The week before the Evo launched I read about the SD card error, which I immediately wrote off as “idiots trying to use a class 2 SDHC to write 720p video” when any photographer could tell yo uyou need at least a class 6 to do HD video. so I was not worried I had already planned to spend the money on a 16GB class 6 micro SDHC card. then they started complaining about battery life, the lack of an AMOLED screen, then it was confirmed it was shipping with a 8GB micro SDHC not the rumored 16GB card. Then there was the extra $10 fee to “unlock greater than 5GB data usage per month” NOT for 4G access like everyone kept saying, please read the fine print people! Next came a charge for tethering, then you needed a special HDMI cable to do the HDMI out, next was the supreme compression level of the 720p video and the 8mp images, the final issue was the monthly charge for Qik!! I could not believe how badly Sprint and HTC had fucked up the perfect cell phone. At least the promised to give Froyo to the Evo before years end, that was the only bonus to look forward to…
then I started using the phone, I installed 259 apps that I had preselected using appbrain.com (also an android app called “app brain”) that uses the Android Marketplace to search for and “queue” apps to install on your phone. what you do is go on the website, find apps you want to use, and then you click install and it loads them into a queue on the website. then when you get your phone (as was my case, since I did this 3 days before the Evo launched), the first thing you do is go to the market and install “app brain” then unfortunately you have to launch the app and login, then it will check the installed app database and compare it to what the website says you want/have installed. DO NOT CLICK THE SYNC BUTTON AT THIS TIME!!! I did not on my phone, but when I upgraded my wife’s Samsung Moment to Android 2.1 I used AppBrain and hit the “Sync” button, instead of updating the phone to match AppBrain’s database, it made the AppBrain Database match the phones (which at the time only contained AppBrain), and I had to go through the marketplace and manually locate and install everything again.
Ok, back to using AppBrain on my Evo, I clicked the “Install” button to add the 259 apps to my new Evo, this sucks, the only thing AppBrain is capable of doing (I think it is a security limitation set by google) is to:
1. open the Android marketplace
2. insert a search query for the apps you selected on their website, one at a time.
So, after clicking install you are provided with the marketplace search screen and after a few seconds it pulls up the app you were looking for (if it is available in your country/OS version, while there is a filter on AppBrain’s website for OS version and country, you may still find and select apps that are not available to your phone, personally I selected about 12-15 that were not found in the marketplace when I tried to install them). from this point on it is almost like doing it yourself, you have to click the install button (or buy if it is a paid app, but I recommend doing th efree version first to make sure it runs well on your device. I ran into several apps I wanted to buy after trying them on my wife’s Moment, only to find out they REQUIRE a physical keyboard, or a ball, or a D-Pad), the install button gives you the warning page of the access that the app wants (if any), just the same as if you did this without AppBrain, select OK and it will initiate the install. NOW, to get to the next app in my huge list to add to the phone (by the way, after 8 days I still have not narrowed the list down to less than 200, but I am working on it) you MUST HIT THE BACK BUTTON on your phone, some apps when they start downloading the MarketPlace will automatically take you back to your search results (which by the way, AppBrain searches by the Unique Identifier for the app, so only the correct app will come up in the search, or no apps), some apps will leave you on the details to watch the progress meter go by while it downloads and installs, if yo uare on the details page, press the back button to get to the search results, once you are on th esearch results page, press the back button again to get the next app on your list. This seems to be the only way to do it, so yes, I had to do this process more than 200 times to get all those apps installed on my phone.
The only benefits I found to using AppBrain, was that I was able to use my laptop to interface with the marketplace and I did it days before I hand my phone in my hands, saving me hours after I got the phone. Now, one more limitation on AppBrain, their website can only show you 50 pages of 10 apps each per category. this means that the maximum number of apps you can browse from AppBrain without doing a search is about 15% of the current android marketplace. So to compensate for this without doing specific searches (yes I looked at all 50 pages of almost every category) they place a “similar apps” and “others by this developer” list on the right hand side of the screen when viewing the details on an app, very handy.
Not too long after I started this process (at exactly 8:00am) my Evo received the now famous SD card patch OTA update.
Alright, so within 2-3 hours I had all 250+/- apps installed that were found, time to start loading them and testing them out, several were duplicate apps that I could not decide which I wanted to use without having actually used them. To this day, I still have not loaded all of the apps on my phone, I have purchased 3 or 4 total, 2 or 3 of which were planned purchases before I even got my phone, I was just waiting to make sure the demo’s worked first (that means 1 was not a planned purchase and just plain surprised me when I found it). There are others that I intend on buying, but need to wait until my next paycheck to afford it, as Android apps on average cost 2-4 times as much as comparable iPhone apps AND the graphics on almost every single Android app looks like an 8 yearold designed it. I really feel that google needs to step in and regulate some quality controlls over the apps, not content, but quality. I am sick and tired of loading an app and finding stick figures, or a plain black background and hand drawn squares and circles and teardrop shaped drawings (see a couple of pictures below for examples, what is sad is those are some of the games I really like too, but won’t buy because they are $2.99 or $4.99 and the graphics are a blank screen with “stick figures”). If you really want to understand my frustration with the graphics, go find someone who is an Apple lover, and has owned more than one iPhone, and ask them to show you some games, then you will understand. some of my favorites are the rogue trainer, field runners, rocket bears (I think that is the name, it’s a teddy bear looking brown bear that is under attack by zombie panda bears), and pocket god (I’ll have to check out my friends iPhone and see what some of the others I like are called, so you can go check them out. trust me there is a huge difference and almost everything he buys is either $0.99 or $1.99 sometimes he waits for it to go on sale before buying, but never pays more than $1.99 for an app).
People complain about the “fart” apps on iPhone, well I think there are more on Android than iPhone, AND Android has a ton of freaking jigsaw puzzle games, I cannot understand that, why is there not 1 or 2 apps, and the rest could be download add on packs that give you more images to use in the jigsaw app…
right next post will be about the phone itself, I’ll post it in a few minutes…
The week before the Evo launched I read about the SD card error, which I immediately wrote off as “idiots trying to use a class 2 SDHC to write 720p video” when any photographer could tell you you should use at least a class 6 card to do HD video. So, I was not worried I had already planned to spend the money on a 16GB class 6 micro SDHC card. then they started complaining about battery life, the lack of an AMOLED screen, then it was confirmed it was shipping with a 8GB micro SDHC not the rumored 16GB card. Then there was the extra $10 fee to “unlock greater than 5GB data usage per month” NOT for 4G access like everyone kept saying, please read the fine print people! Next came a charge for tethering, then you needed a special HDMI cable to do the HDMI out, next was the supreme compression level of the 720p video and the 8mp images, the final issue was the monthly charge for Qik!! I could not believe how badly Sprint and HTC has fucked up the perfect cell phone. At least they promised to give Froyo to the Evo before years end, that was the only bonus to look forward to…
then I started using the phone, I installed 259 apps that I had preselected using appbrain.com (also an android app called “AppBrain”) that uses the Android Marketplace to search for and “queue” apps to install on your phone. what you do is go on the website, find apps you want to use, and then you click install and it loads them into a queue on the website. then when you get your phone (as was my case, since I did this 3 days before the Evo launched), the first thing you do is go to the market and install “AppBrain” then unfortunately you have to launch the app and login, then it will check the installed app database and compare it to what the website says you want/have installed. DO NOT CLICK THE SYNC BUTTON AT THIS TIME!!! I did not on my phone, but when I upgraded my wife’s Samsung Moment to Android 2.1 I used AppBrain and hit the “Sync” button, instead of updating the phone to match AppBrain’s database, it made the AppBrain Database match the phones (which at the time only contained AppBrain), and I had to go through the marketplace and manually locate and install everything again.
Ok, back to using AppBrain on my Evo, I clicked the “Install” button to add the 259 apps to my new Evo, this sucks, the only thing AppBrain is capable of doing (I think it is a security limitation set by google) is to:
1. open the Android marketplace
2. insert a search query for the apps you selected on their website, one at a time.
So, after clicking install you are provided with the marketplace search screen and after a few seconds it pulls up the app you were looking for (if it is available in your country/OS version, while there is a filter on AppBrain’s website for OS version and country, you may still find and select apps that are not available to your phone, personally I selected about 12-15 that were not found in the marketplace when I tried to install them). from this point on it is almost like doing it yourself, you have to click the install button (or buy if it is a paid app, but I recommend doing th efree version first to make sure it runs well on your device. I ran into several apps I wanted to buy after trying them on my wife’s Moment, only to find out they REQUIRE a physical keyboard, or a ball, or a D-Pad), the install button gives you the warning page of the access that the app wants (if any), just the same as if you did this without AppBrain, select OK and it will initiate the install. NOW, to get to the next app in my huge list to add to the phone (by the way, after 8 days I still have not narrowed the list down to less than 200, but I am working on it) you MUST HIT THE BACK BUTTON on your phone, some apps when they start downloading the MarketPlace will automatically take you back to your search results (which by the way, AppBrain searches by the Unique Identifier for the app, so only the correct app will come up in the search, or no apps), some apps will leave you on the details to watch the progress meter go by while it downloads and installs, if yo uare on the details page, press the back button to get to the search results, once you are on th esearch results page, press the back button again to get the next app on your list. This seems to be the only way to do it, so yes, I had to do this process more than 200 times to get all those apps installed on my phone.
The only benefits I found to using AppBrain, was that I was able to use my laptop to interface with the marketplace and I did it days before I hand my phone in my hands, saving me hours after I got the phone. Now, one more limitation on AppBrain, their website can only show you 50 pages of 10 apps each per category. this means that the maximum number of apps you can browse from AppBrain without doing a search is about 15% of the current android marketplace. So to compensate for this without doing specific searches (yes I looked at all 50 pages of almost every category) they place a “similar apps” and “others by this developer” list on the right hand side of the screen when viewing the details on an app, very handy.
Not too long after I started this process (at exactly 8:00am) my Evo received the now famous SD card patch OTA update.
Alright, so within 2-3 hours I had all 250+/- apps installed that were found, time to start loading them and testing them out, several were duplicate apps that I could not decide which I wanted to use without having actually used them. To this day, I still have not loaded all of the apps on my phone, I have purchased 3 or 4 total, 2 or 3 of which were planned purchases before I even got my phone, I was just waiting to make sure the demo’s worked first (that means 1 was not a planned purchase and just plain surprised me when I found it). There are others that I intend on buying, but need to wait until my next paycheck to afford it, as Android apps on average cost 2-4 times as much as comparable iPhone apps AND the graphics on almost every single Android app looks like an 8 yearold designed it. I really feel that google needs to step in and regulate some quality controlls over the apps, not content, but quality. I am sick and tired of loading an app and finding stick figures, or a plain black background and hand drawn squares and circles and teardrop shaped drawings (see a couple of pictures below for examples, what is sad is those are some of the games I really like too, but won’t buy because they are $2.99 or $4.99 and the graphics are a blank screen with “stick figures”). If you really want to understand my frustration with the graphics, go find someone who is an Apple lover, and has owned more than one iPhone, and ask them to show you some games, then you will understand. some of my favorites are the rogue trainer, field runners, rocket bears (I think that is the name, it’s a teddy bear looking brown bear that is under attack by zombie panda bears), and pocket god (I’ll have to check out my friends iPhone and see what some of the others I like are called, so you can go check them out. trust me there is a huge difference and almost everything he buys is either $0.99 or $1.99 sometimes he waits for it to go on sale before buying, but never pays more than $1.99 for an app).
People complain about the “fart” apps on iPhone, well I think there are more on Android than iPhone, AND Android has a ton of freaking jigsaw puzzle games, I cannot understand that, why is there not 1 or 2 apps, and the rest could be download add on packs that give you more images to use in the jigsaw app…
right, next post will be about the phone itself, I’ll post it in a few minutes…
outdoor image in full sunlight taken with the Evo
outdoor image in full sunlight taken with the Evo
taken indoors with minimal lighting from about 6" away
taken outdoors in early morning sunlight in the mountains with the Evo
taken at the same time and place as my dog (the previous picture)
taken about 5 minutes after the last picture of the house from about 2' away
taken just after dusk outside
I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for an entire week and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you. I have always used sprint, since 1997 or 1998.
To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smart phone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Qualcomm branded Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that did not require a stylus for input, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it. the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Pokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface. I replaced that cell phone with the second generation model of that series which was what will now be the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons. I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 5 years after I bought it!
After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college. I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well. So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.
I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive. I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.
I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my dell, and as the dell was a 600MHz, the Touch was a 524MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space. I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE and the Touch had WinMo 2k5. the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.
I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi. right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…
I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”. so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not! Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor. I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died. Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing. I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 24th HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”. I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world! The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!
by the time you finish reading this, I should have posted the next part of this post (I wrote it all at the same time, but broke it up so they would not be quite so long)…
I have been a proud owner of one of Sprint‘s HTC Evo 4G cell phones now for about 10 days and I have decided to share my thoughts and experiences with you. I have always used Sprint, since 1997 or 1998.
To start I need to tell you a bit of background, I purchased my first smartphone in 2000 (maybe real early 2001) it was a Kyocera QCP6035 Palm phone, was in greyscale and was a touchscreen that required a stylus for input in a small box at the bottom and you had to write in palm script, and I was not impressed, but it was cool and no one had anything like it. the front looked like a normal cell phone, like the classic Nokia (if I can find images I’ll add them to the post at the end), but the face flipped up to reveal the Palm 2.x OS interface. This phone was broken, while I was talking on it and walking my dog (the phone was pressed between my shoulder and ear, the dog pulled hard, the phone flew out and hit the concrete destroying the screen). I replaced that cell phone with the Samsung SPH-I300 that was what would become the standard format of the smart phone, a large-ish screen with a D-pad, Talk and Hangup buttons, plus it had the classic Palm Home and Contacts buttons (the website I found the information on these two phones has them listed in order of discontinued date and states the the Kyocera was in use for about a year longer, I replaced the Kyocera with the Samsung, and that the Samsung had only been available for a week when I bought it). I used that phone for about 3 years and went back to it when other phones died or I broke them for another 2 years after that, and finally sold it for $65 almost 5 years after I bought it! I loved that phone, it came with 2 batteries, and I had adobe acrobat reader on it, that I used to read books, the battery would last 8 – 10 hours of constant use about 90% of the time, it came with a dock that charged the phone and the spare simultaneously.
After that I owned a Toshiba windows 2003 (first edition) smart phone and I liked it tremendously; however my friend had a Dell Axim x3 and it it killed my Toshiba on performance for everything it did, we had a lot of the same apps, having been friends for almost 10 years at that point and having lived together both in college and a bit after I graduated from college. I was very envious of the power of his PDA and the extra features it had that I did not (like a phone! which I thought was because I had a hybrid device and they had to make comprimises on the hardware), the only thing I noticed as a negative for the Dell is that he had to manually reboot the phone between every 18 and 36 hours to keep it running well. So, I decided that my next phone would be dumb and I would get a PDA and carry them both around all the time.
I purchased a Dell Axim x31 which was not the newest model, but the newest model (the x50) had just launched and was $200 more expensive. I was very happy with my choice, so much so, that I sold my Axim on ebay as soon as the Dell x51v started to appear for sale on ebay, and I used the money to pick one of those up, even though by this time I had read all the reviews stating how the Axim’s underperformed compared to similarly spec’d models from other handset makers, but I did not care, as the Dell cost $200-$400 less than those other models and the perfomance was good enough for me.
I loved my Dell and it was very hard for me to let go of it, I used it constantly, everyday, but eventually it became very difficult to carry my Axim around, my cell phone, AND my work cell phone. So I gave in and bought an HTC touch, the processor was 1 generation of ARM newer than my Dell, and as the Dell was a 624MHz, the Touch was a 400MHz, I knew I would take a hit on the hardware as it was a hybrid device, and I was okay with that to save pocket space. I was very disapointed with the tiny ass screen, I was very disapointed with the slow performance of the HTC Touch, even being a newer generation of processor, it was MUCH slower, had less system RAM, AND the Dell had WinMo 2k3SE which I upgraded to WinMo 2k5 and the Touch had WinMo 6. the biggestdifference between the two was that they removed the slider that let the user adjust how much system memory was to be used for applications and how much was to be used for user storage, gthis was very bad for me (I understand now that it has more to do with the difference in the type of flash media in the device than with the OS). this was very bad for me, as I had a couple of applications that would only run if moved the slider all the way to Programs (I had an external SD card plugged into the device anyway, or maybe it was a miniSD, I forget) and now I could not do that and use my apps because of the amount of available system memory.
I kept my HTC Touch until the day the HTC Evo came out and was moderately happy with it, except for the microscopic screen size and the lack of wi-fi. right, now that you are all caught up with my past cell phone experiences it’s time to move on to the Evo…
I first heard about the “mysterious” HTC code named:Dragon from Engadget back in October 2009, the first smart phone announced to have a 1GHz CPU! unbelieveable!! I was extremely excited, and I though wow I bet it will be out for the holiday sales season, and nothing happend, then I though well maybe in January, still nothing, but a mysterious direct message on twitter replying to my post to HTC to please tell me where and when I could get my hands on one (something I did atleast 2 times most weeks since November), the DM told me “you will, wait until January 24th”. so I got super excited and told everyone I knew that would care, and several that I knew would not! Somewhere in there the HTC 2010 roadmap was leaked and the first one was all non-USA, but one device looked to be the Dragon, but it was only rumor. I waited and waited, and finally the day came!! There was nothing. no tweets, no news releases, nothing on engadget, nothing on the forums, it was like all the hope in my life shrivelled up and died. Then I thought maybe I was looking in th ewrong places and the news would spread in a day or so and hit the sites I trolled… nothing. I believe it was around Feb 10th when something finally broke, a report that the fabled dragon was coming to Verizon and would be called “Incredible” most of the specs remained the same, but it would not be available until after the HTC HD2 launched with WinMo and the 1GHz snapDragon, so the Dragon would no longer be the first 1GHz smart phone, but at least it would be the first 1GHz Android Phone… finally on March 23rd HTC announced to the world that the HTC Evo 4G was coming to Sprint and was almost identical to the Incredible in specifications, code name “Supersonic”. I was so happy, finally something would be right in the world! The more I heard about it the happier I got, even the failed Flash Demo was not enough to deter me!
this post was published using the Easy Tether application on Android via my HTC Evo 4G, over a 3G network with spotty coverage. (I learned yesterday my cell coverage is poor where I am currently, because the there is no cell tower, the “antennas” are attached to a water tower, and therefore are not at the height that a normal cell tower would be, and as such is more easily blocked by building. just a note, there are NO cell towers in this immediate area, I believe all carriers have antennas mounted on the same water tower, I’ll try and get a picture of it later and add it to this post.)
This blog post that I found specifies some great information on why the iPad will bomb horribly, I agree with all its major arguements too.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tr-out-loud/?p=1666&tag=nl.e550
sorry for posting the complete link, for some reason I cannot insert a web link, when I try my computer just beeps at me and clears the link form. oh well, this works just as well.
start off with some non-techie stuff first…
I head back to see my surgeon next Monday, where he will tell me that in another week or two I should start putting some weight on my leg (toe touch, or partial weight bearing?) when at my PT. I am also hoping he will tell me it is okay to get my incision wet, as it has been making it very difficult to take showers!
ok, on to the good stuff.
So, I am not at home and do not have my desktop machine available for use for the last week, I have been going through withdrawal… but having to work on someone else’s machine, and my wife’s laptop (I think I mentioned before, I gave her mine, and sold her old one) has taught me one important lesson, why I prefer Linux.
My number one reason for preferring Linux over Windows is system maintenance. What do I mean? well, I mean keeping everything up to date, this latest round of Adobe patching should make this make sense to everyone. I don’t use Acrobat on my Linux machines for this reason. However; back to the point, when I need to check for updates on my Linux machine I open Yakuake with a quick hit of F12 and type “sudo yum update” and it comes back and tells me every single thing installed on my system that has an update available, period, end of statement. On windows, I have to launch 5-8 different apps, find their “check for updates” button/link and wait for the results (I have learned by doing this that OpenOffice.org does not notify you of a new version being released, only if there are updates for your version. example, I have 3.1 installed, and 3.2 is now available. clicking the check for updates menu option tells my “There are no available updates for this version” (maybe not word for word, but that is just about what it says). I run windows update, Acrobat Update, Java update, Picasa update, Chrome update, Firefox update, and on and on… (yes I know there is an Adobe Updater, but I don’t know how to initiate it in Windows, and never cared enough to look it up, but now that I have mentioned it I sure I found instructions and have put a link to them here).
Simple and easy to manage, most distros even let you run their package manager and it has a button to click to check for updates for your system, making it easier and more time consuming all at once to do the same thing. (Yakuake is always running and it takes me about 1.5 seconds to type that line into the terminal, it takes a lot longer to load the package manager from the application menu and then click the check for updates button, but you don’t have to type that way!)
The actual GUI interface for Windows an Linux and even MAC are so similar these days, that I don’t care which I am using as far as that is concerned. I have come to the understanding that there will always be applications/games for an OS, other than the one I am using, that I want to use/play (take iPhone for example, they have the best Air Traffic Controller game I have played, and I’ve hunted those down and played quite a number of them, but I don’t own anything made by Apple, and probably won’t ever, unless the 2nd gen iPad totally rocks… but I will be getting an Android Tablet this year (possibly the Notion Ink Adam, or the HTC Google Chrome OS tablet), so I still probably won’t get an iPad). My concern at this point, as I spend more and more time as a Unix Admin is maintenance. The system I use at home needs to be practically maint free, as most Linux and Unix machines are, they will run for years without being touched by an admin, the best I know of are an AIX Server and a OpenVMS server, the AIX server has been running since 1991 and has never been patched, updated, reconfigured, or messed with in any way. It is setup to contact a NIM server for logins, so no new users have ever been added to it, it has never crashed, never lost power, never been rebooted. That to me is the greatest achievement of humankind (in technology anyways, and some of these companies need to take a look at the AIX OS and learn something from it!!!). The other machine, the OpenVMS machine has been running since before 1994, but has not been patched, never been upgraded, never been rebooted, since 1994. now I know next to nothing about OpenVMS, and have not personally logged into the machine itself, but a friend and co-worker of mine used to be the sole admin for the OpenVMS machines at that company and although that one is the only one like this, it is still running today without interference from humans. I am sure some other machines are out there doing the same, but these are two that I know. The longest Windows Server I have heard of running without rebooting or crashing was about 2.5 – 3 years, after which the hardware components in the server failed and the machine was replaced. Some people have told me about Windows servers being up for 4 years and then being restarted by some new guy, but I have no validation of it and they could not give me a more exact time frame.
not sure if I made a compelling argument or not, but I need some medication and to go prop my leg up, so I am done here. Also expecting UPS sooner or later for an over night supersave shipment… and it takes me 5 mins to get downstairs… :)
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