I wondered why there weren't any comments - it's because it's a fake video. I was a bit suspicious as soon as the map showed an area named "Empire", which isn't overly Elder Scrolls-like, but then the first character appeared and he's a Warhammer Warrior Priest! Here is the original Warhammer video.
Someone needs to mod the parent down as "-1 fake"
(Yes, I know it might be obvious to others, but not everyone will have seen the Warhammer video)
I didn't say it was difficult to come up with legitimate uses - after all, I listed the illegitimate uses and then said "but there are a couple of legal ones". Those legitimate uses tend to be used by the minority, though, while the majority complain that they're not getting real-time streaming of 1080p of unlimited (pirated) movies on their 100:1 contention ratio line that costs them ~£20 per month.
I'm all for encouraging new uses of technology, but trying to use current copper wire broadband for "next generation" uses like high-def TV is just a terrible idea. It's like buying a rusted second-hand car for £50 and then expecting to be able to complete the Dakar rally in it - you're expecting far too much for far too little outlay from something that really isn't designed to cope with it. You need to either shell out more or accept the realistic limitations.
I don't have to IMPORT a mac. No extra fees for me.
In the UK we get screwed for most computer parts. You can generally guarantee that if it's ~$50 then it'll be somewhere in the region of £40-£50, even when the exchange rate is up at $2=£1.
Custom built or cheap generics ALMOST always beat out the name brands.
Which is why the Sony (a brand name with 'styling' that I'd have to import) is about the same price as a lower-specced Mac (a brand name with 'styling' that I'd have to import)?
Given the difference in spec and price on some of those machines it points to (to me at least) Apples having a "brand markup" for no benefit other than "I've got a branded machine". It'll be the same with Sony and a number of other main brands, but the Mac normally ends up looking like the lower spec machine out of all of it.
...so, I should pay more for a hard copy, which is going to be less convenient to use, even slower -- aside from the issue of snail mail, there's the issue that CDs are simply slower than my current Internet service, and DVDs aren't much faster -- and a far, far more limited selection (exactly what the magazine decided to bundle)...
Given that it's cheaper than the 'real' cost of the broadband connection if the ISPs weren't overselling, then yeah, seems like a good plan to me. As for the limited selection, the only huge demos I've seen have been on all the cover disks of all the magazines, and if it wasn't a huge demo and wasn't on a magazine then it fits in a more sensible download limit.
Have you seen YouTube?
Yes, which is why I hardly ever visit.
...in a few seconds, I've searched for it, and I'm playing it.
And it's almost certaily infringing copyright, so comes under the "pirating stuff" category. If not then most YouTube videos aren't that huge. You'd still need quite a lot to hit a sensible limit.
You seem to be casually implying that it's OK for ISPs to discriminate against curious Linux users. Is that really what you want to say?
No, I'm implying that a tiny fraction of the people who manage to hit these excessively high caps might be using it for legitimate purposes, and that one of those purposes might be Linux ISOs. If you're really that curious about a range of distros then why download all DVD ISOs, though? Surely it's more sensible in terms of time, if nothing else, to just download the much smaller Live CDs and just get a DVD the odd time that you think it's worth a fuller install.
Hell, I installed my current Fedora 9 from a Live and then added what I needed from there because it was a smaller download (and because we don't have a DVD burner).
I don't think either of my recent ISPs have done (Orange and Sky). Not that they've ever contacted me, even on a 2GB (yes, two gig) cap when I run a downloads website (so I'm uploading and downloading to the server) and a Fedora box (so I can be downloading reasonable size updates at times). Sky are nice enough to say that they'll do the monitoring for me between 5pm and 12am. I've even looked for something in their control panel before but found nothing, which means it'll be my first point I raise if they ever contact me about it.
There are some ISPs that let you see how much you've used in a month, but in the UK they're generally few and far between in my experience.
What if my ISP has me capped on 2GB per month but I've never had them tell me I'm using too much transfer and it's free as part of another package?
IMO, you've either got to be downloading lots of ISOs (e.g. Linux distros), far too many stupidly huge patches, enough demos that you're better off buying a gaming magazine (which also include some of the large patches), or doing a huge amount of pirating for the normal person to have a problem at 20GB.
The only exception is people who use the "watch anytime" TV services, but given the quality of content on TV when it's first broadcast, why would you want to watch it later?
If I want a decent Mac (i.e. one that can have a sensible monitor, not some oversized widescreen thing) then I'm stuck with a Mac Pro at ~£1800. Failing that then if I go for the iMac and want to upgrade my computer I've got to throw my screen out with it! That's a large price slapped on just for having a Mac.
The lowest iMac is £800, or I can get a 'styled' Sony with a slightly slower processor, twice the memory, twice the hard disk space, a BluRay drive, and a graphics card with twice the memory (and, being a #600 instead of a #400 it may be better anyway) for £690 and then slap a sensible monitor on top like the 19" Samsung I just bought for £120.
If that's too odd for you then for £675 you can get a quad-core machine at 2.8GHz per core, four times the RAM, four times the disk space, four times the memory on a 9800GT graphics card and a faster optical drive. Again, slap on a decent monitor and you're looking at a similar price for far better specs.
That's just a quick scan of eBuyer, but IMO those Macs don't look too competitive in price vs features against some off-the-shelf jobs. Given that they've got a Vista license included (which isn't cheap and is probably comparable to an OS X license) then it does look like you get "less plus a label" for more with your Mac.
It's not surprising. When have Microsoft innovated in recent years? I'm not sure if anyone even said it was a new phrase, though, just something that Microsoft used recently.
True, but then it becomes hard to refute something without referring to it. I guess they could have just mentioned it once to say what they were refuting rather than mentioning it multiple times, or they could have just called it "supposed higher prices of Macs", but the comment in the/. post makes it sound like "beware: it's all an MS paid advert"
The article uses the phrase "Mac tax," which one commenter points out is a recent Microsoft marketing canard.
Did that commenter also point out that "Mac tax" is (the first time) both written in quotation marks to imply that it's not their phrase and link to an article that was called "Are Macs More Expensive? Definitely - Just Ask Microsoft!"? The whole point of the article is that the phrase has been coined and they're investigating whether Macs are more expensive for the specs than comparable PCs.
Not that I'm saying Macs are cheap - I'd rather custom build/upgrade and slap Linux on it - but it's not as if it's an unbalanced comparison article.
Okay, you can be suspicious of everyone - the specific act of just being suspicious has no numerical limit on targets - but the following step of tracking everyone and reading their emails when you're suspicious about them because of encryption can become infeasible.
Neighbours spying on neighbours wouldn't work anywhere near as well in computing, since your physical neighbours won't see your net activity and your net neighbours aren't necessarily going to be on your continent, never mind your country.
In terms of "slower and less useful", I meant if a sufficiently large proportion of people start using some form of encryption (either PGP or even SSL to their host's mail servers) then the content either can't be identified (SSL) or would take an infeasibly long time to brute-force the encryption on (PGP). That last part is most certainly best automated (I wouldn't want to break PGP by hand) and is definitely slower than reading plain-text emails, so it is slower and less useful to catch large numbers of encrypted emails.
What, you mean "wait a few years until illegal guns are so prevalant that half of the gangs have killed each other, while all sane people without guns are happily living their lives without the constant worry of 'is some incompetent fool going to accidentally shoot me'"?
History is a very powerful teacher, which is why most Britains knew Iraq wasn't going to work out the way America said, why we knew Bush was a bad idea, and why we know what happens when you let any person have a gun, even if they shouldn't be trusted not to hurt themselves with a blunt spoon.
But you can't be suspicious of everyone - it's technically infeasible. Encryption may become grounds for suspicion, but the fact of the matter is that encryption (even if they have keys) adds an additional overhead to their eavesdropping that makes it slower and less useful for them, if not impossible.
How does this work for Brits who have hosts based in the US and who use SSL on their transactions (e.g. IMAPS and SMTPS)? If I email my family who I've given email addresses to then the email will go from the UK to the server in the US through SSL, and then my family will download the email via IMAP over SSL, so the only time it'll be plainly visible is in the US on the server.
Okay, so it falls down if I need to email anyone who isn't on my server, because emails to UK ISPs will still go through the UK, but given the price of servers and the ease of setting up SSL then it doesn't exactly seem like a difficult think to get around!
As a businessman, I also don't like the idea that if I travel to the UK all my commercial-in-confidence business communications will be recorded by the UK Govt and possibly used to benefit UK companies who may be my competitors.
The simple answer is to not send it in the plain over the Internet then! Anyone can potentially intercept it, and if it is that commercially confidential then you're always risking a lot already.
As for giving it to UK companies, I doubt there's much chance of that. Out government is too incompetent to work that kind of thing. They might lose a database full of it, but it'd be in with a load of spam and other miscellaneous emails and no-one would realise.
It may be an offence, but they're quite lenient with it. You've got to be severely legless to get arrested for "drunk and disorderly". If not then every Friday and Saturday night (and a number of other nights depending on how many clubs there are in an area) you'd be arresting hundreds if not thousands of people!
As for not drinking on the streets, Manchester is a great one for that. You can't have open alcohol on the streets or outside most pubs in the city. The one exception is Canal Street - the street that has pubs/clubs on one side and an actual canal on the other. There's no wall between the street and the canal from what I ever saw, so I'm amazed more people don't fall in when drunk!
The raw idea of simply handing over all this information to any government, however benign, and sticking it in an electronic warehouse is an awful idea if there are not very strict controls about it.
How'd you fall this far, Britain?
We didn't. We have a democracy here, and that's how democracy works:
1) People put themselves forward in an election with all sorts of promises they'll never keep 2) People vote for whichever fraud...potential politician fools them best or sounds least like a criminal/idiot 3) Some of the people from 1) become politicians and forget what they promised 4) Politicians suggest laws that make them look good or that purport to solve some problem, while ignoring the stupidity of it 5) Other politicians approve those laws because they can't be seen to be "letting the terrorists win" or not "doing their bit" for the country 6) Stupid laws/bills like this get passed
So, our influence stopped a few steps ago. It's the main reason I don't have faith in the political system - elections vote in politicians who proceed to do what they think the populace needs, not what it actually needs (although I guess that can often be better than doing what the populace thinks it needs, as the populace taken as a whole are stupid).
Except that it does have the advantage that your email can't be read until they specifically single you out, and to demand your keys off you then they must have a reason (for now at least). That gives us some level of protection even if the government is unreasonably grabbing for power because of the 'terrorist' bogeyman. It's not as if we didn't have our own terrorists posing seemingly more present threats in the past twenty years!
I don't know, I've been using.Net 2's generics on Fedora for a while now, which was the main reason I moved my code to 2.0 when I started re-writing things (at first.Net 2.0 wasn't common enough to assume people had it installed). Looking at the.Net 3.0 and 3.5 changes I can't see a huge amount of "must have" features. In fact, 3.0 seems like a bit of a damp squib in terms of features added since 2.0 compared to 3.5 against 3.0.
Just because a newer version is available doesn't mean everyone will automatically use it. Given the license fees, I can see a lot of Windows people sticking with VS.Net 2005 and not upgrading to 2008.
I think you wanted a "signal terminated" to show your machine had been taken off-line in a 'hilarious' "I'm in the middle of typing something that isn't on/. until I submit" post. Error 404 means a suitable response was not found, which means you got some contact;)
Yes, incredibly easy to solve your ISP hijacking failed DNS lookups by switching to a service that (by default) supports itself by hijacking failed DNS lookups;)
OpenDNS have (or at least used to have) a way of tagging your account as "don't show me the adverts and give me a proper response" but it is associated with an IP address.
Every time we turn our router off for the night we get a new IP because the lease expires. As I run a Linux box I can't use their Mac or Windows "update your IP from the client" apps. If I get a new IP and forget to manually update then they'll still be giving me the adverts. That means there's still going to be a lot of people who can switch to OpenDNS but still won't get rid of hijacked results.
Slashdot Mirror
I wondered why there weren't any comments - it's because it's a fake video. I was a bit suspicious as soon as the map showed an area named "Empire", which isn't overly Elder Scrolls-like, but then the first character appeared and he's a Warhammer Warrior Priest! Here is the original Warhammer video.
Someone needs to mod the parent down as "-1 fake"
(Yes, I know it might be obvious to others, but not everyone will have seen the Warhammer video)
I didn't say it was difficult to come up with legitimate uses - after all, I listed the illegitimate uses and then said "but there are a couple of legal ones". Those legitimate uses tend to be used by the minority, though, while the majority complain that they're not getting real-time streaming of 1080p of unlimited (pirated) movies on their 100:1 contention ratio line that costs them ~£20 per month.
I'm all for encouraging new uses of technology, but trying to use current copper wire broadband for "next generation" uses like high-def TV is just a terrible idea. It's like buying a rusted second-hand car for £50 and then expecting to be able to complete the Dakar rally in it - you're expecting far too much for far too little outlay from something that really isn't designed to cope with it. You need to either shell out more or accept the realistic limitations.
In the UK we get screwed for most computer parts. You can generally guarantee that if it's ~$50 then it'll be somewhere in the region of £40-£50, even when the exchange rate is up at $2=£1.
Which is why the Sony (a brand name with 'styling' that I'd have to import) is about the same price as a lower-specced Mac (a brand name with 'styling' that I'd have to import)?
Given the difference in spec and price on some of those machines it points to (to me at least) Apples having a "brand markup" for no benefit other than "I've got a branded machine". It'll be the same with Sony and a number of other main brands, but the Mac normally ends up looking like the lower spec machine out of all of it.
Given that it's cheaper than the 'real' cost of the broadband connection if the ISPs weren't overselling, then yeah, seems like a good plan to me. As for the limited selection, the only huge demos I've seen have been on all the cover disks of all the magazines, and if it wasn't a huge demo and wasn't on a magazine then it fits in a more sensible download limit.
Yes, which is why I hardly ever visit.
And it's almost certaily infringing copyright, so comes under the "pirating stuff" category. If not then most YouTube videos aren't that huge. You'd still need quite a lot to hit a sensible limit.
No, I'm implying that a tiny fraction of the people who manage to hit these excessively high caps might be using it for legitimate purposes, and that one of those purposes might be Linux ISOs. If you're really that curious about a range of distros then why download all DVD ISOs, though? Surely it's more sensible in terms of time, if nothing else, to just download the much smaller Live CDs and just get a DVD the odd time that you think it's worth a fuller install.
Hell, I installed my current Fedora 9 from a Live and then added what I needed from there because it was a smaller download (and because we don't have a DVD burner).
I don't think either of my recent ISPs have done (Orange and Sky). Not that they've ever contacted me, even on a 2GB (yes, two gig) cap when I run a downloads website (so I'm uploading and downloading to the server) and a Fedora box (so I can be downloading reasonable size updates at times). Sky are nice enough to say that they'll do the monitoring for me between 5pm and 12am. I've even looked for something in their control panel before but found nothing, which means it'll be my first point I raise if they ever contact me about it.
There are some ISPs that let you see how much you've used in a month, but in the UK they're generally few and far between in my experience.
What if my ISP has me capped on 2GB per month but I've never had them tell me I'm using too much transfer and it's free as part of another package?
IMO, you've either got to be downloading lots of ISOs (e.g. Linux distros), far too many stupidly huge patches, enough demos that you're better off buying a gaming magazine (which also include some of the large patches), or doing a huge amount of pirating for the normal person to have a problem at 20GB.
The only exception is people who use the "watch anytime" TV services, but given the quality of content on TV when it's first broadcast, why would you want to watch it later?
Hey, I'm on 2GB per month you insensitive clod!
(No, really, I'm on the Sky "Base" package and it's fine).
If I want a decent Mac (i.e. one that can have a sensible monitor, not some oversized widescreen thing) then I'm stuck with a Mac Pro at ~£1800. Failing that then if I go for the iMac and want to upgrade my computer I've got to throw my screen out with it! That's a large price slapped on just for having a Mac.
£400 for a Mac Mini with a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM and only 80GB of disk space? How about a 2.4GHz Quad Core with 3GB RAM and 500GB of disk space, plus keyboard and mouse? And that's just the top result on the "home PCs" page.
The lowest iMac is £800, or I can get a 'styled' Sony with a slightly slower processor, twice the memory, twice the hard disk space, a BluRay drive, and a graphics card with twice the memory (and, being a #600 instead of a #400 it may be better anyway) for £690 and then slap a sensible monitor on top like the 19" Samsung I just bought for £120.
If that's too odd for you then for £675 you can get a quad-core machine at 2.8GHz per core, four times the RAM, four times the disk space, four times the memory on a 9800GT graphics card and a faster optical drive. Again, slap on a decent monitor and you're looking at a similar price for far better specs.
That's just a quick scan of eBuyer, but IMO those Macs don't look too competitive in price vs features against some off-the-shelf jobs. Given that they've got a Vista license included (which isn't cheap and is probably comparable to an OS X license) then it does look like you get "less plus a label" for more with your Mac.
It's not surprising. When have Microsoft innovated in recent years? I'm not sure if anyone even said it was a new phrase, though, just something that Microsoft used recently.
True, but then it becomes hard to refute something without referring to it. I guess they could have just mentioned it once to say what they were refuting rather than mentioning it multiple times, or they could have just called it "supposed higher prices of Macs", but the comment in the /. post makes it sound like "beware: it's all an MS paid advert"
Sorry, I'd rather have a real machine than a laptop ;)
Did that commenter also point out that "Mac tax" is (the first time) both written in quotation marks to imply that it's not their phrase and link to an article that was called "Are Macs More Expensive? Definitely - Just Ask Microsoft!"? The whole point of the article is that the phrase has been coined and they're investigating whether Macs are more expensive for the specs than comparable PCs.
Not that I'm saying Macs are cheap - I'd rather custom build/upgrade and slap Linux on it - but it's not as if it's an unbalanced comparison article.
Okay, you can be suspicious of everyone - the specific act of just being suspicious has no numerical limit on targets - but the following step of tracking everyone and reading their emails when you're suspicious about them because of encryption can become infeasible.
Neighbours spying on neighbours wouldn't work anywhere near as well in computing, since your physical neighbours won't see your net activity and your net neighbours aren't necessarily going to be on your continent, never mind your country.
In terms of "slower and less useful", I meant if a sufficiently large proportion of people start using some form of encryption (either PGP or even SSL to their host's mail servers) then the content either can't be identified (SSL) or would take an infeasibly long time to brute-force the encryption on (PGP). That last part is most certainly best automated (I wouldn't want to break PGP by hand) and is definitely slower than reading plain-text emails, so it is slower and less useful to catch large numbers of encrypted emails.
What, you mean "wait a few years until illegal guns are so prevalant that half of the gangs have killed each other, while all sane people without guns are happily living their lives without the constant worry of 'is some incompetent fool going to accidentally shoot me'"?
History is a very powerful teacher, which is why most Britains knew Iraq wasn't going to work out the way America said, why we knew Bush was a bad idea, and why we know what happens when you let any person have a gun, even if they shouldn't be trusted not to hurt themselves with a blunt spoon.
But you can't be suspicious of everyone - it's technically infeasible. Encryption may become grounds for suspicion, but the fact of the matter is that encryption (even if they have keys) adds an additional overhead to their eavesdropping that makes it slower and less useful for them, if not impossible.
How does this work for Brits who have hosts based in the US and who use SSL on their transactions (e.g. IMAPS and SMTPS)? If I email my family who I've given email addresses to then the email will go from the UK to the server in the US through SSL, and then my family will download the email via IMAP over SSL, so the only time it'll be plainly visible is in the US on the server.
Okay, so it falls down if I need to email anyone who isn't on my server, because emails to UK ISPs will still go through the UK, but given the price of servers and the ease of setting up SSL then it doesn't exactly seem like a difficult think to get around!
The simple answer is to not send it in the plain over the Internet then! Anyone can potentially intercept it, and if it is that commercially confidential then you're always risking a lot already.
As for giving it to UK companies, I doubt there's much chance of that. Out government is too incompetent to work that kind of thing. They might lose a database full of it, but it'd be in with a load of spam and other miscellaneous emails and no-one would realise.
And all the better for it, but that's another argument.
As for governments gone bad, I think I agree with the person who said American is worse and doesn't know it.
It may be an offence, but they're quite lenient with it. You've got to be severely legless to get arrested for "drunk and disorderly". If not then every Friday and Saturday night (and a number of other nights depending on how many clubs there are in an area) you'd be arresting hundreds if not thousands of people!
As for not drinking on the streets, Manchester is a great one for that. You can't have open alcohol on the streets or outside most pubs in the city. The one exception is Canal Street - the street that has pubs/clubs on one side and an actual canal on the other. There's no wall between the street and the canal from what I ever saw, so I'm amazed more people don't fall in when drunk!
We didn't. We have a democracy here, and that's how democracy works:
1) People put themselves forward in an election with all sorts of promises they'll never keep
2) People vote for whichever fraud...potential politician fools them best or sounds least like a criminal/idiot
3) Some of the people from 1) become politicians and forget what they promised
4) Politicians suggest laws that make them look good or that purport to solve some problem, while ignoring the stupidity of it
5) Other politicians approve those laws because they can't be seen to be "letting the terrorists win" or not "doing their bit" for the country
6) Stupid laws/bills like this get passed
So, our influence stopped a few steps ago. It's the main reason I don't have faith in the political system - elections vote in politicians who proceed to do what they think the populace needs, not what it actually needs (although I guess that can often be better than doing what the populace thinks it needs, as the populace taken as a whole are stupid).
Except that it does have the advantage that your email can't be read until they specifically single you out, and to demand your keys off you then they must have a reason (for now at least). That gives us some level of protection even if the government is unreasonably grabbing for power because of the 'terrorist' bogeyman. It's not as if we didn't have our own terrorists posing seemingly more present threats in the past twenty years!
I don't know, I've been using .Net 2's generics on Fedora for a while now, which was the main reason I moved my code to 2.0 when I started re-writing things (at first .Net 2.0 wasn't common enough to assume people had it installed). Looking at the .Net 3.0 and 3.5 changes I can't see a huge amount of "must have" features. In fact, 3.0 seems like a bit of a damp squib in terms of features added since 2.0 compared to 3.5 against 3.0.
Just because a newer version is available doesn't mean everyone will automatically use it. Given the license fees, I can see a lot of Windows people sticking with VS.Net 2005 and not upgrading to 2008.
I think you wanted a "signal terminated" to show your machine had been taken off-line in a 'hilarious' "I'm in the middle of typing something that isn't on /. until I submit" post. Error 404 means a suitable response was not found, which means you got some contact ;)
Yes, incredibly easy to solve your ISP hijacking failed DNS lookups by switching to a service that (by default) supports itself by hijacking failed DNS lookups ;)
OpenDNS have (or at least used to have) a way of tagging your account as "don't show me the adverts and give me a proper response" but it is associated with an IP address.
Every time we turn our router off for the night we get a new IP because the lease expires. As I run a Linux box I can't use their Mac or Windows "update your IP from the client" apps. If I get a new IP and forget to manually update then they'll still be giving me the adverts. That means there's still going to be a lot of people who can switch to OpenDNS but still won't get rid of hijacked results.
What's wrong with Rockbox? It makes your little music box rock, so it's the perfect name.
If the wife hadn't thrown her old and broken iPod out (I was going to buy a new disk for it) then I'd probably have put Rockbox on it.