Now you can have your cake, but only if you eat on approved plates using paid for proprietary knives and forks. and you may not get the same cake as someone else in another country, and it may not even be the cake you want.
However you can download a good facsimile of the cake and eat it wherever you want for free.
Same - My download Priority:
TV shows not shown here in NZ, or where the scheduling has been so stuffed around that it is impossible to get every episode.
Movies not available in Region4 DVD at the time of release.
This is a global market, and the US media companies had better start providing a global service to everyone at the same time if they don't want to suffer this form of piracy.
If any of the sudios offered DRM content free outside US borders, I would probably buy it.
I'm a Battlestar Galactica fan, but you cannot access any of the episode previews outside of the US, so I simply downloaded them. Not a loss to them as I am not one of their customers and can't buy the product here if I wanted to.
Same thing delaying my upgrade on most of my machines. Almost no themes, and very few plugins ready. I do like the new add-on search though, filters out those that wont work in your version.
Some changes to the way certificates are handled though has broken some applications I use at work, mostly the management interfaces on some firewalls. Probably a poor implementation on the server, but annoying and stopping me sing Firefox daily 8(
In our office, 4 or 5 people tried to get the download from their windows desktops and couldn't get to the download page.
wget got the download fine though, so I downloaded the Windows, Mac an Linux versions 3 times each to make up for it 8)
Playing devils advocate:
I think this action is completely justifiable. After all, if he had a company car and failed to keep it registered, insured, and in a safe condition, then killed some kid on a level crossing, he would be considered negligent and charged.
If the laptop was in his control, is he not responsible for operating it in a safe manner?
8)
IT, Support and Acer make me worry. I dread trying to have to use the Acer webpage for support as it is hard to find drivers, sometimes those drivers are only for their US market machines, not Asia/Pacific, sometimes the downloads are just corrupted.
The power supplies in out Acer desktops fail with regullarity, and I've also had to have the power supply on my personal 20" Ferrari screen replaced twice. So nice gear when working but I think they definitely have "cheapness" written all over them. I wish a High value vendor would put Linux on their gear as an option. Come on HP! Give me linux as an option on my $3000 laptop! Fix your damn ACPI crap in your BIOS on all your gear (I still have to remove/reinsert the battery before booting to get the power levels to register and full speed on the CPU scaling on my HP TC4400. (This is fixed in some of the other HP laptops of the same vintage, but not the TC4400.)
Re:It makes a lot of sense, surprised people notic
on
Acer Bets Big On Linux
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· Score: 1
Why not on corporate networks:
Two words, Active Directory.
Getting this integrated is a pain in linux becuase basicly it's foreign and almost nothing in the linux world is designed with it in mind.
I've got my Suse servers working fine as domain members, and I use domain accounts for ssh and vnc login, but no way to centrally manage the root accounts and passwords, sudo files etc. Still has to be done on each server (simplified for us as we deploy from VMWare templates, but harder to change later.
On desktops, how would we provision the same tools the users get now on Windows, how do you publish bookmarks and desktop settings to KDE/Gnome, Konqueror, Mozilla/Firefox and Opera all at the same time. How do you automatically provision printers for 1000 users?
I love Gnu/Linux at home, but would never function on the desktops in our corporate the way we want without a lot of customisation. Well beyond our 6 person teams ability in terms of time and skill.
Most of the start time in modern desktop kernels is detecting your hardware, and loading critical services. If you don't compile in all of the drivers into the kernel except for the ones you need the meory footprint is smaller and therefor loads faster, and frees more RAM for applications and services, which then run faster as there is less paging required. A virtuous circle. You also dont have to choose a journaling file system if you don't need it, and you can turn off the write after read on mounted volumes if you want to.
They will bank on enough people not wanting their souse/partner/children know they got the infection by installing a codec to let them view kiddie porn movies that they will pay up rather than ruin their lives by going to the police, or just not pay up, wipe the machine and claim it crashed. Oh dear.
Chances are they wont actually send the decrypt key anyway, but if you were dumb enough to install their malware, you'll probably pay them anyway.
Setting up a good hosing services is not cheap, but it is easy. I work for government and we had a public website requirement (check out www.parliament.nz if interested - even if you can get only an asp error page, everything I did is still working 8))
For a corporate, this could have been hosted at an external hosing site, but we had to do it ourselves in-house becuase some of the data is not allowed to be out of our control.
Starting with two 1Gb internet links, two external switches, then two routers, through two firewalls in a failover cluster (Checkpoint is not cheap) then through two load balancers, again clustered, into two seperate web front ends then into multiple back end databases (all redundant, and each pair imports data from source independantly so a SQL data corruption wont be replicated). Then we added streaming video- 4 encoding servers, two streaming servers (you get the hint that we could not afford down time, so there are duplicates of everything)
Oh, and we have to back up the whole lot, multiple times a day.
We couldn't afford to go cheap on any of the infrastructure either. The switches, routers, firewall are all a major brand name, primarily to make sure we could get updates and support 24x7. Luckily we can use our regular service desk for support and issues as we are already 24x7 for the campus we work on.
If I was doing it for myself, I wouldn't really do it any other way, especially if someone was going to be paying me money to host their stuff.
I'd probobably only change the server side, with Virtual servers to isolate customers from each other, maybe offer simple websites on a shared server (No active scripting) and manage site with something like ISPConfig, but customise it for my own use.
I'd try and add other features though to get new customers in, maybe something like an iFolder server, iCal and limited data caps for free clients. Pay for this with advertising on the management portal or mail outs, and paid customers get 24 hr support and more data.
Offer to host backup sites for companies that alsready have their own internal sites, but can't afford the redundancy for 100% uptime.
VPN connections, certificate management, a commerce engine etc. Maybe even a search portal - all of your own data sorted on our server here plus google-yahoo-msn all on one result page. Templates for common business requirements - document management - webmail etc.
The early problems with XP were mostly drivers runnign in the kernel and dim windows driver coders picking up their crayons and writing code for full protected mode OS's for the first time.
Now 8 years later, they have to start remembering their users may not be admin on the desktop either.
UAC is still nowhere near as user friendly as sudo.
By user freindly, I mean once set up properly by an admin, the user need never know it's there.
If there is somehting you want to uer to do that admin cant, you can make them enter no password, their own password or root. Want to stop the user writing to USB drives, Nope, not without installing more third party applications (The OS is capable of it, but has no way for a user to restrict this.)
Any way, why dim my entire f*&kn screen. Why not just ask me for the password and get on with it in a dialog box. If you are going to dim the screen, why not a nice fade, or blur like WindowBlinds does when changing the desktop widgets. Ugly and inflexible.
Don't know myself what advantage QT has. On linux there is no real quicktime player as most of the codecs are proprietary. I guess those sites that use it just miss out on my eyeballs and clicks on their ads, but I dont miss their content.
I helped set up the www.parliament.nz website with video broadcasting, and I actually found it was 100 times easier to get wmv files to stream, and I just use VLC instead of media player in Firefox and it just works on linux.
No way to get quicktime viewing in linux, but we had to add it to the site anyway so DRM crippled macs could see the content too. 8)
To the upgrade geeks - Apple doesn't care about you because you wont make Steve richer. You will want to improve your system and probably by parts that Apple didn't make, so you are a lost cause.
Apple sells computer appliances. Apart from the pro and server range there are almost no user-serviceable parts inside.
Do you complain if you cant upgrade the TV tuner in your DVR? (well I do, but thats why I built a MythTV server).
I love upgrading and doing my own PC build, but once finished, I don't usually upgrade parts piecemeal.
I might go out and by a mac mini just becuase then I cold run nearly any OS I want on it, but still be able to plug it into my existing 22" LCD.
However my small shuttle case is only slightly larger, has a faster CPU and more memory. The only thing it cant do is run OSX. Not sure if I really miss that though.
If they really wanted to, Apple could just sell ATX format motherboards with integrated video/sound with their BIOS and you could build your own Mac. They don't want you to becuse yours might end up being better than theirs.
There are two things required for freedom of speech to work.
1: The information has to be true, or at least uncensored.
2: The majority of the population must be educated and capable of rational criticism.
Either of these may be questionable in the modern USA.
Maybe release something like synaptic for installing Opensource applicaiton binaries on Windows. Get Windows users used to just going to one tool for all their software needs.
Justabout everything I use in linux has a version in Windows too - OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp, Scribus, Bash (OK Cygwin in Windows). I'm trying to think the last time i trawled the net for a shareware/crapware app to do a job. Now I just hit the repos for my distribution.
But if using an external monitor the dimensions of the laptop screen are irrelevant.
I have a 12" tablet, 1024x768 max res. When using it as a tablet, I usually rotate it into portrait mode for less up/down scrolling. When docked I use a 20" wide screen at 1680x1024 so I get the same vertical pitch, but more width. Much less than 1024 pixels in height, I try and hide the task bar, make sure all the Office toolbars/ribbons are gone etc.
Widescreen is only good above 19" in my opinion.
The average net user is also happy to buy (rent) music from iTunes, use Windows Media Center (crippled codecs) and not realise where their freedom is bing restricted.
If you want to know what the net would be like without neutrality, look at the cellphone network. Thats so bad the telcos can even tell you what service your phone has to be connected. Imagine if Apple or MS paid Virgin, (or vice versa) to limit connections from Windows or OSX to their carrier only. There is nothing in law to stop it.
I work in an IT department, our engineers all know about AV security, or home PCs are given free copies of what we have at work, All is good. Yesterday an engineer plugged in a brand new external USB drive, it was r00ted already.
Trojan attempted to load into one of the local disks and was picked up by a scanner.
It can happen to anyone these days.
Slow because spinnning platters tkae time to read data. If is is a single platter large capacity drive, the seektimes will be low.
Highspeed fibre disks are usually mulitple platters, multiple heads and have lots of hardware based cache working with them on a SAN, These are fast.
To make applicaitons load fast, you just need to write with a small binary for the user interface, and have other parts of the program load in the background. That way it seems fast to the user.
That is why windows presents a login box as soon as possible, but still takes a couple of minutes to actually log you in and load all the other startup cruft. 8)
Slashdot Mirror
Now you can have your cake, but only if you eat on approved plates using paid for proprietary knives and forks. and you may not get the same cake as someone else in another country, and it may not even be the cake you want. However you can download a good facsimile of the cake and eat it wherever you want for free.
Same - My download Priority: TV shows not shown here in NZ, or where the scheduling has been so stuffed around that it is impossible to get every episode. Movies not available in Region4 DVD at the time of release. This is a global market, and the US media companies had better start providing a global service to everyone at the same time if they don't want to suffer this form of piracy. If any of the sudios offered DRM content free outside US borders, I would probably buy it. I'm a Battlestar Galactica fan, but you cannot access any of the episode previews outside of the US, so I simply downloaded them. Not a loss to them as I am not one of their customers and can't buy the product here if I wanted to.
Same thing delaying my upgrade on most of my machines. Almost no themes, and very few plugins ready. I do like the new add-on search though, filters out those that wont work in your version. Some changes to the way certificates are handled though has broken some applications I use at work, mostly the management interfaces on some firewalls. Probably a poor implementation on the server, but annoying and stopping me sing Firefox daily 8(
Yup. For me one selling point was the British English version. Dictionary spell checker having no problems with colour and customise 8)
In our office, 4 or 5 people tried to get the download from their windows desktops and couldn't get to the download page. wget got the download fine though, so I downloaded the Windows, Mac an Linux versions 3 times each to make up for it 8)
Playing devils advocate: I think this action is completely justifiable. After all, if he had a company car and failed to keep it registered, insured, and in a safe condition, then killed some kid on a level crossing, he would be considered negligent and charged. If the laptop was in his control, is he not responsible for operating it in a safe manner? 8)
I'd rather just write Fuck You in zinc cream or something I know will be reflective to the scanner all over my body 8)
IT, Support and Acer make me worry. I dread trying to have to use the Acer webpage for support as it is hard to find drivers, sometimes those drivers are only for their US market machines, not Asia/Pacific, sometimes the downloads are just corrupted. The power supplies in out Acer desktops fail with regullarity, and I've also had to have the power supply on my personal 20" Ferrari screen replaced twice. So nice gear when working but I think they definitely have "cheapness" written all over them. I wish a High value vendor would put Linux on their gear as an option. Come on HP! Give me linux as an option on my $3000 laptop! Fix your damn ACPI crap in your BIOS on all your gear (I still have to remove/reinsert the battery before booting to get the power levels to register and full speed on the CPU scaling on my HP TC4400. (This is fixed in some of the other HP laptops of the same vintage, but not the TC4400.)
Why not on corporate networks: Two words, Active Directory. Getting this integrated is a pain in linux becuase basicly it's foreign and almost nothing in the linux world is designed with it in mind. I've got my Suse servers working fine as domain members, and I use domain accounts for ssh and vnc login, but no way to centrally manage the root accounts and passwords, sudo files etc. Still has to be done on each server (simplified for us as we deploy from VMWare templates, but harder to change later. On desktops, how would we provision the same tools the users get now on Windows, how do you publish bookmarks and desktop settings to KDE/Gnome, Konqueror, Mozilla/Firefox and Opera all at the same time. How do you automatically provision printers for 1000 users? I love Gnu/Linux at home, but would never function on the desktops in our corporate the way we want without a lot of customisation. Well beyond our 6 person teams ability in terms of time and skill.
Most of the start time in modern desktop kernels is detecting your hardware, and loading critical services. If you don't compile in all of the drivers into the kernel except for the ones you need the meory footprint is smaller and therefor loads faster, and frees more RAM for applications and services, which then run faster as there is less paging required. A virtuous circle. You also dont have to choose a journaling file system if you don't need it, and you can turn off the write after read on mounted volumes if you want to.
They will bank on enough people not wanting their souse/partner/children know they got the infection by installing a codec to let them view kiddie porn movies that they will pay up rather than ruin their lives by going to the police, or just not pay up, wipe the machine and claim it crashed. Oh dear. Chances are they wont actually send the decrypt key anyway, but if you were dumb enough to install their malware, you'll probably pay them anyway.
Easy to not view these stories, don't click on the link and don't post a comment. Damn, I wish I had followed my own advice on this one.
Setting up a good hosing services is not cheap, but it is easy. I work for government and we had a public website requirement (check out www.parliament.nz if interested - even if you can get only an asp error page, everything I did is still working 8)) For a corporate, this could have been hosted at an external hosing site, but we had to do it ourselves in-house becuase some of the data is not allowed to be out of our control. Starting with two 1Gb internet links, two external switches, then two routers, through two firewalls in a failover cluster (Checkpoint is not cheap) then through two load balancers, again clustered, into two seperate web front ends then into multiple back end databases (all redundant, and each pair imports data from source independantly so a SQL data corruption wont be replicated). Then we added streaming video- 4 encoding servers, two streaming servers (you get the hint that we could not afford down time, so there are duplicates of everything) Oh, and we have to back up the whole lot, multiple times a day. We couldn't afford to go cheap on any of the infrastructure either. The switches, routers, firewall are all a major brand name, primarily to make sure we could get updates and support 24x7. Luckily we can use our regular service desk for support and issues as we are already 24x7 for the campus we work on. If I was doing it for myself, I wouldn't really do it any other way, especially if someone was going to be paying me money to host their stuff. I'd probobably only change the server side, with Virtual servers to isolate customers from each other, maybe offer simple websites on a shared server (No active scripting) and manage site with something like ISPConfig, but customise it for my own use. I'd try and add other features though to get new customers in, maybe something like an iFolder server, iCal and limited data caps for free clients. Pay for this with advertising on the management portal or mail outs, and paid customers get 24 hr support and more data. Offer to host backup sites for companies that alsready have their own internal sites, but can't afford the redundancy for 100% uptime. VPN connections, certificate management, a commerce engine etc. Maybe even a search portal - all of your own data sorted on our server here plus google-yahoo-msn all on one result page. Templates for common business requirements - document management - webmail etc.
But every cow you can buy contains the turd for free, so everyone ends up using shit becaus ethey don't know any different.
The early problems with XP were mostly drivers runnign in the kernel and dim windows driver coders picking up their crayons and writing code for full protected mode OS's for the first time. Now 8 years later, they have to start remembering their users may not be admin on the desktop either.
UAC is still nowhere near as user friendly as sudo. By user freindly, I mean once set up properly by an admin, the user need never know it's there. If there is somehting you want to uer to do that admin cant, you can make them enter no password, their own password or root. Want to stop the user writing to USB drives, Nope, not without installing more third party applications (The OS is capable of it, but has no way for a user to restrict this.) Any way, why dim my entire f*&kn screen. Why not just ask me for the password and get on with it in a dialog box. If you are going to dim the screen, why not a nice fade, or blur like WindowBlinds does when changing the desktop widgets. Ugly and inflexible.
Don't know myself what advantage QT has. On linux there is no real quicktime player as most of the codecs are proprietary. I guess those sites that use it just miss out on my eyeballs and clicks on their ads, but I dont miss their content. I helped set up the www.parliament.nz website with video broadcasting, and I actually found it was 100 times easier to get wmv files to stream, and I just use VLC instead of media player in Firefox and it just works on linux. No way to get quicktime viewing in linux, but we had to add it to the site anyway so DRM crippled macs could see the content too. 8)
To the upgrade geeks - Apple doesn't care about you because you wont make Steve richer. You will want to improve your system and probably by parts that Apple didn't make, so you are a lost cause. Apple sells computer appliances. Apart from the pro and server range there are almost no user-serviceable parts inside. Do you complain if you cant upgrade the TV tuner in your DVR? (well I do, but thats why I built a MythTV server). I love upgrading and doing my own PC build, but once finished, I don't usually upgrade parts piecemeal. I might go out and by a mac mini just becuase then I cold run nearly any OS I want on it, but still be able to plug it into my existing 22" LCD. However my small shuttle case is only slightly larger, has a faster CPU and more memory. The only thing it cant do is run OSX. Not sure if I really miss that though. If they really wanted to, Apple could just sell ATX format motherboards with integrated video/sound with their BIOS and you could build your own Mac. They don't want you to becuse yours might end up being better than theirs.
There are two things required for freedom of speech to work. 1: The information has to be true, or at least uncensored. 2: The majority of the population must be educated and capable of rational criticism. Either of these may be questionable in the modern USA.
Maybe release something like synaptic for installing Opensource applicaiton binaries on Windows. Get Windows users used to just going to one tool for all their software needs. Justabout everything I use in linux has a version in Windows too - OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp, Scribus, Bash (OK Cygwin in Windows). I'm trying to think the last time i trawled the net for a shareware/crapware app to do a job. Now I just hit the repos for my distribution.
But if using an external monitor the dimensions of the laptop screen are irrelevant. I have a 12" tablet, 1024x768 max res. When using it as a tablet, I usually rotate it into portrait mode for less up/down scrolling. When docked I use a 20" wide screen at 1680x1024 so I get the same vertical pitch, but more width. Much less than 1024 pixels in height, I try and hide the task bar, make sure all the Office toolbars/ribbons are gone etc. Widescreen is only good above 19" in my opinion.
The torrent clients are not malicious, just be careful that what you download is what it claims to be. I use ktorrent. Perfectly fine for my usage.
The average net user is also happy to buy (rent) music from iTunes, use Windows Media Center (crippled codecs) and not realise where their freedom is bing restricted. If you want to know what the net would be like without neutrality, look at the cellphone network. Thats so bad the telcos can even tell you what service your phone has to be connected. Imagine if Apple or MS paid Virgin, (or vice versa) to limit connections from Windows or OSX to their carrier only. There is nothing in law to stop it.
I work in an IT department, our engineers all know about AV security, or home PCs are given free copies of what we have at work, All is good. Yesterday an engineer plugged in a brand new external USB drive, it was r00ted already. Trojan attempted to load into one of the local disks and was picked up by a scanner. It can happen to anyone these days.
Slow because spinnning platters tkae time to read data. If is is a single platter large capacity drive, the seektimes will be low. Highspeed fibre disks are usually mulitple platters, multiple heads and have lots of hardware based cache working with them on a SAN, These are fast. To make applicaitons load fast, you just need to write with a small binary for the user interface, and have other parts of the program load in the background. That way it seems fast to the user. That is why windows presents a login box as soon as possible, but still takes a couple of minutes to actually log you in and load all the other startup cruft. 8)