This should be a cautionary tale for those who wonder what happens when a company no longer "feels like" supporting a previous version of their product shutting down the online services needed to support it.
Most people think "Well, Microsoft was never successful in this market, Apple is still strong there. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen to me," but this happened to me recently with the iPhone as well.
I needed to install an app that required iOS 4. My phone 3G was running iOS 3.1.3 (I hadn't upgraded at the time due to the reports that iOS 4 was so slow when it first came out). Ok, time to upgrade iOS, right? Well I did the phone backup and update thing, and when it was done, I had iOS 4 on my machine, but no apps. Not unusual, you just need to sync apps back -- except they wouldn't copy over. I was flummoxed, why couldn't I copy my apps from iTunes back? The phone was authorized, the apps had all been updated. When I tried downloading them from within the phone, I got my answer "this app requires iOS 5."
Oh, ok.. so I need to install iOS 5? Except that the oldest phone that Apple allows to run iOS 5 is the 3GS -- my 3G is out of luck. But nearly every app on the app store now requires iOS 5, and the App Store only carries the latest version. The ooooonly possibility left to me is to contact each individual app publisher and ask them to send me an older version, and that has a pretty low chance of success.
So I'm screwed. I'm locked out of running apps on my phone, while yesterday everything worked fine on it. I have no backup copies of old apps, unfortunately. I would have made copies if I'd even known this could happen. Out of the 10 apps that I had, only one (the one that started this whole mess!) runs on my phone.
My next phone will be Android. It ain't perfect, but I've tired of the completely walled garden.
I run Linux at home and at work. "M$" is a childish label that reflects more poorly on the person saying it than it does on Microsoft. Calling people on 'your side' out for being juvenile is not being a mindless shill for Microsoft. It means that you're not always proud of what your fellow Linux supporters say.
and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows
I assure you, you're not in the majority there. For a little while, performance was pretty decent, but on my fairly new computer with top-of-the-line video card currently, performance drops down to almost-unbearable (less than 10-fps) in raid finder raids unless I turn every single video setting down to its minimum. This was also the case in Burning Crusade, but the game was quite playable in large groups in Wrath and I thought Cata as well.
My frustration with WoW under Wine is that OpenGL is treated as "good enough," while DirectX support for the client is very very rocky. This is unfortunate because for about five years now Blizzard has been making very few improvements to the OpenGL engine, and using OpenGL disables all the prettier improvements like realistic shadow, good-looking water, and sunshafts.
And yeah, I've found VMs (mostly using VirtualBox, but some VMWare too) to be insufficient for... well, for most things I'd want, graphically. The performance was too poor when I tried playing Silverlight and Flash videos awhile back.
Oh, of course. No need to post proof that if Lulzsec were doing this for profit to help a company they would get a slap on the wrist.
Instead, just post some pablum about "storm troopers kicking down doors" to get a knee-jerk rah-rah-rah reaction from the Slashdot crowd. Modded to +5 too! This place feels like Fox News sometimes.
In essence, if you could do something about X in practical anonymity with an easily concealed device with little to no chance of getting caught, you would.
Yes. When you're dealing with a thug mentality, that's only reasonably safe method for fixing the problem.
Some people like their ringtones so much they like to cycle through them and play them all while trying to figure out which ringtone to make the default for the day. Yeah, that's fun.
Many buses disallow cell phone calls (ex. express bus service in NYC). Many trains have "quiet cars" where cell phone calls are not permitted. They're not absolutely strict on that stuff, but it's certainly unacceptable.
Loud and obnoxious activities (because really, the cell phone itself isn't at issue) are never socially acceptable around a group of quiet people. To think otherwise is ignorant. Act otherwise and you're just an asshole.
Unforuntely, just like staff doesn't harass people who text and talk on the phone in movie theaters, there's little enforcement of that sort of thing when truly obnoxious people talk on "quiet cars."
Yeah, it's much better if they exploit their own cheap exploitable labor instead of letting some rich bastard in another country do it.
You are, in fact, exactly right. It benefits both countries, as develops its own industries to raise their own standard (slowly), and from the first-world perspective outsourcing acts as a money drain, sending jobs out of the country and leaving few here (the whole "oh, but this opens the path for other, newer jobs those people could take" thing is mentioned a lot in pro-outsourcing speeches but never seems to materialize). The only person it doesn't benefit is that rich bastard in the 1st world.
The post itself is technically not trolling, but describes the behavior possible with a new sort of cyber-troll. What if you did give motor control access to technology, and someone -could- hack into your cybernetic systems and cause you to start hitting yourself?
Thus, +1 troll, not -1 troll. But it's been modded up to +5 anyway in the meantime.
That particular episode needs tons of suspension of disbelief
It certainly does, though I think the notion that many genetically-compatible humanoid races would independently evolve across the galaxy to require more suspension of disbelief.:-)
Because they believe, honestly, that an abortion is the killing of a human life, and that the life before birth is just as valid as the life So pro-choice people
Grarrr.. That should read: "Because they believe, honestly, that an abortion is the killing of a human life, and that the life before birth is just as valid as the life after birth. So pro-choice people..."
They're no pro-life or pro-baby, they're anti-woman. Most of them seem to want to outlaw contraception and are quite happy to strip women of unrelated healthcare as part of their mission too.
I'm an agnostic, but this demonization obscures the issues involved. Personally I am pro-choice, but I -understand- the reasons why the other side believes the way they do. I just don't agree, and it's not something as stupid as hating women or being anti-woman or whatever.
Why are they against contraception? Because the Bible clearly states that sex has exactly one valid purpose, procreation, and any other sexual activity is a perversion of God's intent. Sex feels -good- and it feels good because it's a reward for teh baby-making. Some can deal with things like condoms that prevent conception from ever occurring, but for a very large number, conception is the line that cannot be crossed, and anything that harms a fertilized egg falls under the "abortion" category below.
Why are they against abortion? Because they believe, honestly, that an abortion is the killing of a human life, and that the life before birth is just as valid as the life So pro-choice people can wail about how "they want to control my vagina" and other such things, and the easy response is "you have control over your vagina, but that never gives you the right to murder another human being." For them, it's murder, just as if you'd drowned your toddler in the bathtub. It's not "anti-woman" to state that a woman can't kill her own child, so they could be very much for equal rights, but equal rights still do not allow for murder. For pro-choice people, the line is drawn at birth. For pro-life, it's drawn at conception.
Now, you can easily make the case that the Bible is misogynist. That's not exactly a stretch, it was written by societies that skewed towards the extreme end of patriarchy. Its rules are clearly outdated, but if you -firmly- believe that the Bible is the unerring word of God, then it can't be outdated, and it must be followed, regardless of your sympathies.
Indeed, one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes dealt with that search for the "common ancestor" which seeded their own DNA around the galaxy which resulted in humans, Vulcans, and Klingons.
I'm pretty sure that neither Spock (half Vulcan) nor Worf (half Klingon) were implied to be sterile.
A bribe is when you give money to government officials in return for favorable legislation. Bullying is when you cut off current trade agreements and routes unless government officials give you favorable legislation.
Americans who think it is a joke do so because they never think that they might one day go to prison, they don't care about what happens to prisoners, and they don't think through that allowing that culture to exist in prisons will mean the same rape culture is brought outside prison walls after prisoners are released.
Americans in general feel that prison is a place for someone to be -punished-, and that sitting in a cell and reading, exercising in the yard, or working out is far too light a punishment. They are quite all right with the thought that there is a physical torture aspect involved, since prisoners deserve to really suffer for their crimes. I don't know if it's part of our Puritanical/Calvinist background that we still struggle with or if it's something more all-encompassing.
The thing is that Anonymous is really just an idea. and as we all know, you can't just arrest an idea and throw it in jail.
Yeah. Next, let's arrest a revolution, or a book and other stuff like that. Congrats for wasting taxpayers money!
Many countries, especially the United States, vigorously attack ides, philosophies, and methods all the time. You can't arrest drugs, it didn't stop us from declaring a useless War on Drugs. You can't arrest the idea of blowing yourself up in a crowded area, but the War on Terror has been in full swing for some time, and the latter has shown itself to be surprisingly effective. There's no reason why a War on Hacking couldn't be declared, and end up being effective either.
Slashdot Mirror
This should be a cautionary tale for those who wonder what happens when a company no longer "feels like" supporting a previous version of their product shutting down the online services needed to support it.
Most people think "Well, Microsoft was never successful in this market, Apple is still strong there. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen to me," but this happened to me recently with the iPhone as well.
I needed to install an app that required iOS 4. My phone 3G was running iOS 3.1.3 (I hadn't upgraded at the time due to the reports that iOS 4 was so slow when it first came out). Ok, time to upgrade iOS, right? Well I did the phone backup and update thing, and when it was done, I had iOS 4 on my machine, but no apps. Not unusual, you just need to sync apps back -- except they wouldn't copy over. I was flummoxed, why couldn't I copy my apps from iTunes back? The phone was authorized, the apps had all been updated. When I tried downloading them from within the phone, I got my answer "this app requires iOS 5."
Oh, ok.. so I need to install iOS 5? Except that the oldest phone that Apple allows to run iOS 5 is the 3GS -- my 3G is out of luck. But nearly every app on the app store now requires iOS 5, and the App Store only carries the latest version. The ooooonly possibility left to me is to contact each individual app publisher and ask them to send me an older version, and that has a pretty low chance of success.
So I'm screwed. I'm locked out of running apps on my phone, while yesterday everything worked fine on it. I have no backup copies of old apps, unfortunately. I would have made copies if I'd even known this could happen. Out of the 10 apps that I had, only one (the one that started this whole mess!) runs on my phone.
My next phone will be Android. It ain't perfect, but I've tired of the completely walled garden.
I run Linux at home and at work.
"M$" is a childish label that reflects more poorly on the person saying it than it does on Microsoft.
Calling people on 'your side' out for being juvenile is not being a mindless shill for Microsoft. It means that you're not always proud of what your fellow Linux supporters say.
and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows
I assure you, you're not in the majority there. For a little while, performance was pretty decent, but on my fairly new computer with top-of-the-line video card currently, performance drops down to almost-unbearable (less than 10-fps) in raid finder raids unless I turn every single video setting down to its minimum. This was also the case in Burning Crusade, but the game was quite playable in large groups in Wrath and I thought Cata as well.
My frustration with WoW under Wine is that OpenGL is treated as "good enough," while DirectX support for the client is very very rocky. This is unfortunate because for about five years now Blizzard has been making very few improvements to the OpenGL engine, and using OpenGL disables all the prettier improvements like realistic shadow, good-looking water, and sunshafts.
And yeah, I've found VMs (mostly using VirtualBox, but some VMWare too) to be insufficient for... well, for most things I'd want, graphically. The performance was too poor when I tried playing Silverlight and Flash videos awhile back.
Oh, of course. No need to post proof that if Lulzsec were doing this for profit to help a company they would get a slap on the wrist.
Instead, just post some pablum about "storm troopers kicking down doors" to get a knee-jerk rah-rah-rah reaction from the Slashdot crowd. Modded to +5 too! This place feels like Fox News sometimes.
In essence, if you could do something about X in practical anonymity with an easily concealed device with little to no chance of getting caught, you would.
Yes. When you're dealing with a thug mentality, that's only reasonably safe method for fixing the problem.
Some people like their ringtones so much they like to cycle through them and play them all while trying to figure out which ringtone to make the default for the day. Yeah, that's fun.
This why a lot of people don't use public transit.
Many buses disallow cell phone calls (ex. express bus service in NYC). Many trains have "quiet cars" where cell phone calls are not permitted. They're not absolutely strict on that stuff, but it's certainly unacceptable.
Loud and obnoxious activities (because really, the cell phone itself isn't at issue) are never socially acceptable around a group of quiet people. To think otherwise is ignorant. Act otherwise and you're just an asshole.
Unforuntely, just like staff doesn't harass people who text and talk on the phone in movie theaters, there's little enforcement of that sort of thing when truly obnoxious people talk on "quiet cars."
30 years ago no one had cell phones... things havent gotten THAT much more important in 30 years
Times change. Society progresses. The limitations of yesteryear are not necessarily acceptible today.
Offshoring is fine as long as you compensate for it in other ways.
It's interesting how we're very very quick to offshore, but we rarely seem to get around to the compensation part.
Yeah, it's much better if they exploit their own cheap exploitable labor instead of letting some rich bastard in another country do it.
You are, in fact, exactly right. It benefits both countries, as develops its own industries to raise their own standard (slowly), and from the first-world perspective outsourcing acts as a money drain, sending jobs out of the country and leaving few here (the whole "oh, but this opens the path for other, newer jobs those people could take" thing is mentioned a lot in pro-outsourcing speeches but never seems to materialize). The only person it doesn't benefit is that rich bastard in the 1st world.
Gaming shouldn't require 'a lot' of bandwidth, but it does require constant bandwidth. It also requires packets not be dropped and low latency.
The post itself is technically not trolling, but describes the behavior possible with a new sort of cyber-troll. What if you did give motor control access to technology, and someone -could- hack into your cybernetic systems and cause you to start hitting yourself?
Thus, +1 troll, not -1 troll. But it's been modded up to +5 anyway in the meantime.
Mods, this should really be +1, Troll. Please moderate accordingly.
That particular episode needs tons of suspension of disbelief
It certainly does, though I think the notion that many genetically-compatible humanoid races would independently evolve across the galaxy to require more suspension of disbelief. :-)
Because they believe, honestly, that an abortion is the killing of a human life, and that the life before birth is just as valid as the life So pro-choice people
Grarrr.. That should read: "Because they believe, honestly, that an abortion is the killing of a human life, and that the life before birth is just as valid as the life after birth. So pro-choice people..."
They're no pro-life or pro-baby, they're anti-woman. Most of them seem to want to outlaw contraception and are quite happy to strip women of unrelated healthcare as part of their mission too.
I'm an agnostic, but this demonization obscures the issues involved. Personally I am pro-choice, but I -understand- the reasons why the other side believes the way they do. I just don't agree, and it's not something as stupid as hating women or being anti-woman or whatever.
Why are they against contraception? Because the Bible clearly states that sex has exactly one valid purpose, procreation, and any other sexual activity is a perversion of God's intent. Sex feels -good- and it feels good because it's a reward for teh baby-making. Some can deal with things like condoms that prevent conception from ever occurring, but for a very large number, conception is the line that cannot be crossed, and anything that harms a fertilized egg falls under the "abortion" category below.
Why are they against abortion? Because they believe, honestly, that an abortion is the killing of a human life, and that the life before birth is just as valid as the life So pro-choice people can wail about how "they want to control my vagina" and other such things, and the easy response is "you have control over your vagina, but that never gives you the right to murder another human being." For them, it's murder, just as if you'd drowned your toddler in the bathtub. It's not "anti-woman" to state that a woman can't kill her own child, so they could be very much for equal rights, but equal rights still do not allow for murder. For pro-choice people, the line is drawn at birth. For pro-life, it's drawn at conception.
Now, you can easily make the case that the Bible is misogynist. That's not exactly a stretch, it was written by societies that skewed towards the extreme end of patriarchy. Its rules are clearly outdated, but if you -firmly- believe that the Bible is the unerring word of God, then it can't be outdated, and it must be followed, regardless of your sympathies.
Indeed, one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes dealt with that search for the "common ancestor" which seeded their own DNA around the galaxy which resulted in humans, Vulcans, and Klingons.
I'm pretty sure that neither Spock (half Vulcan) nor Worf (half Klingon) were implied to be sterile.
A bribe is when you give money to government officials in return for favorable legislation.
Bullying is when you cut off current trade agreements and routes unless government officials give you favorable legislation.
Americans who think it is a joke do so because they never think that they might one day go to prison, they don't care about what happens to prisoners, and they don't think through that allowing that culture to exist in prisons will mean the same rape culture is brought outside prison walls after prisoners are released.
Americans in general feel that prison is a place for someone to be -punished-, and that sitting in a cell and reading, exercising in the yard, or working out is far too light a punishment. They are quite all right with the thought that there is a physical torture aspect involved, since prisoners deserve to really suffer for their crimes. I don't know if it's part of our Puritanical/Calvinist background that we still struggle with or if it's something more all-encompassing.
Remember, "we hang the petty thieves, and appoint the murderers to high office" -- that's not just still true, that's even more true than ever before.
Well, Sweden(?) has the Pirate Party..
The thing is that Anonymous is really just an idea. and as we all know, you can't just arrest an idea and throw it in jail.
Yeah. Next, let's arrest a revolution, or a book and other stuff like that. Congrats for wasting taxpayers money!
Many countries, especially the United States, vigorously attack ides, philosophies, and methods all the time. You can't arrest drugs, it didn't stop us from declaring a useless War on Drugs. You can't arrest the idea of blowing yourself up in a crowded area, but the War on Terror has been in full swing for some time, and the latter has shown itself to be surprisingly effective. There's no reason why a War on Hacking couldn't be declared, and end up being effective either.
That's more like an anime 'catgirl,' IE, a human with animal ears, but hardly a furry.
Another favorite: Galaxy Quest
A Klingon or Vulcan mating with a human IS bestiality; these aren't different races, they're different species
Is that still the case if the two are genetically compatible enough to produce offspring?