Posts by eulampios

Re: Reminds me of someone...

s/wholes/holes/

Re: Reminds me of someone...

You might need to move to more secure OS than WinXP if you are concerned, even Vista was a step forward. Yet GNU/Linux (or *BSD) + MAC tweaking would be almost rock solid.

Look what Mozilla is fixing now, it's more proactive work than patching for already exploitable wholes. BTW, pwn2own really had shown that it takes 24 hours for Mozilla and Google to do what Microsoft have taken 2 whole months.

Re: bloat...

have a look at what Windows Vista's minimum requirements were.

I don't have to, I remember it. It was 512mb (V. basic). I got that preinstalled on a laptop. It was stuttering until I added 1 more gig into it. But before that I put GNU/Linux on it right away and it was sleek. I don't know if those were enough. MS and their products are a constant enigma.

What I am driving at is that at least 128, 256 mb used to be quite common on cheap Android tablets, phones and even small netbooks. You still can get 256 mb tablet on newegg.

I got one low power device (A10, 512mb ram, it got a decent video card mali400). I don't experience any stuttering on it. Some apps are good, some are not. Most of google's apps are fine. Even Debian off the sd card is okay (where apps are much better of course ;)), it's slower than it should be though due to the lima video driver, it's not up to the proprietary mali Android uses. The latter is constantly improving. When it finally gets to level of the mali it will perform on par with Android.

So any benchmarks comparing Windows and Android on the same low spec'ed hardware?

iOS device activation

plus I can't even activate it, they won't let you do it on any free OS, like GNU/Linux or *BSD.

Re: Chaos breads creativity

..but I think the tone is too negative.

This is the same tone that sounds usually positive when singing about Apple, Microsoft et al, being negative about Android, Linux, FOSS and Wikipedia. Like in this ode to the "rounded corners" .

Re: bloat...

Windows Phone 7 took the approach that I believe Android's developers wanted to: optimised, native-code libraries serving byte-coded apps.

According to the min hardware requirements originally Android needed only 32 MB of ram while WP 7 required 256 MB, resp. I believe, that 256 MB was still enough for the recent 4.0 Android. Multitasking was only introduced to WP7 as an update.

Comparing the user performance of a WP7 device with that of similarly-specified device running Android shows that it was the right thing to do from a technical standpoint.

Any benchmarks? Links to urls where people try Android vs. WP7 on the same hardware?

So even if the OEM apps are better, so you end up with two email clients, two music stores, two camera apps, and so on.

Experience tells me, that Google's apps are actually more simplistic and usually better. However, what precludes you or a user from uninstalling the unwanted apps?

@mmeier

This is an enigma then really. A Unix admin to be fond of Windows and Microsoft and hating Linux at the same time somehow?

@TheVogon

According to Microsoft? They are really good at assessment. Their figures are usually encrypted as reciprocals of actual numbers.

@marekt77

Let me counter some of your tirades:

Having been the first to market with and Android phone?...but what dfference does it make if HTC cannot seem make money on Android?

HTC were one of the first, they did and do make nice devices, they managed to mess up with update/upgrades, agreed to pay MS $15 and other sums to Apple per a device for some alleged patents (they must be rich then).

Anyhow, you seem to forget that HTC is also an MS partner to manufacture an WP phone, which some people had mentioned is even more advertised by MS themselves, over Nokia? So, ultimately, how does it save HTC? Samsung are not that interested in WP as HTC, which might be explaining partially their very different performance.

HTC had originally had no Meego, nor had they ever had as much muscle and patent power as Nokia once had. How come it is good enough for Sumsung (Tizen), and so bad for Nokia?

"Cherchez la femme", as the French say, more exactly here, Cherchez la taupe. This guy, S. Elop is a really crazy MS mole.

Re: Oh Dear

Exactly,

Elop's decision to unilaterally go with Microsoft, killing Meego and put all the company's eggs in Redmond's basket would be justified if at least one of the following were true:

a) Win8 were a much better platform, which is not.

b) you could only go with a single platform at a time. The rest of manufactures have proven just otherwise. Or at least they were more any of them would be more interested in Winphone8 than in Android.

c) Win8 were free of charge, but still why not using both, plus Meego? Especially, when Android is free as in freedom and you can configure it better than the proprietary one. Meego might have been quite interesting on tablets, e.g. You can make you phones dual-trial-boot

d) Microsoft would buy every phone Nokia makes by the Nokia's price and resells it for them

e) Steven Elop were not a crazy MS fanboy, nor a Microsoft payee, nor a liquidation manager appointed by S. Ballmer

Re: Why don't they just throw in the towel?

Recent versions of Firefox and Chrome have far more vulnerabilities...

Remind us please, when did last time any of those allow dropping a trojan without a user's consent and exploited in the wild? Moreover, even the last pwn2own contest one Chrome flaw was partly "Windows kernel flaws to bypass Chrome sandbox ".

And yet, no known exploitable stuff on Linux. Yes, of course any Linux distro has much more vulnerabilities than Windows does. Sure, there is several magnitudes more software on any Linux that is being counted, more hardware architectures to be included. Plus these vulnerabilities are too technical and not that interesting as the favorite MS' remote code execution delicacies after all.

@AC, begging to differ

Very few people can actually understand Windows. That is the problem. I think the KISS principle has NOT been refuted up to this day.

As I said earlier a free *nix system is easier to troubleshoot. It is usually, dmesg and syslog creating concise but enough for a human to understand logs. These are pretty verbose and would tell you the name of misbehaving driver/module upfront. You do get a lot of hex numbers, however they are used for debugging purposes for the actual developers and seem to serve better. So you basically know where you start. Google/Bing is most often your best friend, since you get a workaround or fix very quickly. Sometimes you find a workaround or fix yourself (out of experience and logic). Most obvious and "dumb" way, which I seem to resort to more often, is to try an upstream fresher kernel that would work in 95% of the cases.

AMOF, never would you get a suggestion to clean up your computer from malware from one place and reinstall the system from another (the most popular panacea in the Windows world). The enigma for me was that neither MS nor Toshiba seemed to know what the hell that hex number f3-f100-0010 represented. This and many other instances are enough evidence for me that Windows must either be very stupid or require some rocket science.

Did you ever hear about the "registry hell"? I did. I've seen and heard about very slow Windows XP/Vista machines. No one (not even MS) know the reason. One theory suggests over-crammed and ill-maintained registry. Remember frequent accusations of Windows OS designers of messy directories where program files, documents and other stuff is often mixed up together. The culprit for a mess in the registry is not the user but applications. Never sis I hear about messed up .conf2 or .config dirs, more so about any chaos in /etc/ .conf files that are usually not cryptic and easier than registry to edit (for a human), logic and common sense are your best friends. Same goes with g/mconf tools, they do use xml but gconf or dconf-editor make it human readable and human editable. So MS Windows system might be out of this world, and there is an extraterrestrial humanoid life that would find it good for them? Hopefully, it's already been discovered by the Kepler telescope. ;-)

@AC hurt by Slackware

Are you sure you mean Slackware or is it LFS?

As for people always, always underestimate how much "free" or "cheap" costs I'd say people also do tend to overestimate the quality of pricy stuff.

anti-MS FUD

Lack of the Microsoft Win8 EULA decline button is also someone's FUD? The Linux community doesn't have money to squander on FUD, like some people in Redmond, it is not a "don't get scroogled" campaign. UEFI is a pain in the arse but seemingly not enough for Microsoft, so they came up with the new EULA that you always agree with!

@h4rm0ny

We've heard it from you already. I know at least two OEMS, with products I had to deal myself. Say on Acer machines turning off secure boot only if you have set a BIOS/EFI password. No other OEM is known to require it. It's not in those (U)EFI docs. Neither do you receive documentation with an Acer machine purchase. Asus got another option to turn off prior to booting from an external media.

Re: Quick Noob Q.

Hopefully, the OEM you choose would let you boot off a usb media by turning secure boot off. Even if it is possible it might have some secret option to be turned on/off within the EFI interface, before you can do just that.

Re: @1Rafayal

I think the big reason most people don't use Linux on the desktop is because they are largely happy with Windows

What is their choice? Yeah, it's like voting back in the USSR. It's democracy, right. So you have the right to vote. Fine. How many candidates are there? One. Can you vote against him/her though? No? Are you allowed to not vote at all? No.

The current Windows 8 EULA providing no declining options might be borrowing its letter "U" from the USSR voting system.

@Bill, who needs iTunes

Iwill just install iTunes and move my music over.......oh no wait.

Or, wait, that's crApple's decision, iTunes is completely locked-in stuff. So neither Linus, nor MS, nor even Ubuntu have anything to do with it. You can move your music back and forth with other tools though. However, noway to activate an iDevice. Who would care about iShite anyways? crApple doesn't even bother about FreeBSD. What a nice irony?

an explanation

Samsung (who was willing to take on the most cash-rich company in the world) would "roll over and play dead" for Microsoft, hmm? Any explanation for that?

Since neither you nor me nor anyone else has the actual figures of how much is paid, who among the two is the payer and payee, it's not correct to call the Samsung's behavior as "rolling over and playing dead". How do you know if MS is not actually the payer here?

It might be that Samsung simply agrees to admit they are licensing some MS technology in exchange of continuing their "good relations" and some other incentives. Google is only one that suffers here, not Samsung.

In the case of B&N, MS at first apparently tried some harsher and more impudent means and might have demanded some actual or more money because B&N is a much smaller company that wouldn't afford substantial legal resources that, e.g., Samsung got. It was a blunder though anyways, since MS never thought B&N would be so resolute in defending and go as far as complaining to the anti-monopoly authorities.

Re: Can someone grow a pair

And, is Google any less evil for owning patents?

Algebra of evilness.

Definition A company is evil in the sense of its patent portfolio, if it uses its patents to attack other companies without being threatened by them and to compensate its competition failures. A company is not evil when using its patents to protect itself against evil companies.

Theorem. Microsoft is evil in the sense of its patent portfolio.

Proof: Since MS uses its alleged patents to threaten OEMs using Android and Chrome OS and subsequently coerces them to to sign non-disclosure license agreements. MS is not threatened by any of these companies in any way other than being unable to compete with them. QED

Remark Even if the aforementioned companies don't pay MS a single penny, the MS actions are evil since those would qualify as FUD used to thwart competition.

Theorem. Google is not evil.

Proof:Google is not yet known to use its patents in initiating attacks against others. It does use patents though to protect against attacks from evil companies when it can.QED

Re: and what about

right, Damn Small Linux distro, DSL, claims to only require about 32MB of RAM with fluxbox. However, if I remember correctly, they are still using 2.4 kernel, there were plans to switch to 2.6 though.

Re: and what about

s/LXFCE/LXDE/g

was it XFCE +LXDM I was thinking about ;-)

Re: If...

Alternatively, one can put them on a usb stick, provided there are iso images available. I am sure they will fit on a 8-16gb flash drive (plus some persistent casper-rw space). This way the compressed images take up around 1gb (+casper-rw). However, you need more RAM for seamless performance.