Corporate Gaming is dying...don't throw it a life-preserver by purchasing their bullshit. There are a TON of Emulators and Kickstart projects out there--give THOSE folks your money.
And it's really a shame, too. I've given up on most PC gaming unless it's indie or through Steam, or through the Mac App Store for Mac games, since I'll know all this nonsense will be avoided (though you do have to pay some attention on Steam regarding non-Steam DRM). Also, Blizzard and most MMOs do it right as well.
Fortunately, that still leaves a lot of great games, and builds an eager user base for indie games. I was hoping that EA would prove themselves with this, and I could add Origin to my list of trusted sources, but clearly that's not the case. For the time being, I'll stick to consoles for my EA fix. Too bad about Sim City though, I was really looking forward to it.
This! When the next big content company that competes against Apple decides to take a move in the right direction to make their customers happy, Apple will be waiting with this patent, lawyers ready to pounce.
Based on...???
I've given up all hope that Apple actually wants it's users to be happy
For Apple, happy customers is one of their primary driving forces. It's why their products are so wildly popular, in spite of what a handful of butthurt Slashdot-types would have you believe.
iOS application DRM is the least of them all. You can run your iOS apps on all devices that run iOS, unlike books or movies, etc., which cannot be used on all devices that can play MP4 video or ePub books.
The original Galaxy S, and to some extent, the SII, looked a lot like the iPhone. The SIII looks quite different, unique, and is not a copy.
The main problem I have with the two original Galaxy S's is that they clearly look like variations on an iPhone theme. You're right that there are differences, but that's not terribly useful. What matters most is what dominates, the differences or the similarities? At some point, you pass a threshold and go from, "yes, all phones are going to be rectangular" to "this phone has the same styling as this other phone".
The best way I can illustrate it is to compare the SII with the SIII and an iPhone 3GS. Look at them all from the front. The SII looks more like the iPhone 3GS than it does the SIII. And some of Samsung's tablets are even worse, while just like with the SIII, the Galaxy Tabs now have their own unique style.
That's what bothers a lot of people. The SII is clearly trying to ape the iPhone, while the SIII is unique and lays out its own style. People like that, and it's no surprise that the SIII is the first truly successful Android phone, almost reaching iPhone proportions.
I like variety and uniqueness. I don't like "me too" and coattail riding.
What I object to are uninformed people saying that someone has "stolen" Apples ideas.
People rarely say "stolen", they say "copied". And that's the rub. When you steal something, you make it yours. The whole "great artists steal" quote is referring to this: taking something that exists and redoing it so well that what came before might as well never have existed. That's what they do best.
But other companies tend to just copy. That is, take an existing idea, and just make their own "me too" version of it.
I don't have a problem with copying or stealing (in this context). I don't think Apple does either. The "copying" that really bugs Apple (and Apple fans) is the kind where Samsung (for example) or HP makes a product that looks almost exactly like Apple's version. Around here that's dismissed as "rounded rectangles", but that's absurd. There are many ways to make a rectangle, and every phone that doesn't look like an iPhone or tablet that doesn't look like an iPad, while still being a rectangle with rounded corners, is a testament to that.
Also, it tends to be a bit silly when people call Apple out for "copying", when they are talking about adding features (like notification center, which Android copied from the iOS jailbreak community, as it turns out!). That's the sort of "copying" that we want, features being added but in a unique way. I'm happy to see iOS and Android copy from, and improving upon, each other.
And when pressed, I suspect most Apple and Android fans alike would support. I could be naive on this point though, there are some... obsessive people out there.
FireWire, Thunderbolt (they were involved in it), 802.11b (they were involved in it), the original Apple computers, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad, unibody notebooks, magsafe, FaceTime...
Maybe if you stopped calling anyone who says something nice about Apple a "fanboi", you'd start to see that having an opinion different from yours doesn't make someone stupid, a hipster, or whatever else you seem to think it means.
On *any* topic, there will be people defending something. Why start a priori that they must somehow be idiots or fanbois? (with the extra-idiotic "i", which only serves to make the name-caller look all the more the asshole)
Windows XP boxes are used as a servers all the time too. But you don't colocate a SFF Dell Vostro with XP,
Yet you *do* colocate Mac minis with OS X. Again, that's evidence that your position (and the position of the person I was replying to) is wrong.
If OS X on a mini were truly a bad choice, these Mac mini colocation services would be fraught with issues, but they are not. Instead of starting with a dogma ("Macs aren't good for servers", or even just "Mac minis aren't good for colocated servers"), you should start with it as a question ("are Mac minis good for colocated servers?"), and then look at the evidence.
Far too many nerds mistake their own personal preferences for axioms.
As for the Mac Pro, they are poor values as servers. Mac minis offer far more bang for the buck. The place where Mac Pros excel (well, when they aren't years without being updated at least) is as workstations.
To me this reads like a Mac zealot trying to justify their use of them as a good thing rather than a well thought out argument for why they are good in the datacenter.
Or maybe it's someone who has had great success using them in the datacenter, and sharing their experience?
It's idiotic to call someone a "zealot" for saying Mac minis make good servers.
Yet it's used as a server all the time. So, what's more likely, that those servers are crashing and burning all over the place and people who use them are incompetent? Or that you just have a hard on for Apple and are just fitting the facts to your prejudices?
More likely at some point they'd tout some ARM multi-core with keyboard snap on (ala the Asus Transformer) as the "future of Macs" and kill the X86 line, it just doesn't fit well with their current business strategy.
No. How is it you can spout this nonsense for years now, and still think it makes any sense? I'm sure that Apple is constantly assessing their use of Intel chips, and is looking at ARM-based Macs, but there's no way they are going to completely switch to ARM unless they can make better ARM Macs than they can Intel Macs, and that day is not coming any time soon.
It's definitely possible, but you take a silly axiom (that Apple must control everything), and apply it to absurd extremes (that Apple will kill the Mac to make it wholly controlled by them).
Is this just some hipster fad? Finding a use for old Apple boxes? Or do they offer something that linux/windows hosting doesn't?
No more so than Windows/Linux offers something that OS X doesn't for small scale deployments like this. It's six of one, half dozen of the other.
I think the main mistake here is in thinking that Apple users are simply hipsters. They are normal people, like you and me. In your example, that person probably uses a Mac, and wants something he can relate to, maybe even maintain himself to some extent, and at the very least, will be configured to be more compatible with his PC than a Linux or Windows server.
And you're doing the same thing, in reverse. You run Windows and Linux, so you prefer your servers to be what you know. It's the same thing he's doing.
They're all just computers, nothing wrong with any of them, even Windows PCs.
None of these things are unreasonable. It makes navigating the internet a little less convenient, but that is what you sacrifice if you don't want to browse without having google sniffing your every move. People need to stop pretending to be helpless.
That's complete rubbish. Most people are helpless here. 99+% of people have no comprehension whatsoever about how these things work. They are helpless not solely because the task is impossible, but fundamentally because they lack the understanding necessary to help themselves.
And even with that knowledge, you can't do it all. How are you going to go to a Blogger site, view a YouTube video, view a friend's vacation photos on Picasa, etc., without Google knowing?
No, it's wholly unreasonable that each and every person need become a tech god just to keep Google from building a profile on them.
Can what? You can go to a Blogger site without going through Google? You can go to a site with Google ads and analytics, without Google knowing? You can send mail to someone with a Gmail address, without sending the mail to Google? You can call or text a Google Voice number without Google storing your communication?
You've just listed alternatives to Google's major products (sans Blogger, Picasa, etc., which you can't avoid without avoiding interacting with others). Google's reach is far deeper than that. And though you can block some of this through plugins and editing hosts files, that's a lot of effort (especially for most people) and won't even be all that thorough.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me from NOT signing in to Google, or even removing the Google account from my Galaxy Nexus. I will have a fully functional phone / portable computer, and I can select Amazon as my app store, Garmin as my navigation provider, etc.
That's not true, there's plenty stopping you. What is true is that you can, with not trivial effort, completely avoid signing into Google.
And that only gets you so far. You still have to use Google as per the wishes of others, or forego the Internet altogether. Even with all the adblocking plugings, hosts file settings, and other tricks, you'll still hit Google dozens of times per hour without ever going to a Google site or service directly.
Even if *all* online small business purchases went through PayPal in Europe, that's still less impact that Google has on user's daily lives. And, besides, it's not like only one service can be addressed at a time.
Three over the course of a whole year? And one of them had an alternative?
How does that remotely compare to Google? I'd be surprised if the average user doesn't feed Google data any less than three times *per hour* on average, not a paltry thrice per year.
There are a number of ways that you can make sure you don't use any google services while still using the web.
Not reasonably so. Such regulations, should they be warranted, aren't to protect the small portion of people who *can* skirt Google, but for the vast majority of people who *can't*.
I don't remember them all, but I am sure APK could help you.
I've long since given up giving a shit, mostly because there's nothing you can do about it beyond being some sort of nerd hermit like Stallman. Fuck that.
But some sort of regulatory oversight might be able to give me (and billions of others) back some of my privacy. I can't see how that's a bad thing. No one's talking about shutting Google down.
You do realize that none of the services you mention actually collect any information about you beyond what your browser delivers to every website you visit.
Does that change anything? All you've really said is that Google doesn't steal the information.
Unless, of course, you are logged in to a Google account... Which is the point.
It's not so binary. If Amazon knows everything I do on amazon.com (without an account, so it's mostly anonymous), Google knows everything I do all over the web. It's just not tied to my name, though I suspect there's plenty of data in there by which they could reasonably name a lot of "anonymous" users.
But then you sign in once. Why? You bought an Android phone, you want to save YouTube videos, you want to post on a blogger site, you want to buy something online. The problem is that Google's reach is too far and broad, and you truly can't avoid dealing with them on the Internet.
That doesn't mean Google can't offer the services they offer, just that given the scope of their power, safeguard may be warranted.
No, it's not trivial at all. The people for whom it *is* trivial are themselves a trivial portion of the public at large. Government regulations aren't there to protect those that are able to fend for themselves, but for those that can't.
Besides, PayPal is sufficiently optional across the entire web with very few exceptions (beyond eBay, I'm not sure of anything of note that requires PayPal).
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? 500MB as a minimum size for Linux + X11? You're doing it wrong. Very, very, wrong.
Corporate Gaming is dying...don't throw it a life-preserver by purchasing their bullshit. There are a TON of Emulators and Kickstart projects out there--give THOSE folks your money.
And it's really a shame, too. I've given up on most PC gaming unless it's indie or through Steam, or through the Mac App Store for Mac games, since I'll know all this nonsense will be avoided (though you do have to pay some attention on Steam regarding non-Steam DRM). Also, Blizzard and most MMOs do it right as well.
Fortunately, that still leaves a lot of great games, and builds an eager user base for indie games. I was hoping that EA would prove themselves with this, and I could add Origin to my list of trusted sources, but clearly that's not the case. For the time being, I'll stick to consoles for my EA fix. Too bad about Sim City though, I was really looking forward to it.
You could have left off the last two words.
This! When the next big content company that competes against Apple decides to take a move in the right direction to make their customers happy, Apple will be waiting with this patent, lawyers ready to pounce.
Based on...???
I've given up all hope that Apple actually wants it's users to be happy
For Apple, happy customers is one of their primary driving forces. It's why their products are so wildly popular, in spite of what a handful of butthurt Slashdot-types would have you believe.
iOS application DRM is the least of them all. You can run your iOS apps on all devices that run iOS, unlike books or movies, etc., which cannot be used on all devices that can play MP4 video or ePub books.
Then why not just use Linux? Or better yet, a proper realtime OS?
The original Galaxy S, and to some extent, the SII, looked a lot like the iPhone. The SIII looks quite different, unique, and is not a copy.
The main problem I have with the two original Galaxy S's is that they clearly look like variations on an iPhone theme. You're right that there are differences, but that's not terribly useful. What matters most is what dominates, the differences or the similarities? At some point, you pass a threshold and go from, "yes, all phones are going to be rectangular" to "this phone has the same styling as this other phone".
The best way I can illustrate it is to compare the SII with the SIII and an iPhone 3GS. Look at them all from the front. The SII looks more like the iPhone 3GS than it does the SIII. And some of Samsung's tablets are even worse, while just like with the SIII, the Galaxy Tabs now have their own unique style.
That's what bothers a lot of people. The SII is clearly trying to ape the iPhone, while the SIII is unique and lays out its own style. People like that, and it's no surprise that the SIII is the first truly successful Android phone, almost reaching iPhone proportions.
I like variety and uniqueness. I don't like "me too" and coattail riding.
What I object to are uninformed people saying that someone has "stolen" Apples ideas.
People rarely say "stolen", they say "copied". And that's the rub. When you steal something, you make it yours. The whole "great artists steal" quote is referring to this: taking something that exists and redoing it so well that what came before might as well never have existed. That's what they do best.
But other companies tend to just copy. That is, take an existing idea, and just make their own "me too" version of it.
I don't have a problem with copying or stealing (in this context). I don't think Apple does either. The "copying" that really bugs Apple (and Apple fans) is the kind where Samsung (for example) or HP makes a product that looks almost exactly like Apple's version. Around here that's dismissed as "rounded rectangles", but that's absurd. There are many ways to make a rectangle, and every phone that doesn't look like an iPhone or tablet that doesn't look like an iPad, while still being a rectangle with rounded corners, is a testament to that.
Also, it tends to be a bit silly when people call Apple out for "copying", when they are talking about adding features (like notification center, which Android copied from the iOS jailbreak community, as it turns out!). That's the sort of "copying" that we want, features being added but in a unique way. I'm happy to see iOS and Android copy from, and improving upon, each other.
And when pressed, I suspect most Apple and Android fans alike would support. I could be naive on this point though, there are some... obsessive people out there.
FireWire, Thunderbolt (they were involved in it), 802.11b (they were involved in it), the original Apple computers, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad, unibody notebooks, magsafe, FaceTime...
What exactly do you mean by "technical"?
Maybe if you stopped calling anyone who says something nice about Apple a "fanboi", you'd start to see that having an opinion different from yours doesn't make someone stupid, a hipster, or whatever else you seem to think it means.
On *any* topic, there will be people defending something. Why start a priori that they must somehow be idiots or fanbois? (with the extra-idiotic "i", which only serves to make the name-caller look all the more the asshole)
Windows XP boxes are used as a servers all the time too. But you don't colocate a SFF Dell Vostro with XP,
Yet you *do* colocate Mac minis with OS X. Again, that's evidence that your position (and the position of the person I was replying to) is wrong.
If OS X on a mini were truly a bad choice, these Mac mini colocation services would be fraught with issues, but they are not. Instead of starting with a dogma ("Macs aren't good for servers", or even just "Mac minis aren't good for colocated servers"), you should start with it as a question ("are Mac minis good for colocated servers?"), and then look at the evidence.
Far too many nerds mistake their own personal preferences for axioms.
As for the Mac Pro, they are poor values as servers. Mac minis offer far more bang for the buck. The place where Mac Pros excel (well, when they aren't years without being updated at least) is as workstations.
To me this reads like a Mac zealot trying to justify their use of them as a good thing rather than a well thought out argument for why they are good in the datacenter.
Or maybe it's someone who has had great success using them in the datacenter, and sharing their experience?
It's idiotic to call someone a "zealot" for saying Mac minis make good servers.
Mac Mini is flagrantly unsuitable as a server
Yet it's used as a server all the time. So, what's more likely, that those servers are crashing and burning all over the place and people who use them are incompetent? Or that you just have a hard on for Apple and are just fitting the facts to your prejudices?
More likely at some point they'd tout some ARM multi-core with keyboard snap on (ala the Asus Transformer) as the "future of Macs" and kill the X86 line, it just doesn't fit well with their current business strategy.
No. How is it you can spout this nonsense for years now, and still think it makes any sense? I'm sure that Apple is constantly assessing their use of Intel chips, and is looking at ARM-based Macs, but there's no way they are going to completely switch to ARM unless they can make better ARM Macs than they can Intel Macs, and that day is not coming any time soon.
It's definitely possible, but you take a silly axiom (that Apple must control everything), and apply it to absurd extremes (that Apple will kill the Mac to make it wholly controlled by them).
You're drunk hairyfeet, go home.
Is this just some hipster fad? Finding a use for old Apple boxes? Or do they offer something that linux/windows hosting doesn't?
No more so than Windows/Linux offers something that OS X doesn't for small scale deployments like this. It's six of one, half dozen of the other.
I think the main mistake here is in thinking that Apple users are simply hipsters. They are normal people, like you and me. In your example, that person probably uses a Mac, and wants something he can relate to, maybe even maintain himself to some extent, and at the very least, will be configured to be more compatible with his PC than a Linux or Windows server.
And you're doing the same thing, in reverse. You run Windows and Linux, so you prefer your servers to be what you know. It's the same thing he's doing.
They're all just computers, nothing wrong with any of them, even Windows PCs.
None of these things are unreasonable. It makes navigating the internet a little less convenient, but that is what you sacrifice if you don't want to browse without having google sniffing your every move. People need to stop pretending to be helpless.
That's complete rubbish. Most people are helpless here. 99+% of people have no comprehension whatsoever about how these things work. They are helpless not solely because the task is impossible, but fundamentally because they lack the understanding necessary to help themselves.
And even with that knowledge, you can't do it all. How are you going to go to a Blogger site, view a YouTube video, view a friend's vacation photos on Picasa, etc., without Google knowing?
No, it's wholly unreasonable that each and every person need become a tech god just to keep Google from building a profile on them.
Can what? You can go to a Blogger site without going through Google? You can go to a site with Google ads and analytics, without Google knowing? You can send mail to someone with a Gmail address, without sending the mail to Google? You can call or text a Google Voice number without Google storing your communication?
You've just listed alternatives to Google's major products (sans Blogger, Picasa, etc., which you can't avoid without avoiding interacting with others). Google's reach is far deeper than that. And though you can block some of this through plugins and editing hosts files, that's a lot of effort (especially for most people) and won't even be all that thorough.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me from NOT signing in to Google, or even removing the Google account from my Galaxy Nexus. I will have a fully functional phone / portable computer, and I can select Amazon as my app store, Garmin as my navigation provider, etc.
That's not true, there's plenty stopping you. What is true is that you can, with not trivial effort, completely avoid signing into Google.
And that only gets you so far. You still have to use Google as per the wishes of others, or forego the Internet altogether. Even with all the adblocking plugings, hosts file settings, and other tricks, you'll still hit Google dozens of times per hour without ever going to a Google site or service directly.
Even if *all* online small business purchases went through PayPal in Europe, that's still less impact that Google has on user's daily lives. And, besides, it's not like only one service can be addressed at a time.
Three over the course of a whole year? And one of them had an alternative?
How does that remotely compare to Google? I'd be surprised if the average user doesn't feed Google data any less than three times *per hour* on average, not a paltry thrice per year.
There are a number of ways that you can make sure you don't use any google services while still using the web.
Not reasonably so. Such regulations, should they be warranted, aren't to protect the small portion of people who *can* skirt Google, but for the vast majority of people who *can't*.
I don't remember them all, but I am sure APK could help you.
I've long since given up giving a shit, mostly because there's nothing you can do about it beyond being some sort of nerd hermit like Stallman. Fuck that.
But some sort of regulatory oversight might be able to give me (and billions of others) back some of my privacy. I can't see how that's a bad thing. No one's talking about shutting Google down.
You do realize that none of the services you mention actually collect any information about you beyond what your browser delivers to every website you visit.
Does that change anything? All you've really said is that Google doesn't steal the information.
Unless, of course, you are logged in to a Google account... Which is the point.
It's not so binary. If Amazon knows everything I do on amazon.com (without an account, so it's mostly anonymous), Google knows everything I do all over the web. It's just not tied to my name, though I suspect there's plenty of data in there by which they could reasonably name a lot of "anonymous" users.
But then you sign in once. Why? You bought an Android phone, you want to save YouTube videos, you want to post on a blogger site, you want to buy something online. The problem is that Google's reach is too far and broad, and you truly can't avoid dealing with them on the Internet.
That doesn't mean Google can't offer the services they offer, just that given the scope of their power, safeguard may be warranted.
However, you can choose to use the internet without google services.
No, you can't. Not reasonably so. You can use it without using a Google login, though you might find some limitations on various sites and services.
No, it's not trivial at all. The people for whom it *is* trivial are themselves a trivial portion of the public at large. Government regulations aren't there to protect those that are able to fend for themselves, but for those that can't.
ONLY ONE THING AT A TIME PLZ1!11
???
Besides, PayPal is sufficiently optional across the entire web with very few exceptions (beyond eBay, I'm not sure of anything of note that requires PayPal).