Apple's released their mini-DisplayPort royalty free, but burred deep down inside the license agreement is an exclusion that voids the license if the licensee "commence an action for patent infringement against Apple".
Ever read the license agreements for some other standards (especially single-vendor "standards", which mini-DP is not)? There's some scary stuff in there, the only reason people freak out about Apple in these cases is because it's Apple so some guy with a chip on his shoulder is likely to sit down and look for stuff that could make them look bad.
Since the transition to OS X Apple has been quite fond of open standards (but considering that a lot of people seem to still think that Apple computers can only handle a single mouse button I'm not surprised the myth of the locked-down proprietary protocols and other tech of the Apple walled garden thrives).
My issue with this is just that they could have kept the old features and just added the new ones. Instead they completely replaced Spaces and Exposé with Mission Control and killed a bunch of good features.
Don't forget that they've gimped the ability to drag windows between desktops (now it's limited to windows in the currently active desktop).
Oh, and you can't use the arrow keys to switch between windows in Mission Control (Exposé let you do this).
And you can't arrange your desktops in a grid anymore, only a straight line.
And you can't have keyboard shortcuts to "fullscreen app" desktops (that's what they are after all, just another desktop with the app maximized) which means the fullscreen "feature" of Lion is pretty much useless for anyone who isn't a "hunt-and-click" kind of user ("Hm, I swear it was here *click* No *click* *click* It's a button I think *click* No, maybe it was a picture of a... something *click*").
The biggest problem is, IMHO, inertia. In order for Linux to beat the others it has to be clearly superior
And of course, Linux is still far from being trouble-free. I've been a Linux user since the mid-90s (although for a period I mainly used FreeBSD) but switched over to an iMac as my main workstation a few years ago. Was this because I couldn't get Linux to run right? No. Was it because Linux was "too hard"? No. Was is because of marketing? No. It was because it was UNIX and a turnkey solution. I know it's a tired phrase but it just works. I no longer fear software updates (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade used to terrify me, had a few incidents where it ate its own package database or simply uninstalled necessary packages (like my X server) for no particular reason) and it stays out of my way.
Now, obviously this isn't for everyone. I still have Linux desktops at home, they're just not my main workstation because I still can't quite shake that feeling of "well, it's stable now but it took two days of configuring and god knows what'll happen next time I update some software"...
What about Ubuntu? Well, it's sometimes more user-friendly than Debian but it also breaks in new and exciting ways (for example, for the longest time I couldn't get it to accept the idea of an interface having a static IPv4 address and a dynamic IPv6 address using the GUI tools, and editing config files somehow broke the GUI tools so they would constantly assume that I had no internet connectivity at all).
I'm pretty sure both Netflix and Hulu are out of the question unless they tunnel their connection via a machine in the US.
Welcome to the world of Not-the-USA where you know new TV shows and movies are readily available but if you try to access them legally you get a "friendly" message telling you that your money is no good and that any day/month/year/decade now they'll get around to letting you pay for it...
This is mostly a problem when you have a situation like the one in the US with local laws against gun ownership but guns being freely available ten minutes away.
That said, I'm not really in favor of banning guns but if you're caught carrying an illegal firearm (unlicensed, concealed carry without a permit, etc) the legal system should look very harshly on this. This seems to be a contributing reason for why criminals in countries with few guns don't have guns (or at least don't carry them on their person unless they plan on using them), if getting busted with an illegal handgun means you go to jail you'll probably avoid carrying one without reason (and since other criminals are likely to reason the same way you're not risking all that much).
Do keep in mind that police estimates of the value of the drugs are often street-level prices. Someone who's sitting on meth worth $35 million on the street isn't out selling it in those quantities. They buy or manufacture a large batch at price much lower than the street price, then they sell it in smaller batches at a price which is higher than the one they paid but still a lot less than the street price, the next guy in the chain is probably the guy who sells smaller batches to individual dealers (who in turn sell it to users).
Your antiquated paper ballot system that allows for voting by mail and relies on senior citizen volunteers who frequently check off the wrong name and fail to check ID fails to deal with the problem.
Or, maybe most sane people in even remotely civilized countries would react to this behavior by calling the cops...
This somehow reminds me of arguments where people compare cannabis and alcohol. Those in favor of alcohol but opposed to cannabis will demand that cannabis be proven to be infinitely safer than alcohol before they'll consider legalizing it yet handwave away any comments about the relative dangers of alcohol by pointing out that "yeah, well, it's already legal so suck it asshat".
You're the one with the 1M+ UID. And I do remember Windows 3.x all too well. But from what I remember of those days most people didn't run Windows the way you do these days, they'd just start it up when they needed to run a Windows-only program, otherwise they'd just stick to DOS. It's also ancient history so it felt kind of pointless to mention.
And yes, I remember the IRQ conflicts of those days, almost as much "fun" as SCSI chains...
Win 9x (95/95 OSR2/98/98SE/ME) was overall a steaming pile of dung.
WinNT (NT3.51/NT4/2k/XP/etc) have all been pretty decent compared to 9x (although they've made quite a few questionable design decisions along the way).
As for the recent UI changes, all par for the course with MS, they seem to always change something and their fanboys/shills will dismiss complaints with "well, we did a biased usage test and concluded that this was the best solution so STFU". Eventually everyone gets used to it and the world moves on.
So, you want a system that logs that the user has voted but not what the user has voted for?
Shouldn't be too hard to build. You could even make it "better" by creating a mechanism for the user to retrieve/change their vote without anyone but the user being able to get to this information. So now if someone forces you to vote for someone you didn't want to vote for you can change the vote later, and you're still the only one with access to the information about who you voted for (unless we assume someone puts a gun to your head but in that sort of situation with the current system they're likely to simply target a weak link further up in the chain since it's easier to get things right and cover your tracks that way).
And here in Sweden anyone can vote through the mail or at a pre-voting-day location (there tend to be at least couple of these per town, staffed by senior citizen volunteers and where the vote-buyer could stand 10 meters away and watch the voter he paid stuff the pre-sealed envelope he gave the voter into the voting box), compared to this the "ZOMG DADDY COULD FORCE MOMMY TO VOTE FOR SOMEONE HE WANTS HER TO VOTE FOR"/"ZOMG VOTE BUYING" scare of online voting makes no sense.
There are all sorts of interesting safeguards you can build into the system that won't keep anyone from voting but which will slow down any attempts at vote-buying quite significantly. Safeguards that would be a lot harder to implement with paper ballots.
Well, every year when Safari was the first browser to be targeted and thus also the first to be broken the fandroids and the anti-Apple crowds would scream on and on about how this proved Safari was the shittiest browser in existence and by extension Apple was a horrible horrible company.
I guess it's Google's turn this year.
And no, I don't use Safari, I just find it interesting that when previous stories like this have been about Safari the first dozen or so posts weren't about how the reporting was biased...
Yeah, I used to do tech support and anything over 100 ms or so for the first hop outside the ISP's network was likely to be escalated to a 3rd line tech if we couldn't solve it.
Hell, right now I'm getting approximately 100-120 ms pings against random machines in the US northeast and around 190-200 ms for the west coast and I'm in northern Sweden...
This is sometimes called "hellbanning", the user continues seeing content but his/her actions are ineffective (on some forums the user sees his/her own posts but others do not see them, thus giving the user the impression of being ignored by everyone).
Well, the thing is that if your job involves pattern recognition for 40+ hours per week you're likely to be more susceptible to finding patterns in random noise than the average person.
And since programmers often spend a lot of time finding patterns in seemingly random data...
It would be pertinent to point out that BC basically topped out around $35 for a very short while, classic boom and bust cycle which was then replaced by organic growth.
Before the massive increase in BC value that led up to the crash the value was actually a lot lower than it is right now.
TeliaSonera is not Finnish, it's the product of a merger between Finnish Sonera and Swedish Telia. Their headquarter is in Sweden.
Also, in Sweden "Telia e-leg" is not very popular as an e-id, most people use BankID which is based on the Nexus Personal client software and the service itself is provided by Finansiell ID-teknik AB which is a company co-owned by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Ikano Bank, Länsförsäkringar Bank, SEB, Skandiabanken and Swedbank.
And how is this any worse than someone paying people to vote for a politician who will then make the "right" decisions? I keep hearing this as some kind of "ZOMG DIRECT DEMOCRAZY WILL NEVAR WORK!!1" argument but I just don't see how it's any more flawed than parliamentary elections, if anything it's less flawed since you'd have to convince people to all vote for or against a specific issue rather than to just vote for a politician (who they are likely to not care too strongly about compared to a single issue).
The current exchange rate for Bitcoins to USD is around 4.6 USD for 1 BC. That makes 43,000 BC worth almost $200k. I'd say that's a decent amount of money.
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Apple's released their mini-DisplayPort royalty free, but burred deep down inside the license agreement is an exclusion that voids the license if the licensee "commence an action for patent infringement against Apple".
Ever read the license agreements for some other standards (especially single-vendor "standards", which mini-DP is not)? There's some scary stuff in there, the only reason people freak out about Apple in these cases is because it's Apple so some guy with a chip on his shoulder is likely to sit down and look for stuff that could make them look bad.
Since the transition to OS X Apple has been quite fond of open standards (but considering that a lot of people seem to still think that Apple computers can only handle a single mouse button I'm not surprised the myth of the locked-down proprietary protocols and other tech of the Apple walled garden thrives).
My issue with this is just that they could have kept the old features and just added the new ones. Instead they completely replaced Spaces and Exposé with Mission Control and killed a bunch of good features.
Currently open windows on my workstation? 19
How many of those have tabs in themselves? 7 (Two firefox windows = 24 tabs, Four iTerm windows = 12 tabs, One MySQL workbench window = 4 tabs
How many desktops am I using? 6 at the moment
Resolution? 2560x1440 + 1920x1080
Conclusion? Your use case is not everyone's use case.
Don't forget that they've gimped the ability to drag windows between desktops (now it's limited to windows in the currently active desktop).
Oh, and you can't use the arrow keys to switch between windows in Mission Control (Exposé let you do this).
And you can't arrange your desktops in a grid anymore, only a straight line.
And you can't have keyboard shortcuts to "fullscreen app" desktops (that's what they are after all, just another desktop with the app maximized) which means the fullscreen "feature" of Lion is pretty much useless for anyone who isn't a "hunt-and-click" kind of user ("Hm, I swear it was here *click* No *click* *click* It's a button I think *click* No, maybe it was a picture of a... something *click*").
The biggest problem is, IMHO, inertia. In order for Linux to beat the others it has to be clearly superior
And of course, Linux is still far from being trouble-free. I've been a Linux user since the mid-90s (although for a period I mainly used FreeBSD) but switched over to an iMac as my main workstation a few years ago. Was this because I couldn't get Linux to run right? No. Was it because Linux was "too hard"? No. Was is because of marketing? No. It was because it was UNIX and a turnkey solution. I know it's a tired phrase but it just works. I no longer fear software updates (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade used to terrify me, had a few incidents where it ate its own package database or simply uninstalled necessary packages (like my X server) for no particular reason) and it stays out of my way.
Now, obviously this isn't for everyone. I still have Linux desktops at home, they're just not my main workstation because I still can't quite shake that feeling of "well, it's stable now but it took two days of configuring and god knows what'll happen next time I update some software"...
What about Ubuntu? Well, it's sometimes more user-friendly than Debian but it also breaks in new and exciting ways (for example, for the longest time I couldn't get it to accept the idea of an interface having a static IPv4 address and a dynamic IPv6 address using the GUI tools, and editing config files somehow broke the GUI tools so they would constantly assume that I had no internet connectivity at all).
I'm pretty sure both Netflix and Hulu are out of the question unless they tunnel their connection via a machine in the US.
Welcome to the world of Not-the-USA where you know new TV shows and movies are readily available but if you try to access them legally you get a "friendly" message telling you that your money is no good and that any day/month/year/decade now they'll get around to letting you pay for it...
The swedish minister of law (it's funny because she dropped out of law school)
Actually, "Tant Gredelin" (AKA Beatrice Ask) never even attended law school, she briefly studied economics...
This is mostly a problem when you have a situation like the one in the US with local laws against gun ownership but guns being freely available ten minutes away.
That said, I'm not really in favor of banning guns but if you're caught carrying an illegal firearm (unlicensed, concealed carry without a permit, etc) the legal system should look very harshly on this. This seems to be a contributing reason for why criminals in countries with few guns don't have guns (or at least don't carry them on their person unless they plan on using them), if getting busted with an illegal handgun means you go to jail you'll probably avoid carrying one without reason (and since other criminals are likely to reason the same way you're not risking all that much).
Do keep in mind that police estimates of the value of the drugs are often street-level prices. Someone who's sitting on meth worth $35 million on the street isn't out selling it in those quantities. They buy or manufacture a large batch at price much lower than the street price, then they sell it in smaller batches at a price which is higher than the one they paid but still a lot less than the street price, the next guy in the chain is probably the guy who sells smaller batches to individual dealers (who in turn sell it to users).
"Give me your voter card or you're fired."
Your antiquated paper ballot system that allows for voting by mail and relies on senior citizen volunteers who frequently check off the wrong name and fail to check ID fails to deal with the problem.
Or, maybe most sane people in even remotely civilized countries would react to this behavior by calling the cops...
This somehow reminds me of arguments where people compare cannabis and alcohol. Those in favor of alcohol but opposed to cannabis will demand that cannabis be proven to be infinitely safer than alcohol before they'll consider legalizing it yet handwave away any comments about the relative dangers of alcohol by pointing out that "yeah, well, it's already legal so suck it asshat".
You're the one with the 1M+ UID. And I do remember Windows 3.x all too well. But from what I remember of those days most people didn't run Windows the way you do these days, they'd just start it up when they needed to run a Windows-only program, otherwise they'd just stick to DOS. It's also ancient history so it felt kind of pointless to mention.
And yes, I remember the IRQ conflicts of those days, almost as much "fun" as SCSI chains...
You've got it wrong.
Win 9x (95/95 OSR2/98/98SE/ME) was overall a steaming pile of dung.
WinNT (NT3.51/NT4/2k/XP/etc) have all been pretty decent compared to 9x (although they've made quite a few questionable design decisions along the way).
As for the recent UI changes, all par for the course with MS, they seem to always change something and their fanboys/shills will dismiss complaints with "well, we did a biased usage test and concluded that this was the best solution so STFU". Eventually everyone gets used to it and the world moves on.
So, you want a system that logs that the user has voted but not what the user has voted for?
Shouldn't be too hard to build. You could even make it "better" by creating a mechanism for the user to retrieve/change their vote without anyone but the user being able to get to this information. So now if someone forces you to vote for someone you didn't want to vote for you can change the vote later, and you're still the only one with access to the information about who you voted for (unless we assume someone puts a gun to your head but in that sort of situation with the current system they're likely to simply target a weak link further up in the chain since it's easier to get things right and cover your tracks that way).
And here in Sweden anyone can vote through the mail or at a pre-voting-day location (there tend to be at least couple of these per town, staffed by senior citizen volunteers and where the vote-buyer could stand 10 meters away and watch the voter he paid stuff the pre-sealed envelope he gave the voter into the voting box), compared to this the "ZOMG DADDY COULD FORCE MOMMY TO VOTE FOR SOMEONE HE WANTS HER TO VOTE FOR"/"ZOMG VOTE BUYING" scare of online voting makes no sense.
There are all sorts of interesting safeguards you can build into the system that won't keep anyone from voting but which will slow down any attempts at vote-buying quite significantly. Safeguards that would be a lot harder to implement with paper ballots.
Well, every year when Safari was the first browser to be targeted and thus also the first to be broken the fandroids and the anti-Apple crowds would scream on and on about how this proved Safari was the shittiest browser in existence and by extension Apple was a horrible horrible company.
I guess it's Google's turn this year.
And no, I don't use Safari, I just find it interesting that when previous stories like this have been about Safari the first dozen or so posts weren't about how the reporting was biased...
Right, I completely forgot they released 5.4.0 last week.
Yeah, I think they nuked magic quotes with 5.4.0 as well.
Register globals has been off by default for I don't know how many years.
Magic quotes is officially deprecated.
What serious developer doesn't use PDO/mysqli and prepared statements?
I'd rather take a good Myostatin inhibitor over a dose of caffeine so high it might kill me.
Yeah, I used to do tech support and anything over 100 ms or so for the first hop outside the ISP's network was likely to be escalated to a 3rd line tech if we couldn't solve it.
Hell, right now I'm getting approximately 100-120 ms pings against random machines in the US northeast and around 190-200 ms for the west coast and I'm in northern Sweden...
This is sometimes called "hellbanning", the user continues seeing content but his/her actions are ineffective (on some forums the user sees his/her own posts but others do not see them, thus giving the user the impression of being ignored by everyone).
Well, the thing is that if your job involves pattern recognition for 40+ hours per week you're likely to be more susceptible to finding patterns in random noise than the average person.
And since programmers often spend a lot of time finding patterns in seemingly random data...
It would be pertinent to point out that BC basically topped out around $35 for a very short while, classic boom and bust cycle which was then replaced by organic growth.
Before the massive increase in BC value that led up to the crash the value was actually a lot lower than it is right now.
TeliaSonera is not Finnish, it's the product of a merger between Finnish Sonera and Swedish Telia. Their headquarter is in Sweden.
Also, in Sweden "Telia e-leg" is not very popular as an e-id, most people use BankID which is based on the Nexus Personal client software and the service itself is provided by Finansiell ID-teknik AB which is a company co-owned by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Ikano Bank, Länsförsäkringar Bank, SEB, Skandiabanken and Swedbank.
And how is this any worse than someone paying people to vote for a politician who will then make the "right" decisions? I keep hearing this as some kind of "ZOMG DIRECT DEMOCRAZY WILL NEVAR WORK!!1" argument but I just don't see how it's any more flawed than parliamentary elections, if anything it's less flawed since you'd have to convince people to all vote for or against a specific issue rather than to just vote for a politician (who they are likely to not care too strongly about compared to a single issue).
The current exchange rate for Bitcoins to USD is around 4.6 USD for 1 BC. That makes 43,000 BC worth almost $200k. I'd say that's a decent amount of money.