From the RSS feed of Le Slashdot comes the BBC News of Microsoft's planned Skype killer.
(Well, it beats reading and writing about that other MS story all the time.)
If you ask me, more competition is really very much a good thing, whether it be pressure from a company such as MS trying to gain entre into new niches or pressure from new startups challenging the established giants. Now, I must qualify that: any company with deep pockets can crush the innovation out of a small niche market if it really wants to. This may be worth while in the long run if the return on investment (ROI) is there.
Sometimes a company will pour money into loss leaders and get good products out there (witness the Microsoft XBox) and sometimes it will try to drown problems in money and succeed in getting market share, but not produce anything really better for the user. For example, I'm still not convinced that Media Player is a better product, nor have I seen a single multi-IM client that I am totally happy with. I was happy with my iPAQ (which started with PocketPC 2000 and which I flashed soon thereafter with PocketPC 2002), but as you can see, RIM's Blackberry and Palm still have their pieces of the pie. (Mmm. PDA pie.)
I have not given up on Skypifying Sting (my H3635 iPAQ, 32Mb RAM, CF-based 802.11b)!
nikolasco pointed out that HP is only selling Windows for Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition upgrades for the 3900 series and up, but as I always say, there's got to be a way to make new software run on POC obsolete hardware because I'm not ready to get a new one!
In other news:
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Banazir
(Well, it beats reading and writing about that other MS story all the time.)
If you ask me, more competition is really very much a good thing, whether it be pressure from a company such as MS trying to gain entre into new niches or pressure from new startups challenging the established giants. Now, I must qualify that: any company with deep pockets can crush the innovation out of a small niche market if it really wants to. This may be worth while in the long run if the return on investment (ROI) is there.
Sometimes a company will pour money into loss leaders and get good products out there (witness the Microsoft XBox) and sometimes it will try to drown problems in money and succeed in getting market share, but not produce anything really better for the user. For example, I'm still not convinced that Media Player is a better product, nor have I seen a single multi-IM client that I am totally happy with. I was happy with my iPAQ (which started with PocketPC 2000 and which I flashed soon thereafter with PocketPC 2002), but as you can see, RIM's Blackberry and Palm still have their pieces of the pie. (Mmm. PDA pie.)
I have not given up on Skypifying Sting (my H3635 iPAQ, 32Mb RAM, CF-based 802.11b)!
nikolasco pointed out that HP is only selling Windows for Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition upgrades for the 3900 series and up, but as I always say, there's got to be a wayIn other news:
- I'm still trying to recover that JPEG photo from the Dell Inspiron 6000, and it's annozzling. I've shut Hirilonde down just so the swap and incidental use won't overwrite it, but masaga tells me it may involve a laptop HD adapter (IDE? portable SCSI?) and a session with Linux sector scan utilities. Whatever happened to Undo My Doopitity operating system features? What's that? There never were any, you say? Every OS sucks, you say?
- Is anyone familiar with the
finduserfeature in LiveJournal? I'm trying to do ahttp://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?userid=[number]&mode=fullinstead ofhttp://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=[name]&mode=full, but LJ requires the user issuing the POST command to have "finduserprivileges". Is there any way to get the same functionality?
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Banazir
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It could be on its way in the future.
If 32Kb of RAM is good enough to go to the moon, it's enough for you!
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Banazir
Seriously, I have not seen an increase in stability since DOS 6.22.
My home installation and lab installations of Windows 2000 were more stable than Win98 and our lab installation of NT 4.0, but looking back, I'm pretty sure it was because we had an insane amount of crap installed under NT4 (100+ apps versus 40 major packages under Win2K). Now that I have a Win2K system with 50+ apps, it's also not nearly 100% stable - it locks up about once every week or two, or develops hibernation problems as soon as I exceed about 30-40 open windows.
Slower is as slower does. Everyone who looks at my 20+ tabs in Firefox and dozen each of mail, IE, Notepad, Explorer, and miscellany says that I use Windows in ways "beyond how it was meant to be used". I just have to say that any window manager that does not gracefully degrade when resources are reaching their limit, but rather crashes the whole OS, or opens undead windows with pieces missing (the Address Bar and Common Tasks sidebar), is a piece of crap. Let me be clear:
And if MacOS 10.4 does this sort of thing, it's a piece of crap, too!
All you GNOME (Dropline, Ximian, whatever), KDE, and other Linux WM proponents: now's your chance to sway me back. Will your windows manager support a resource gluttony of orgiastic proportions? I am talking about Baron Harkonnen, Jabba the Hutt, Fat Bastard, and Weird Al Yankovic all rolled into one professorial package! Is your WM up to the challenge?
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Banazir
I've got 10.2 and it doesn't. Things will slow down as resources are eaten. Occasionally (rarely) the windows manager will crash. But then it just restarts itself (or you apple-option-esc and force it to restart) and in a few seconds, everything's fine again and all your programs are right where you left them. Very very rarely does the whole thing crash and it's usually when I've been running it (hard) for a couple months or so.
My recent issues with it were entirely my fault for putting more than 60GB on a 60GB HD. Ask Keanu Reaves, that's never a good idea.