Want Neal Stevenson's Reamde as an e-book? Yes it's in kindle, in the US only. I don't live there so that sucks. ThePiratebay had a copy thou so I got it there. I would have paid $ for it if it was able to be sold to me.
I've always thought it odd that anyone would buy a kindle reader that can't read unencrypted.epub. It's like buying a media player that only plays.aac or.wmv and can't play.mp3. Hmm, remember those?
Thank god this is Linux then, not Windows. You can still install whatever UI you want. Don't like Aero on Windows or Aqua n OS X? Tough. Don't like Unity, simply type "sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop" (or similar, I'd have to check the new package name), or wait for Kubuntu, or try Linux Mint, I believe they are staying with Gnome for the default GUI.
Be carefull, be small, and stay under the radar. Never put client data whenere it can be openly accessed on your server, encrypt everything. Most attacks will actually come from your own staff, and most likely someone with authorised access anyway. What makes these sites jucy is the passwords they may contain for other sites, and email addresses for spam or identity theft. Keep your clients so anonympus, even you dont know who they are. Except if you live in France, then you have to keep everything anyone ever does on your site logged, and passwords in plain text. 8)
Gee, I have a cloud boosted OS now. On my Mac a home I edit a document using open office an save it to my Dropbox. All my safari bookmarks are all synched with xmarks, and my rss news feeds using reeder are synched to google reader. My personal email, contacts and calendars are synched through ActiveSync to my phone, and Apple mail with imap, iCal and iCard. I get on a bus and carry on reasons my rss feeds right where I left off from my desk using reeder on my phone. I then get to work, and using my windows pc I retrieve the doc I worked on from my Dropbox. Open the webpage I had open in safari at home with firefox. Thanks xmarks. Etc. All day my data is synched in the cloud. At work all our services are accessble from laptops using VPN or citric, or published web apps. Our corporate cloud works well too. It doesn't gave to be a cloud owned by someone else.
With the death of the Mac 1U rack server, what are they filling the racks with? Maybe the centre is so huge because they have a dozen or more Mac Pro towers in there??
The 8 year olds review
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
I dug out the originL Tron to watch in the morning with my 8 year oldmson, and then we played some fairly good recreations of packman and pong to get into the mood. After watching he said "you plaid money to see this?" However Tron Legacy got a full thumbs up and a grinning "awesome!" review on the way out of the theater. A very pretty movie, and now has a new fan for the franchise, so not all bad I guess.
Easy, they do exactly what they are now, but silent;y, through filters, killing off US access to all the mirrors as they are detected. To add to this, they will make sure their money supply is cut off. Cant process credit payment, no bank accounts to cash cheques or take money orders. It's the final thing that killed allofmp3.com. They could have kept on trading if it wernt for not being able to actually pay them for content that was completely legal in their own country.
After porn, it will be other harmful content, then wikileaks, then anyother site the government doesnt want you to get to. And as they have to sniff you traffic to see if it's porn, they may as well keep all those logs on you, and get to them without any need for a pesky warrant, or due process.
My old x-box is a general purpose computer too, that Microsoft locked down the firmware on. Luckily it was also broken so I can run XBMC on it. My 360 is still locked down tight though, There haven't been too many ways to run un approved software on it or XBMC would have been ported there too by now.
This move by Apple though is just bone headed. If they had just let it in, they would have seemed confident, and the bigger man. By blocking it, Apple have given this Android mag more advertising then they could ever have paid for on their own, and shown how petty they actually are.
This really still points to one thing, the Apps Store rules: No APIs we didnt write No Apps that Disney or Pixar viewers would find offensive. No fart apps, And no Apps we just dont like, for whatever reason we see fit. But Safari is OK, you can browse any adult, smutty, or waste of time site you want to with that.
Just look at online gmae serivces like OnLive. Why should I buy a hot noisy local game cpnsole when I can buy a small quiet streaming device and have a game served to me instead. The the game servers just need to be upgraded, and everyone wins. As networks get faster and ltency drips, scren res can be pushed up, and I can play anywhere, even on a handheld if I want. Consoles are dead, long live the games!
Hey, I just did this for an 8 person company. 1 8 port GB switch, a UPS, DSL modem, HP ML110 server with 4GB RAM and 3x320GB HDDs in a RAID 5 array, and a free copy of ESXi4 vSphere. On here run Ubuntu server as a VM Guest for OpenLDAP, SAMBA, and LAMP for their intranet (a media WIKI server) for storing manuals and other documentation. For mail, I used the 10 person free verison of Zimbra as a VMWare appliance. For their internet firewall, I used Astaro. What they get: Directory services, File/Print, Intranet, full groupware mail services, mobile access to mail with any phone supporting iMap or Active sync, and webmail. Astaro provides a VPN, and virus scanning at the border. When they grow past 10 users, They'll be big enough to pay for full versions of their suites, and easily expand onto a second ESXi4 server for more redundancy, and allow them to gracefully age out the old server. Then we just sell them 4 hrs engineering time each month to do maintenance for all their desktops/laptops and server side updates. As they have a VPN, we just do it from our office, no travel required. All up, NZ$8000 give or take, and most of that is just the one off services time to set everything up and move their data from their PCs to the network.
For their main desktops They are happy with their Dells, for roaming staff, I recommended 11" Macbook Airs, for battery life and ruggedness. Expensive at NZ$1600 a pop, but will last much longer than most other plastic fantastic ultraportables. Also being fairly small, and limited disk space, and no Windows OS for games, less likely for the staffs family to mess with them 8) I recommended no Flash either, to keep temptation away. Small drives also means a full disk image can be easily taken regularly, and restored if required. Timemachine for away from the network backups.
Android kernel is open, most of its applications and utlities are as closed as anything on Windows and OS X. If you want to write for an open system, write for the web, dont use flash,.net, or silverlight, and voila, open platform development!
However, open may actully provide a better platform, but "better" may not always win the market over marketing and industy inside deals.Otherwise, how would Windows have ever dominated?
And you know what, as this is linux, it doesnt really matter WTF Ubuntu ships with, you can change it easily yourself. If the default prove un pupular, it will fork. Mint will probably stay Gnome for a while, but they have versions with KDE, XFCE etc as well. Just like the moaning that goes on about Ubuntu brown interface. Who cares? the default theme rarely lasts more than 30 seconds after install on my desktop anyway.
Licences for this stuff will end up being, that you own the hardware, but only a licence to use one copy of the software that does not belong to you, and can only run it without modification.
Damn, I guess my 4 year old daughter is going to have to disagree with you. It has a mouse, icons, Windows just like Windows PCs. She can find here applications from her login (by clicking on the user icon we setup for her) and launch Firefox, and get her favourite websites (bookmars synched by xMarks) She uses Tux Paint - which is brilliant with a stylus for young kids, my laptop is an HP tablet running Linux Mint) and can find her movies and TV shows in XBMC. Yes there are some setup differnces between FluxBox, Gnome and KDE, but these days, distros like Ubuntu is really as easy to use out of the box as OS X or Windows, especially if you have no preconcieved ideas about how your PC should look. She can also do all of these things on my Mac, or my wifes Windows PC. Because the Apps are what is important, the OS is just the tool that lets them run on your computer. For me, the OS chice is more important because I never again want to be enslaved to one platform, so I use all three major ones 8)
Oh, and one other killer Linux feature - the repositories. Once a week I patch everything. On Windows and OS X it aways seems like every little app is pestering you for an update, Windows especially. - Java needs and update, Acrobat needs an update, Your browser needs an update, Windows is going to reboot in 5 minutes unless you say otherwise for an update. I have NEVER had my linux laptop suddenly prompt for an update in the middle of a presentation or right when I want to shut down to go home, or have to wait 15 minutes for a patch to apply when I boot up.
My experiance was a little differnet with my Mac. I was already using Linux and Windows, so most of my apps were all cross platform. I simply switched on the new Mac I had bought, and after reading the handy pamphlet it came with that seemed to be the entire intorduction to the OS X UI, I logged in, connnected to my network, patched, rebooted and downloaded and installed all of the OS X versions of the Apps I was using in Linux. It all just worked. Probably about 1 hour of my life to get going. This compared to the Windows7 laptop I got from work, which took about a day to iron out all the kinks. Where I find Apple lacking is when you find something that should be really easy to do (like say, synch 16BG of unprotected music and video files over the network to a phone without needing a freeking cable!!!!, or share a single iTunes or iPhoto database with multuple users on the same computer) just impossible with their included software. Amarok on my Linux box is brilliant at these sorts of things, like adding all the metadata back to the.mp3 file so you dont NEED a database to share the track info, and scanning for changes in the music folders to auto add new tracks. Mount a folder on your media device in a location Amarock can see, and tell Amarok to copy music to it. On my netbook, Rythmbox was able to play tracks straight from my iPhone long before Apple let iTunes do it. While Linux is still more flexible, it will find a place on my desktops.
Oh, shit, I had better remove Linux from my netbook, laptop, desktop at home, management workstation and all my servers I use at work if it is going to be a dead platform. I really hope it doesnt go mainstream, then it would be just like Windows and OS X.
Where iPhone wins for me is one device for work and play. I can set up Activesync with the exchange gateway for work, and with GMail for personal use. I aslo have my own iMAP server for archiving to when GMail gets large. Blackberry, Android and WinMobile to date can still only synch with one source at a time as far as I know. If the company is paying, then I guess it would be a blackberry, because it is their phone, not mine. They can block extra apps, and enforce device encryption, adn it is setup automatically, the user doesnt really have to do anthing other than enter their password. iPhone synch with Exchange is not seamless, especially if you wnt to deploy the settings to hundreds of phones. The iPhone can be easily cracked if stolen, so even the onboard encryption is useless, but for me and the nature of the emails I have (nothing that would risk the companys finance or confidential client info which I dont put in mail anyway, the iphone is a better choice, for me personally.
Oh, no, that means no more playing the indians in a game of cowboys and indians, or as my niece and newphews played it, Patriots and Scuds. No more flying Japanese and Russian planes in combat flight simulators, or playing the empire roles in Tie Fighter. Maybe by just calling them opposing forces, it closer refects another view of the situation, that often the Taliban were just freedom fighters trying to defend their way of life from the invaders. Thy might be right or wrong, but that shouldnt make predending to be them wrong in a game. it appears it is still OK to be a Marine in the game and take THEM out. I am still stunned that this is a major issue in the US, the "land of the free" where it is OK to have a dissenting viewpoint from the majority. I guess next it i''l be a new version of reds under the bed. There are already leafelets helping people identify "Terrorists" in their neighbourhood, and dob them in.
Most devs I know are coding first for iOS, because it makes them the money to pay for the Android version, then code an HTML5 version for everyone else. 8)
It's the comms lag that should actually enhance the feeling of isolation. Just a few hundred years ago, colonists in the new world had to wait months for new from the homeland, or had to spend entire decades simply travelling to vist parts of their far flung business empire. Even movies as far back as 2001: Space Odyessy got this right for crying out loud!
Slashdot Mirror
Want Neal Stevenson's Reamde as an e-book? Yes it's in kindle, in the US only. I don't live there so that sucks. ThePiratebay had a copy thou so I got it there. I would have paid $ for it if it was able to be sold to me.
I've always thought it odd that anyone would buy a kindle reader that can't read unencrypted .epub. It's like buying a media player that only plays .aac or .wmv and can't play .mp3. Hmm, remember those?
Thank god this is Linux then, not Windows. You can still install whatever UI you want. Don't like Aero on Windows or Aqua n OS X? Tough. Don't like Unity, simply type "sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop" (or similar, I'd have to check the new package name), or wait for Kubuntu, or try Linux Mint, I believe they are staying with Gnome for the default GUI.
Be carefull, be small, and stay under the radar. Never put client data whenere it can be openly accessed on your server, encrypt everything. Most attacks will actually come from your own staff, and most likely someone with authorised access anyway. What makes these sites jucy is the passwords they may contain for other sites, and email addresses for spam or identity theft. Keep your clients so anonympus, even you dont know who they are. Except if you live in France, then you have to keep everything anyone ever does on your site logged, and passwords in plain text.
8)
Gee, I have a cloud boosted OS now. On my Mac a home I edit a document using open office an save it to my Dropbox. All my safari bookmarks are all synched with xmarks, and my rss news feeds using reeder are synched to google reader. My personal email, contacts and calendars are synched through ActiveSync to my phone, and Apple mail with imap, iCal and iCard. I get on a bus and carry on reasons my rss feeds right where I left off from my desk using reeder on my phone. I then get to work, and using my windows pc I retrieve the doc I worked on from my Dropbox. Open the webpage I had open in safari at home with firefox. Thanks xmarks. Etc. All day my data is synched in the cloud. At work all our services are accessble from laptops using VPN or citric, or published web apps. Our corporate cloud works well too. It doesn't gave to be a cloud owned by someone else.
With the death of the Mac 1U rack server, what are they filling the racks with? Maybe the centre is so huge because they have a dozen or more Mac Pro towers in there??
I dug out the originL Tron to watch in the morning with my 8 year oldmson, and then we played some fairly good recreations of packman and pong to get into the mood. After watching he said "you plaid money to see this?"
However Tron Legacy got a full thumbs up and a grinning "awesome!" review on the way out of the theater.
A very pretty movie, and now has a new fan for the franchise, so not all bad I guess.
Easy, they do exactly what they are now, but silent;y, through filters, killing off US access to all the mirrors as they are detected.
To add to this, they will make sure their money supply is cut off. Cant process credit payment, no bank accounts to cash cheques or take money orders.
It's the final thing that killed allofmp3.com. They could have kept on trading if it wernt for not being able to actually pay them for content that was completely legal in their own country.
After porn, it will be other harmful content, then wikileaks, then anyother site the government doesnt want you to get to. And as they have to sniff you traffic to see if it's porn, they may as well keep all those logs on you, and get to them without any need for a pesky warrant, or due process.
My old x-box is a general purpose computer too, that Microsoft locked down the firmware on. Luckily it was also broken so I can run XBMC on it. My 360 is still locked down tight though, There haven't been too many ways to run un approved software on it or XBMC would have been ported there too by now.
This move by Apple though is just bone headed. If they had just let it in, they would have seemed confident, and the bigger man. By blocking it, Apple have given this Android mag more advertising then they could ever have paid for on their own, and shown how petty they actually are.
This really still points to one thing, the Apps Store rules:
No APIs we didnt write
No Apps that Disney or Pixar viewers would find offensive.
No fart apps,
And no Apps we just dont like, for whatever reason we see fit.
But Safari is OK, you can browse any adult, smutty, or waste of time site you want to with that.
Just look at online gmae serivces like OnLive. Why should I buy a hot noisy local game cpnsole when I can buy a small quiet streaming device and have a game served to me instead. The the game servers just need to be upgraded, and everyone wins. As networks get faster and ltency drips, scren res can be pushed up, and I can play anywhere, even on a handheld if I want.
Consoles are dead, long live the games!
Hey, I just did this for an 8 person company.
1 8 port GB switch, a UPS, DSL modem, HP ML110 server with 4GB RAM and 3x320GB HDDs in a RAID 5 array, and a free copy of ESXi4 vSphere. On here run Ubuntu server as a VM Guest for OpenLDAP, SAMBA, and LAMP for their intranet (a media WIKI server) for storing manuals and other documentation.
For mail, I used the 10 person free verison of Zimbra as a VMWare appliance.
For their internet firewall, I used Astaro.
What they get: Directory services, File/Print, Intranet, full groupware mail services, mobile access to mail with any phone supporting iMap or Active sync, and webmail. Astaro provides a VPN, and virus scanning at the border.
When they grow past 10 users, They'll be big enough to pay for full versions of their suites, and easily expand onto a second ESXi4 server for more redundancy, and allow them to gracefully age out the old server.
Then we just sell them 4 hrs engineering time each month to do maintenance for all their desktops/laptops and server side updates. As they have a VPN, we just do it from our office, no travel required.
All up, NZ$8000 give or take, and most of that is just the one off services time to set everything up and move their data from their PCs to the network.
For their main desktops They are happy with their Dells, for roaming staff, I recommended 11" Macbook Airs, for battery life and ruggedness. Expensive at NZ$1600 a pop, but will last much longer than most other plastic fantastic ultraportables. Also being fairly small, and limited disk space, and no Windows OS for games, less likely for the staffs family to mess with them 8) I recommended no Flash either, to keep temptation away. Small drives also means a full disk image can be easily taken regularly, and restored if required. Timemachine for away from the network backups.
Android kernel is open, most of its applications and utlities are as closed as anything on Windows and OS X. .net, or silverlight, and voila, open platform development!
If you want to write for an open system, write for the web, dont use flash,
However, open may actully provide a better platform, but "better" may not always win the market over marketing and industy inside deals.Otherwise, how would Windows have ever dominated?
The Licence applies only if you accept the EULA. If I dont, I can still hack the device OK can't I?
And you know what, as this is linux, it doesnt really matter WTF Ubuntu ships with, you can change it easily yourself. If the default prove un pupular, it will fork. Mint will probably stay Gnome for a while, but they have versions with KDE, XFCE etc as well.
Just like the moaning that goes on about Ubuntu brown interface. Who cares? the default theme rarely lasts more than 30 seconds after install on my desktop anyway.
Licences for this stuff will end up being, that you own the hardware, but only a licence to use one copy of the software that does not belong to you, and can only run it without modification.
In the land of the fee...., and the home of the laws bought by big media companies. Doesn't quite rhyme properly any more.
Damn, I guess my 4 year old daughter is going to have to disagree with you. It has a mouse, icons, Windows just like Windows PCs. She can find here applications from her login (by clicking on the user icon we setup for her) and launch Firefox, and get her favourite websites (bookmars synched by xMarks) She uses Tux Paint - which is brilliant with a stylus for young kids, my laptop is an HP tablet running Linux Mint) and can find her movies and TV shows in XBMC. Yes there are some setup differnces between FluxBox, Gnome and KDE, but these days, distros like Ubuntu is really as easy to use out of the box as OS X or Windows, especially if you have no preconcieved ideas about how your PC should look.
She can also do all of these things on my Mac, or my wifes Windows PC. Because the Apps are what is important, the OS is just the tool that lets them run on your computer.
For me, the OS chice is more important because I never again want to be enslaved to one platform, so I use all three major ones 8)
Oh, and one other killer Linux feature - the repositories. Once a week I patch everything. On Windows and OS X it aways seems like every little app is pestering you for an update, Windows especially. - Java needs and update, Acrobat needs an update, Your browser needs an update, Windows is going to reboot in 5 minutes unless you say otherwise for an update.
I have NEVER had my linux laptop suddenly prompt for an update in the middle of a presentation or right when I want to shut down to go home, or have to wait 15 minutes for a patch to apply when I boot up.
My experiance was a little differnet with my Mac. I was already using Linux and Windows, so most of my apps were all cross platform. .mp3 file so you dont NEED a database to share the track info, and scanning for changes in the music folders to auto add new tracks. Mount a folder on your media device in a location Amarock can see, and tell Amarok to copy music to it.
I simply switched on the new Mac I had bought, and after reading the handy pamphlet it came with that seemed to be the entire intorduction to the OS X UI, I logged in, connnected to my network, patched, rebooted and downloaded and installed all of the OS X versions of the Apps I was using in Linux. It all just worked. Probably about 1 hour of my life to get going. This compared to the Windows7 laptop I got from work, which took about a day to iron out all the kinks.
Where I find Apple lacking is when you find something that should be really easy to do (like say, synch 16BG of unprotected music and video files over the network to a phone without needing a freeking cable!!!!, or share a single iTunes or iPhoto database with multuple users on the same computer) just impossible with their included software.
Amarok on my Linux box is brilliant at these sorts of things, like adding all the metadata back to the
On my netbook, Rythmbox was able to play tracks straight from my iPhone long before Apple let iTunes do it.
While Linux is still more flexible, it will find a place on my desktops.
Oh, shit, I had better remove Linux from my netbook, laptop, desktop at home, management workstation and all my servers I use at work if it is going to be a dead platform.
I really hope it doesnt go mainstream, then it would be just like Windows and OS X.
No, I think you meant "Smoke" not "Power"
Where iPhone wins for me is one device for work and play. I can set up Activesync with the exchange gateway for work, and with GMail for personal use. I aslo have my own iMAP server for archiving to when GMail gets large.
Blackberry, Android and WinMobile to date can still only synch with one source at a time as far as I know.
If the company is paying, then I guess it would be a blackberry, because it is their phone, not mine. They can block extra apps, and enforce device encryption, adn it is setup automatically, the user doesnt really have to do anthing other than enter their password.
iPhone synch with Exchange is not seamless, especially if you wnt to deploy the settings to hundreds of phones. The iPhone can be easily cracked if stolen, so even the onboard encryption is useless, but for me and the nature of the emails I have (nothing that would risk the companys finance or confidential client info which I dont put in mail anyway, the iphone is a better choice, for me personally.
Oh, no, that means no more playing the indians in a game of cowboys and indians, or as my niece and newphews played it, Patriots and Scuds. No more flying Japanese and Russian planes in combat flight simulators, or playing the empire roles in Tie Fighter.
Maybe by just calling them opposing forces, it closer refects another view of the situation, that often the Taliban were just freedom fighters trying to defend their way of life from the invaders. Thy might be right or wrong, but that shouldnt make predending to be them wrong in a game. it appears it is still OK to be a Marine in the game and take THEM out.
I am still stunned that this is a major issue in the US, the "land of the free" where it is OK to have a dissenting viewpoint from the majority.
I guess next it i''l be a new version of reds under the bed. There are already leafelets helping people identify "Terrorists" in their neighbourhood, and dob them in.
Most devs I know are coding first for iOS, because it makes them the money to pay for the Android version, then code an HTML5 version for everyone else. 8)
It's the comms lag that should actually enhance the feeling of isolation. Just a few hundred years ago, colonists in the new world had to wait months for new from the homeland, or had to spend entire decades simply travelling to vist parts of their far flung business empire. Even movies as far back as 2001: Space Odyessy got this right for crying out loud!