On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 03:58:26PM -0600, Mark wrote: > This sounds like going to a whole lot of work to do something that > I've been doing for years with POP3 without any additional server or > software... It's actually very hard to do this robustly using POP3 because you don't have stable identifiers for e-mail addresses. Qualcomm dealt with this problem by adding a unique ID into the mail headers (thus modifying the message), but (a) not all POP servers do this, and (b) it means you're modifying the mail message, which is aesthetically unclean. The problem with not having a unique message identifier is that if some other application deletes a message, it's very easy to confuse a mail synchronization program. So such schemes tend not to be very robust. Still, if something worked for you, great! > In other words, f*** off! This is exactly the attitude that will > always keep open source from gaining significant market share. Only > the projects that actually listen to such concerns ever make any real > impact (Mozilla, anyone?). Mozilla gets millions of dollars from Google every year; it's nice when you can have that support. Otherwise, you can always get together with other folks to sponsor someone to write a feature, or you can implement the feature yourself. Open source is not about free features that people can get just by whining about them. It's about having the freedom to change it --- either by yourself, or by paying someone to do it for you. It means you're not beholden to a single source supplier to make those changes. As Bob Young once said, proprietary software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut, so only the dealer can work on it. Open source allows you or someone you pay, like a neighborhood mechanic, to work on the car, not just the dealer. But that doesn't mean you get your car fixed for free! And as much as you threaten a car manufacturer that you won't buy a car unless they provide free car customization services, just try it and see how far you get. Similar, with open source, by itself it does not mean the software is better, just that over time it is likely to get better as more people work on it, not just the company who owns the software. So yes, Open Source is not a magic bullet. But I'd much rather have an open platform than a closed one. > Bull hockey! The Nokia tablets are sold as consumer devices, but are > severely lacking in software functionality. I didn't lay out several > hundred in cash just so I can carry yet another device around. The > whole point was to replace several devices with one. This amounts to > false advertising, and ensures that the the tablets will never take > off or make any real impact with consumers, especially since Nokia has > been rumbling for some time about orphaning the devices completely and > leaving them to their fate with the community. In other words, > resigning them to a fate of never being anything more than developers' > playthings. Actually, Nokia has been very clear that the only thing the N800 was ever meant to be was an Internet Tablet. So web browsing really was its primary goal. Communication progams were always secondary, and PIM functionality, not at all. They've always been very clear about that, and you can see it in how much they bothered to spend in development dollars improving the mail application or the instant messaging application. The advantage with Open Source is that it allows the N800 to be expanded beyond what Nokia was willing to invest development dollars to improve. So there is at least a *chance* that the PIM functionality will one day get better than what the Palm Pilot offers, as opposed to "not at all" which would appear to be the case with (a) any Symbian based cell phone, or (b) any other closed-source platform. If you're not happy with that set of priorities, then maybe you shouldn't have purchased an N800 in the first place. I'm sorry you feel that open source developers or Nokia somehow owe you to implement whatever functionality you happen to want, but unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. I have may pet favorite enhancements that I wish Apple would implement for the ipod, or Canon in their digital SLR's. But having proprietary software doesn't mean I get my favorite features, even if large web sites like Luminous Landscape has been whining about certain features (like an easy way to implement mirror lockup using a single button push, instead of several button pushes to navigate through multiple levels of menus) for years. > If you want anyone to use your software and are using them for alpha > and beta testers, then you *have* to expect some feedback. If you > don't want feedback, don't distribute your software. It's that simple! It's not the feedback, it's the attitude. With that kind of attitude, you'll probably be generally very unhappy in life, regardless of whether you use open source or proprietary software. Sometimes asking nicely will get you much farther than asking with a snarl. Best regards, - Ted _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
