Perhaps he's bitchy because he saw Star Trek as a mediocre sci fi series that somehow transformed into cult tv and he doesn't want his entire acting career to summarised as playing some alien with rubber ears.
To put it in nerd terms, you'd probably be a bit pissed too if you were only remembered for some 8-bit platform jumper when you'd written rocket guidance systems and were still gigging for other serious work. Eventually you might come to embrace your "fame" especially if it made you money but it still might not sit well in your mind.
If it's user friendly it's because it's ubuntu with minimal changes. And those changes are retrograde - removing branding & drivers which means the dist works on less hardware. Perhaps that increases the dist's appeal to masochists who don't want their graphics card to work very well. To pragmatists, not so much.
I assume they weighed up their choices and made it. What they certainly didn't choose to do is get lumbered with GPLv3. Some might say "no great loss" but if companies pull developers from projects then the project will suffer too. Now Samba has lost possibly 2 or 3 paid up developers who would have been fixing bugs, adding features, ensuring Samba built properly on Darwin etc.
Look at gcc as another example. Apple have thrown their weight behind clang so all the Objective C development in gcc is danger of going bitrotten. I can also imagine that if clang starts to pull ahead (as it already looks like doing) that maybe even some BSD & even Linux based dists might consider using it.
Apple isn't the only one by any stretch either. There is a very good reason that the kernel and certain tools like uclibc & busybox don't adopt GPLv3 and its for the same reason. It would be suicide to do it. I expect in those cases that there would be so many disgruntled people that the project *would* branch and the official branch would die on the vine.
So ironically GPLv3 may hurt the project it sets out to protect. If commercial entities can't use a product because of GPLv3 they're not going to be paying developers to work on it any more. Instead they'll fork or adopt a project with a more suitable licence. It's no wonder that some projects such as the kernel and embedding projects don't want to jump to v3 because it would be the kiss of death.
You don't know what reasons someone may have to visit a torrent site. Perhaps it's to download something illegal, perhaps it isn't. Regardless there is no reason that they need expose themselves to malware or other risks in doing so and one way is to use an ad blocker.
They probably work that way because you haven't set your browser to wipe your session history on exit. Try that and see how useful app tabs are. To me an app tab is a glorified bookmark / homepage. It's something I've explicitly told the browser I want to be there when I restart the browser. On the other hand the regular tabs are things which should be subject to my privacy settings. At the moment the two concepts are tied together rendering app tabs useless for people like me.
Sadly app tabs are a pretty useless feature in Firefox 4. They should work the way pinned apps work in a Windows 7 taskbar or OS X dock, namely when you restart your session the app tabs should be there. The normal tabs, should be subject to a user's privacy settings, i.e. to restore them only if a user chooses not to wipe their session history on exit.
On the whole Opera vs Firefox thing, I consider tabs on top to be most useful on netbooks and their ilk. The status bar, title bar, tab bar, menu, bookmarks all carve a significant chunk of real estate out of the screen. In Windows 7, it's great to be able to merge title, tabs & menu into a single line and status is gone completely. I can't say I appreciate tabs on top as much for larger screens where it's less likely the browser window will be maximized anyway and the effect looks pretty awful in XP too.
Actually they're quite valid and you've chosen to ignore them. It won't be my loss if the system goes titsup as it probably will in one way or another.
I have an interesting idea on how we can drop IE's market share and gain more for Firefox. Someone should make a firefox installer that works without user, and we put those out on torrent sites as something else. Firefox gets installed on lots of people and internet is better again.
Most people that use torrent sites probably have firefox silly.
If for no other reason than to block all the obnoxious and possibly malware ads that torrent sites are infested with.
Maybe you should read what I said, to wit - "If you absolutely had to purchase a precious metal as a form of security against currency fluctuations there are far more secure ways to go about it."
I am not saying that purchasing gold / silver is a bad thing. Just that if you do so through liberty dollars or some shady gold exchange in response to exhortations of Glen Beck then you are an idiot. There are far better ways to buy and sell precious metals. Liberty dollars were and are just a glorified MLM scam set up to appeal to paranoid libertarian types. As for silver eagles, well even those represent better value than a liberty dollar and likely command better resale value too.
My 5 year old son gets a new Britannia coin for his birthday. Maybe some day he can sell them, or just hold them as a keepsake. What he shouldn't do is demand to be paid in silver or trade them at face value when there is a perfectly functional national currency for that purpose.
As you appear to be an apologist for liberty dollars and the like I wouldn't expect a better answer off you. Of course real money has its flaws but it is backed by governments and banks who put guarantees in place about it's value, the safety of your investment in banks, rules that govern trading, taxation, exchange rates etc. If you exchange real money for funny money you will be the one left holding the bag when the scheme collapses. And it will collapse.
It's also amusing how you're bleating how we should be paying in silver funny money and now you're leaping to defend bitcoin. A system which involves hash functions and cryptographic signatures. Computer bits. At least be consistent in your arguments.
Thanks for your condescending reply but I'm completely aware how it functions. I have the client, I've played with mining programs like poclbm chiefly to put OpenCL to some use. I've read the documentation, I've read the philosophy. I can see what it does, I understand the technology, what it aspires to do and how it's likely to be brought to it's knees. As such I've hilighted some very likely scenarios the system will fail.
I can only surmise that only fools would invest real money in this system. As I said it has the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme. People who "got in early", who set up the exchanges, who generated a reserve of bitcoins have most to gain. They're the people who'll sell their bitcoins for dollars at the first opportunity, probably already have. The remainder will be carrying the can when the system goes titsup, either through regulation, hacking, disinterest or because something better comes along.
# Barter clubs or corporate barter organizations are an example of alternative currency systems.
# BerkShares........
# Liberty Dollar is a private currency backed by silver, designed to be a nationwide alternative currency in the United States.
The guy is releasing SILVER DOLLARS. By definition they are worth much more than whatever garbage the Fed is printing.
The real counterfeit operation is what the Fed is involved in. This guy wants sound money back, and the Fed is destroying him for it.
No they're not. If they were worth more than US dollars, why can you buy them with US dollars? Why is the value of the silver in a Liberty worth less than the face value on the coin? I bet the guy running this scam looks at his bank balance and laughs at all the idiots who fell for it.
If you absolutely had to purchase a precious metal as a form of security against currency fluctuations there are far more secure ways to go about it.
Written by someone who has absolutely no clue on how it works. Thanks for your incredible insight.
I've used Bitcoin and I can tell how it works. It's an elegant system for producing cryptographically signed "currency" which can be exchanged over P2P. However elegant it may be, it's also quite naive and/or dishonest to overlook some of it's shortcomings.
Namely, it is the people who got in early and mined coins or bought them at a low exchange rate who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would not go so far as calling it a pyramid scheme but it certainly shares some similarities in terms of who benefits and who does not.
How could it collapse? In numerous ways. Various governments might start auditing / taxing people who use it as a form of currency. They might legislate against it, deeming it to be bogus financial instrument. It might get a reputation for money laundering and all the popular exchanges get shutdown along with the accounts. A rival to bitcoin might appear which is easier to use or has other benefits.Someone might develop a crack / exploit which allows them to inject "poisoned" transactions over P2P where the database is corrupted, or worse compromises Bitcoin such that wallets are wiped or drained of funds. A popular exchange is hacked and all the money is stolen. There might be a run on bitcoins if the system shows sign of collapse / compromise and the exchanges refuse to exchange bitcoins into dollars.
All of these scenarios are feasible and I think it only a matter of time before the system is hit by one of them. I have no issue with bitcoin per se but I do not see the long term viability in the system.
So they block the websites... people will just use a proxy, vpn or something like Opera's mini / turbo mode and bypass it. Mirrors will also popup to facilitate searches. Longer term, a distributed p2p search function will appear which means there is no one IP to block.
What I'd love to know why any ISP thinks doing this is a good idea. Once they admit they can block IPs, what is their defence when other pressure groups / government starts leaning on them to block porn sites, or d-notice sites, or terrorist sites, or trademark infringing sites, or libellous sites or whatever? Caving in like this almost makes the concept of a national firewall an inevitability and puts the ISP on the line for everything they act as a conduit for.
Virtually every booking these days is over the net. Sometimes you can get away with reference nrs. Other times you need to print out vouchers, bar codes or whatnot. Often the important bits are enclosed by several pages of dense legalese that you don't need. Sometimes the content you need can be tweaked to fit on a single page instead of two by scaling it slightly. You need print preview, especially with ink jet printers to save paper & ink.
Sorry, but the tablets already exist demonstrating your CAN make a modern high performance tablet for significantly less than an iPad. The Vega is a Tegra 2 dual core processor device. Even if we were to nit pick about equivalence (as if the iPad represents the dividing line between a useful tablet and one which is not), I doubt that adding flash, rear camera or some other trinkets would cost more than £50 to the component cost of the device.
As for Samsung, well... wrong again. Seems to match Apple pretty well, undercutting them by a small amount. Not as much as they should be undercutting but undercutting all the same. Then you have Asus, Acer and more coming down the pipe shortly. The notion that iPad is the cheapest price a usable tablet can be made for is utterly absurd. It was absurd when the iPad launched and it is ridiculous now.
The Archos 101 is a great piece of hardware. The major fault that can be laid at its feet is the software it runs which is Android 2.2. I assume that whatever model replaces it will likely be Android 3.0 and if not Archos then some other manufacturer. Point being that if some relatively small multimedia manufacturer can turn out a tablet so cheap then there is no excuse that others cannot do likewise. This is especially true for the likes of LG, Samsung etc. who probably own stakes in the factories churning out the touchscreens, LCDs etc.
That's £250 including 20% VAT or £200 without which would be $327. And of course the UK suffers from the well known "Atlantic exchange rate" where kit priced in dollars mysteriously turn into the same decimal amount in pounds. I expect in practice that if a Shuttle OEM tablet turned up for the US market it would likely be for $299.
I just told you you can buy an Advent Vega for £250. That's for a Tegra 2 dual core 10" capacitive tablet with an 8+ battery life. It's made by Shuttle but badged under the Dixons / PC World in-house brand. There is nothing inherently expensive about a tablet over a netbook. A 16GB SSD probably costs little different than the HDD it replaces. A touch screen costs little different than the keyboard it replaces. The CPU / GPU use less power so the battery can be smaller. And so on.
If Dixons can flog these things and make a profit, it demonstrates that tablets costing nearly double are a complete ripoff. Components like 3G, larger flash may add some cost to a device but not double, especially when many tablets packing 3G are sold under contract which should more than subsidize the cost of the extra components.
To reiterate, tablet prices are too high and not reflective of costs or competition. Manufacturers are enjoying a relatively open field and simply aren't competing very hard. When more Android 3.0 tablets turn up, as will happen over the course of the year we might see prices come down to a reasonable and justifiable level.
I used to contract for Motorola and I remember an email from a VP of something moaning that he noticed people around the office were using non-Motorola phones and how awful it was and we should all feel guilty etc. I felt like replying that maybe he should compare the usability of a Moto phone to one from Nokia before being so quick to judge. This was about 10 years back when Moto phones like Startac looked great but the software was almost unusable. So many buttons, so unforgiving, so arcane. About 5 years later and my advice my wife bought a Razr or something for its looks and while it was tolerable it didn't compare well to other devices. I think Motorola's misfortunes were from bad experiences and word of mouth.
To be fair I don't think Motorola's Android smart phones are getting bad reviews. They're actually getting good reviews. But the vibe I get is they really don't support their devices very well, and they're quite expensive. As such what's the reason to buy a Motorola phone? That's probably why Moto is sidelined so much these days. I did find Carphone Warehouse in the UK sells a couple of models so they're not completely gone but they may as well be.
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To put it in nerd terms, you'd probably be a bit pissed too if you were only remembered for some 8-bit platform jumper when you'd written rocket guidance systems and were still gigging for other serious work. Eventually you might come to embrace your "fame" especially if it made you money but it still might not sit well in your mind.
If it's user friendly it's because it's ubuntu with minimal changes. And those changes are retrograde - removing branding & drivers which means the dist works on less hardware. Perhaps that increases the dist's appeal to masochists who don't want their graphics card to work very well. To pragmatists, not so much.
Look at gcc as another example. Apple have thrown their weight behind clang so all the Objective C development in gcc is danger of going bitrotten. I can also imagine that if clang starts to pull ahead (as it already looks like doing) that maybe even some BSD & even Linux based dists might consider using it.
Apple isn't the only one by any stretch either. There is a very good reason that the kernel and certain tools like uclibc & busybox don't adopt GPLv3 and its for the same reason. It would be suicide to do it. I expect in those cases that there would be so many disgruntled people that the project *would* branch and the official branch would die on the vine.
So ironically GPLv3 may hurt the project it sets out to protect. If commercial entities can't use a product because of GPLv3 they're not going to be paying developers to work on it any more. Instead they'll fork or adopt a project with a more suitable licence. It's no wonder that some projects such as the kernel and embedding projects don't want to jump to v3 because it would be the kiss of death.
I almost expected the US Military to sue Sony for killing "Other OS" because of this.
"We only purchased the machines to use the "Other OS" option. Now that you killed it, the consoles are useless to us."
I assume the military is not using the machines to play games so the boxes do not encounter a situation where they need to upgrade their firmware.
I'm referring to browsing history. Set it to 0 and it forgets everything even tabs you made app tabs.
You don't know what reasons someone may have to visit a torrent site. Perhaps it's to download something illegal, perhaps it isn't. Regardless there is no reason that they need expose themselves to malware or other risks in doing so and one way is to use an ad blocker.
They probably work that way because you haven't set your browser to wipe your session history on exit. Try that and see how useful app tabs are. To me an app tab is a glorified bookmark / homepage. It's something I've explicitly told the browser I want to be there when I restart the browser. On the other hand the regular tabs are things which should be subject to my privacy settings. At the moment the two concepts are tied together rendering app tabs useless for people like me.
There is also considerably trauma to an IE update. It's a large download with a reboot in the middle.
On the whole Opera vs Firefox thing, I consider tabs on top to be most useful on netbooks and their ilk. The status bar, title bar, tab bar, menu, bookmarks all carve a significant chunk of real estate out of the screen. In Windows 7, it's great to be able to merge title, tabs & menu into a single line and status is gone completely. I can't say I appreciate tabs on top as much for larger screens where it's less likely the browser window will be maximized anyway and the effect looks pretty awful in XP too.
Actually they're quite valid and you've chosen to ignore them. It won't be my loss if the system goes titsup as it probably will in one way or another.
I have an interesting idea on how we can drop IE's market share and gain more for Firefox. Someone should make a firefox installer that works without user, and we put those out on torrent sites as something else. Firefox gets installed on lots of people and internet is better again.
Most people that use torrent sites probably have firefox silly.
If for no other reason than to block all the obnoxious and possibly malware ads that torrent sites are infested with.
I am not saying that purchasing gold / silver is a bad thing. Just that if you do so through liberty dollars or some shady gold exchange in response to exhortations of Glen Beck then you are an idiot. There are far better ways to buy and sell precious metals. Liberty dollars were and are just a glorified MLM scam set up to appeal to paranoid libertarian types. As for silver eagles, well even those represent better value than a liberty dollar and likely command better resale value too.
My 5 year old son gets a new Britannia coin for his birthday. Maybe some day he can sell them, or just hold them as a keepsake. What he shouldn't do is demand to be paid in silver or trade them at face value when there is a perfectly functional national currency for that purpose.
It's also amusing how you're bleating how we should be paying in silver funny money and now you're leaping to defend bitcoin. A system which involves hash functions and cryptographic signatures. Computer bits. At least be consistent in your arguments.
I can only surmise that only fools would invest real money in this system. As I said it has the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme. People who "got in early", who set up the exchanges, who generated a reserve of bitcoins have most to gain. They're the people who'll sell their bitcoins for dollars at the first opportunity, probably already have. The remainder will be carrying the can when the system goes titsup, either through regulation, hacking, disinterest or because something better comes along.
Did you even read the wiki page you referred to?
# Barter clubs or corporate barter organizations are an example of alternative currency systems. # BerkShares ........
# Liberty Dollar is a private currency backed by silver, designed to be a nationwide alternative currency in the United States.
The guy is releasing SILVER DOLLARS. By definition they are worth much more than whatever garbage the Fed is printing.
The real counterfeit operation is what the Fed is involved in. This guy wants sound money back, and the Fed is destroying him for it.
No they're not. If they were worth more than US dollars, why can you buy them with US dollars? Why is the value of the silver in a Liberty worth less than the face value on the coin? I bet the guy running this scam looks at his bank balance and laughs at all the idiots who fell for it.
If you absolutely had to purchase a precious metal as a form of security against currency fluctuations there are far more secure ways to go about it.
Written by someone who has absolutely no clue on how it works. Thanks for your incredible insight.
I've used Bitcoin and I can tell how it works. It's an elegant system for producing cryptographically signed "currency" which can be exchanged over P2P. However elegant it may be, it's also quite naive and/or dishonest to overlook some of it's shortcomings.
Namely, it is the people who got in early and mined coins or bought them at a low exchange rate who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would not go so far as calling it a pyramid scheme but it certainly shares some similarities in terms of who benefits and who does not.
How could it collapse? In numerous ways. Various governments might start auditing / taxing people who use it as a form of currency. They might legislate against it, deeming it to be bogus financial instrument. It might get a reputation for money laundering and all the popular exchanges get shutdown along with the accounts. A rival to bitcoin might appear which is easier to use or has other benefits.Someone might develop a crack / exploit which allows them to inject "poisoned" transactions over P2P where the database is corrupted, or worse compromises Bitcoin such that wallets are wiped or drained of funds. A popular exchange is hacked and all the money is stolen. There might be a run on bitcoins if the system shows sign of collapse / compromise and the exchanges refuse to exchange bitcoins into dollars.
All of these scenarios are feasible and I think it only a matter of time before the system is hit by one of them. I have no issue with bitcoin per se but I do not see the long term viability in the system.
What I'd love to know why any ISP thinks doing this is a good idea. Once they admit they can block IPs, what is their defence when other pressure groups / government starts leaning on them to block porn sites, or d-notice sites, or terrorist sites, or trademark infringing sites, or libellous sites or whatever? Caving in like this almost makes the concept of a national firewall an inevitability and puts the ISP on the line for everything they act as a conduit for.
Virtually every booking these days is over the net. Sometimes you can get away with reference nrs. Other times you need to print out vouchers, bar codes or whatnot. Often the important bits are enclosed by several pages of dense legalese that you don't need. Sometimes the content you need can be tweaked to fit on a single page instead of two by scaling it slightly. You need print preview, especially with ink jet printers to save paper & ink.
As for Samsung, well... wrong again. Seems to match Apple pretty well, undercutting them by a small amount. Not as much as they should be undercutting but undercutting all the same. Then you have Asus, Acer and more coming down the pipe shortly. The notion that iPad is the cheapest price a usable tablet can be made for is utterly absurd. It was absurd when the iPad launched and it is ridiculous now.
Went to Chrome... Not looking back without a good reason...
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The Archos 101 is a great piece of hardware. The major fault that can be laid at its feet is the software it runs which is Android 2.2. I assume that whatever model replaces it will likely be Android 3.0 and if not Archos then some other manufacturer. Point being that if some relatively small multimedia manufacturer can turn out a tablet so cheap then there is no excuse that others cannot do likewise. This is especially true for the likes of LG, Samsung etc. who probably own stakes in the factories churning out the touchscreens, LCDs etc.
That's £250 including 20% VAT or £200 without which would be $327. And of course the UK suffers from the well known "Atlantic exchange rate" where kit priced in dollars mysteriously turn into the same decimal amount in pounds. I expect in practice that if a Shuttle OEM tablet turned up for the US market it would likely be for $299.
If Dixons can flog these things and make a profit, it demonstrates that tablets costing nearly double are a complete ripoff. Components like 3G, larger flash may add some cost to a device but not double, especially when many tablets packing 3G are sold under contract which should more than subsidize the cost of the extra components.
To reiterate, tablet prices are too high and not reflective of costs or competition. Manufacturers are enjoying a relatively open field and simply aren't competing very hard. When more Android 3.0 tablets turn up, as will happen over the course of the year we might see prices come down to a reasonable and justifiable level.
To be fair I don't think Motorola's Android smart phones are getting bad reviews. They're actually getting good reviews. But the vibe I get is they really don't support their devices very well, and they're quite expensive. As such what's the reason to buy a Motorola phone? That's probably why Moto is sidelined so much these days. I did find Carphone Warehouse in the UK sells a couple of models so they're not completely gone but they may as well be.