And yey it still keeps on being applied to digital media. Come on, Even iTunes has goe DRM free with music, they see that one as lost, but I wonder why you still can't download an unprotected movie from them? I wont buy any of their DRM content, but now they are DRM free on music, I have been buying more. The price is acceptable, I get it in a format I can use, and the quality is good. Now if I could only do it without iTunes. What a particulary sucky piece of software.
All the DRM does on the kindle is make it harder to move the same book to another device, not impossible. Bus as to only a few years left? Well Talk to Apple about a propietary locked down format for content that can be easily pirated. They won eventually because the device was easy to use, and the content was available WORLD WIDE. Wize up Amazon and the whole publishing industry. E-books have no borders or regions, just like digital music. I live in NZ and would love to get my hands on ebooks from amazons catalog, and I would buy them too, but it is restricted to US only regions, and locked to the Kindle, so I'll keep on pirating the content to get it in a format I can use. Thanks Amazon. You just keep on protecting that content 8)
Now this might bring about the micro OS, just enough OS to run the application you require. I already have a mimimal linux to run in my VMWare server, but something custom made to work in the hypervisor would be more efficient. But really, as I can start a couple of VMs including Vista on my Mac Mini Why would I mess around with Java in a browser. Which version of Java and which browser, and on what hardware? In my experiance Java has always been very fussy about the version of the JVM you need to run certain apps.
I think its more likely that the slightly overweight are less likely to be involved in sports or other dangerous activities like sky diving or motor racing, or curding cad of which has claimed a fitter friend of mine.
The issues here is that Mono is a "free" implementation of.Net, but there may be timebombs in any patents as to how it works, not copies of code. The other thing is - who the hell actually uses Tomboy and how is this being used to trojan in mono??? It's just a freeking note taking app, with fairly average features, no network ability or sharing features for the notes you take, so they are siloed into your own data and cant be shared, and no implimentaiton of tomboy on other platforms like OS X or Windows so useless if you want to work accross platforms. Is there something I am missing with Tomboy??
Because it would have been so hard to impliment a POSIX shell that most people who are command line junkes already know. Now, they use MONAD and PowerShell to wrap around.Net, and again ties people into Windows. Otherwise you might be able to run your scripts on anything!
I have 5 general purpose PCs at home, and three games consoles. My work provided laptop runs Win7RC because is really is so much better than Vista, and meant the company could save some money and didn't have to upgrade the hardware in it, my Wifes PC runs Vista, because that is what it came with. My server runs Suse Linux (and VMWare Server, and 4 linux guests), my netbook runs Ubuntu. My desktop is a Mac Mini. With all this stuff, everything I need runs on all of these platforms, except anything provided by Microsoft. Office 2007-nope. Powershell-nope, Office Communicator-nope However I can install cygwin on the windows boxs to get X11 and BASH, and opensource software for everything means I am not beholden to any one vedor to keep my home network running fine. Really important as all of this cost me no more than the initial cost of the hardware. 8) Oh, and none of my machines have ever been pwnd by a virus, even windows. It is possible to run a secure windows platform, but it is much harder than with other OS's. At work I am working on an implimentation of a corporate wifi using 802.1x authentication It needs to transparently just work, and so trying various methods of authentication. The wifi is in a seperate firewalled extranet. The Authentication servers have to work through a firewall. The Linux clients auth using RADIUS, not a problem, only a couple of ports through the firewall to the known RADIUS servers. For windows AD auth, nope, need RPC, which is one port out, then the DCs responds on a random highport back out making is nealy impossible to protect the wifi authentication servers properly. It still amazes me that RPC ever made it in the server enviornment. Most people just swiss-cheese their firewalls to make it work then wonder why they then get pwned. The OS has got better, but MS's protocols remain the same.
But they still think the US and it's friends are the whole world:
From the download site: Not available in your country or region
You appear to be in a country or region where the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta is unavailable.
This beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel (English only), People's Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).
Yeee-haw. Well, now I can grab that old Challenger, fit a roll cage and head on out and pound around at road legal speeds on dirt and gravel. Got any old bridges for jumping too?
Amd HTML5 will do much of the video streaming and onscreen animation that flash and silverlight are offering, but is an actual open standard. I tolerate flash, but silverlight is not getting anywhere near my machines, Windows, OS X or Linux. Now I see it can install apps and updates directly to the desktop, and is based on.net/mono - absolutely no way! Novell - for some reason they keep shipping this crapware called tomboy on their distros, that required mono. It is the single largest resource consuming app on my machine at boot time. And its just a frikken desktop note-pad app.
My perfect netbook: Long battery life, instant or very fast suspend and resume, support for Citrix, VNC, RDP & X11 remote desktops, ipsec and openssl VPNs and have atleast 1024x900 screen resolution. That and a full browser with flash. With that and good wireless I'd pay up to NZ$1000 mainly for the size conveniance over a small laptop. My iPhone nearly fits the bill apart from some of the remote desktop and flash. My Acer aspire one fits with everything except instant on. It's getting there though.
I think the trick now is to get as many platforms as possible to synch with google, then using Active sync to GMail and GCalander/Contscts you can get the whole PIM thing. I've managed to get Kontact to Read Only sync, but atleast my iphone can sync with Google. On Windows, I use Googles sync application with Ourlook and there is a similar app for iCal on Mac but havent got contacts yet, so I use that too. I finally have a synch between all my system for calander. I just hope there is something for contacts too. I just use iMAP/smtp for mail.
What they mean here is the web apps can be run from the phone. it also has a small web server engine for hosting it's apps I believe. You dont need to code in any special API or use a particular dev kit.
Cool. By identifying as an iPod, then it will also seemlessly synch with my linux clients - Banshee on my netbook, & Amarok on my desktop 8) Now if they would only detail the really important sync - calendar, tasks, contacts and mail.
Discourage general use of your laptop by learning to type properly then blacking out all of the keys 8) Actually, blacking out all of the keys is a great motivator to learn to type properly anyway without looking down.
If I was running a school computer system, for primary schools, I'd use kiosk style desktops with only the screens and keyboards/mice accessible. For secondary schools, look at wall-wart style computers in public places like the library or study halls, with browsers/basic office applications only, no Flash. Specific computers in other places for specific software required for those classes. Where possible, use Citrix, virtual desktops or X11 style remote console apps. Some new Wyse terminals are pretty good desktop replacements now. Wireless mesh network for pervasive campus access. Offer two networks, staff and student/guest. Offer deals on netbooks or sub $1000 laptops, Offer buybacks on good condition 1 year old machines sold by the school to recondition and sell back for $500 And I know it is a pain, but no real personalisation of profiles apart from wallpapers, browser favourites/history and a couple of gigs of personal storage. Allow access to this storage via web page/Citrix. If money were no object, use one time access tokens and usernames try to limit access to the individuals. Tokens returned at the end of each year or loose a bond.
My Mac Mini is a really nice Windows device too, and Linux. Dell are offering a small desktop with compariable hardware to the Mini, but their wireless keyboard is made out of cheap plastic and creaks when being typed on, an the plastic casr just looks a little sad in real life. The Mac Mini clocks in at only NZ$300 more, has a much better video card and Firewire 800 over the basic intel video card and firewire 400 in the Dell (this is if you add Vista Premium and the wifi card to the Dell to get it to match the OS features and hardware in the Mini. The CPU in the Dell is faster, but the mini gets faster memory and frontside bus. Would probably even out)
A friend brought over a Sony video camera. I wanted to grab a copy of what was on it so we chucked it onto my wife's Vista machine. After 30 or so minutes of futzing around we were unable to locate working drivers or get an import with Windows Movie Maker. Plug into my Mini, camera detected, import into iMovie, import completed fine.
I have a Lemark laser printer, the driver it shipped with for XP and Vista was rubbish, with poor rendering of transparency and diffuclty in getting ome stuff to rpint with out a PCL error. On my Mac and Linux boxes, I just used the.ppd file for the postscript config and pointed it at the LPR daemon on the printers network port. Perfect Prints. I have had no trouble for 3 years now with this printer.
Logitec webcam, a huge driver set required to be installed to get it to go in Windows, and there always seem to be updates for it. On Linux and Mac it was just detected and worked.
Other PC gear != Mac. I agree, I have not seen any other all-in-one that has the class of the iMac, and no main desktop computer smaller than the Mini. The Pro workstations are elegantly assembeled, infact I would call them server class pieces of kit. However the market is crying out for a well supported Windows alternative. I have Linux on my servers, but there are just some things that make using the Mac as my Desktop a pleasure. However, I wince at the NZ$3000 required to get in on the laptop ladder with mac when you really can get a Dell with very similar spec for 1/3 the price.
And dont forget the whole DVD region thing. Another annoyance that does not seem to have slowed down the availability of new release movies to piratebay one little bit, but I have to have 2 DVD players to play the legitimate content I bought in the US, and here in New Zealand as it is pretty hard to find a proper region free player any more apart from my Linux PC.
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And yey it still keeps on being applied to digital media. Come on, Even iTunes has goe DRM free with music, they see that one as lost, but I wonder why you still can't download an unprotected movie from them? I wont buy any of their DRM content, but now they are DRM free on music, I have been buying more. The price is acceptable, I get it in a format I can use, and the quality is good. Now if I could only do it without iTunes. What a particulary sucky piece of software.
All the DRM does on the kindle is make it harder to move the same book to another device, not impossible. Bus as to only a few years left? Well Talk to Apple about a propietary locked down format for content that can be easily pirated. They won eventually because the device was easy to use, and the content was available WORLD WIDE. Wize up Amazon and the whole publishing industry. E-books have no borders or regions, just like digital music. I live in NZ and would love to get my hands on ebooks from amazons catalog, and I would buy them too, but it is restricted to US only regions, and locked to the Kindle, so I'll keep on pirating the content to get it in a format I can use. Thanks Amazon. You just keep on protecting that content 8)
And why not add some antivirus and a firewall on the phone, and make it a bit bigger, say like a netbook... damn, feature creep again 8)
Now this might bring about the micro OS, just enough OS to run the application you require. I already have a mimimal linux to run in my VMWare server, but something custom made to work in the hypervisor would be more efficient.
But really, as I can start a couple of VMs including Vista on my Mac Mini Why would I mess around with Java in a browser. Which version of Java and which browser, and on what hardware? In my experiance Java has always been very fussy about the version of the JVM you need to run certain apps.
Like IE8 critical update?
Well, Duh! Welcome to the club. Pandora had the best music recommendation system I had used. Now cant access it. thanks RIAA.
The thing is, no one thought this could happen in the land of the free. Check your own history America.
I think its more likely that the slightly overweight are less likely to be involved in sports or other dangerous activities like sky diving or motor racing, or curding cad of which has claimed a fitter friend of mine.
The issues here is that Mono is a "free" implementation of .Net, but there may be timebombs in any patents as to how it works, not copies of code.
The other thing is - who the hell actually uses Tomboy and how is this being used to trojan in mono???
It's just a freeking note taking app, with fairly average features, no network ability or sharing features for the notes you take, so they are siloed into your own data and cant be shared, and no implimentaiton of tomboy on other platforms like OS X or Windows so useless if you want to work accross platforms.
Is there something I am missing with Tomboy??
Because it would have been so hard to impliment a POSIX shell that most people who are command line junkes already know. Now, they use MONAD and PowerShell to wrap around .Net, and again ties people into Windows. Otherwise you might be able to run your scripts on anything!
I have 5 general purpose PCs at home, and three games consoles. My work provided laptop runs Win7RC because is really is so much better than Vista, and meant the company could save some money and didn't have to upgrade the hardware in it, my Wifes PC runs Vista, because that is what it came with. My server runs Suse Linux (and VMWare Server, and 4 linux guests), my netbook runs Ubuntu. My desktop is a Mac Mini. With all this stuff, everything I need runs on all of these platforms, except anything provided by Microsoft. Office 2007-nope. Powershell-nope, Office Communicator-nope
However I can install cygwin on the windows boxs to get X11 and BASH, and opensource software for everything means I am not beholden to any one vedor to keep my home network running fine. Really important as all of this cost me no more than the initial cost of the hardware. 8)
Oh, and none of my machines have ever been pwnd by a virus, even windows. It is possible to run a secure windows platform, but it is much harder than with other OS's.
At work I am working on an implimentation of a corporate wifi using 802.1x authentication It needs to transparently just work, and so trying various methods of authentication. The wifi is in a seperate firewalled extranet. The Authentication servers have to work through a firewall. The Linux clients auth using RADIUS, not a problem, only a couple of ports through the firewall to the known RADIUS servers. For windows AD auth, nope, need RPC, which is one port out, then the DCs responds on a random highport back out making is nealy impossible to protect the wifi authentication servers properly.
It still amazes me that RPC ever made it in the server enviornment. Most people just swiss-cheese their firewalls to make it work then wonder why they then get pwned.
The OS has got better, but MS's protocols remain the same.
Even odds this will be offered through Windows Update, just like IE.
But they still think the US and it's friends are the whole world:
From the download site:
Not available in your country or region
You appear to be in a country or region where the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta is unavailable.
This beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel (English only), People's Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).
Yeee-haw. Well, now I can grab that old Challenger, fit a roll cage and head on out and pound around at road legal speeds on dirt and gravel. Got any old bridges for jumping too?
Amd HTML5 will do much of the video streaming and onscreen animation that flash and silverlight are offering, but is an actual open standard. I tolerate flash, but silverlight is not getting anywhere near my machines, Windows, OS X or Linux. Now I see it can install apps and updates directly to the desktop, and is based on .net/mono - absolutely no way!
Novell - for some reason they keep shipping this crapware called tomboy on their distros, that required mono. It is the single largest resource consuming app on my machine at boot time. And its just a frikken desktop note-pad app.
I have a two seater motorcycle that weighs less than that.
My perfect netbook:
Long battery life, instant or very fast suspend and resume, support for Citrix, VNC, RDP & X11 remote desktops, ipsec and openssl VPNs and have atleast 1024x900 screen resolution. That and a full browser with flash.
With that and good wireless I'd pay up to NZ$1000 mainly for the size conveniance over a small laptop.
My iPhone nearly fits the bill apart from some of the remote desktop and flash. My Acer aspire one fits with everything except instant on.
It's getting there though.
I think the trick now is to get as many platforms as possible to synch with google, then using Active sync to GMail and GCalander/Contscts you can get the whole PIM thing. I've managed to get Kontact to Read Only sync, but atleast my iphone can sync with Google. On Windows, I use Googles sync application with Ourlook and there is a similar app for iCal on Mac but havent got contacts yet, so I use that too. I finally have a synch between all my system for calander. I just hope there is something for contacts too. I just use iMAP/smtp for mail.
What they mean here is the web apps can be run from the phone. it also has a small web server engine for hosting it's apps I believe. You dont need to code in any special API or use a particular dev kit.
Cool. By identifying as an iPod, then it will also seemlessly synch with my linux clients - Banshee on my netbook, & Amarok on my desktop 8)
Now if they would only detail the really important sync - calendar, tasks, contacts and mail.
Discourage general use of your laptop by learning to type properly then blacking out all of the keys 8) Actually, blacking out all of the keys is a great motivator to learn to type properly anyway without looking down.
If I was running a school computer system, for primary schools, I'd use kiosk style desktops with only the screens and keyboards/mice accessible. For secondary schools, look at wall-wart style computers in public places like the library or study halls, with browsers/basic office applications only, no Flash. Specific computers in other places for specific software required for those classes. Where possible, use Citrix, virtual desktops or X11 style remote console apps. Some new Wyse terminals are pretty good desktop replacements now. Wireless mesh network for pervasive campus access. Offer two networks, staff and student/guest.
Offer deals on netbooks or sub $1000 laptops, Offer buybacks on good condition 1 year old machines sold by the school to recondition and sell back for $500
And I know it is a pain, but no real personalisation of profiles apart from wallpapers, browser favourites/history and a couple of gigs of personal storage. Allow access to this storage via web page/Citrix.
If money were no object, use one time access tokens and usernames try to limit access to the individuals. Tokens returned at the end of each year or loose a bond.
My Mac Mini is a really nice Windows device too, and Linux. Dell are offering a small desktop with compariable hardware to the Mini, but their wireless keyboard is made out of cheap plastic and creaks when being typed on, an the plastic casr just looks a little sad in real life. The Mac Mini clocks in at only NZ$300 more, has a much better video card and Firewire 800 over the basic intel video card and firewire 400 in the Dell (this is if you add Vista Premium and the wifi card to the Dell to get it to match the OS features and hardware in the Mini. The CPU in the Dell is faster, but the mini gets faster memory and frontside bus. Would probably even out)
A friend brought over a Sony video camera. I wanted to grab a copy of what was on it so we chucked it onto my wife's Vista machine. After 30 or so minutes of futzing around we were unable to locate working drivers or get an import with Windows Movie Maker.
Plug into my Mini, camera detected, import into iMovie, import completed fine.
I have a Lemark laser printer, the driver it shipped with for XP and Vista was rubbish, with poor rendering of transparency and diffuclty in getting ome stuff to rpint with out a PCL error. On my Mac and Linux boxes, I just used the .ppd file for the postscript config and pointed it at the LPR daemon on the printers network port. Perfect Prints. I have had no trouble for 3 years now with this printer.
Logitec webcam, a huge driver set required to be installed to get it to go in Windows, and there always seem to be updates for it. On Linux and Mac it was just detected and worked.
Other PC gear != Mac. I agree, I have not seen any other all-in-one that has the class of the iMac, and no main desktop computer smaller than the Mini. The Pro workstations are elegantly assembeled, infact I would call them server class pieces of kit.
However the market is crying out for a well supported Windows alternative. I have Linux on my servers, but there are just some things that make using the Mac as my Desktop a pleasure. However, I wince at the NZ$3000 required to get in on the laptop ladder with mac when you really can get a Dell with very similar spec for 1/3 the price.
And dont forget the whole DVD region thing. Another annoyance that does not seem to have slowed down the availability of new release movies to piratebay one little bit, but I have to have 2 DVD players to play the legitimate content I bought in the US, and here in New Zealand as it is pretty hard to find a proper region free player any more apart from my Linux PC.