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Comment Re:No More Cowbell (Score 2, Insightful) 610

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.

Comment Re:I have a better idea. (Score 1) 610

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.

Comment Re:I have a better idea. (Score 1) 610

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???

Comment Apple the new Mickeysoft? Hardly (Score 1, Insightful) 610

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)

Comment Bloat? I didn't see anything about that! (Score 2, Insightful) 187

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.

Comment Re:Defrag? (Score 1) 835

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.

Comment Re:Expected (Score 1) 1654

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!

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