But my kids will watch them over and over, ad nauseum.
Personally, I don't intend to let that happen. My girl can watch Pixar films all she wants, she can watch selections from my growing library of stop motion or Muppet movies... But no Dreamworks. We must have standards in our household.
I don't know about the rest of you, but we're getting closer and closer to the day that a desktop PC is considered a relic. For the vast majority of people, "mobile" is where it's at. I'm quickly realizing that for what I spend most of my day interfacing with a "computer", I can just as easily do it with an iPad
Well, what kind of usage are you talking about?
For regular "goofing around" type activities, absolutely an iPad would work.
For other tasks - not necessarily "development" but generally "working on things" (animation, video, photo, 3-D graphics modeling) - an iPad could work, but I think the benefits of my large, high-resolution monitor and drawing tablet on my home PC would be significant - as would the connectivity options (i.e. USB and 1394 ports, memory card slots, and so on)
So to me it seems that for certain applications, a desktop computer has advantages that even large laptops have difficulty competing with.
/.'ers are so ambiguous. uhhh..Windows is so unsecure it's pathetic..ohh man..they are trying to secure my device, who do they think they are?
I don't think "ambiguous" is the word you were looking for.
If you're accusing folks of hypocrisy, you have to be specific about who you're addressing. It's not "Slashdotters", it's not "Linux users" - both are groups so large that they include a wide range of opinions on any given subject. These opinions you cite are held by specific individuals in each group. Subsets of one group may not agree with each other on every issue. If you lump them all together, it looks like hypocrisy, but that's just because you haven't distinguished members within these large groups from one another. You've labeled them and assumed that anything said by any representative is agreed upon by the whole group. It is not.
I agree that there is real security value in this move. But I'm not at all happy to see PCs get locked down to this extent. Traditionally, home computers and laptops have been very open-ended platforms. I hope that this will continue to be the case.
I run linux in a VM, till now happy with the performace. Why mess around with dual boot, grub,lilo etc?
For the same reason you don't run Linux and then Windows in a VM. Not everything works or is usable on a VM.
Stop trolling.
Trolling? Oh, come on. I think it's a fair point.
I run Linux exclusively, because it's the system that I want to run. But it seems to me that Linux could run quite well in a VM. TTY apps are a no-brainer, of course. X stuff would require a good X server on the host OS (I guess GL could be an issue, though.) So what's not going to work well under a VM?
So how would windows update work? Any update that modified the system files would have to modify the bootloader to imprint the new hashes, which would then in turn would have to modify UEFI, which would have to modify the loader, which can't be modified. Any change to the system at all would cause the boot-up to fail.
Cryptographically sign your system files with a private key. Bootloader uses the public key to verify the signature. Updates to system files are signed with the same key as the versions they replace.
Consumers who care about this issue should look for this feature in whatever device they purchase. What's all the fuss?
When you first installed Linux on your computer, was it on a computer you purchased for the purpose of installing Linux on, or on a computer that you already owned? While existing Linux users might care enough to search for hardware that has a hardware switch like the Chromebook or an option to disable signed binaries via the UEFI setup menus, but new Linux users will not. They will see/hear about their friends and co-workers using Linux and decide to experiment on their own, only to find out their computer isn't able to install anything but Windows 8+ because of something about keys. And for most people, that's as far as it will go.
Well, not necessarily.
For starters, there's virtualization software. They could run Linux in that. And, honestly, that could be a good way to go for someone who's just dabbling in Linux. They get to sit nice n' cozy in their Windows environment, and run Linux stuff with a good degree of integration into the Windows environment.
Personally I find such an arrangement distasteful - personally, Linux is the environment I want to be in, and I'd rather avoid dependency on other OSes to do it. But as the technical process of setting up such a VM becomes less complicated, it could be a great way for new users to get the benefits of running Linux. This kind of solution could, in a short time, become what live CDs were a few years ago. Or maybe it already has, I don't know.
Of course, real security, in the form of a physical switch, is too simple, and too easy for the owner to, well, switch..
What about a physical switch that is hard to access. but no so hard that it would void the warranty. IE remove this 1 screw to make the switch operable. Then you wont have user error from "Accidentally" flipping a switch
Well, suppose, then, that the user finds themselves needing to flip this switch. (If the switch is an alternative to a key signing system rather than a complement to it, then this would be a pretty basic scenario - like "any OS upgrade") - it takes them a bunch of time and effort to access and flip the switch...
Now, once the upgrade is complete, are they going to go through all that hassle again to flip the switch back to "safety" position? I kind of doubt it...
Oh right, this is slashdot. We're here to bash Microsoft.
I'm sorry, but bash and Microsoft are 2 very different things, with very different licences. There was a time on slashdot when people didn't try to compare apples and bananas...
Maybe he installed Cygwin?
(I want to smack whoever decided that the Cygwin filesystem should be a distorted, rearranged copy of the true underlying filesystem...)
"And why would a device manufacturer lock the device to a particular OS? Maybe for the same reason they could be coaxed to only sell the device with a particular OS?
You're absolutely right, if you completely ignore history."
True.
FYI: Phones are different since each phone is customized for it's manufacturer and the phone software works directly with the hardware instead of interacting with a hardware abstraction layer. Locking the phone from installing a different operating system makes it more difficult to screw up the phone. A bad phone can actually screw up a network by behaving like a brute force jamming device and constantly transmitting, causing increased network load.
You almost make it sound like locking down the OS is some unexpected side-effect of necessary network-protection measures.
Ensuring that devices behave themselves is a concern, sure, but phone companies are, I'm sure, only too happy to ensure they retain control of the software platforms of the phones. If they control the phone's OS, they can position themselves at the front of the line of people trying to sell you things.
If one accepts the idea that smart phones and devices like the iPad represent the future of computing, then the fact that the manufacturers have succeeded in getting customers to accept this lockdown does not bode well for people interested in having a fuller degree of control over there machines. (Don't get me wrong, I know that a lot of people don't care - but for mainstream computing to take a turn toward the kind of position game consoles have traditionally occupied... For me that's not a happy prospect.)
I think there's a specific concern here that it will take extra effort on the part of PC manufacturers to provide users with the security information they need to install an alternate OS - and that many manufacturers probably won't bother.
I'm sick of hearing that crap. How do you vote with your feet if there is barely any choice in the so-called "marketplace"? And if you vote with your wallet, will that count against the votes of others whose wallets are rather thicker than yours?
All these "vote with" phrases make a mockery of democracy. Here is my suggestion: vote with your vote. I know, it's pretty damn bold.
It seems to me that that one has exactly the same problems as the other "vote with" phrases.
There wasn't even an OS update attached to this one. It was just "if you want to login to PSN you have to agree to this" - which rendered Netflix unusable (it seems you can no longer get past this like we could during the PSN outage...)
Deanna Troi in a *VERY* short dress (to the point that she looks rather uncomfortable...);oD
Heh, true...
Though re-watching TNG's first season, my eyes were on the tactical position.:)
In one of the "behind the scenes" specials for the show, they talked about Troi's outfit in the first episode and called her the "Space Cheerleader"... That hit pretty close to the mark, I'd say.:)
I had no idea and I don't know shit about filming.
Then I'll explain:
A frame of 35mm film, well-shot and properly focused, can hold more detail than a 1080p HDTV can display. Therefore, a transfer from the 35mm original footage to HDTV will yield more original detail from the shoot than you'd be able to see in the original (standard-definition) version of the show.
Wil has complained publicly that he was forced to play the character as a whiny bitch. I don't think he used those words, but you should probably try to recognize that shows and movies have directors who tell you what to do and how to do it. And since his character was on his way to transcendence it wouldn't make much sense for him to be on Voyager.
Well, if the scenario we're considering is "What if Wil Wheaton had stuck with Star Trek?" then probably he wouldn't have hooked up with the Traveler again, he would've stuck with Starfleet.
I'm rewatching TNG these days, and I think even between seasons 1 and 2 they improved Wesley's character a lot. He really was the "Mary Sue" in the first season, any time he got involved it was generally to save the day. In season 2 and 3 it seems like he's acting more like an officer in training, he's learning from the senior officers instead of constantly weaseling his way into their favor. I enjoyed the episode where he had to take charge of a survey team, and learn how to order people around. That, to me, showed how much he still had to learn.
Why? TNG was the worst thing to ever happen to the franchise.
<shrug> I've been re-watching the show on Netflix lately, and I love it. Even the first season, which (prior to re-watching) I expected to be the worst of the whole series... And while there were some really bad episodes in there, there were some good ones as well, and I even enjoyed the bad ones.
Of course, some of that is nostalgia, I'm sure... But I have a deep appreciation for many aspects of this incarnation of Star Trek. From the ship design (and corresponding model-making) to the props and costumes and sets, the characters, even some of the ideological BS they were trying to feed us. It is "futurism" in a sense that most TV sci-fi is not.... Going back to the core of this topic, the HD transfer... I am very curious about how they plan to do this. TFA does note that the series was edited on video. I'm sure they can do better with a new transfer and remaster, but I am very curious about how much better they can expect to do... Personally I'd rather they didn't replace the special effects with CG on this one. In the original series, re-doing special effects as CG made a certain amount of sense, because the live footage was all on film, and as a result they could get a high-quality picture for that which couldn't be matched by the old special effects work. But TNG had a much higher standard for its special effects. Of course it's still limited and they could do better by replacing the effects, but the physical models are a part of the show's history, and something I'd miss if they removed them. Not to mention that if they replace the Enterprise with CG, they'll probably make it look like the four-footer in all shots... (Six-footer is a prettier ship, although it must be noted that the interior of Ten Forward doesn't fit in the six-footer...)
That's why Heathkit is a good idea. If nothing else, it lets kids learn about electronics via practical examples. There a few other electronic kits out there, but Heathkit was always the gold standard.
The real question (assuming Heathkit really is making a comeback) - is will they continue to be the gold standard, or will they just be riding on name recognition, in the vein of Commodore's "return"?
Could they come back onto the scene and be a better Sparkfun than Sparkfun, for instance? Are they going to be yet another purveyor of Arduino boards and accessories? Or have they got something more impressive in store - and if so, what are they going to do, and how?
Slashdot Mirror
The kicker in our house to not axe Netflix streaming recently was the quantity of preschool to elementary school aged product available on demand.
Indeed. I tried it, and now I like it!
But my kids will watch them over and over, ad nauseum.
Personally, I don't intend to let that happen. My girl can watch Pixar films all she wants, she can watch selections from my growing library of stop motion or Muppet movies... But no Dreamworks. We must have standards in our household.
$30 mil per movie title!
That just seems insanely expensive to me.
Yeah, I don't think I can afford that!
I don't know about the rest of you, but we're getting closer and closer to the day that a desktop PC is considered a relic. For the vast majority of people, "mobile" is where it's at. I'm quickly realizing that for what I spend most of my day interfacing with a "computer", I can just as easily do it with an iPad
Well, what kind of usage are you talking about?
For regular "goofing around" type activities, absolutely an iPad would work.
For other tasks - not necessarily "development" but generally "working on things" (animation, video, photo, 3-D graphics modeling) - an iPad could work, but I think the benefits of my large, high-resolution monitor and drawing tablet on my home PC would be significant - as would the connectivity options (i.e. USB and 1394 ports, memory card slots, and so on)
So to me it seems that for certain applications, a desktop computer has advantages that even large laptops have difficulty competing with.
Any serious user would install linux on a separate hd or ssd to benefit from the native file system.
You don't need a separate hard disk, a separate partition is quite sufficient.
/.'ers are so ambiguous. uhhh..Windows is so unsecure it's pathetic..ohh man..they are trying to secure my device, who do they think they are?
I don't think "ambiguous" is the word you were looking for.
If you're accusing folks of hypocrisy, you have to be specific about who you're addressing. It's not "Slashdotters", it's not "Linux users" - both are groups so large that they include a wide range of opinions on any given subject. These opinions you cite are held by specific individuals in each group. Subsets of one group may not agree with each other on every issue. If you lump them all together, it looks like hypocrisy, but that's just because you haven't distinguished members within these large groups from one another. You've labeled them and assumed that anything said by any representative is agreed upon by the whole group. It is not.
I agree that there is real security value in this move. But I'm not at all happy to see PCs get locked down to this extent. Traditionally, home computers and laptops have been very open-ended platforms. I hope that this will continue to be the case.
I run linux in a VM, till now happy with the performace. Why mess around with dual boot, grub,lilo etc?
For the same reason you don't run Linux and then Windows in a VM. Not everything works or is usable on a VM.
Stop trolling.
Trolling? Oh, come on. I think it's a fair point.
I run Linux exclusively, because it's the system that I want to run. But it seems to me that Linux could run quite well in a VM. TTY apps are a no-brainer, of course. X stuff would require a good X server on the host OS (I guess GL could be an issue, though.) So what's not going to work well under a VM?
So how would windows update work? Any update that modified the system files would have to modify the bootloader to imprint the new hashes, which would then in turn would have to modify UEFI, which would have to modify the loader, which can't be modified. Any change to the system at all would cause the boot-up to fail.
Cryptographically sign your system files with a private key. Bootloader uses the public key to verify the signature. Updates to system files are signed with the same key as the versions they replace.
Consumers who care about this issue should look for this feature in whatever device they purchase. What's all the fuss?
When you first installed Linux on your computer, was it on a computer you purchased for the purpose of installing Linux on, or on a computer that you already owned? While existing Linux users might care enough to search for hardware that has a hardware switch like the Chromebook or an option to disable signed binaries via the UEFI setup menus, but new Linux users will not. They will see/hear about their friends and co-workers using Linux and decide to experiment on their own, only to find out their computer isn't able to install anything but Windows 8+ because of something about keys. And for most people, that's as far as it will go.
Well, not necessarily.
For starters, there's virtualization software. They could run Linux in that. And, honestly, that could be a good way to go for someone who's just dabbling in Linux. They get to sit nice n' cozy in their Windows environment, and run Linux stuff with a good degree of integration into the Windows environment.
Personally I find such an arrangement distasteful - personally, Linux is the environment I want to be in, and I'd rather avoid dependency on other OSes to do it. But as the technical process of setting up such a VM becomes less complicated, it could be a great way for new users to get the benefits of running Linux. This kind of solution could, in a short time, become what live CDs were a few years ago. Or maybe it already has, I don't know.
Of course, real security, in the form of a physical switch, is too simple, and too easy for the owner to, well, switch..
What about a physical switch that is hard to access. but no so hard that it would void the warranty. IE remove this 1 screw to make the switch operable. Then you wont have user error from "Accidentally" flipping a switch
Well, suppose, then, that the user finds themselves needing to flip this switch. (If the switch is an alternative to a key signing system rather than a complement to it, then this would be a pretty basic scenario - like "any OS upgrade") - it takes them a bunch of time and effort to access and flip the switch...
Now, once the upgrade is complete, are they going to go through all that hassle again to flip the switch back to "safety" position? I kind of doubt it...
Oh right, this is slashdot. We're here to bash Microsoft.
I'm sorry, but bash and Microsoft are 2 very different things, with very different licences. There was a time on slashdot when people didn't try to compare apples and bananas...
Maybe he installed Cygwin?
(I want to smack whoever decided that the Cygwin filesystem should be a distorted, rearranged copy of the true underlying filesystem...)
Aw come on we aren't a bunch of Victorian ladies.
You, sir, are a clod, and insensitive to boot!
I'll just run Mac OS X and have no need for Linux or Windows, no?
As a Linux user, that prospect would drive me insane. :) But it sounds like it'd work for you just fine.
"And why would a device manufacturer lock the device to a particular OS? Maybe for the same reason they could be coaxed to only sell the device with a particular OS?
You're absolutely right, if you completely ignore history."
True.
FYI: Phones are different since each phone is customized for it's manufacturer and the phone software works directly with the hardware instead of interacting with a hardware abstraction layer. Locking the phone from installing a different operating system makes it more difficult to screw up the phone. A bad phone can actually screw up a network by behaving like a brute force jamming device and constantly transmitting, causing increased network load.
You almost make it sound like locking down the OS is some unexpected side-effect of necessary network-protection measures.
Ensuring that devices behave themselves is a concern, sure, but phone companies are, I'm sure, only too happy to ensure they retain control of the software platforms of the phones. If they control the phone's OS, they can position themselves at the front of the line of people trying to sell you things.
If one accepts the idea that smart phones and devices like the iPad represent the future of computing, then the fact that the manufacturers have succeeded in getting customers to accept this lockdown does not bode well for people interested in having a fuller degree of control over there machines. (Don't get me wrong, I know that a lot of people don't care - but for mainstream computing to take a turn toward the kind of position game consoles have traditionally occupied... For me that's not a happy prospect.)
"it can"
Where did you read "it will"?
I think there's a specific concern here that it will take extra effort on the part of PC manufacturers to provide users with the security information they need to install an alternate OS - and that many manufacturers probably won't bother.
"Vote with your feet", "vote with your wallet"...
I'm sick of hearing that crap. How do you vote with your feet if there is barely any choice in the so-called "marketplace"? And if you vote with your wallet, will that count against the votes of others whose wallets are rather thicker than yours?
All these "vote with" phrases make a mockery of democracy. Here is my suggestion: vote with your vote. I know, it's pretty damn bold.
It seems to me that that one has exactly the same problems as the other "vote with" phrases.
There wasn't even an OS update attached to this one. It was just "if you want to login to PSN you have to agree to this" - which rendered Netflix unusable (it seems you can no longer get past this like we could during the PSN outage...)
Deanna Troi in a *VERY* short dress (to the point that she looks rather uncomfortable...) ;oD
Heh, true...
Though re-watching TNG's first season, my eyes were on the tactical position. :)
In one of the "behind the scenes" specials for the show, they talked about Troi's outfit in the first episode and called her the "Space Cheerleader"... That hit pretty close to the mark, I'd say. :)
I had no idea and I don't know shit about filming.
Then I'll explain:
A frame of 35mm film, well-shot and properly focused, can hold more detail than a 1080p HDTV can display. Therefore, a transfer from the 35mm original footage to HDTV will yield more original detail from the shoot than you'd be able to see in the original (standard-definition) version of the show.
Wil has complained publicly that he was forced to play the character as a whiny bitch. I don't think he used those words, but you should probably try to recognize that shows and movies have directors who tell you what to do and how to do it. And since his character was on his way to transcendence it wouldn't make much sense for him to be on Voyager.
Well, if the scenario we're considering is "What if Wil Wheaton had stuck with Star Trek?" then probably he wouldn't have hooked up with the Traveler again, he would've stuck with Starfleet.
I'm rewatching TNG these days, and I think even between seasons 1 and 2 they improved Wesley's character a lot. He really was the "Mary Sue" in the first season, any time he got involved it was generally to save the day. In season 2 and 3 it seems like he's acting more like an officer in training, he's learning from the senior officers instead of constantly weaseling his way into their favor. I enjoyed the episode where he had to take charge of a survey team, and learn how to order people around. That, to me, showed how much he still had to learn.
Am I the only person that liked Enterprise?
No. Trolls will tell you that you are, and some fans get hung up on continuity issues with other series (I did at first) - but Enterprise kicked ass.
Why? TNG was the worst thing to ever happen to the franchise.
<shrug> I've been re-watching the show on Netflix lately, and I love it. Even the first season, which (prior to re-watching) I expected to be the worst of the whole series... And while there were some really bad episodes in there, there were some good ones as well, and I even enjoyed the bad ones.
Of course, some of that is nostalgia, I'm sure... But I have a deep appreciation for many aspects of this incarnation of Star Trek. From the ship design (and corresponding model-making) to the props and costumes and sets, the characters, even some of the ideological BS they were trying to feed us. It is "futurism" in a sense that most TV sci-fi is not. ... Going back to the core of this topic, the HD transfer... I am very curious about how they plan to do this. TFA does note that the series was edited on video. I'm sure they can do better with a new transfer and remaster, but I am very curious about how much better they can expect to do... Personally I'd rather they didn't replace the special effects with CG on this one. In the original series, re-doing special effects as CG made a certain amount of sense, because the live footage was all on film, and as a result they could get a high-quality picture for that which couldn't be matched by the old special effects work. But TNG had a much higher standard for its special effects. Of course it's still limited and they could do better by replacing the effects, but the physical models are a part of the show's history, and something I'd miss if they removed them. Not to mention that if they replace the Enterprise with CG, they'll probably make it look like the four-footer in all shots... (Six-footer is a prettier ship, although it must be noted that the interior of Ten Forward doesn't fit in the six-footer...)
My Heathkit IT-3117 vacuum tube tester still works great. When the tubes in my TV set need checking, I don't have to make a trip to Radio Shack.
My TV set is about 1 inch thick... how do they fit the tubes in there?
They stopped using vacuum tubes when practical means of manufacturing and injecting Magic Smoke were developed.
That's why Heathkit is a good idea. If nothing else, it lets kids learn about electronics via practical examples. There a few other electronic kits out there, but Heathkit was always the gold standard.
The real question (assuming Heathkit really is making a comeback) - is will they continue to be the gold standard, or will they just be riding on name recognition, in the vein of Commodore's "return"?
Could they come back onto the scene and be a better Sparkfun than Sparkfun, for instance? Are they going to be yet another purveyor of Arduino boards and accessories? Or have they got something more impressive in store - and if so, what are they going to do, and how?
how good are you at soldering BGA's?
I'd be willing to give it a go, set up a simple home reflow station and take a crack at it. Worst that happens is I fail and the parts are destroyed.