. The article was a bit short on this aspect. Has anybody used it? How is it?
I had this happen to me as well about a year ago. It looks like somebody is running a big scam in Eastern Europe. The strange thing is that I don't have a skype account, nor did I think I had a paypal account. In the end, I found out that at one point I bought an ELER t-shirt where the guy required that I create a paypal account and then I forgot I had created that. It took a frustratingly long time to get my paypal account canceled, and skype is still bugging me about returning their e-mails about getting my "skype account" (which never existed) straightened out. The nice thing about this whole shenanigan was that my credit card company immediately contacted me and in short order created a different account number for me. I'll think twice before ever creating either a skype or a paypal account ever again though, that's for sure.
Note that at the time she was exposed, she was still considered an undercover operative. And here's another source:
She was still active duty, she could have gone undercover when a new assignment came up, and Cheney and Co. leaked her name anyway to the press for political purposes. And yet somehow my comment above is getting flamebait and troll mods for pointing this out. The words "double standards" come to mind. When Republicans lie and cheat and steal, it's for our protection, when Democrats do it, it's because they're traitorous liberals who hate america. Hypocrisy.
You mean kind of like exposing the identity of an active duty undercover CIA agent? He's got a long way to go before he can top that one.
Heh, yeah I guess you're right. :) Let me rephrase that: Between this and the Adamo ads, Dell is destroying any chance they had of developing desirability or panache.
It's not just that. Let's say hypothetically that Dell's marketing department has decided that in order to reach the male demographic better, they're going to start putting sports news on their web-site. Now, does anyone really think that putting sports news on their web-site is a good idea? No, of course not, it's totally irrelevant to the process of buying a computer, if I want sports news, I'll go to espn or something. Dell would pretty quickly get a reputation for being complete idiots doing this. It's one thing to try and appeal to the female demographic by targeted marketing, but it's another to do it badly, which is what Dell did here. Just like nobody wants sports while buying computers, nobody wants recipes either.
Between this and the Adamo ads, I think that Dell is rapidly destroying any desirability or panache they ever had (think Apple products). But then again, they never really got much after those "Dude, you're getting a Dell" commercials, I myself just kind of forgot about it. I think they're pretty much doomed to stay the mundane computer manufacturer like this though.
Well, considering that the kindle is already powered by linux, it's completely idiotic to assert that he's "shoving your pet OS down your throat" because you're already running linux on the Kindle.
Also, there is a text-to-speech is a standard package in one of the most common desktop managers for linux. I use the text-to-speech sometimes while I'm doing the dishes, etc. It does about as well as most text-to-speech programs do. You don't have to use kde to do it, ktts is just the front-end, it uses the festival synthesis system, so a front end might be out there can use a less full-featured OS than kde, which might be faster and hence more suitable for an e-book reader device. I wonder if it's possible to get the festival speech synthesis system running on it and bypass amazon's DRMed solution all together.
At first I thought it was this movie (soundtrack here), and I thought, wow a video game about an 80s ski movie with break dancing. That would be funny in a kitschy sort of way -- I can see it now, EA sports presents Fire and Ice, win races and get your character's hair perm to twice as frizzy, or add some new break dancing moves to your characters repertoire.
I recommend growing a beard.
You mean like this? That's San Francisco in google maps. Here's Atlanta, same thing. All the buildings are 3-D representations. Granted, that's not quite what you describe, which is more like William Gibson's version of the internet. But, between this and street view, I bet this is not outside the realm of possibility.
You know what I find interesting? Every single real human being that I've talked to has hated the ribbons. This includes people who are barely computer literate and hard-core linux users who write code for a living. Yet, on slashdot, I consistently see comments like the grand-parent modded up, e.g. some story about how after a while of using the ribbons they get used to it and have at least "twice the productivity" (whatever that means). Either, a) I'm talking to too small of a sample size of real humans to get meaningful data (probably about 5 people total, I'm not in the polling business), b) slashdot users are different from most other users, or c) slashdot is filled with MS astroturfers. I'm guessing it's a combination of all three.
Another thing I see a lot on slashdot is that a lot of people who makes a comment critical of Windows here, or favorable towards Apple, get at least one troll mod. or if at least an overrated mod (even at a base moderation score). I guess I shouldn't be surprised that uou can't actually trust any of the moderators (and hence readers) to even try to be unbiased but still, for a site that started as a linux-favorable site, it's drifted pretty far towards a pro-MS site. It pretty much sucks actually, because I don't ever get mod points any more because I make some of these "controversial" posts.