XFCE is quite a good alternative now - just install it and the option will appear in your login menu. YMMV but I found it to be a happy enough home.

Hi,

You're letting your politics choose bad friends for you and it's not a good idea because it means that without thought or consideration you choose to be on the side of some very bad people. Everyone has choices including the people in charge of the DPRK and my home too and if we wound back the problems of life far enough we'd find that the DPRK helped Mugabe, for example, or that Henry Kissenger helped Mugabe or that his mum wasn't nice to him or whatever. But I don't blame Mugabes behaviour on them.

The way you are trying to compare two very different things to try and bash the US or mitigate the DPRK is a loss of perspective and it's usually the stuff one reads in government controlled newspapers in the kind of place I'm from. It relies on people not really knowing what immense freedoms there are in the civilised world and on people from the civilised world not having the tiniest inkling what it's really like to live in a police state. I wonder if you have ever felt that you can't say what you think at a party of friends because you're not sure whether some of them have relatives in the secret police? I have.

This is why it makes me feel ill to see such, frankly and to be kind, silly comparisons. I

Unfortunately, I have now put you in a position where you have to argue on the side of even more horrible people in order to try and win the argument. But if you do then you're just making the same mistake even more thoroughly. Meanwhile people who have courage or morals or a sense of decency that got them into trouble are getting beaten and starved quietly far beyond the reach of the BBC to exclaim on their woes and you just tried to make it sound ok.

Regards,

Tim

These are political prisoners, not ordinary every day thieves or drug dealers.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/images-reveal-scale-north-korean-political-prison-camps-2011-05-03

Interesting how ready people are to rush to the defence of anything to bash the US. I'm a Zimbabwean in the UK, BTW and I regularly hear people defending Mugabe, presumably because they think he's left wing and anti American. There is some incredible loss of perspective, unfortunately but also demonstrates how little anyone really cares about "the poor people in X" when compared to making some political point at home.

Can't mod you up but it's true - the less you know the more stuffed you are.

I'll take this situation any day over being dictated to. After all, for people who want to be serfs and sing in the landowner's choir, there are always the options you mention.

You just contradicted yourself! "You can have classic but it's going" that's the summary - we are being railroaded and that's not freedom.

Actuially they regularly state that they don't intend to keep maintaining it when I have emailed the mailing lists. Not only that, but it doesn't appear to support applets so e.g. I can't see the current time on my "gnome fallback" panel.

I always take the bait, but just in case you are serious, it's a moble operating system. I was making the point that you have 3 options for your development environment. Symbian has had a huge bashing by some very self-satisfied people and I am enjoying pointing out that for all that, you aren't forced to buy a new computer to write software for it.

Cheers :-)

. . .. . but with Symbian you can develop on a Mac, Windows or Linux...... YAY! :-)

You should do be able to do whatever the heck you like.

I do like a place with a canteen though - helps you to meet people outside your team. Those who want privacy don't use it and those who do use it tend to be happy enough to talk. It gets my mind off my specific work and let me find out about things I'd never hear of otherwise.

That's like saying that its failure was inevitable because you couldn't be a working OS in the past and a powerful one in the present. I agree that their choices were not wrong for everything but they did not prepare for a different future - where's the equivalent for Symbian of Android's Dalvik or Windows mobile's Silverlight? I'm not really so familiar with iOS but at least Objective-C is "all virtual" afaik and there is quite a powerful and mature framework for desktop-sized applications..

The only clearly stupid idea was to write in C++ wih exceptions etc before any of the compilers supported it properly. Oh, and platsec was also stupid - simply killed all interest and prevented an ecosystem from happening (never seen suich a case of own foot shooting). Death before insecurity - death it is then.

A less clear but still stupid thing was to believe that code would be ported to Symbian. iOS and Android benefit from being able to use POSIX code defeloped for Linux, FreeBSD, solaris etc etc. With Symbian every conversion is a terrifying effort and once done, hard to maintain. By choosing to go the "odd C++" route, Symbian cut itself off from the industry. Symbian people seemed to imagine that it would become its own standard and that such things wouldn't matter. Oops.

A final thing that was silly was the idea of "binary compatibility forever" - something that didn't work all that well in practise and doesn't matter at all now that Symbian isn't going to be here anymore.

It has a good kernel and a very comprehensive API and Qt made the "bitch to program" thing considerably less of a problem but it was still a bitch to progam for the people working on the middleware and non-Qt user code. and consumer electronics companies tend not to see why they need to make their engineers more productive and how it requires that they produce different types of products (e.g. ones with enough RAM).

It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago and of Nokia for being a bad customer and trying to push all the things that lead to the disaster and to both of them for ignoring the fact that higher performance hardware was coming and tha tpeople actualy would pay for it. Their entire focus was on trying to move down ro cheaper hardware and they dug themselves deeply into a hole before admitting the need for a 180 degree turn.

It's just a classic case of people "optimizing" something and of time making their optimisations first irrelevant and then a terrible burden.

Nokia could have fixed their problems at many points and didn't because the short term pain would have been high. Now it's much higher.

We all have to assume that you're defending your purchase to some extent. Some purchases are at least partially about status anyhow and there's also the question of how much it all resembles audio equipment where one can spend any amount of money in search of some kind of barely perceptible perfection.

If you start the day happy with your current TV and someone makes you feel it's not good enough and that another one is what you must have then to a certain extent you are at least being manipulated.

The lesson about Symbian and Nokia is one that one could have learned about UNIX when MS brought NT. And it would be true enough but UNIX sort of didn't die like it was told to exactly but spawned a bastard child which grew up to be stronger.

Life is full of near misses and one doen't know how near they are until you have strained every nerve trying. Even then you never know what could have happened if you had been just a little bit luckier or smarter or, indeed, slower or dumber.

There is so much w*****g about the Symbian UI but it's a good OS and does a lot of stuff that, e.g., Windows Phone cannot do now but makes up for with much more expensive hardware. What's crapulent is the organisation which wants everything (masses of models at different price points with exceedingly complex features in the OS to try and get around the deficiencies in the hardware, backwards compatibility with all the mistakes of the past etc) and ends up with nothing.

If you haven't learned that it's the people that matter most then you are missing the point.

Well you can create giant planet-sized data stores and find things in them :-) That's pretty cool.

It seems to me analagous to arguing that neural networks are inaccurate and "nowhere near as powerful as computers". Some 6 billion neural nets out there are nodding along in interest while someone demonstrates their X million line program to algorithmically teach a robot arm to play table tennis in a special room.