Not so simple.

Imagine Apple powered by RIAA lawyers. (Is it really that hard?) They would pay your phone carrier to monitor activity to and from your phone , building up their evidence of a jailbroken phone . When ready, their super expensive (better than you can afford) lawyers would write it all up and submit it to the court along with 100 or so other cases. As I understand it this is illegal but it's not like our government (US) has been keeping to it's own laws much lately.

Up till now you are clueless, happily enjoying your open device. Then you receive a registered letter informing you of the problem. The case is made against you before you even knew you needed to mount a defense.

Now, you are given a choice. Fork over a good amount of hard earned cash immediately, or face trial.

If you chose trial there will be a panel of highly paid lawyers of a different class than you can afford explaining their case to a probably technically incompetent appointed for life, answering to no one judge. Who will explain said "technobable" to him? Said lawyers of course. This trial will not be for the large lump of cash which was asked for previously in the settlement offer, it will be for a much larger amount that will probably keep you broken for life.

Yes, you are in the right. You were only using your device which you own as you see fit.

Good luck with that.

That would be fine too. I like the Zaurus option b/c of the USB host and microdrive, you could extend it to do just about anything with that but an IPAQ with SD+CF would be just fine. In fact, the same software could probably run on both!

Actually, even the old US sold Zauri (55/5600 series) which I mentioned not using would technically work for this as they have both CF and SD though I don't think you would want to carry them in your pocket and you could get so much more power from something newer.

If the phone existed.... I don't think gnumeric would take long!

Sounds nice...

Good luck with that though...

Here in the US it's going to take the money of a large corporation to get the phone FCC type approved. I doubt it is much better elsewhere.

Even if you get past that the carriers won't touch it. They want to charge you for each program you install, each ringtone you download etc... Then they want to charge it again when you upgrade to a new phone. They won't let your open phone on their network.

What might work... a PDA with a CF cellular modem card. I think Cingular had CF cards for a while just before AT&T ate them. I'm not sure if you can get voice through it though. If not there is alway VoIP but it requires the data connection be on which will probably go through batteries faster than most people would want to deal with. Plus, any data plan I have seen forbids using it for VoIP (protecting that traditional phone revenue). You would always be at risk of getting noticed and turned off.

If you did this you would need a PDA with a CF slot. Since most PDAs only have one memory slot filling it with your cell modem kind of sucks. For that reason I would suggest a Sharp Zaurus. Not the ones which were released here in the US 10 years ago (too outdated) but the clamshell ones they only sold in Japan. Some of those had internal microdrives and USB host.

You might want to look into Opie and GPE. I think they both had phone editions, or at least phone apps. I would go with GPE as it's X based, you could port all sorts of stuff to it w/o much work. They could probably use some updated 3d eye candy though if this is to compete with the iPhone. GPE + compiz? Is it possible?

Of course, having a device with a CF card sticking out the top all the time is an invitation for breakage too if it catches on something...

Any better ideas???

Apple has always been more proprietary than Mickeysoft! Before OSS gained a real showing outside of academia Mickeysoft was the open, free choice over Apple because at least you could choose the hardware.

And yet... so many Mickeysoft hating OSS fans (me) also love Apple (not me). Not even PocketPC locks it's users into the one Mickeysoft marketplace. Leave it to Apple to come up with that.

Honestly, if you bought an iPhone, turn in your geek card immediately and seek rehabilitation! Myself, I'll hold onto my PocketPC until a REAL Linux phone is released. Something with X, GTK and Qt where I can actually port my Desktop apps over with no more than a UI shuffle to handle the small screen. Not a new (read no existing software base)Java API with a Linux kernel hiding under 10 layers of cruft as though someone was embarrassed of it(that means you GPhone)

And if Apple Corp. was suing you with some strange interpretation of the DMCA today and the legal dream team it must be able to afford...

What you be confident that the judge would sort it all out?

I didn't see anything in the article where the author made a value statement, that it is bad (or good) that system calls are increasing. He was just pointing out that the trend is not towards simplicity in this area.

I would also point out, that ext4 is very new and ntfs may not be new but never has been quite completed so active feature development could explain away the upward curves in their call counts, though not the absolute values.

"since you've waited for ages while it was being done"

Do you sit there and watch the grass grow in-between cuttings too? Just go do something else.

Defrag is not a bad idea at all.

It would be strange for the filesystem to become fragmented this much all at once as the computer seems to have slowed down all at once but it might if there was a lot of software install/removal going on at the time or maybe if some large updates were installed.

Still, if you want to speed a Windows box up...
Defrag it. Really!

The common perception these days on defraging is that it is no longer necessary, just an old DOS-Win9x thing. People also tend to buy new computers every couple of years or at least reformat. Hmmm.....

Here's the thing... Microsoft defrag is broken. It has been in every Windows version which came after Win98. Not that the ones in Win95/8 were that great either! If you run the defrag that comes with Windows it will probably not be much better after. People mistake this for meaning the computer didn't need it.

Get a third party defragger. I'm using Diskeeper. It works well. I've noticed a huge difference on my work PC (has to be Windows) since installing it. If you search Google there are many other defraggers out there but watch out. Many of them are just shells which run the Microsoft defrag in the background. Make sure the one you get actually is it's own defrag program.

Even if this doesn't fix the current problem it will make most Windows machines faster. At least it does if you use it like I do and install/remove a lot of stuff regularly. Maybe a simple email/word processing box wouldn't get so fragmented??? I'll probably never know.

that would be baking not cooking

Unless the alcohol consumer is a Malaysian Muslim.

1-1000 2-1000 3-1000.... Can I hit submit yet?

Lulfas - "This is the sort of thing that is going to happen when you give a normal person *nix. Sadly, in this case, Windows "just works."

Someone mod this back up!!

Personally I disagree with Lulfas' statement but it is a very common sentiment. How can it be addressed if it is burried?!?!

If moderating is used to push one's own opinions and keep others down then Slashdot becomes Digg!!!! Let's not go there!

Bah!

It's not Linux/Windows. It's Verizon and a ton of other companies.

I have Verizon. I tether my phone to my laptop. What did it take? I added the "phone#", username, and password in KPPP plus selected the USB serial port (my phone). It's pretty much the exact same process people have been doing to get dialup in Windows since Dial Up Networking in Windows95. And no, it isn't really any different in Windows today.

The issue... Verizon documentation makes it sound like you need Windows. Sadly, this is common with many ISPs, hardware vendors, etc...

Still, it has nothing to do with ease of use of Linux or Windows.

And that is the problem Linux faces on the desktop.

Just about every argument I've read in the last 7 years or more against Linux being ready on the Desktop has revolved around "this piece of hardware is difficult to get working" or "I need X application because that's what my work, school, etc... uses".

First off, when a hardware vendor supports Linux either by writing the driver themselves or better yet by releasing enough info to allow the community to do so it is very rarely difficult to install. In fact, being experienced in both Windows and Linux I would say for supported hardware Linux is EASIER. An example, I recently upgraded my video card. Both new and old were nVidia. Know what I had to do in the software? NOTHING!! The nVidia driver supports all nVidia cards and setup is pretty much the same. I just pulled the old one out and put the new one in. In Windows I would have had to install a driver. Not the worlds most difficult task but... one more step than in Linux.

The problem is a chicken & egg problem. Linux will not be a mainstream desktop OS w/o the hardware support, it will not get the hardware support w/o being a mainstream desktop OS.

Then the software. Using Wine might still be a little much to ask of someone whith no inherent interest in computers, just a desire to do his/her homework. (To be fair it really isn't that hard though if you have even a little interest in learning) So, only considering apps that run natively in Linux is there really that large a percentage of people whom need something which isn't available in Linux?

Take MSOffice which seems to come up again and again as a "necessity". People argue endlessly over wether or not OpenOffice is full featured in comparison to MSOffice. Personally I have no idea. I rarely use an office suite beyond writing a simple letter or maybe typing up a list in a spreadsheet. I do know that both office suites have way more features than I will ever use. For that matter, so does KOffice, AbiWord/Gnumeric and I'm sure many others. Am I really so alone in this?

I can't believe more than 10% of MSOffice users use any more of the features than that. The only other app I hear about regularly... Adobe Photoshop. How many fingers do you need to count the number of people you know whom use Photoshop? And beyond the features found in Gimp? No, your answer doesn't count if you work in a large graphics shop. Most computer users don't.

So, what if the 90% whom could switch did so? Well, that would have to tip the scales enough to get the hardware vendors to support Linux better and proprietary software released w/ Linux versions (if you really need it).

I realize that untill this happens the majority of people have no real motivation to make it happen. This isn't an issue of Linux not being ready though, it's just momentum. Still, I can't believe that one company, which has only been around for one generation will dominate computers (which increasingly dominate society) so thouroughly as Microsoft currently does forever. But what will it take?

Yeah, it will pretty much make it stop for ya.... permanently!