Slashdot Mirror

"What next an EULA that prevents me from posting a bad review or the companies product?"

Already done for health care, maybe more: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/all-your-reviews-are-belong-to-us-medical-justice-vs-patient-free-speech.ars/

Yes, they did have a warrant. There was standard due process, that is, an in-house judge rubber-stamped the request.

Worth mentioning all those companies also have suits against Apple, or in Amazon's case licensed patents like 1-click to them which are hardly different from Apple's patents. This graphic should be well known by now and shows nobody is exactly blameless in this patent war. (People will argue about defensive vs offensive which is about as useful here as it would be in a nuclear holocaust.)

What I was getting at is that AFAIK, only Samsung has been taken to task over the much ridiculed "rectangle LOL"-patents. All the others were over obscure technical patents which were the proverbial "stick to beat a dog."

The number of actual viruses that exist for the Mac can be numbered in the single digits, and has been like this for a while. Viruses spread very poorly on Macs, and most unix-based systems, for a variety of reasons such as not giving a user admin access by default.

Now, if you're talking about *Trojans*, that's something else entirely. Unless an OS flat out blocks a user from having direct access to the underlying platform (such as iOS), there is no OS on the planet that can stop a trojan. As long as the user is given the choice of running something, there is always the ability for a user to bypass any restrictions an OS may implement because they really want to see that latest hot actress nudie video.

And *of course* the Macs fall first in Pwn2Own. Macs are very highly sought after, so naturally everyone goes after them first. Once the Macs are gone, THEN all the hackers pay attention to the other machines. All the machines get hacked in these competitions. It's guaranteed. The order in which they fall is determined by interest, not difficulty. Heck, WP7 survived the challenge because.... no one bothered to show up to hack it. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/03/pwn2own-day-2-iphone-blackberry-beaten-chrome-firefox-no-shows.ars

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-experience-with-working-for-ars-on-the-ipad.ars

"Working on a tablet made it more difficult to constantly monitor everything that happens in a day, but there was a tradeoff: it was significantly easier to be productive when actually writing. In fact, I produced slightly more the day I worked on the iPad than on a normal day, and I didn't miss any significant news—work-related or otherwise. I did feel as if I was somewhat disconnected from the world compared to my usual setup, but I wasn't—I just couldn't see everything at the same time, all the time.

Instead, I had to make conscious decisions to switch over to IM and respond to several people at once, or go to IRC to see what the rest of the staff was up to, or go back to Writing Kit to dedicate another hour to uninterrupted writing. It's a different mental process for a typical computer user, but it worked out a bit better than fine if personal productivity was the metric."

And it wasn't pretty Somebody points out that a tablet can only be a good primary computer if one's primary work is non-computer intensive, like an editor with a light workload; use-iPad-for-everything people get defensive about the technical rigor of their work, and computational significance of their needs; comments section gets shut down due to hurt feelings.

An article briefly touching on the cozy relationship between Google, carriers, and your personal info:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/03/googles-nfc-plan-involves-data-sharing-targeted-ads-and-discounts.ars

From the article
"Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski publicly supported usage-based pricing in December, a victory for cable companies concerned that usage-based billing would run afoul of net neutrality rules prohibiting Internet services from favoring one form of content for another."

Look at the FCC chairs history

"He was Chief of Business Operations and a member of Barry Diller's Office of the Chairperson at IAC/InterActiveCorp and executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting. He earned at least $USD2.5 million when Vivendi acquired Universal assets in 2003.[10] He had previously served on the Boards of Directors of Expedia, Hotels.com, and Ticketmaster.[5]"

The Internet shouldn't be metered at all, rather they should use fixed priced and fixed caps, want more? buy the next tier up to and including unlimited data transfer.

They did this with Television, first it was the proliferation of advertising to the point where TV shows are now 1/3 or greater advertising time, then with cable TV they continued to raise the prices.
Now they will do it with the Internet effectively destroying innovation, and lets not forget telecoms suing people in towns trying to create their own service providers because their towns weren't deemed profitable enough to deploy services to.
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care.ars

It just seems to me that corporations really run everything, and since they are bottom line focused that translates to greed running everything which in turn translates to the death of everything else.

Since things didn't go their way, did anyone really expect a different response from AT&T?

Did I expect them to suddenly agree? No. Did I expect them to disagree in a way that wouldn't antagonize the FCC? Yes. And it's gotten noticed already, as Ars Technica's article points out in an update:

The FCC doesn't appear to be very happy about AT&T's comments. In a comment made via the FCC's Twitter feed, Joel Guerin, the chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said he was deeply concerned about AT&T's response to the release of the report.

This is likely to cause AT&T trouble down the line. Pissing off the officials who oversee your business is never a good move. Congress is unlikely to be impressed either.

While I agree with the spirit of your rant, AT&T did just show us this past spring that we might already be in such a dystopia. They challenged a customer's right to partake in a class-action lawsuit (when a customer had signed an binding arbitration contract. AT&T took it to the supreme court and won.

So what about?

http://consumerist.com/2007/10/valve-deactivating-customers-who-bought-orange-box-internationally.html
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/10/valve-locking-out-user-accounts-for-incorrect-territory.ars

> I'd only clicked on a couple of articles since Jon Stokes left,

Agreed! Jon "Hannibul" Stokes articles were extremely well-written; explaining the latest esoteric hardware in [almost] layman's terms.
It's too bad he left Ars Technica -- the site jumped the shark a while ago and is everything is dumbed down. At least AnandTech is still [relatively] OK.
http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2011/07/send-off-jon-hannibal-stokes-marches-his-elephant-army-away-from-ars.ars

Sad that none of the links work ... for his "Classic" Essays ;-(
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/cpu.html

> I'd only clicked on a couple of articles since Jon Stokes left,

Agreed! Jon "Hannibul" Stokes articles were extremely well-written; explaining the latest esoteric hardware in [almost] layman's terms.
It's too bad he left Ars Technica -- the site jumped the shark a while ago and is everything is dumbed down. At least AnandTech is still [relatively] OK.
http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2011/07/send-off-jon-hannibal-stokes-marches-his-elephant-army-away-from-ars.ars

Sad that none of the links work ... for his "Classic" Essays ;-(
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/cpu.html

FYI:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1142220 (note DrPizza is Peter Bright)
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hodm3/iama_editorinchief_of_ars_technica_sister_site_to/c1x2j4r

Oh? I have only seen one such story. Something about a store in China? Then there are these:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/android-malware-angry-birds/
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/03/malware-in-android-market-highlights-googles-vulnerability.ars

Then again, Windows Phone 7 doesn't allow sideloading of applications, IIRC. Which would make it more secure, at the cost of your liberty.

Well Android does (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-15/tech/30400455_1_ios-iphone-smartphone-market), but then you have to correlate that to market growth as well. Can you do that?

The share of Android phones as a percentage of the market has been growing. The market itself has been growing. By what strange application of mathematics could it be the case that the number of Android phones is not consequently also growing?

No i think you'll find the iphone is the most common smartphone.

Ah yes, the literal argument. And if the Apple has the most popular laptop model it clearly must mean that more people buy laptops with MacOS than with Windows. (Or not, in either case.)

The birth of the consumer smartphone market, look at how it's different from what it was 6 years ago. Same as with the birth of the PC market decades ago.

There were smartphones before the iPhone, like the Blackberry. Or that stuff Microsoft was selling back then. There has to be some reason why people chose early iOS and Android over their contemporaries. You're trying to define "smartphone" as "iPhone", which is just begging the question.

Your baseline is zero, you don't use a completely different product to base it on. If you wanted to measure a change in the ipad market share you don't use the newton as a baseline, you don't use the ipod as a baseline for the iphone, you don't use windows gaming pcs as a baseline for the xbox.

Those things are not replacements for one another. There was no one still using a Newton when the iPad came out. You can't run Excel on an XBOX; it isn't intended as a replacement for a Windows PC. They didn't stop making Windows when they started making XBOX, which means there was nobody whose Windows PC was too old who wanted a newer one but found them unavailable and looked to the XBOX as the nearest living relative. That is not the case with Windows Mobile, which disappeared just as WP7 came onto the scene and which Microsoft was more than happy to direct its former customers to if they came looking for "WM7" to replace their WM6. I mean look, they continued the version numbering. It isn't "Windows Phone 1.0."

No because it is obviously completely different, you might as well say that a gamer who has a windows PC is pre-disposed to buying an xbox instead of a PS3 or Wii, obviously stupid.

See above. Windows PCs are not fungible with consoles. You don't buy a console and throw away your PC. By contrast, nobody buys a WP7 phone to supplement a WM6 phone. They (the mythical they who actually buys one) would do it to replace a WM6 phone.

Given your lack of numbers or comparison to other platforms in their first year your whole argument is absolutely baseless.

The comparison to iOS and Android would be meaningless exactly because of what I'm talking about. Before iOS and Android, neither Apple nor Google made mobile operating systems. When WP7 was released, Microsoft already had a distribution chain. They had relationships with manufacturers and carriers. They had existing customers to convert to the new product. Their failure to make hay from that speaks much louder than would any delay (necessary to, you know, build relationships with manufacturers and carriers and find new customers) between initial release and substantial market share for iOS and Android.

Where? Those figures look pretty made up.

IIRC the specific estimates above are for the higher education market, but I'll give you the numbers for the whole US market. The trend of increasing Mac market share holds in either case. Here is one from 2007-2009, and another consistent with the first bringing us from 2009 to the present. We see Mac market share go from ~7% in 2007 to ~10% in 2009 and is now ~15%. (Naturally that comes at the expense of Windows because, well, what else?)

>windows
>itanium

Excuse me?

Windows on Itanium is being EOLed.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/microsoft-its-the-end-of-the-line-for-itanium-support.ars

Microsoft: it's the end of the line for Itanium support
By Peter Bright | Published about a year ago

Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will represent the last versions to support Intel's Itanium architecture, Microsoft has announced on its Windows Server blog. Mainstream support for Windows Server 2008 R2 will end on July 9, 2013, with extended support ending five years later.

--
BMO

And I'm serious. While not as versatile towards own-hosted solutions as the old Windows Mobiles, it's still light years beyond Android and iOS. You can easily use your own Exchange server to sync and share your contacts, calendar and other stuff, which gives you true privacy.

Is it really that easy to set up your own Exchange server? Does everyone around here keep a Windows server in a coloc somewhere so they can run Exchange?

The reason for this is simple too. Microsoft may be many things, but they have always respected privacy.

Really? Always?

http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/02/08/08/0923231.shtml
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/users-outraged-over-windows-live-privacy-violations
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/microsft-investigates-hotmail-privacy-breach.ars

And that's just what I found in a quick google search.

Show me a single major PC manufacturer who ships a machine that dual-boots Windows and any non-Microsoft OS.

No, really. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Read what i wrote, i didn't say 'dual-boots', I said 'Linux-based PCs', I also said that they canned the project as in it is no longer running, it's not that hard to read and it's not at all obfuscated so you shouldn't have that much trouble with it. The Dell Ubuntu PCs could dual boot but weren't sold in that configuration, they were sold with just Linux until Dell realized that relatively no-one wanted to buy a PC with Ubuntu pre-installed.

Dell did ship PCs with Ubuntu but dropped it due to it's poor sales performance but they are reportedly bringing it back in the chinese market.

Asus are shipping PCs with Ubuntu Linux as well.

And although they aren't yet, HP have announced plans to include webOS as a boot option on their PCs.

What makes you think private industry cares more about your privacy than the government.

Companies actively look to analyze and sell your data to anyone who will pay. Most companies see your data as an asset. Recall the ATT/NSA scandal. ATT provided locked secret rooms to the NSA. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/04/6585.ars

At least the government, would likely try and keep the information obtained through spying classified, rather than sell it.

While a few privacy laws may exist, the US has no formal fundamental right to privacy.

In reality both governments and corporations have little interest in anyones perceived natural privacy rights, and in the US as most celebrity tabloids show, the right to freedom of speech trumps peoples privacy.

Or, if you will:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-oems-pay-about-50-for-each-copy-of-windows.ars

It IS free as the cost of Win 7 HP has been published several times, it is $15 a copy.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/newegg-reveals-windows-7-oem-prices.ars

"Earlier this month, we learned OEMs pay Microsoft about $50 for each copy of Windows."

No I don't think they are going away. My guess is that Apple doesn't think their users care about #1, and they don't like the fact that #2 competes with iTunes.....

Indeed. The fact that the Macbook Air is selling like hot cakes - indeed, estimates suggest it accounts for 28% of Apple's notebook sales - is neither here nor there. Apple's users want optical drives, and they're prepared to vote with their wallets.

Good luck using Windows Server family on mainframes... Sure, big corporations base their internal communication on the SharePoint, MS Communicator and Exchange. And that's it! But there is more out there than just big, fat companies A lot of small and middle companies who deliver on Linux.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/despite-enterprise-dominance-microsoft-struggles-in-web-server-market.ars
http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/692631.aspx

Ummm, no? They didn't just use GPS clocks, they physically carried atomic clocks from one location to the other. Look up the actual science behind what they did, it's pretty interesting. Oh, and relativistic factors of GPS systems is pretty standard learning in basic science. Maybe there was a compounding effect that they missed... but I doubt it. That article is 100% pure speculation. And it's bullshit, quite frankly. Check out this: Ars article for what the team did. (They also ran photons between the sites to check the time, in addition to GPS and portable atomic clocks.)

Huh? How did they send regular photons through hundreds of miles of solid rock? They don't have the equipment to send and receive ultra-long radio wavelengths that could do this.

Ummm, no? They didn't just use GPS clocks, they physically carried atomic clocks from one location to the other. Look up the actual science behind what they did, it's pretty interesting. Oh, and relativistic factors of GPS systems is pretty standard learning in basic science. Maybe there was a compounding effect that they missed... but I doubt it. That article is 100% pure speculation. And it's bullshit, quite frankly. Check out this: Ars article for what the team did. (They also ran photons between the sites to check the time, in addition to GPS and portable atomic clocks.)

It's pretty awful on OS X as well. Flash 10 needed about 6x more CPU on OS X than Windows and crashed every 10 minutes or so. According to this elderly benchmark anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-player-10.ars

Apple doesn't have a history of suing all patent violators. Just the ones that made Steve Jobs cry

Go Android!

Um. Google *can* and does remotely delete apps from phones:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/03/google-using-remote-kill-switch-to-swat-android-malware-apps.ars

And given that Android phones can report what apps you use to carriers, that's probably a really bad idea in a place like Syria.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2011/11/16/verizon_and_sprint_using_rootkit_to_collect_data_from_android_phones

But it is deeper than that. It's about Novell working with MS in principle ... Once a company is tainted by working with the likes of Microsoft or say Oracle, that's it.

Linus Torvalds has said he has no problems working with MS or any other company. As he put it, "Microsoft hatred is a disease".

I'm a big believer in "technology over politics". I don't care who it comes from, as long as there are solid reasons for the code, and as long as we don't have to worry about licensing etc issues. I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out. There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

"extremists" - in other words, freetards like RMS, and, evidently, you. Sad, really.

And further, here:

âoeI agree that itâ(TM)s driven by selfish reasons, but thatâ(TM)s how all open source code gets written! We all âoescratch our own itchesâ. Itâ(TM)s why I started Linux, itâ(TM)s why I started git, and itâ(TM)s why I am still involved. Itâ(TM)s the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree.

So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. Thatâ(TM)s the point of open source â" the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the âyourâ(TM) in question happens to be.

Does anybody complain when hardware companies write drivers for the hardware they produce? No. That would be crazy. Does anybody complain when IBM funds all the POWER development, and works on enterprise features because they sell into the enterprise? No. That would be insane.

So the people who complain about Microsoft writing drivers for their own virtualization model should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are being so hypocritical.â

So, since Linus cooperates with Microsoft (even the SAMBA team is now taking patches from Microsoft), what OS are you going to switch to? OSX? They've cooperated with Microsoft in the past. Plan9? Won't you be running that on Intel? Intel cooperates with Microsoft. And Microsoft is now working with ARM ...

I guess it's time for you to stop being a hypocrite and go on eBay to look for an old Atari800, since ALL Linux, and all current hardware, is "contaminated" by Microsoft. Let us know how that works out for you with your 8k of ram (48k max)... oops - Atari BASIC by Microsoft. Sorry. Guess you'll have to stop using computers entirely now.

This seems like a really foolish thing for a convicted monopoly to do.

Microsoft started it's Android patent protection program in full, and their judicial oversight just ended Both events are April 2011... clearly coincidence and happenstance.

See http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

AC 'cause I moderated.

Google are:
- releasing source code to their operating system for free, under no obligation. The Nook Tablet and Color and Kindle Fire are great examples of how this can work against Google - Android devices that make no payment to Google and do not come with access to Google's Android Marketplace, or Google's proprietary apps.

- virtually the only major silicon valley company left (compared to Apple, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon etc) who haven't patent trolled anyone (except in retaliation of course), although they could have, Google still has thousands of patents even though companies like Microsoft have far more, some of them are a lot more important than Apple GUI animation patents. e.g. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/googles-mapreduce-patent-what-does-it-mean-for-hadoop.ars

- been far better at sticking to privacy promises and openness compared to the likes of Facebook

- have entire divisions of their company and features that make no revenue for them (and are not R&D projects in hope of future earnings) but are retained. e.g. Free offline and IMAP/SMTP/POP access to gmail from day one, google docs for personal use (I can open and edit files with no ads anywhere), AOSP, Google chrome/ chromium, google.org

- principled stand on net neutrality

- taking a principled stand and pulling out of China

Somehow Google are still constantly attacked, way more than companies like Apple and Microsoft these days, they deserve some credit. Sure, they are far from the do no evil motto, but these days, doing a lot less evil than other megacorps is still remarkable.

Seriously off topic illogical adhominem attack using troll? Playing with youself? I know you are all about no-adhominem attacks. Thor SCHMUCK is exactly that: He's no expert, no security researcher with certs in it, no degrees in CSC either etc. (he's a schmuck, plain & simple).

Lastly - No matter what Reimer writes, it's all derivative drivel garbage, just like his BLATANTLY PLAGIARIZED HISTORY OF THE GUI vs. Doug Englebart's work before it

ON his "Scribblings" that nobody but his "private playpen" @ arstechnica will put up (he writes for no reputable technical sites)?

WELL... last time I looked, that goof hadn't written a thing since 1997 & arstechnica was practically CRYING & BEGGING Users not block ads, because it was getting authors there FIRED:

E.G.-> ----

An experiment gone wrong - By Ken Fisher | Last updated March 6, 2010 11:11 AM

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars

"Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool. Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn't see our content."

and

"Our experiment is over, and we're glad we did it because it led to us learning that we needed to communicate our point of view every once in a while. Sure, some people told us we deserved to die in a fire. But that's the Internet!"

Thus, as you can see? Well - THAT all "went over like a lead balloon" with their users in other words, because Arstechnica was forced to change it back to the old way where ADBLOCK still could work to do its job (REDDIT however, has not, for example). However/Again - this is proof that HOSTS files can still do the job, blocking potentially malscripted ads (or ads in general because they slow you down) vs. adblockers like ADBLOCK!

----

On Reimer though? What a JOKE!

He is an undereducated in the Computer Sciences wannabe, no certs or degrees in them, & FAR from an "authority" on anything technical in computing, & this post proved that much easily -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2523490&cid=38047978 which is WHY he brought in Jay Little (shot down on Exchange server lol) & Jarrett DeAngelis/StarKruzr (a then doctoral candidate @ Notre Dame in those days who ended up agreeing with a good 99% of my technical points there).

You KNOW you've dusted a FOOL like Reimer, easily too, when he resorts to making libelous edited photos of yourself, impersonating you on his websites to defame you or try to (he was caught in it & HAD TO ADMIT IT, lol), email harasses you and gets put on ISP tracking tickets + having the law cool his jets on that & more (to which he BACKED OFF & admitted impersonating me publicly as well)... & far more bogus behavior from that little cowardly scumbag.

That's not adhominem attacks pointing out facts mind you, it's not libel when it's truth either.

Ask Reimer why after SO MANY YEARS "married" (to a stripper for Pete's sake who looks like she's an oriental mail order bride paid for & all, lol) WHY HE HAS NO KIDS?

Is his so-called childless marriage just a "cover up" for his TRUE "nature" (gay, lol) or does he need a dose of viagra to do his 'homework' on the wife? LMAO...

APK

P.S.=> You can "shy away" from facts in that thread, ones backed by MS' own documentation on Exchange Server especially (but there is tons more too), & evidences of Jeremy Reimer the trolling scumbag's wrongdoings too!

Stuff like stalking me there off topic the entire time, trolling myself there @ Windows IT Pro off topic the ENTIRE time, only to have:

1.) Large porti

You've never accomplished anything in the computer sciences of any decent note, and you NEVER will (or you would have by now), but I have...

But, assuming your accomplishments are as grand as you make them out to be (you haven't really listed anything that isn't pretty much typical work for some sectors of the IT field), you haven't actually listed anything from more than 15 years ago. If my estimate of you being 15 years older than me seems to be more or less correct. So, that means that I haven't yet reached the age where you started your glorious career of accomplishment. So, therefore, isn't there hope for poor little me to someday measure up to your glory and magnificence? ;)

Since you asked specifically on this?

I also increased the speed and efficiency of SuperCache-NT, & applied ideas for database work on SuperDisk-NT, since you asked, that led to how well EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com did @ Microsoft Tech-Ed 2 yrs. in a row in the hardest category there - SQLServer Performance Enhancement (both myself & John Enck of Windows IT Pro magazine (then Windows NT mag) "hit upon" this idea back in the mid 1990's & extolled it on EEC Systems' website in fact)...

Ok. You increased the speed and efficiency of SuperCache-NT, but specifically how? You have to understand that, for a disk-caching program whose goal is to speed up the system, saying that you increased the speed of the software is ambiguous. Sure, it was a long time ago, but you have to remember some details. Now, you've expanded a little on your original description by saying that you "applied ideas for database work" to the software, but that's still pretty ambiguous. What ideas did you apply? It's all sounding very generic
 

That's examples of things I was doing while you were still in diapers, and only a fraction of what I could put out here mind you... whereas you? You have ZERO... lol!

I think you have your timeline wrong. If I am about 15 years older than you, then I was well out of diapers when that software came out. Also, the opinions of cantankerous old men everywhere aside, being born before someone else isn't an accomplishment.

(By the way - I never EVER posted @ Arstechnica as "Cybordeath", no need to do that much...

Oh please. Cybordeath shows up right after you are banned and starts posting specifically about you and your disputes. His posting style is altered from yours without all the bolding and capitalizing and not so much stuff in quotes and not as much extra punctuation, etc., but everything else about the way he expresses himself is extremely similar to you. There's pretty much universal concensus on the forum that Cybordeath is you. It seems pretty unlikely that you'd have such a rabid fan, obsessed with carrying on your feuds who didn't chime in before you were banned, but signs on right after. Sorry Clark Kent, the glasses aren't fooling anyone.

Also, you've posted a few times in this thread in support of yourself, while pretending to be someone else, and you've followed me to another thread to post multiple times from a small comment I made and not signed your posts there. Based on that evidence, I'd have to say that my (and everyone else's) theory on the identity of Cybordeath is probably pretty solid.
 

P.S.=> Please - Give us a break, you f'ing "ne'er-do-well" talker with not a DAMN THING to show for yourself by way of comparison to just a tiny FRACTION of what I could put out... apk

Give what a break? Replying to you? I wish I could. It wastes too much time. But it's somehow addicting. I can't help myself. Every time you say something ridiculous, I just have to try to get you to understand the real world. I know you never will, but I just can't help myself.

Come on. 2000 was never particularly widely used. Only in business environments. The driver support was lacking for too much consumer-level hardware, for one thing. And of course, as you pointed out, games are important to mainstream acceptance, and 2000 didn't have the support from games companies. NT was even less mainstream. XP was the first mainstream NT derivative.

Anyway. I was interested in whether or not you were actually a career troll, or if it was just this one article you were posting on and you were having a bad week or something. So, I looked for you via google. It seems that you're pretty much a career troll. At least, it looks to me like just about everyone, just about everywhere you post thinks so. You can call this an Ad Hominem attack if you want, but an Ad Hominem attack isn't always a logical fallacy. When it bears on your character and your actual ability to engage in rational debate it's perfectly valid. An example would be someone who insists that the moon landings were faked because rocketry is impossible and refuses to even look at the mountain of evidence that thousands of rockets have been launched or to look through a telescope at the artificial satellites. In such a case, calling the person crazy might technically be an Ad Hominem attack, but it's not a logical fallacy.

So, anyway, some great links related to you:
This one about a situation where you threatened to sue over a piece of software of yours being identified as malware. It seems to me you could have worked with them to resolve the issue amicably, but you couldn't help yourself.

This insane thread that you posted to for years. My favorite quote from it is: "Great Scott! APK's numerous and highly repetitious responses read like examples from a freshman textbook on logical fallacy and deceptive rhetoric." I think that poster had you pegged perfectly.

This exchange which was absolutely hilarious. That one really was worth a LOL!

This has a list of some of your ars technica posts. You seem to have been hated there right from the start for good reason. The fact that you seem to have believed that C++ was dying, but that Delphi was the future is hilarious. It's also really funny when you post under a different alias pretending to be some random person supporting you. It's so blatantly obvious that it's you, even when you use a handle like Cybordeath. I'm a bit disturbed by some of the racism, homophobia and misogyny in some of your posts, by the way. Your temper seems to have calmed a bit over the years. Your fundamental troll nature seems to be coming through even more as you age, however.

So, basically, you're a very well known troll, which is an accomplishment, I suppose. Getting sucked into long flame wars with you doesn't seem wise, and it looks like any discussion with you pretty much has to turn into a flame war.

Come on. 2000 was never particularly widely used. Only in business environments. The driver support was lacking for too much consumer-level hardware, for one thing. And of course, as you pointed out, games are important to mainstream acceptance, and 2000 didn't have the support from games companies. NT was even less mainstream. XP was the first mainstream NT derivative.

Anyway. I was interested in whether or not you were actually a career troll, or if it was just this one article you were posting on and you were having a bad week or something. So, I looked for you via google. It seems that you're pretty much a career troll. At least, it looks to me like just about everyone, just about everywhere you post thinks so. You can call this an Ad Hominem attack if you want, but an Ad Hominem attack isn't always a logical fallacy. When it bears on your character and your actual ability to engage in rational debate it's perfectly valid. An example would be someone who insists that the moon landings were faked because rocketry is impossible and refuses to even look at the mountain of evidence that thousands of rockets have been launched or to look through a telescope at the artificial satellites. In such a case, calling the person crazy might technically be an Ad Hominem attack, but it's not a logical fallacy.

So, anyway, some great links related to you:
This one about a situation where you threatened to sue over a piece of software of yours being identified as malware. It seems to me you could have worked with them to resolve the issue amicably, but you couldn't help yourself.

This insane thread that you posted to for years. My favorite quote from it is: "Great Scott! APK's numerous and highly repetitious responses read like examples from a freshman textbook on logical fallacy and deceptive rhetoric." I think that poster had you pegged perfectly.

This exchange which was absolutely hilarious. That one really was worth a LOL!

This has a list of some of your ars technica posts. You seem to have been hated there right from the start for good reason. The fact that you seem to have believed that C++ was dying, but that Delphi was the future is hilarious. It's also really funny when you post under a different alias pretending to be some random person supporting you. It's so blatantly obvious that it's you, even when you use a handle like Cybordeath. I'm a bit disturbed by some of the racism, homophobia and misogyny in some of your posts, by the way. Your temper seems to have calmed a bit over the years. Your fundamental troll nature seems to be coming through even more as you age, however.

So, basically, you're a very well known troll, which is an accomplishment, I suppose. Getting sucked into long flame wars with you doesn't seem wise, and it looks like any discussion with you pretty much has to turn into a flame war.

And in the interim, you could even have a functional trackpad.

Sometimes you actually have to pay for quality.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/senate-votes-down-anti-net-neutrality-resolution.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

Why exactly is IOS the benchmark? It's a minority platform regardless of how devote its followers are.

It is not a minority of mobile browsing. A majority of people run Android but they seem to use their phones more like featurephones.

It's also a good benchmark because it's a relatively old, known and predictable quantity. Everybody knows what mobile Safari is and does, its competitive and it's been out for a long time, it doesn't do anything remarkably novel or unusual that would make it difficult to compare to other browsers, and the experience of using it is basically the same regardless of hardware.

But will these porn sites run on Flash?

(I expect the story of Adobe discontinuing Flash on mobile platforms to show up here tomorrow as "Breaking News".)

At least we'll finally see what patents Microsoft has been using to strong arm manufacturers of Android based phones into patent licensing.

Here are the 9 patents that Motorola is defending itself from against Microsoft

I mean jesus fucking christ its been a whole fucking year now.. WE KNOW WHAT THE PATENTS ARE ALREADY.

if you are this uninformed, maybe just maybe you shouldnt fucking be discussing things? For christ sakes.

MacOS X is not BSD Unix

Yes it is.

I'm not sure what you think Apple would need to do to make it "real BSD," but if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Where is the change in policy about the real names crap?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/google-shifts-stance-on-google-anonymity-will-support-pseudonyms.ars

About 63 kB per Siri query.

In other words, I could use Siri 6 or 7 times, and still consume less "bandwidth" (data) than loading the mobile version of Slashdot's front page (418 kB when I checked just now).

You know, I'm never really in the situation of having a cell connection but not having 3G, so I can't comment on performance over GPRS/EDGE. Here's some information on Siri data usage, though: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

I've been running & setting up TS (while it was Citrix even as far back as 1996 for Bell South's workforce, on laptops no less (Windows NT 3.51 over 56k modems) - was said to be impossible, but between NT & Ascend gateways, we did it!)

So, that said?

Well - IF You have problem apps that are "trashing you" or rather, your TS setups? Then, though this MAY BE A "BANDAID ON A BULLETWOUND", there are settings in Citrix/TS for "bad apps" that LIMIT them overrunning everything else & that's been present since the late 1990's, look into it!

IIRC, I did a post on Arstechnica about it, circa 2000/2001 iirc, here -> http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1011866&start=40

SPECIFICS:

1.Run Regedt32.exe and locate the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\TerminalServer\Compatibility\Applications

NOTE: The above registry key is one path; it has been wrapped for readability.

2.Double-click the Applications subkey to reveal several pre-defined settings. Select SETUP under the Applications subkey. The following values are displayed on the right side of the Registry Editor window:

FirstCountMsgQPeeksSleepBadApp:REG_DWORD:0xf

Flags:REG_DWORD:0x8
MsgQBadAppSleepTimeInMillisec:REG_DWORD:0
NthCountMsgQPeeksSleepBadApp:REG_DWORD:0x5

This was VERY KEY to my research in it...

(Except I kept the attack in code where it SHOULD be done, saving this fix for issues in programs where the source is not available... the OS was not at fault, but the middleware, client load, citrix session, and Grids we used, WERE! Proof was in the pudding & success of it going from 100% cpu use & freezeups, to 2% & client loads of 500-1000 folks on it at once on a WAN with Citrix Session galore to the warehouses!)

On the registry hack?

No guarantee this is the RIGHT thing to do, this OS level Reg hack, taxing an already taxed out server either! Probably would work, but only as a last resort in my book at least, here's why:

Correct the code first if you can! Not the OS... it's NOT at fault usually!

Hacking the registry for this fix, is Bad Business, Bad Logic unless YOU HAVE NO CHOICE!

You correct the app according to MS/Citrix constraints on TS/WinFrame/MetaFrame design considerations & save this "BadApp" list for apps you CANNOT correct!

* There you go, hope that helps...

See - last time I ran into this was 2000/2001, & what REALLY helped later, was even better/simpler/smarter:

Later, I was a coder for a team on a clientserver program for multiple campuses using VB over TS... we had an app flooring us. Never happened on the local network though, only thru Citrix/TS, to remote campus miles away.

It ended up being because of the Oracle middleware we used (OO40, faster than ADO for writes back to the DB engine on Sun OS)...

That middleware driver, like most, was designed to MAX OUT cpu usage for speed, no time slicing/ceding back CPU time to other running processes!

(Which is FINE on normal workstations over a network, but not on CITRIX/TS - that's really as I am sure you know, a SINGLE SESSION, shared out to many "slave" ts nodes is why).

What cured it? Using SLEEP API calls on data processing loops that populated the shop floor's tracking systems grid controls, in loops... every so many loops, we would "sleep" it for 30ns or so for each shared TS session... problem went away!

Curing at the PROBLEM APP's LEVEL - the BETTER smarter way, absolutely

(However, as you know? You need sourcecode of said app to do it, & I programmed that one with 4 other guys over a year, roughly 1 million lines of VB code, & tons more in stored procs & SQL statements on Oracle too).

I.E.-> CPU usage on TS sessions was what was flooring it... &

Siri doesn't send your voice to Apple's servers. It parses it & sends queries based on it's parsing.

Where do you get these wacky ideas? Are you genuinely misinformed, or are you an Apple marketing 'bot trying to spread misinformation?

Again: No. Siri sends raw voice data over the network. Even worse, it sends the data at a radically higher bitrate (~100 kbits/s) than the cell network uses for your voice calls (~12 kbits/s).

If you don't believe me, go read the arstechnica test results here:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

Apple indexes queries, just like Google does.

Google has no idea when I call or text someone, set an appointment with someone, etc. Apple should not have this information either. The ~only~ company who should know when I call or text someone, is my cell service provider.

Others have already corrected your misconceptions about Maps "navigation", including, ironically, the author of the article that you linked above. LOL.

The funny thing is that Best Buy in fact is already doing something like this:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/11/the-hp-touchpad-has-reappeared.ars?comments=1

The site was Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars