The fanboy's all bought Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices laughing at the Beta Test campaign. Imagine being a Windows nerd, having done that, and found out that your phone is obsolete in less than the period of a standard phone contract (24mths most places; 3 years in some) how your Apple fanboy friends will laugh at you if you turn up with a Windows 8 device.
"Are you hoping for a free upgrade to 3.11"?
"If the Windows 7 was the Gamma test, Windows 7.5 was the delta test, Windows 8 is the epsilon test, do you think they'll get it fixed before they run out of Greek letters?"
"Windows Phone; straight from Alpha to bargain bin without going through 'test'".
Actually; it seems to be pretty much the party line. Every time we get any discussion of the various Windows 8 components someone pipes up and says "have you tried it", "if you saw the real thing" etc. etc. Every analyst house has completely overestimated the success of Windows phone 7 and Windows 8 in every way. In the same time when Tommi Ahonen was able to give accurate Windows Phone market share forecasts. Have a look at a almost any review; They say "it's great but the price is too high"
Microsoft should have charged $300, not $600 for the Surface (businessinsider.com)
"The problem is these things are priced way too high. Look at the history of tablet products priced above the iPad. Not pretty," he said today in a phone interview. (IDC)
"Microsoft needs hack a third off Surface RT prices and widen distribution to give the fondleslab a fighting chance to compete," [Forbes]
Look at the difference between an Android tablet priced for $300 and an Android for $600. One of them is a great value device with real compromises to bring it down to price and the other is a really great no questions device. You can't write a review which says "it's great but it's only worth half it's price". What you mean is "it's crap for the price and they should cut the price to a level where it's worth the money". The entire media is running scared of naming the pile of garbage that is Surface. Have a look at how carefully they never criticize the low resolution of surface; They always prefix with some Microsoft marketing statement; for example extreme tech writes:
Microsoft was at pains to point out that the Surface RT's low resolution (1366×768) doesn't necessarily mean
etc. etc.
Try to find one of the mainstream reviews which mentions that the surfaces resolution, at 148 PPI, is worse than almost any modern tablet. As a point of reference; the iPad has 264 PPI, the Nexus 7 has 216 PPI and the iPad mini has 163 PPI. The Google Nexus 10 with a 300 PPI screen is a completely different league. With a screen like that the correct price for a Surface is in fact around $250. You would have to go back to the very original iPad screen to find an Apple product with a lower resolution screen. The same thing repeats with mention of the terrible user interface experience - always gently skipped over or we are told "you can get used to it fast". Again with the app store, almost every review completely ignores the quality of the apps ported from iOS.
Have a look on any site with "consumer reviews". You will probably find more positive reviews than there are people outside Microsoft with tablets, and any review which reads as if someone actually used the product will be voted down out of visibility.
I think that the great thing is that consumers have finally realised that there is a Microsoft party line; have realised that that line is everywhere and that they are choosing to ignore it.
Can't be that hard to create a custom app if need be that uses a more secure backend.
Almost anyone can create an app that doesn't communicate with all the people you need. In fact it's basically one line of code ("echo $1 | gpg $options"). The difficulty comes when you want to actually deliver communications. For that SMS, Skype, POTS, email currently have an unbeatable advantage in their particular domains and taken overall there's almost nothing which comes close to competing.
SMS is almost impossible - it works on a bunch of non-programmable dumbphones. This means that if you know someone's mobile number you know you can send them a message. There's no way you can replace those phones. If you could just get something which came close to skype in terms of availability to different people I would be impressed.
Technically, since vaccines are only ~80% effective (very rough estimate depending on the vaccine, etc), a large number of people who get the vaccine aren't protected either. These are the people who need to be protected by herd immunity. These are the people who are hurt by the anti-vaxxers.
And you never know, you might be one of those whose vaccine didn't work.
More importantly your children may be. I think one off the most important things that can be done in this debate is for parents to try to insist on their schools demanding vaccination certificates from all children present or specific medical certificates with statements of vaccine allergies making vaccination impossible.
Gradually we will have children segregated into two groups; those in schools which do have vaccines and those in schools that don't. Then one day we will have a great learning experience for the parents... uh... when we realise that all of the people on one school have autism.... I guess.
Your parents may not understand how to use that technology, but they understand its implications as they saw the world change as it became widely used.
There are some things that they get, sure, but most of the information retrieval that people see is or seems unstructured. E.g. google. They have no idea that you could do something like (in pseudo SQL)
Select emailer.name, emailer.id, friend.name, friend.id, email.body_subject, email.id, friend.sedition_rating, from emails, people as emailer, people as friend, friendship where friend.id = friendship.a_id and friendship.b_id = $target_person, and email.body_subject in (select subject from email_subjects where subject_area = "political" or subject_area = "fishing" );
and get a complete list of emails sent to your friends on political subjects and fishing (where they know you sometimes meet your political contacts) in order to start guessing who else might be worth picking up and interrogating to find out more about your own political activities. The old people think of email as something like faster/instant letters. They definitely don't understand the implications of the structured data included and the ease of feeding such data into databases.
In many ways, the "little bit of knowledge" is much more dangerous than no knowledge. The whole "I've got nothing to hide" comes from not understanding that what you wanted to hide might be something that you didn't even know about yourself. E.g. that two of your friends are doing something secret that you would want to support if you knew about it but wouldn't want the government to know about.
You are of course carrying out argument ad Hominem. If you can't answer the critique except by insulting the person criticising you then you have failed already. but you do require an answer:
Whilst Russia is far down the world press freedom index other countries like the USA have been falling fast. It's most likely a mistake to think that wherever you come from is definitely going to stay superior without your working for it. I think Russians who have been having to fight for their freedom recently and can frankly and clearly see that they often aren't winning that fight may have plenty to tell those of us who just sit and assume that we are free.
Lots of the freedom in the US and other liberal democracies used to be based on the idea that individuals can privately and quitely act on their beliefs and discuss them with friends without fear. Occasionally someone comes up with a new idea which convinces other people. If that new idea gets around to many people then we get a change in the whole society. In totalitarian countries some time early in that process an informer will report the idea to the government. If the government doesn't like the idea then they nip it in the bud and silently arrest all the people related to the idea in a way which causes no disruption to the society.
Similar attacks ideas do happen in the USA; look at some of the things that happened to the occupy movements. Look at recent scandles with undercover policemen infiltrating environmental movements in the UK. If the only thing which was different between us and the totalitarian countries - the lack of right for the government to spy on everyone - goes away, then there's no reason to think that this won't end up being abused.
This is not wikipedia. Bald assertions serve to move the debate forward and show the baseless assumptions of the other side. If you think there are facts against what someone said state them. If you think that proving someone is completely wrong will help your case then provide the citation. If you can't be bothered then as in any debate, you lose. Just go and read XKCD for strength.
on this, but Win 8 is probably a better fit for inexperienced users than anything else out there right now.
Please remember that it's for usability it's better to go with testing with multiple users than opinion since what seems to an technology expert to be good for a beginner might not actually be. In this case the testing has been done and a summary is avialable.
having two environments on a single device is a prescription for usability problems for several reasons
Users have to learn and remember where to go for which features
[..]
Switching between environments increases the interaction cost of using multiple features.
[etc... ]
Read the full report to get the rest. Basically added to an interface which has been designed for graphic effect rather than usability:
the new look sacrifices usability on the altar of looking different than traditional GUIs
this all adds up to a system which will take much longer to learn and have much higher training costs than other UIs which exist currently, including Windows 7.
So use the desktop interface then. It's still there.
You should have a look at this usability report which will help you understand it better. Basic summary: applications are written for either the desktop or the Metro interface. Where the apps are written for a particular interface you have to use that interface to use the app. There are some places where two different apps have the same name on both sides (for example "Internet Explorer" exists as both a Metro and a Desktop app) but you can see that they are separate from the way that they don't show the same Window list. Imagine the confusion which can happen if you use "Metro Internet Explorer" started from another metro app and then a desktop app also opens "Classic Internet Explorer".
All this confusiion adds up to an interface which very much slows down and confuses the user.
Yes; More so in Asia. However in Europe there are also some really interesting dodgy VOIP providers particularly incoming towards moible providers (note that call completion costs lots more towards many mobile operators than it costs their own customers.. see if you can think of a business plan based on that). The problems are a bit different, but there is a whole load of interesting stuff that comes out from deregulation.
Personally I think we are getting pretty close to the stage where we will have to give up on POTS. There are just too many security and structural problems whilst the whole cost structure is becoming impossible and at the same time it is becoming fully dependent on VOIP and so doesn't realy provide any stability advantages over IP telephony. I just hope that someone makes this as a decision and makes sure that we get proper emergency services and security on IP before POTS collapses.
This is a far more complex situation than that. Much closer to BGP than mere STP
In a simple way; imagine that your neigboring multi-layer router is very well connected but has a memory problem on that means that 30% of the IP packets through it outgoing on certain outgoing ports get lost.
When you build your spanning tree you get what seems to be complete connectivity, however, when your users send connections to destinations which route through those ports on your neighbor router then their connections work terribly.
This is not something which can be solved by the individual other router (first customer's carrier) or end router (the rural carrier); Only by identifying which router is causing the problem. The problem with that is it requires work and is probably not profitable; See the previous AC posting.
Nope; there is very much related bullshit going on more or less everywhere (except direct international calls which cost so much that nobody wants to drop them). It's just more visible in the US 'cos the rest of us are too lazy or beaten down to compain.
If you can't route it for more than what you charge (on average) then you're not charging enough. You can't just drop the call!
The way this is being described it's very likely that the carrier of the person calling the rural subscriber doesn't even know this is being done. Notice that they describe calls completing and then being cut off. In the statistics those look like successful calls. Probably even more so because I will bet that the carrier in the middle reports a normal call end back in each direction.
What's happening is that some intermediate carrier is promising to deliver the call for a very cheap amount; signing a contract with the VOIP carrier which is doing the least cost routing and then profiting by droping those calls which wouldn't make mone.
The "Least cost routing" isn't directly to blame. It's a cheap and dodgy intermediate carrier woul is doing exactly what you say they shouldn't in a way that nobody can easily spot.
If they can earn more money in the city, then that is probably because the benefit they provide to society is higher in the city. We are all poorer because rural citizens are underperforming their potential.
Or alternatively; the benefit they provide to society in terms of stability of food availability, particularly in wartime; in terms of distributing the population and providing places for support and evacuation in the case of a failure of a city; in terms of maintaining culture and crop variety and a bunch of other things, are not measurable by normal market economics.
It's up to the customer(s) to get together and test the different phone services that are doing this and make a detailed case to the FCC and FTC.
This is totally impractical. In order to test for this problem you need to make automated repeated long calls from many different locations towards a particular number and prove that it is statistically much worse than other numbers elsewhere. The only people who have this capability are the phone companies and even they don't all do it that widely.
Now that this has been reported, basically the FCC should demand that carriers, especially cheap VOIP providers, start testing it and audit them to make sure that they do.
However, Seagate's "hard drive division" is not Seagate. Buying out their business unit, shutting it down, and transferring the business to a Samsung business unit, doesn't make Samsung seagate.
How are your feelings about this relevant to the discussion? What matters is the man's feelings - maybe he ascribed blame to Samsung however logical or illogical. What also matters are Samsung's feelings - did they feel they would be fairly judged. Finally what matters is the mans honesty.
The man lied. He got on the jury in a situation where normally he would have been barred. He then, according to his own admission, broke the law in order to damage Samsung. Those are the facts. The only question is whether Apple knew about his dishonesty and so was complicit. It seems that they did not. This shows that their claim that Samsung should have known was unreasonable.
As far as I'm concerned it's war now [...] Fuck these scum, any way possible.
Totally; but sharing their music is not a way of doing that. Remember the studies that show that "pirates" buy more music. Remember that Bill Gates said "if they are going to pirate then I want them to pirate windows" (more or less; I didn't actually look up the quote). Anything which supports the RIAA keeping their monopoly is a bad thing.
The best way of hurting the RIAA and MPAA is to, whenever you hear of an artist from them, instead publicise some independent artists who are as good or better. Try to push especially artists who are anti RIAA. If you are good at film or music, try to create some art independent of them.
I don't see that breaking the law to distribute their music and so give them publicity has any place in such a war. It might make sense to break in to break into their web sites and delete the music; maybe to put up banners protesting what they do and talking about alternatives.
I think the main thing was pressing the on button. After that almost everything works better, including the fact that you don't actually have to reach up to touch the screen to launch programs since it's got a proper desktop computer interface.
I think Kim is, a definite lesson here. What he was doing is really similar to running a Tor exit node but his attitude to it was almost guaranteed to get him into trouble. If you do plan to run one, you want to do a bunch of things differently from the way he does it. Here are some ideas, but remember that some of them might be a really bad idea in one place and a fine idea in a different one. Talk to not just a lawyer, but a lawyer who is actually working for you (more later).
Make sure you, yourself are squeaky clean. Don't break other laws even if you disagree with them. For example, I'm deeply opposed to the media industry (RIAA & MPAA) but I don't consider it a terrible life threatening hardship to go without their products. Thus, if I actually for some sick reason or other found myself wanting to listen to Lady Gaga I would go out and buy a DRM free CD. I would rip it, however that is legal where I live so it's not a legal risk. Make sure that all your media, software etc. is 100% legal.
Secondly; Kim seems to have been setting out to tweak the whiskers of big media. His moral case was never very strong. Make very sure that the reason that you are involved is strongly about protected free speech. Make your views clear; make sure that they are openly registered somewhere.
Thirdly; People in Kim's organisation seem to have been caught supporting piracy and so on. You might want to see when you can identify pirating connections and block them. Nice is to show a little page telling them you identified them (e.g. from the identifiers in their traffic) and explaining why they are overloading the system. You want to be really active in blocking or even hunting down users that are invovled in things like child pornography. This is a bit difficult; merely reporting something might make you of interest; however if you are active in combatting child pornographers this makes it difficult to accuse you of supporting them.
Forthly; Kim was trying to make a profitable service; this makes it easy to portray him as greedy sponger. Make sure you don't accept any money for your work; not even expenses.
Fifthly; where Kim was all about personality and basically painted a big target sign on himself, consider hiding behind an association. Get together as a group of people who believe in tor, and have a leadership of people who are not actively involved in any way in the day to day running of the service (best if they have no practical knowledge of where the servers are and who owns them. )
Having an association will also allow you to do a bunch of legal things; e.g. hiring a lawyer as a group; which would be difficult otherwise. You will be able to talk to the government as a group. If they say that what you are doing is illegal, you will be able to take them to court without any particular individual having to risk taking the stand for what they are already doing.
Have you used Windows 8 for more than 30 seconds in a store? I'm using it right now on a 6-year-old laptop. Windows 8 is just fine. It's certainly superior to IOS in every imaginable way.
The available advice on designing for the "modern UI style" seems to guide designers to create applications with extraordinarily low information density. See, for example
The tablet version of Windows 8 introduces a bunch of complicated gestures that are easy to get wrong and thus dramatically reduce the UI's learnability.
Oh no.. that's not what I was looking for. I guess the visual design must be better than iOS:
The Windows 8 UI is completely flat in what used to be called the "Metro" style and is now called the "Modern UI." There's no pseudo-3D or lighting model to cast subtle shadows that indicate what's clickable
Maybe it's the new powerful features they added over Windows 7?
One of the worst aspects of Windows 8 for power users is that the product's very name has become a misnomer. "Windows" no longer supports multiple windows on the screen
Maybe the sacrifice is worth it because it improves the desktop version?
. On a regular PC, Windows 8 is Mr. Hyde: a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their productivity.
My only disappointment with the Surface is its low resolution. I've been rocking 1920x1200 for 6 years, and just got 2560x1440 on the desktop. I don't want to go backwards.
For most people it seems that the main disappointment is the low quality of the apps, even where there are any available, and the lack of responsiveness of those apps compared to the swishy interface. Given this, the only thing surface is really good for is acting as a video player. In that role, the low resolution screen is probably less important than in other roles.
MS doesn't pay anyone to put their OS on a system. Utterly false but still modded up by fanbois as fact.
Microsoft is paying Nokia over $200 per phone to put their crapware onto Nokia's systems. I don't know exactly what the situation is now, but traditionally Microsoft charged PC vendors per PC with Windows installed but then gave them a big payment towards marketing costs, typically conditional on exclusive use of Windows for domestic use.
Just how much does Dell get from installing crapware?
I expect that that would be a deep secret inside Dell, even if they can get an actual complete picture (for example they might be paid more if the crapware is actually used once). The best estimates I can find are several tens of dollars per PC.
Maybe a better value would be the cost of getting rid of it; Microsoft charges $99.
Alternatively you could think of the value to the customer, where it frees up memory and speeds up the system considerably. This could be easily equivalent to a $500 upgrade in syste specifications.
In any case, it's pretty clear that getting a clean Ubuntu over a crapware laden Windows for a mere $50 is pretty good value.
I don't see the point in showing Dell there is a demand for Linux from the factory - not artificially like that, anyway.
You are kind of right; if Dell doesn't provide any value whatsoever then it's better to get the Windows laptop in the right jurisdiction (one where Windows rebates are enforced) then work through the pain of forcing them to refund you for Windows. However, I don't believe that's the case. Furthermore, the hassle of getting a refund in MS Windows is quite big and if you don't do that you are basically contributing funds to a company which is trying to stop you from working and communicating. Giving money to your enemy and an enemy of humanity is stupid. Instead of getting the Dell, why not go out and find a clone without Windows or at least with an illegal copy which you can immediately delete?
What do I get out of it?
When something doesn't work out of the box, you call up support; they fix your problem with your own OS running (otherwise; they tell you to reinstall windows)
You have a reference version of Linux which is configured to fully use the hardware. You can back it up then view the backup whenever you have a config problem
You know that all the hardware has been selected so that device drivers are available. N.B. often things such as wireless hardware are different from version to version.
You know that there will be support for the other Linux users of the hardware, so you will benefit from that indirectly even if your own OS install is unsupported
You get a crapware free OS install out of the box which you can start using straight away.
You really think Dell spent a lot of time on drivers when they largely build their laptops from components from other companies anyway?
Most of the far east manufacturers only provide a Windows driver. There is a big effort involved in selecting and purchasing reliably components for which Linux support is possible. Even in many cases where the support is possible, Dell will not have found a decent Linux driver for modern hardware and will have had to make some improvements.
I wouldn't even use Ubuntu, and think I should pay extra for it just to prove a point that won't go anywhere anyway?
You don't need to run it to benefit from being able to back it up and then restore at least the/etc/ directory on your new install where you can see any special tricks they used to get everything working perfectly.
Anything megaupload deleted following a DMCA request could immediately be posted again by someone else.
Most criminals are good at following the letter of the law but breaking its spirit.
If they followed the letter of the law then they aren't criminals. That's what "law" means. To be honest, what you really mean is "most dishonest people tend to pretend to follow the letter of the law whilst actually cheating and being to stupid to shut up when they are recorded". I suspect that will get Kim in the end, but in the mean time there seems to be a major due process fail on the side of the US authorities. If they can't fix this Kim should be allowed free and the investigators and prosecutors involved should be disciplined for incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
The fanboy's all bought Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices laughing at the Beta Test campaign. Imagine being a Windows nerd, having done that, and found out that your phone is obsolete in less than the period of a standard phone contract (24mths most places; 3 years in some) how your Apple fanboy friends will laugh at you if you turn up with a Windows 8 device.
"Are you hoping for a free upgrade to 3.11"?
"If the Windows 7 was the Gamma test, Windows 7.5 was the delta test, Windows 8 is the epsilon test, do you think they'll get it fixed before they run out of Greek letters?"
"Windows Phone; straight from Alpha to bargain bin without going through 'test'".
That's not the party line, citizen.
Actually; it seems to be pretty much the party line. Every time we get any discussion of the various Windows 8 components someone pipes up and says "have you tried it", "if you saw the real thing" etc. etc. Every analyst house has completely overestimated the success of Windows phone 7 and Windows 8 in every way. In the same time when Tommi Ahonen was able to give accurate Windows Phone market share forecasts. Have a look at a almost any review; They say "it's great but the price is too high"
Look at the difference between an Android tablet priced for $300 and an Android for $600. One of them is a great value device with real compromises to bring it down to price and the other is a really great no questions device. You can't write a review which says "it's great but it's only worth half it's price". What you mean is "it's crap for the price and they should cut the price to a level where it's worth the money". The entire media is running scared of naming the pile of garbage that is Surface. Have a look at how carefully they never criticize the low resolution of surface; They always prefix with some Microsoft marketing statement; for example extreme tech writes:
etc. etc.
Try to find one of the mainstream reviews which mentions that the surfaces resolution, at 148 PPI, is worse than almost any modern tablet. As a point of reference; the iPad has 264 PPI, the Nexus 7 has 216 PPI and the iPad mini has 163 PPI. The Google Nexus 10 with a 300 PPI screen is a completely different league. With a screen like that the correct price for a Surface is in fact around $250. You would have to go back to the very original iPad screen to find an Apple product with a lower resolution screen. The same thing repeats with mention of the terrible user interface experience - always gently skipped over or we are told "you can get used to it fast". Again with the app store, almost every review completely ignores the quality of the apps ported from iOS.
Have a look on any site with "consumer reviews". You will probably find more positive reviews than there are people outside Microsoft with tablets, and any review which reads as if someone actually used the product will be voted down out of visibility.
I think that the great thing is that consumers have finally realised that there is a Microsoft party line; have realised that that line is everywhere and that they are choosing to ignore it.
Can't be that hard to create a custom app if need be that uses a more secure backend.
Almost anyone can create an app that doesn't communicate with all the people you need. In fact it's basically one line of code ("echo $1 | gpg $options"). The difficulty comes when you want to actually deliver communications. For that SMS, Skype, POTS, email currently have an unbeatable advantage in their particular domains and taken overall there's almost nothing which comes close to competing.
SMS is almost impossible - it works on a bunch of non-programmable dumbphones. This means that if you know someone's mobile number you know you can send them a message. There's no way you can replace those phones. If you could just get something which came close to skype in terms of availability to different people I would be impressed.
Technically, since vaccines are only ~80% effective (very rough estimate depending on the vaccine, etc), a large number of people who get the vaccine aren't protected either. These are the people who need to be protected by herd immunity. These are the people who are hurt by the anti-vaxxers.
And you never know, you might be one of those whose vaccine didn't work.
More importantly your children may be. I think one off the most important things that can be done in this debate is for parents to try to insist on their schools demanding vaccination certificates from all children present or specific medical certificates with statements of vaccine allergies making vaccination impossible.
Gradually we will have children segregated into two groups; those in schools which do have vaccines and those in schools that don't. Then one day we will have a great learning experience for the parents... uh... when we realise that all of the people on one school have autism.... I guess.
There's nothing recent about the tactics.
You are right 100%; sorry I wasn't clear about that. Thanks for clarifying.
Your parents may not understand how to use that technology, but they understand its implications as they saw the world change as it became widely used.
There are some things that they get, sure, but most of the information retrieval that people see is or seems unstructured. E.g. google. They have no idea that you could do something like (in pseudo SQL)
Select emailer.name, emailer.id, friend.name, friend.id, email.body_subject, email.id, friend.sedition_rating, from emails, people as emailer, people as friend, friendship where friend.id = friendship.a_id and friendship.b_id = $target_person, and email.body_subject in (select subject from email_subjects where subject_area = "political" or subject_area = "fishing" );
and get a complete list of emails sent to your friends on political subjects and fishing (where they know you sometimes meet your political contacts) in order to start guessing who else might be worth picking up and interrogating to find out more about your own political activities. The old people think of email as something like faster/instant letters. They definitely don't understand the implications of the structured data included and the ease of feeding such data into databases.
In many ways, the "little bit of knowledge" is much more dangerous than no knowledge. The whole "I've got nothing to hide" comes from not understanding that what you wanted to hide might be something that you didn't even know about yourself. E.g. that two of your friends are doing something secret that you would want to support if you knew about it but wouldn't want the government to know about.
RT knows all about freedom of press, hm?
You are of course carrying out argument ad Hominem. If you can't answer the critique except by insulting the person criticising you then you have failed already. but you do require an answer:
Whilst Russia is far down the world press freedom index other countries like the USA have been falling fast. It's most likely a mistake to think that wherever you come from is definitely going to stay superior without your working for it. I think Russians who have been having to fight for their freedom recently and can frankly and clearly see that they often aren't winning that fight may have plenty to tell those of us who just sit and assume that we are free.
Lots of the freedom in the US and other liberal democracies used to be based on the idea that individuals can privately and quitely act on their beliefs and discuss them with friends without fear. Occasionally someone comes up with a new idea which convinces other people. If that new idea gets around to many people then we get a change in the whole society. In totalitarian countries some time early in that process an informer will report the idea to the government. If the government doesn't like the idea then they nip it in the bud and silently arrest all the people related to the idea in a way which causes no disruption to the society.
Similar attacks ideas do happen in the USA; look at some of the things that happened to the occupy movements. Look at recent scandles with undercover policemen infiltrating environmental movements in the UK. If the only thing which was different between us and the totalitarian countries - the lack of right for the government to spy on everyone - goes away, then there's no reason to think that this won't end up being abused.
This is not wikipedia. Bald assertions serve to move the debate forward and show the baseless assumptions of the other side. If you think there are facts against what someone said state them. If you think that proving someone is completely wrong will help your case then provide the citation. If you can't be bothered then as in any debate, you lose. Just go and read XKCD for strength.
on this, but Win 8 is probably a better fit for inexperienced users than anything else out there right now.
Please remember that it's for usability it's better to go with testing with multiple users than opinion since what seems to an technology expert to be good for a beginner might not actually be. In this case the testing has been done and a summary is avialable.
Read the full report to get the rest. Basically added to an interface which has been designed for graphic effect rather than usability:
this all adds up to a system which will take much longer to learn and have much higher training costs than other UIs which exist currently, including Windows 7.
So use the desktop interface then. It's still there.
You should have a look at this usability report which will help you understand it better. Basic summary: applications are written for either the desktop or the Metro interface. Where the apps are written for a particular interface you have to use that interface to use the app. There are some places where two different apps have the same name on both sides (for example "Internet Explorer" exists as both a Metro and a Desktop app) but you can see that they are separate from the way that they don't show the same Window list. Imagine the confusion which can happen if you use "Metro Internet Explorer" started from another metro app and then a desktop app also opens "Classic Internet Explorer".
All this confusiion adds up to an interface which very much slows down and confuses the user.
Yes; More so in Asia. However in Europe there are also some really interesting dodgy VOIP providers particularly incoming towards moible providers (note that call completion costs lots more towards many mobile operators than it costs their own customers .. see if you can think of a business plan based on that). The problems are a bit different, but there is a whole load of interesting stuff that comes out from deregulation.
Personally I think we are getting pretty close to the stage where we will have to give up on POTS. There are just too many security and structural problems whilst the whole cost structure is becoming impossible and at the same time it is becoming fully dependent on VOIP and so doesn't realy provide any stability advantages over IP telephony. I just hope that someone makes this as a decision and makes sure that we get proper emergency services and security on IP before POTS collapses.
This is a far more complex situation than that. Much closer to BGP than mere STP
In a simple way; imagine that your neigboring multi-layer router is very well connected but has a memory problem on that means that 30% of the IP packets through it outgoing on certain outgoing ports get lost.
When you build your spanning tree you get what seems to be complete connectivity, however, when your users send connections to destinations which route through those ports on your neighbor router then their connections work terribly.
This is not something which can be solved by the individual other router (first customer's carrier) or end router (the rural carrier); Only by identifying which router is causing the problem. The problem with that is it requires work and is probably not profitable; See the previous AC posting.
Nope; there is very much related bullshit going on more or less everywhere (except direct international calls which cost so much that nobody wants to drop them). It's just more visible in the US 'cos the rest of us are too lazy or beaten down to compain.
If you can't route it for more than what you charge (on average) then you're not charging enough. You can't just drop the call!
The way this is being described it's very likely that the carrier of the person calling the rural subscriber doesn't even know this is being done. Notice that they describe calls completing and then being cut off. In the statistics those look like successful calls. Probably even more so because I will bet that the carrier in the middle reports a normal call end back in each direction.
What's happening is that some intermediate carrier is promising to deliver the call for a very cheap amount; signing a contract with the VOIP carrier which is doing the least cost routing and then profiting by droping those calls which wouldn't make mone.
The "Least cost routing" isn't directly to blame. It's a cheap and dodgy intermediate carrier woul is doing exactly what you say they shouldn't in a way that nobody can easily spot.
If they can earn more money in the city, then that is probably because the benefit they provide to society is higher in the city. We are all poorer because rural citizens are underperforming their potential.
Or alternatively; the benefit they provide to society in terms of stability of food availability, particularly in wartime; in terms of distributing the population and providing places for support and evacuation in the case of a failure of a city; in terms of maintaining culture and crop variety and a bunch of other things, are not measurable by normal market economics.
It's up to the customer(s) to get together and test the different phone services that are doing this and make a detailed case to the FCC and FTC.
This is totally impractical. In order to test for this problem you need to make automated repeated long calls from many different locations towards a particular number and prove that it is statistically much worse than other numbers elsewhere. The only people who have this capability are the phone companies and even they don't all do it that widely.
Now that this has been reported, basically the FCC should demand that carriers, especially cheap VOIP providers, start testing it and audit them to make sure that they do.
However, Seagate's "hard drive division" is not Seagate. Buying out their business unit, shutting it down, and transferring the business to a Samsung business unit, doesn't make Samsung seagate.
How are your feelings about this relevant to the discussion? What matters is the man's feelings - maybe he ascribed blame to Samsung however logical or illogical. What also matters are Samsung's feelings - did they feel they would be fairly judged. Finally what matters is the mans honesty.
The man lied. He got on the jury in a situation where normally he would have been barred. He then, according to his own admission, broke the law in order to damage Samsung. Those are the facts. The only question is whether Apple knew about his dishonesty and so was complicit. It seems that they did not. This shows that their claim that Samsung should have known was unreasonable.
As far as I'm concerned it's war now [...] Fuck these scum, any way possible.
Totally; but sharing their music is not a way of doing that. Remember the studies that show that "pirates" buy more music. Remember that Bill Gates said "if they are going to pirate then I want them to pirate windows" (more or less; I didn't actually look up the quote). Anything which supports the RIAA keeping their monopoly is a bad thing.
The best way of hurting the RIAA and MPAA is to, whenever you hear of an artist from them, instead publicise some independent artists who are as good or better. Try to push especially artists who are anti RIAA. If you are good at film or music, try to create some art independent of them.
I don't see that breaking the law to distribute their music and so give them publicity has any place in such a war. It might make sense to break in to break into their web sites and delete the music; maybe to put up banners protesting what they do and talking about alternatives.
I think the main thing was pressing the on button. After that almost everything works better, including the fact that you don't actually have to reach up to touch the screen to launch programs since it's got a proper desktop computer interface.
Look at Kim Dotcom.
I think Kim is, a definite lesson here. What he was doing is really similar to running a Tor exit node but his attitude to it was almost guaranteed to get him into trouble. If you do plan to run one, you want to do a bunch of things differently from the way he does it. Here are some ideas, but remember that some of them might be a really bad idea in one place and a fine idea in a different one. Talk to not just a lawyer, but a lawyer who is actually working for you (more later).
Make sure you, yourself are squeaky clean. Don't break other laws even if you disagree with them. For example, I'm deeply opposed to the media industry (RIAA & MPAA) but I don't consider it a terrible life threatening hardship to go without their products. Thus, if I actually for some sick reason or other found myself wanting to listen to Lady Gaga I would go out and buy a DRM free CD. I would rip it, however that is legal where I live so it's not a legal risk. Make sure that all your media, software etc. is 100% legal.
Secondly; Kim seems to have been setting out to tweak the whiskers of big media. His moral case was never very strong. Make very sure that the reason that you are involved is strongly about protected free speech. Make your views clear; make sure that they are openly registered somewhere.
Thirdly; People in Kim's organisation seem to have been caught supporting piracy and so on. You might want to see when you can identify pirating connections and block them. Nice is to show a little page telling them you identified them (e.g. from the identifiers in their traffic) and explaining why they are overloading the system. You want to be really active in blocking or even hunting down users that are invovled in things like child pornography. This is a bit difficult; merely reporting something might make you of interest; however if you are active in combatting child pornographers this makes it difficult to accuse you of supporting them.
Forthly; Kim was trying to make a profitable service; this makes it easy to portray him as greedy sponger. Make sure you don't accept any money for your work; not even expenses.
Fifthly; where Kim was all about personality and basically painted a big target sign on himself, consider hiding behind an association. Get together as a group of people who believe in tor, and have a leadership of people who are not actively involved in any way in the day to day running of the service (best if they have no practical knowledge of where the servers are and who owns them. )
Having an association will also allow you to do a bunch of legal things; e.g. hiring a lawyer as a group; which would be difficult otherwise. You will be able to talk to the government as a group. If they say that what you are doing is illegal, you will be able to take them to court without any particular individual having to risk taking the stand for what they are already doing.
Have you used Windows 8 for more than 30 seconds in a store? I'm using it right now on a 6-year-old laptop. Windows 8 is just fine. It's certainly superior to IOS in every imaginable way.
I'm guessing you haven't used it much on a tablet Have a look at what the usability testers have to say ("modern UI is a new codeword for Microsoft's Metro interface
Oh no.. that's not what I was looking for. I guess the visual design must be better than iOS:
Maybe it's the new powerful features they added over Windows 7?
Maybe the sacrifice is worth it because it improves the desktop version?
My only disappointment with the Surface is its low resolution. I've been rocking 1920x1200 for 6 years, and just got 2560x1440 on the desktop. I don't want to go backwards.
For most people it seems that the main disappointment is the low quality of the apps, even where there are any available, and the lack of responsiveness of those apps compared to the swishy interface. Given this, the only thing surface is really good for is acting as a video player. In that role, the low resolution screen is probably less important than in other roles.
MS doesn't pay anyone to put their OS on a system. Utterly false but still modded up by fanbois as fact.
Microsoft is paying Nokia over $200 per phone to put their crapware onto Nokia's systems. I don't know exactly what the situation is now, but traditionally Microsoft charged PC vendors per PC with Windows installed but then gave them a big payment towards marketing costs, typically conditional on exclusive use of Windows for domestic use.
Just how much does Dell get from installing crapware?
I expect that that would be a deep secret inside Dell, even if they can get an actual complete picture (for example they might be paid more if the crapware is actually used once). The best estimates I can find are several tens of dollars per PC.
Maybe a better value would be the cost of getting rid of it; Microsoft charges $99.
Alternatively you could think of the value to the customer, where it frees up memory and speeds up the system considerably. This could be easily equivalent to a $500 upgrade in syste specifications.
In any case, it's pretty clear that getting a clean Ubuntu over a crapware laden Windows for a mere $50 is pretty good value.
I don't see the point in showing Dell there is a demand for Linux from the factory - not artificially like that, anyway.
You are kind of right; if Dell doesn't provide any value whatsoever then it's better to get the Windows laptop in the right jurisdiction (one where Windows rebates are enforced) then work through the pain of forcing them to refund you for Windows. However, I don't believe that's the case. Furthermore, the hassle of getting a refund in MS Windows is quite big and if you don't do that you are basically contributing funds to a company which is trying to stop you from working and communicating. Giving money to your enemy and an enemy of humanity is stupid. Instead of getting the Dell, why not go out and find a clone without Windows or at least with an illegal copy which you can immediately delete?
What do I get out of it?
You really think Dell spent a lot of time on drivers when they largely build their laptops from components from other companies anyway?
Most of the far east manufacturers only provide a Windows driver. There is a big effort involved in selecting and purchasing reliably components for which Linux support is possible. Even in many cases where the support is possible, Dell will not have found a decent Linux driver for modern hardware and will have had to make some improvements.
I wouldn't even use Ubuntu, and think I should pay extra for it just to prove a point that won't go anywhere anyway?
You don't need to run it to benefit from being able to back it up and then restore at least the /etc/ directory on your new install where you can see any special tricks they used to get everything working perfectly.
Anything megaupload deleted following a DMCA request could immediately be posted again by someone else.
Most criminals are good at following the letter of the law but breaking its spirit.
If they followed the letter of the law then they aren't criminals. That's what "law" means. To be honest, what you really mean is "most dishonest people tend to pretend to follow the letter of the law whilst actually cheating and being to stupid to shut up when they are recorded". I suspect that will get Kim in the end, but in the mean time there seems to be a major due process fail on the side of the US authorities. If they can't fix this Kim should be allowed free and the investigators and prosecutors involved should be disciplined for incompetence.