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If it was obvious then early 1990s tablet PCs would have soon had the same design.

No it's because the technology clearly wasn't there yet since there were many tablet designs that the ipad appears to have been copied from in scifi movies well before it came along, but you'll ignore that because you want to believe the design was invented by Apple and no-one had ever thought of such a thing before.

If it wasn't for Apple's iPad and iPhone, Samsung's tablets and phones would look like this and this.

You mean just like how if Stanley Kubrick hadn't come along Apple's iPad and iPhone would look like the Newton, but of course it's ok for Apple to copy others, but not ok for others to copy Apple.

> "unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition"

This is Apple's cross to bear, designing and then popularising products of such elegance and simplicity that after they're released, the design appears bleeding obvious. An ex post facto judgment that this is what tablets always were, always should have been, and everybody knows that duh.

Except nobody bar a few design students with incredible vision (but without the support of large companies) knew it at all. If it was obvious then early 1990s tablet PCs would have soon had the same design.

If it wasn't for Apple's iPad and iPhone, Samsung's tablets and phones would look like this and this.

Give us back 3.5 with Konqueror.

You'd think with all the GUI work done by Apple, Microsoft, even Google, and other folks one might expect the KInfoCenter right column would have an one icon for the CPU [single slot systems] and a clean list of # of Cores, Extensions, etc and not an Icon for each Core. If you have multiple slots and thus say, 2 Quad Core CPUs then fine, put two icons. The rounded rectangle Border is hideous and how they can't get and inset look boggle the imagination.

Even something freshly KDE 4 that organizes intelligently in a similar look: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/mac-os-x-account-preferences.png

could go a long way to a professional, clean look. It can be their own, but this image is garbage: http://linuxcrunch.com/sites/default/files/imagepicker/3/kinfoCenter.png

How about one combined Rounded Rectangle with an inset look and start with 4 Icons across one row with one active DIV describing all the pertinent information below that Icon tab, then click the next Icon Tab and switch the view? Use jQuery or some other library to pull it off.

Put in the install CD that came with the Mac, go to the utilities menu at the top, select "reset password". Takes about 10 minutes to do, including fumbling about with the silly paper packet the CD comes in, especially if the lip of it is still stuck down.

It says this in the manual, and if you google it.

You don't need to fuck about in single user/root mode (which is disabled by default), you just need to look at some very simple instructions. "Starting critical services" is a total red herring.

Literally 0.21 seconds with Google (according to the timer on the search results): http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_reset_my_mac_os_x_admin_root_password.html

If you ask me, I have no problem with monopolies by themselves.. They're the natural result of a capitalistic system.

The problem occurs when the company with the monopoly becomes abusive of its users or detrimental to the industry due to lack of competition.

For example, Microsoft has become detrimental. There are quirky, broken, useless things in Windows because they haven't had to compete on merit for years. They're still using a drive addressing system invented on the VAX. You can't even cd directly to a directory on another freaking drive. It's still a two step process. The font dialogs in Vista are the same ones from Windows 3.1! IE, the worst, most painful, browser on the market came to dominate via coupling with the monopolistic OS, not by merit. Windows Media Player became hugely popular despite being DRM friendly (user abusive) and a steaming bloated pile compared to winamp, once again by being bundled with the OS and harnessing the power of defaults. Vista includes DRM code in the kernel execution path that makes it slower than XP - and this wasn't done for the users of the OS, but for the interests of other big companies.

Adobe has become abusive with their Acrobat reader. Bundling so much crap with it that's is a steaming pile that takes 10s of seconds load, will no longer allow you to disable its automatic updates, etc.

Most Telecoms and ISPs are abusive. The cost of text messages goes up even though their costs didn't. Verizon is particularly bad, they'll deliberately cripple Bluetooth OBEX profiles on phones you get from them to try and force you to buy ringtones & crap at an estimated 20,000% markup, they brand their phones with hideous schemes that reduce usability, they've been guilty of padding HTTP headers with junk data to arbitrarily increase data usage. (I can understand the contract severance penalties since their subsidizing the phones - provided the fee diminishes to zero by the end of the contract).

Even apple has done this. Way back around iTunes 3, you could download songs from the ipod to iTunes. They subsequently removed this functionality that was useful to their users because of interests of third parties.

These are the companies that need investigation.

Google on the other hand seems to have gotten nothing but better as their power grows. Google searches are still fantastic, they've added tons of incredibly useful free services out of the blue. They keep giving more, awesome, free stuff. More importantly, their existing free stuff keeps getting better not abusive. Maybe I missed something awful they're doing, but so far even their use of my pseudo-private data seems more useful than harmful - I get non-abusive, non-intrusive text based ads for things that are actually relevant. This is the key to long term success. Give your customers what they want and they'll keep coming back and telling their friends. It leads to long term profits, not the short quarterly gains that MS, Adobe, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox, *IAA, etc seem to be more focused on.

So antivirus software, even Microsoft Office itself, is not even close to ready for (l)users by your metric. Hell, fixing the registry should apparently be part of normal system maintenance.

Hell, an obscure text file is easier to walk someone through editing than the registry is, and a LOT lower chance of completely hosing the entire system while you're at it.

You seem to not realize that you're comfortable with Windows and the dumbness that goes into administrating it (do you even think twice about downloading and installing drivers on a brand new PC, and uninstalling shitware?). When it's different, you all of a sudden think that this makes the new software somehow "unsuitable" for the general user. That is patently false... the people who have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who consider themselves "power users" of Windows.

1. Setup a e-mail list..(ie funkid@coollist.com). Put yourself as owner & moderator. Set to moderate all non members.
   There are many list providers like http://coollist.com/
2. Create a gmail account, set it up with the same name as the e-mail list (funkid@gmail.com)
3. Configure the gmail account to send as the e-mail list address (good tutorial at) http://www.askdavetaylor.com/configure_google_gmail_to_have_a_different_sender.html
4. your child is setup with an e-mail address of : funkid@coollist.com, don't even tell them about the gmail address, it simply serves as their client

every e-mail that comes in will then be moderated to your e-mail address, you choose which e-mails your kids recieve and also can observe what your kids are talking about.

I think you need to take your argument up with Jim...

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadcas t_flag.html

His explanation is somewhat different to yours, in fact its completely the opposite.

The broadcast flag is a request for a response that uses Unicast.... which is not a legacy thing at all. Just the opposite legacy routers often do not support Unicast.

So maybe you have it back the front, perhaps Vista has been optimised such that it now works better with most of the routers out there today but does not work with old routers that do not support Unicast or handle the broadcast flag in the DHCP request.

Which is precisely the reason why Vista is not at fault here.

The Linux DHCP server is at fault, because it's not responding to Vista DHCP requests.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadcas t_flag.html

To quote Jim...

This isn't so much a client issue as it is a server issue. In order for your Windows clients to receive DHCP responses by unicast rather than broadcast, you need to configure the DHCP server accordingly to allow clients to request a unicast response.

In Lundis case I suspect their DHCP server doesn't support unicast responses, and their Anti-MS zealot admins don't feel like changing that.

You can just imagine how diffent this would be if it were a new version of Apple OSX and not Vista having issues with their outdated systems.

Broken?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadcas t_flag.html

It sets the DHCP Unicast Broadcast flag.

Yeeeeeeep that them Vista DHCP packets be real broked I reckon rightly. Nice thunkin.

Anyway, here's Jim's answer:

This isn't so much a client issue as it is a server issue. In order for your Windows clients to receive DHCP responses by unicast rather than broadcast, you need to configure the DHCP server accordingly to allow clients to request a unicast response. To do so, you must modify the registry on the DHCP server (assuming a Windows-based DHCP server).

1. On the server, open the Registry Editor and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\DHCPServer\Parameters.

2. If the IgnoreBroadcastFlag value does not exist in this key, create it as a DWORD value.

3. Set the value of IgnoreBroadcastFlag to to 1 to cause the server to ignore the client broadcast flag and always respond with multicast. Set the value of IgnoreBroadcastFlag to 0 to allow the clients to request unicast.

4. Close the Registry Editor and restart the DHCP server.



Vista's implementation is fine, it's the antiquated software Lundis admin are grimly determined to hang on to that's the problem.

Well the support KB from Microsoft paints a different picture

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadcas t_flag.html

So basically the problem is that Vista is utilising a part of the DHCP standard that is not implemented on Lundis DHCP server.

It's the Linux system here which is failing to comply with the DHCP standard not the other way around.

I think this would be an entirely different story and an entirely different response from Lundis admin if this issue was with say... a new version of Apple OSX.

They should just update their DHCP server to something a little more up to date and compliant, and stop playing stupid anti-MS political games.

I don't really blame Microsoft for refusing to help your Vista users. As with most companies Microsoft charges for support, they're not going to help your users for free.

What sort of IT Administrators do you have ? Most of the civilised IT world would have a single administrator or at least appoint a single person to consult Microsoft and determine an appropriate solution, in this case a simple reg file distributed on a USB key or a login script would do the trick.

What you're probably seeing is Amazon's new "Omakase" ads. They've been beta testing them for a little while. Apparently they take into account the user's Amazon search history (have you searched for widgets on Amazon or affilates?), the site's referral sales history (have ads on the site resulted in widget sales before?) and the site's content (is the site about widgets?). I've been using them on my blog -- not sure if they are more or less effective than regular ads, but I do like that their appearance is more customizable and can be made less in-your-face and more Google Adsense like.

Is this the Dave Taylor of id Software/Crack.com fame?

If I recall correctly, he was id Software's resident "Unix Guru" for a time. What a change of pace.

IDDT forever =).

Check it out: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/google_has_adsense_fo r_rss_any_risks.html