Having not read the article, two thoughts come to mind:
1.) Game leagues require a network effect - if there's only one team per division because only one school can afford it, it's going to be a bit difficult for a game to become entrenched at the college level. If Blizzard makes competitive Starcraft fees problematically high, Riot Games can undercut them, and if they're too high, call Epic Games to undercut and use Unreal Tournament or whatever. I'm sure "becoming the de facto standard game played in eSports when the idea is first being implemented" is going to provide incentive to license for peanuts until the matches can start paying themselves.
2.) Don't competitive gaming leagues already exist? Don't they have rates somewhere? Why would the colleges pay differently?
Later when Macs and PCs hit schools, the level of interest kids had in programming or even understanding computers dropped so we ended up with a generation of kids who couldn't do much more than type up a letter in MS Word compared with my generation which were writing hand coded assembly and building robots....Typing up letters and doing spreadsheets is not computing but seems to be all the schools are prepared to teach.
I think you've struck on a set of symptoms of an underlying problem. Like most Slashdotters, you were largely self-taught. Exposure to the 8-bit machines gave you a starting point, and you took the initiative from there.
I'd argue that we've ended up with two generations of kids who only know cursory word processing and web browsing skills. Would they have been apt to code if the only available computer to use required assembler? I doubt a statistically relevant number of them would have, at least not without direct education on the matter - and it is on that front where we find the root cause.
Yesterday, I spoke with my high school English teacher. One of the best my high school had. She left teaching about three years ago, and in our discussions, she stated that while she would like to go back to subbing or being a TA or full-time tutoring, she did not want to return to her own classroom again. In the last 2-3 years of her time teaching there, she indicated that there was a noticeable shift in student attitudes. There were always a number of students (a majority, at times) who wouldn't get excited about Shakespeare no matter what she did, but she at least attempted to make the projects more enjoyable than simple Q&A worksheets (newspaper production, video projects, etc.). By time she left, it was fighting tooth and nail to get anyone to even go along with the classwork. I'd be hard pressed to find a meaningful number of current high school teachers who would disagree.
Now, let's bring it back to computer class. The nature of "teaching computer" means that there is a need for one of precisely two types of people: teachers who understand computers, or CS/IT folks who know how to teach. Considering the amount of education requirements and "don't get us sued" workshops required for becoming a teacher, as well as the endless grading and meager salaries, to add "technologically adept" to the mix would be incredibly difficult. My English teacher had a bit of an advantage in that the English language hasn't changed in the past 20 years, and neither have most of the classical works we read. What language do you teach in school today? Do you start with the generally-irrelevant-but-easy-to-teach VB? Do you turn it into The Hunger Games and start with Perl? What happens when the Eclipse-based curriculum you've refined over the past 2-3 years needs to start from scratch because the superintended wants to look all modern to parents and thus informs you that you need to start teaching Comp Sci on iPads and the Win7 desktops will be gone by the summer? Even at that, how much time do you devote to programming when the students don't have a meaningful grasp of the file structure? Is it wisdom to assume programming is more important than using Word, even though there is a far more immediate use case for Word than there is for being able to program PHP? What about the IT side of things - if coding is a good thing to teach them, then isn't it also a good thing to teach how to do things like install simple PHP scripts like Wordpress on a LAMP stack and then secure them? All of this is subject to the question of shelf life on top of it.
All of this applies in reverse to the programmer or sysadmin who decides to go into teaching. The programmer now gets to create lesson plans and grade papers (which gets super tedious in the case of grading source code and/or checking IT projects), deal with classroom control, attend continuing education (which has very little to do with what is actually being taught), placate parents informing them that they are not doing thei
I'll defend Winamp a bit on this front for a few reasons...
1. The download installer is 10MB. A kitchen-sink installation is 50MB. In 2017. The installer for VLC is 30MB, and a kitchen sink install of that is 122MB. iTunes is over 100MB for the installer. Winamp may be bigger than it used to be, but it's still very comfortably on the left of the bell curve - its full installer takes less disk space than the amount of RAM needed by the Pandora website. 2. They've got a custom installer. Don't want the visualizations or CD ripper support or video playback modules? You can opt out of installing them. The 'lite' profile is under 10MB installed. It doesn't play video or support 'modern' skins or have a media library, but if that's a feature rather than a bug, it far eschews iTunes's utter lack of custom install options (oh, you don't have an iPhone and didn't want five services starting with your computer now? sucks to be you!). 3. Truly opt-out of data collection. 4. I don't ever think I've had Winamp crash. 5. Though I hate the Bento skin and its propensity to assume I want the library displayed rather than a small windowshade, every version for the last 20 years has shipped with the 'classic' skin, and short of the added menu options, has looked and worked exactly the same, requiring zero relearning on the part of the user unless they explicitly wished to use a different skin.
So no, the new versions haven't been coded by demoscene savants who could have fit it on a floppy disk with room to spare, but it's still relatively small, functional, stable, and familiar - adjectives that are very infrequent to use when describing most software today.
I don't see the same longevity in Facebook as Google. When more grannies are on Facebook than 18 year olds, won't they lose their cool factor and become another MySpace?
Well, that depends. Off the top of my head, here were Myspace's problems:
-Their IM client never worked. -They allowed raw HTML pasting, which meant that MySpace pages were filled with gobs and gobs of glitter graphics and terrible CSS that made each page a different style of navigation. -Their advertising consisted of "punch the monkey" banner ads, but they were serving up massive amounts of internet traffic. They didn't have much in the way of user profiles or 'brand pages' with which to monetize. -As much as Facebook and Twitter get ire when they change the UI, Myspace never seemed to attempt to do so...until they deleted everyone's data...then restored about half of it years later. -It predated the critical mass of smartphones (yes, there was a Blackberry app...and very little to do with it) and failed to keep users engaged over time. -It didn't have the userbase Facebook has.
Facebook will probably experience a slow decline, but even if grannies become the prevalent demographic, I don't think Facebook cares as much about their 'cool factor', as long as the people who use the site have good click-through rates or profiles marketers are willing to pay for. However, its sheer pervasiveness and market saturation means that it's basically the "lowest common denominator" of social networks. Snapchat may be the cool thing right now, but Facebook users outnumber them by over 10:1.
Will something else take over? Well, that relies on two things: sufficient dissatisfaction with Facebook, and a comparable competitor to take up the slack. Myspace wouldn't have experienced its mass exodus if Facebook wasn't waiting in the wings to give everyone a home, along with additional functionality - in Facebook's case, it was possible to interact with it via text message, which was a big deal when flip phones and 'feature phones' still well-outnumbered smartphones.
The question for the first part is what it would take to make people dissatisfied with Facebook. UI changes haven't done it, privacy implications haven't done it, political backlash hasn't done it, the Messenger debacle didn't do it...so it's rather tough to tell what the breaking point would be for Facebook...but let's say that whatever it was, happened. What would the competitor have to have in order to cause a migration? I can't believe it would take more than a month to conjure up an app/website combination that had one-to-many messaging, one-to-one messaging, image sharing, and location sharing. Besides "it's not Facebook", what would the incentive be? Instagram has had a decent amount of success due to ease-of-use and filters. Snapchat became popular because of its fun face changers and 24-hour limit. Whatever Facebook++ has, it'll need to do something desirable that isn't already being done, and have lots of people migrate to it.
worked great, Napster became the most dominant platform for legitimate music downloads.
Yes, yes, haha, Napster didn't own the market...but I submit that this was primarily because of colossally bad timing more than anything else. Napster 'went legit' in 2003. In 2003, 802.11b was new, exciting, and expensive, and iPod/iTunes had just come to the PC. The RIAA was still trying to figure out how to combat Kazaa, Windows 2000 was still the preferred version of Windows because 'XP' stood for 'Xtra Problems', an 80GB hard disk was like 8TB now, and cellular data was billed per-minute and ran at 28.8kbps if you were lucky - and you were almost guaranteed to be tethering to a laptop. There was no Youtube, no Spotify, and no Pandora...because there were no 'apps', unless you count what was run on the Cybiko, also ahead of its time (despite its use of a serial cable).
The RIAA was all-in on DRM, and Apple would neither license FairPlay, nor would they allow DRM'd WMA files on iPods. In the coming years, the iPod would basically be the standard in portable audio players; it was basically 80% Apple, with the other 20% split between Creative, iRiver, Sandisk, and everyone else who was making MP3 players...and only a subset of players by those manufacturers could support Microsoft's DRM. So, Napster was trying to compete with Apple when Apple cornered the hardware market and wouldn't let Napster's music play on it. That simply wasn't going to work out too well.
Then, Napster preempted Spotify by five years, in a pre-iPhone, pre-cellular data world - $15/month allowed for users to download as many music files as they wanted onto their devices, and they would work for 30 days. Slashdot decryed the Janus DRM that enabled this sytem to exist, but really there is no meaningful way to have digital rentals without DRM. No matter; Dell and Creative made a handful of players that worked with it (sidebar: the Creative Zen Vision:M was/is an epic portable media player and could have been #2 to the iPod if they didn't make some really dumb design choices), so basically the use of the service was contingent on users explicitly purchasing compatible hardware, but by then the iPod and iTunes were so well-entrenched that its potential market was "people who didn't buy an iPod and who also didn't have a philosophical objection to DRM files in the context of a rental and who also were willing to pay for stuff rather than downloading from Limewire"...so, like, 6 people...and yes, I was one of them.
So, now we have Youtube streaming taking up the I-have-no-money-but-want-to-hear-this-song-in-particular folks, Spotify taking up the rent-any-song market, and Apple/Amazon/Google selling tracks for $1 a pop for those who want MP3/AAC downloads. Laugh all you want at how Napster wasn't able to achieve success, but these services owe a lot of their success to Napster doing it first.
Probably. Crysis was a game that required a Geforce 8800 to run suitably in 1080p, even with things sorta-high. However, the GPU in my current laptop mops the floor with it in specs, it wasn't the highest end GPU I could have chosen at the time, and it's over a year old. For that matter, the GPU of my last laptop largely outpaces it. I have no issues running Crysis at 1080p on ultra mode. Meanwhile, CryEngine has gotten more optimizations; the system requirements for Crysis 2 were similar but the performance was measurably better on similar hardware. Crysis 3 was a different kettle of fish.
So, unfortunately (or fortunately), we're at the point where even the higher end Intel Integrated GPUs can playably run Crysis (albeit at modest settings) - which is to be expected since the game is ten years old now. We need a new game that pushes the limits of GPUs again. My experience is that Mass Effect Andromeda has pushed my GPU pretty heavily, but I don't think it's quite 'it' yet.
If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless.
Unless you often need to connect the drives to different computers (and no, network file sharing doesn't count), internal storage is much better than external.
I think it's a horses-for-courses thing. Don't get me wrong, my laptop has more onboard storage than most and I don't walk around with external drives, but I also have a NAS for a reason.
Less expensive
Well, yes...but a half decent RAID controller evens the score pretty quickly.
less cables
Technically, yes...but it's not like one power cable and one bus cable is in itself going to be a dealbreaker.
less bulky
Depends on how many drives are needed and a few other factors. If a desktop can only handle two internal drives, a 4-bay NAS isn't bad at all.
no need for a second power supply
Can't argue that one.
you get the full speed of the native hard drive bus.
In theory, yes. In practice, a 4-bay Synology with link aggregation and 7200RPM disks will sustain a good 240MBytes/sec, which certainly isn't a slouch. Conversely, I've got a server at a client's office that's using on of those wretched Dell H310 RAID controllers and it makes me cry because of how terrible the performance is. If you're doing software RAID that's not necessarily the worst thing ever, but it still involves an abstraction layer and other areas of compromise.
Instead of having a dedicated NAS device it's often a better idea to get a tower with built-in hard drives, and share them over the network.
So, a NAS then, just not a storage appliance;-).
I love my FreeNAS, which is basically what you're describing here. I'm just saying that there are circumstances where more than two internal hard drives can get very messy, very quickly.
If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless. The problem is that the recent Macs have performed the paradoxical task of both pigeon-holing and fragmenting the market for such things.
For users where disk I/O isn't critical (photographers, etc.), NAS units like Synology or QNAP are great, plentiful, and relatively inexpensive. They'd be more useful if there were 10gbit NICs on their computers or even if the Thunderbolt adapters that were either 10g or dual-head gig weren't $400+. They work well enough for bulk storage for folks who are okay with wireless speeds, but even 802.11ac isn't a bargain unless you're in the same room with your router - the only choice for those who have Macs which sport the lack of a network connector.
Thunderbolt arrays are a thing, but $400 for an 4-bay dumb enclosure is only a bargain when compared to $1,600 for an 8-bay unit...and those are the prices on diskless models.
Since Apple is all-in with USB-C now, the industry is just starting to cater to the folks who are in this camp...meaning that my cursory Google searches were only able to find 2-bay units so far. Users who want faster speeds and capacities are getting their fix with some sort of dongle.
I'm not saying Apple needs to ship every computer with every port they ever standardized on, but it's clear that while PC users have no shortage of options (USB3, eSATA, internal RAID, affordable >1gbit network) while Mac users do not.
How about you let your personal morals dictate your decisions, admit that in a large society you're going to have to accept that you're side doesn't automatically win and further accept that conflicts of liberty are inevitable and complex.
Where did I say that my side automatically wins? I went to great lengths to indicate that the situation is more nuanced than "a unified group of people who believe that abortion recipients deserve the death penalty".
As to martyrdom, spare me. They doctored their recordings. That isn't just breaking what they may feel is an unjust law, that's a violation of one of the Ten Commandments; thought shalt not bear false witness.
If the recordings were doctored in a way that is misleading, then by all means, I concur with you. However, I submit that it's not false witness if the editing was not manipulative or intended to be misleading, and that the illegality of the recordings is a result of the two-party consent requirement. Moreover, if they were manipulatively edited, then by all means, slander charge, maximum sentence. The Pro-Life movement does not need that sort of behavior for the very reasons you've specified.
At any rate, you seem keen to hand wave away bastards who insist impregnated victims of incest and rape are examples of God's mysterious ways, meanwhile basically asserting anyone who is pro choice is an uninformed ignoramus.
How about this. You don't tell me what my personal medical choices will be, and I will keep my nose out of yours.
I have done neither. I have admitted that there are those who are extremists, but focusing on extremists is a guaranteed way to avoid the possibility of productive discussion as we find common ground on the unacceptability of the extremism while neglecting to address the more rational points of the discord. I did not use an ad hominem attack of any kind on anyone who is Pro-Choice, I did not tell anyone what their medical choices would be, and I did not advocate for any method, legislative or otherwise, which would give me such a 'right'.
Here's a way you can do it: Disavow some of your crazies, there are more than a few of them around, including the submitter. Instead of ignoring, confront them and dissuade them from their madness. They're not hard to find, here in this thread, and you can make a good start by standing against them.
That's a suggestion for you. Even these "activists" would be a good target. Denounce them. Condemn them as enemies to your movement. Because they are, same as Trump lying about abortions in the debate, or Fiorina making up a story about seeing an abortion video, or Eric Harris committing an act of terrorism.
You lose the moral high ground with every lie, every deceit, and every act of violence.
And do look at the abuses at Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They're as bad as the Catholic ones in Ireland.
No problem. I disavow those who who cause harm to others, direct or indirect, specifically in the context of the movement which wishes to defend the lives of those who are not yet born They are enemies to the movement.
I have never lied about anything regarding those in Planned Parenthood or the nature of abortions, I have never harmed anyone with whom I have disagreed on the topic, and I have never knowingly supported, directly or indirectly, any group, organization, or facility which has done so, and have researched the groups and facilities I have supported to ensure that, to the best of my knowledge, they are providing assistance and services with dignity and respect to their recipients.
If that counts, you have what you want. If it does not count because I have not single-handedly silenced every individual who has caused harm, then the suggestion requires clarification.
As one of the handful of Christians on Slashdot, hopefully I can provide a reasonable, rational counterargument to the string of assumptions about "Pro-Lifers"...
1. Yes, there are crazies. We have them. The left has their SJWs, and the right has the weekly Pro-Life protesters whose concern ends on delivery day. Yes, I know. Extremism on *any* cause is invariably going to make a mess of the initial concern. Moreover, it's not helpful that the extremists tend to make the headlines, while the majority of people who adhere to a cause tend to be willing to avoid making waves despite agreement with the core principle. If, for the sake of argument, we could ignore the third standard deviation for a few minutes, I'd appreciate it.
2. As has been discussed elsewhere in the thread, the core question involved here is this: "At what point is it 'human'?". Is it at birth, and not a minute before? Is it 'human' the day before? Is it third trimester (i.e. where the fetus can generally survive outside the womb)? Is it when it can feel pain, when there's a heartbeat, detectable brainwave patterns, when RNA recombinates, when the zygote attaches to the uteran wall, or when the egg is fertilized? Right now, the legal limit is 'birth', but I submit that there's at least some validity to the notion that a child should be legally protected as much on the day before its birth as the day after. Disregarding the rhetoric and talking points, the core question at hand is where the line should be drawn.
3. Many Christians *do* provide help and care to mothers amidst crisis pregnancies. CareNet is a network of crisis pregnancy centers that are completely donor supported and provide assistance for women amidst crisis pregnancies both before and after their birth. Diapers and formula are freely given to those who need it. Most have a skeleton crew of paid staff with the majority being volunteers, all of whom go through formal training, medical services are being provided by licensed medical doctors, and they're hella quick to dismiss anyone who treats those who come for care with anything but dignity and respect. There are lots of Christians who are looking to solve the problem, rather than legislate it into a criminal act.
4. Yes, chauvinists are still a thing. However, pursuant to point #2, there's some middle ground between "it's not worth protecting until after birth" and "women belong barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen".
Yes, we can do better, and I (and many like me) am working on it. However, I have a completely sincere question: The elected officials who say dumb things and the protesters who clearly haven't done a lick of critical thinking get a whole lot of airtime, for free, and it echoes far and long. What should those who are trying to address the matter in the right way supposed to do? Put a camera in the face of every woman who walks in? Facebook Live every time a pro-life individual calls out a wreckless protester? Burn people at the stake if they say mean things to someone amidst a crisis pregnancy? Or, on the other hand, not act in accordance to a held set of beliefs, even if it's in a way that does not impose upon others? If doing the wrong thing gets publicity and doing the right thing doesn't, the narrative is going to be swayed as a result. I'm perfectly content helping out in the shadows and not claiming any sort of credit for it (happy to give any credit to God to whom it's due), but I honestly wish it were possible to realistically counterbalance the "Pro-Lifers are hypocritical jerks" narrative without publicity whoring and am completely open to suggestions in that respect.
On the topic at hand, if they took the videos in a state which requires both parties consent to recordings, then yes, they should have acted in accordance with the law. The situation they're in now is what it means to be a martyr, and if they did what they did because they believed in it enough to break the law, then this is the consequence and I while I wish them the best in court (due process is everyone's right), if the court does not rule in their favor, then that is the nature of martyrdom.
Why can't any of these hot, new companies push open protocols and interoperating standards?
To be blunt, because it's boring work that, by definition, other people can make money off of.
Who makes money off SMTP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol. Who makes money off HTTP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol. Who makes money off SIP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol. Who makes money off SSH? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
Nobody who makes interoperable standards is going to do so in a way that doesn't make them vulnerable to EEE by someone else, and you're basically signing up to allow any installed base to leave and take their data with them. These things are features to us (otherwise the world would still be using AOL e-mail), but for investors willing to value a company with a ten-figure dollar amount, minimizing the likelihood of a mass exodus instills a level of safety that straight protocols don't enable.
If you make something anyone can use, you won't be a rockstar. If you want to be a rockstar, you can't become one making a standardized protocol....but that's just how I see it.
When "2.2.1" is one of the Google Autocomplete terms for "utorrent", it basically sums up the fact that uTorrent was 'done' at about that time. Meanwhile, uTorrent qBittorrent and Transmission have nearly all the same features, and seedbox providers have more-or-less standardized on rTorrent/ruTorrent (RIP Torrentflux).
What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there? I'm thinking that uTorrent's best days are behind it, and as long as 2.2.1 lives on Oldversion or OldApps, that is its legacy.
Because everybody knows there's nothing like a self-selected sample to get accurate insights into your product.
This is what I find hypocritical of Microsoft. The people who are going to sign up to get prerelease versions of Windows are going to be the more tech savvy crowd who are going to articulate what they want, and then get summarily ignored...
"Provide a means to actually-disable telemetry!" "No." "Let me control my update cadence!" "No." "Provide a classic mode for the Start Menu, even if it's not by default!" "No." "...At least let me leave Classic Shell in after the different major updates?" "No." "Let me use Chrome without Edge acting like a clingy ex-girlfriend?" "No." "Stop auto-downloading apps I didn't ask for?" "No." "Can we use ZFS or at least ReFS in desktop Windows?" "No." "Could you stop changing my default PDF reader?" "No." "Could you make the control panel situation a bit more consistent?" "No." "Could you integrate more cloud storage providers, rather than plastering me with OneDrive ads?" "No." "Could we have our integrated backup tools back like we used to have in Windows 7?" "No." "Could my installed drivers be set to be excluded from auto-updates in Windows Update?" "No." "Then what feedback *do* you want?" "The kind your computer provides to us automatically." "So, you don't want actual human feedback, then?" "No."...Because that's what I think they seem to want.
Perhaps not - that's why there's Spideroak and a few others whose MO is storing data on someone else's hard disk, but not the means of accessing it. It may well be possible to use Google Docs and OneDrive and Docs.com and Dropbox securely, but while it's possible to point to individuals and organizations who have had data compromised inadvertently, it's far less common for that to happen to data kept internally. "Default Distrust" is not paranoia, it's a response to reality.
And this is just an example of that. Only documents which were set to public were shared.
Now why the defaults on cloud providers don't err majorly on the side of caution is another story,
I'd argue that it's the same story. If the issue that documents needed to be set to 'private', rather than being set to 'public' without a default-private setting, the distinction between incompetence and malice is basically academic.
but as always there's more too this than "cloud bad hurr hurr hurr"
The cloud isn't all bad, but there do need to be very heavily leveraged expectations.
Okay, so...the first thing is far the best bang for the buck you'll get is a SiliconDust Homerun HD Prime. Get a CableCard from your provider, and give it a coax line, an Ethernet cable, and some power. Now, any computer on your network is a DVR. Still running Windows 7? Windows Media Center is amazing. MythTV is excellent, and Plex just released a DVR module.
These (and a few more) can run on whatever computer is convenient, but the bigger question is playback - if your DVR computer isn't hooked up to your TV, you're looking at a client/server model. MythTV does this pretty well, and WMC is also capable of it. Be aware that if you have HBO (or your cable company is terrible enough to introduce the copy protect flags), most OSS applications won't be able to record the stream.
It'll probably take a Saturday afternoon to iron everything out, but it's *so* worth it.
But the cable co's are now encrypting to make cable on all but a few channels making it impossible for me to view on the platform of my choice.
The reason for the cableCard you claim you have more than one of is to do the decryption of content. If your cableCard isn't decrypting the content you are paying for, it is broken. Call the cable company and get it fixed.
I have an HDHomeRun with a cable card, and VLC talks to it just great on Linux. At the point it hits the net it is unencrypted and ready for many different viewing programs. I've even got a DLNA (IIRC) app on one of my Android tablets that can view the content from the HDHR.
Fellow HDHomeRun owner here. It was my hope that your description would be the case. I initially made my setup with Mythbuntu, and then I learned about the CopyOnce flag. The use of the CopyOnce flag is prohibited on the broadcast channels, but on actual-cable channels (not even HBO/Showtime/Starz), it's up to the cable company as to whether they want to use it. My cable company (Altice, formerly Cablevision) sets that flag on all their non-broadcast HD channels, and over half of the SD ones, not including premium channels. It worked for the two dozen or so channels that didn't have the flag, as did VLC, but virtually every non-network show I wanted to watch was on a C1 channel. Mythbuntu can't use signals with the CopyOnce flag, and it never will because of the licensing requirements (no one is giving the decryption methods to an OSS project). and neither can the bundled SiliconDust software or mobile apps, meaning that my only option was Windows Media Center. This was amusing, as in my 4-5 calls to activate my CableCard, none of the reps I spoke with had ever spoken with someone using Windows Media Center and I had to describe it to them a bit.
Win7 worked for a month until it didn't and wouldn't start working again (bizarrely, even after a machine format), leaving me to spend a weekend hacking WMC into Windows 10 on my DVR. It's definitely off the beaten path, but it works. Hopefully the new SiliconDust DVR software won't suck, because I have a gut feeling my setup will only work until Win7 support ends.
So, tl;dr, the GP can absolutely be right in that his CableCard is decrypting the stream properly, but the broadcast flags are prohibiting him from using an OSS application.
No, I'm not worried about a boogeyman. I am worried about my country being at a disadvantage in a war. Cause, you know, they happen.
So, literally the only thing that matters is being in a position to win a war? An absolute dictatorship would be the most efficient means of ensuring this outcome*. If we want to have some level of liberty in the process, then liberty itself must be defended. It's not just "terrorists" or "communists" or "China" that is a threat to liberty unless we define "threats to liberty" as only coming from external entities.
*Yes, it didn't work out so well for Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini...but each had their own reasons for failure that had very little to do with the fact that they were indeed dicatators.
This feature is obviously disabled by default, but users can enable it really easily if they want.
Until it's not. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft sets this by default to try and force users to buy apps from the Windows store.
On the one hand, I accused Apple of exactly this within the past few weeks, so I'm certainly not above believing that Microsoft would follow this very path.
On the other hand, I see this being a much rougher sell for Microsoft than Apple. Apple hasn't been to court for web browser choice, and isn't under the same EU scrutiny. I also think the number of niche, high-priced LoB applications for Windows far outnumbers those for OSX, so trying to make sure every critical application on Main Street is still working is going to be about as tough a sell as having every one of those businesses formatting their computers to then pay $10/month for LTSB Windows is going to make a mess.
Ultimately, I see it this way: The moment Microsoft makes it impossible to install legacy applications on Windows 10 is the day that Linux starts making inroads. If the options are "pay monthly for an OS that doesn't run Windows applications" or "get an OS that doesn't run Windows applications for free", I have a sneaky guess which will win that contest.
We really take our faster computers for granted, and our code is far from the level of optimization we were once required to achieve.
And that's a good thing too; now we can focus on more important things.
Admittedly not a coder, but I'm in partial agreement with this. True, the ability to throw hardware at a performance problem is easier now than it used to be, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a benefit to optimization.
Even if not formal QA, it's worth going to Best Buy and getting the absolute cheapest computer they have (probably a Celeron with 4GB of RAM, a slow hard disk, and no GPU of consequence), along with Norton Internet Security, and no uninstalling anything that shipped with the machine. Use your program on that and see how it runs. A measurable number of your users will try using your software on that. If it's not usable, it's worth optimizing.
You might have a development workstation with 32GB of RAM and a core i7 and a Quadro card and an SSD, but not all of your users are. Even if they do, they may well be running Photoshop, AutoCAD, and a VM or two. "Lots of hardware" and "Lots of hardware for you to use" are two different things. Sure, far less necessary to optimize programs as much as they used to be, but there is still value to keeping system resource usage as low as it can.
First, the Mac App Store was opt-in. Then, it was opt-out. Then, it prompted when applications were run if they weren't installed from the App Store. Then it required admin access to allow sideloaded applications.
It's abundantly clear that Apple is using the winning formula from iOS and applying it to OSX. Slowly, of course, but mark my words: within the next release or two of OSX, you'll see at least a few of these: -require a terminal command to enable sideloaded apps, -prompt every time a sideloaded app is run without the ability to suppress it. -require a third party patch of some kind. -require some sort of jailbreaking procedure. -threat of voided warranty if sideloaded apps are found.
OSX isn't a walled garden yet...but Tim Cook is absolutely building a wall. And his customers are paying for it.
Nope.
For starters, there's a limit to apps in the Mac App Store. They can't install device drivers, nor can they be "demo" apps.
Admittedly I'm not a daily Mac user, but I'm having a rough time coming up with hardware that fits the limitations. Device drivers? I'm having trouble coming up with one that doesn't come from Apple directly. Even specialty/media hardware tends to either be class compliant or properly autodiscovered, and typically the super-specialty hardware (like MRI machines or factory floor operations equipment) tends to be PC specific.
And then those apps are sandboxed - they do not have full access to the filesystem. So this excludes a whole bunch of utilities.
Okay, so WinDirStat and XYplorer and Defraggler are out...
Finally, Gatekeeper only pops up the message when a app is copied from "untrusted" sources. What's untrusted? Stuff downloaded from the internet. Not stuff obtained from USB sticks or optical media, or even... the compiler.
Apple doesn't sell machines with optical drives anymore, and very few pieces of software made it to flash drive distribution. Basically everything is download now, so Gatekeeper is going to apply to like 99% of software installed that isn't from the MAS. The compiler makes sense, because it's the same user account doing the compiling as is approving the message from Gatekeeper...and again, applies to developers and basically nobody else.
And the Mac App Store has a $1000 limit on pricing.
That's where IAPs come into play. The kitchen sink edition of the Waves plug-ins costs about $7,000, but one at a time they're like $800. People regularly spend more than $1,000 on phone apps; desktop app devs aren't going to let something like that slow them down.
And there's the few developers who will never be on there - Adobe and Microsoft, in particular.
So as long as people want to use Photoshop, Office on Mac, keeps it open.
This is probably the best case made. Part of me is thinking that Apple and Microsoft can absolutely come to some sort of arrangement, and that while Adobe may largely be in the same boat, they've managed to figure out how to make annual releases of Photoshop Elements a thing for a decade beyond its feature-completeness. Serif has got a bullseye on Photoshop with their $40 Affinity Photo, and Apple's gutting of the 'pro' versions of their products to be on par with midrange PCs makes me wonder how much they care about pissing off pro photographers.
As long as AutoCAD costs more than $1000, it will be open. (AutoCAD LE, though, is sold through the Mac App Store. Autodesk has said they make more per copy of AutoCAD LE than through their resellers).
AutoCAD is far from an OSX staple. it spent about 30 years being PC-only prior to its release on the Mac in 2011, and only a very small number of the very expensive Mac Pros have Firepro or Quadro cards to take advantage of the rendering capabilities beyond the LE version.
Macs have never had a "Walled Garden" approach. The vast majority of Mac software is still sold independently of the Mac App Store.
For now.
First, the Mac App Store was opt-in. Then, it was opt-out. Then, it prompted when applications were run if they weren't installed from the App Store. Then it required admin access to allow sideloaded applications.
It's abundantly clear that Apple is using the winning formula from iOS and applying it to OSX. Slowly, of course, but mark my words: within the next release or two of OSX, you'll see at least a few of these: -require a terminal command to enable sideloaded apps, -prompt every time a sideloaded app is run without the ability to suppress it. -require a third party patch of some kind. -require some sort of jailbreaking procedure. -threat of voided warranty if sideloaded apps are found.
OSX isn't a walled garden yet...but Tim Cook is absolutely building a wall. And his customers are paying for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Having not read the article, two thoughts come to mind:
1.) Game leagues require a network effect - if there's only one team per division because only one school can afford it, it's going to be a bit difficult for a game to become entrenched at the college level. If Blizzard makes competitive Starcraft fees problematically high, Riot Games can undercut them, and if they're too high, call Epic Games to undercut and use Unreal Tournament or whatever. I'm sure "becoming the de facto standard game played in eSports when the idea is first being implemented" is going to provide incentive to license for peanuts until the matches can start paying themselves.
2.) Don't competitive gaming leagues already exist? Don't they have rates somewhere? Why would the colleges pay differently?
Later when Macs and PCs hit schools, the level of interest kids had in programming or even understanding computers dropped so we ended up with a generation of kids who couldn't do much more than type up a letter in MS Word compared with my generation which were writing hand coded assembly and building robots....Typing up letters and doing spreadsheets is not computing but seems to be all the schools are prepared to teach.
I think you've struck on a set of symptoms of an underlying problem. Like most Slashdotters, you were largely self-taught. Exposure to the 8-bit machines gave you a starting point, and you took the initiative from there.
I'd argue that we've ended up with two generations of kids who only know cursory word processing and web browsing skills. Would they have been apt to code if the only available computer to use required assembler? I doubt a statistically relevant number of them would have, at least not without direct education on the matter - and it is on that front where we find the root cause.
Yesterday, I spoke with my high school English teacher. One of the best my high school had. She left teaching about three years ago, and in our discussions, she stated that while she would like to go back to subbing or being a TA or full-time tutoring, she did not want to return to her own classroom again. In the last 2-3 years of her time teaching there, she indicated that there was a noticeable shift in student attitudes. There were always a number of students (a majority, at times) who wouldn't get excited about Shakespeare no matter what she did, but she at least attempted to make the projects more enjoyable than simple Q&A worksheets (newspaper production, video projects, etc.). By time she left, it was fighting tooth and nail to get anyone to even go along with the classwork. I'd be hard pressed to find a meaningful number of current high school teachers who would disagree.
Now, let's bring it back to computer class. The nature of "teaching computer" means that there is a need for one of precisely two types of people: teachers who understand computers, or CS/IT folks who know how to teach. Considering the amount of education requirements and "don't get us sued" workshops required for becoming a teacher, as well as the endless grading and meager salaries, to add "technologically adept" to the mix would be incredibly difficult. My English teacher had a bit of an advantage in that the English language hasn't changed in the past 20 years, and neither have most of the classical works we read. What language do you teach in school today? Do you start with the generally-irrelevant-but-easy-to-teach VB? Do you turn it into The Hunger Games and start with Perl? What happens when the Eclipse-based curriculum you've refined over the past 2-3 years needs to start from scratch because the superintended wants to look all modern to parents and thus informs you that you need to start teaching Comp Sci on iPads and the Win7 desktops will be gone by the summer? Even at that, how much time do you devote to programming when the students don't have a meaningful grasp of the file structure? Is it wisdom to assume programming is more important than using Word, even though there is a far more immediate use case for Word than there is for being able to program PHP? What about the IT side of things - if coding is a good thing to teach them, then isn't it also a good thing to teach how to do things like install simple PHP scripts like Wordpress on a LAMP stack and then secure them? All of this is subject to the question of shelf life on top of it.
All of this applies in reverse to the programmer or sysadmin who decides to go into teaching. The programmer now gets to create lesson plans and grade papers (which gets super tedious in the case of grading source code and/or checking IT projects), deal with classroom control, attend continuing education (which has very little to do with what is actually being taught), placate parents informing them that they are not doing thei
I'll defend Winamp a bit on this front for a few reasons...
1. The download installer is 10MB. A kitchen-sink installation is 50MB. In 2017. The installer for VLC is 30MB, and a kitchen sink install of that is 122MB. iTunes is over 100MB for the installer. Winamp may be bigger than it used to be, but it's still very comfortably on the left of the bell curve - its full installer takes less disk space than the amount of RAM needed by the Pandora website.
2. They've got a custom installer. Don't want the visualizations or CD ripper support or video playback modules? You can opt out of installing them. The 'lite' profile is under 10MB installed. It doesn't play video or support 'modern' skins or have a media library, but if that's a feature rather than a bug, it far eschews iTunes's utter lack of custom install options (oh, you don't have an iPhone and didn't want five services starting with your computer now? sucks to be you!).
3. Truly opt-out of data collection.
4. I don't ever think I've had Winamp crash.
5. Though I hate the Bento skin and its propensity to assume I want the library displayed rather than a small windowshade, every version for the last 20 years has shipped with the 'classic' skin, and short of the added menu options, has looked and worked exactly the same, requiring zero relearning on the part of the user unless they explicitly wished to use a different skin.
So no, the new versions haven't been coded by demoscene savants who could have fit it on a floppy disk with room to spare, but it's still relatively small, functional, stable, and familiar - adjectives that are very infrequent to use when describing most software today.
So...Mega Maid?
I don't see the same longevity in Facebook as Google. When more grannies are on Facebook than 18 year olds, won't they lose their cool factor and become another MySpace?
Well, that depends. Off the top of my head, here were Myspace's problems:
-Their IM client never worked.
-They allowed raw HTML pasting, which meant that MySpace pages were filled with gobs and gobs of glitter graphics and terrible CSS that made each page a different style of navigation.
-Their advertising consisted of "punch the monkey" banner ads, but they were serving up massive amounts of internet traffic. They didn't have much in the way of user profiles or 'brand pages' with which to monetize.
-As much as Facebook and Twitter get ire when they change the UI, Myspace never seemed to attempt to do so...until they deleted everyone's data...then restored about half of it years later.
-It predated the critical mass of smartphones (yes, there was a Blackberry app...and very little to do with it) and failed to keep users engaged over time.
-It didn't have the userbase Facebook has.
Facebook will probably experience a slow decline, but even if grannies become the prevalent demographic, I don't think Facebook cares as much about their 'cool factor', as long as the people who use the site have good click-through rates or profiles marketers are willing to pay for. However, its sheer pervasiveness and market saturation means that it's basically the "lowest common denominator" of social networks. Snapchat may be the cool thing right now, but Facebook users outnumber them by over 10:1.
Will something else take over? Well, that relies on two things: sufficient dissatisfaction with Facebook, and a comparable competitor to take up the slack. Myspace wouldn't have experienced its mass exodus if Facebook wasn't waiting in the wings to give everyone a home, along with additional functionality - in Facebook's case, it was possible to interact with it via text message, which was a big deal when flip phones and 'feature phones' still well-outnumbered smartphones.
The question for the first part is what it would take to make people dissatisfied with Facebook. UI changes haven't done it, privacy implications haven't done it, political backlash hasn't done it, the Messenger debacle didn't do it...so it's rather tough to tell what the breaking point would be for Facebook...but let's say that whatever it was, happened. What would the competitor have to have in order to cause a migration? I can't believe it would take more than a month to conjure up an app/website combination that had one-to-many messaging, one-to-one messaging, image sharing, and location sharing. Besides "it's not Facebook", what would the incentive be? Instagram has had a decent amount of success due to ease-of-use and filters. Snapchat became popular because of its fun face changers and 24-hour limit. Whatever Facebook++ has, it'll need to do something desirable that isn't already being done, and have lots of people migrate to it.
worked great, Napster became the most dominant platform for legitimate music downloads.
Yes, yes, haha, Napster didn't own the market...but I submit that this was primarily because of colossally bad timing more than anything else.
Napster 'went legit' in 2003. In 2003, 802.11b was new, exciting, and expensive, and iPod/iTunes had just come to the PC. The RIAA was still trying to figure out how to combat Kazaa, Windows 2000 was still the preferred version of Windows because 'XP' stood for 'Xtra Problems', an 80GB hard disk was like 8TB now, and cellular data was billed per-minute and ran at 28.8kbps if you were lucky - and you were almost guaranteed to be tethering to a laptop. There was no Youtube, no Spotify, and no Pandora...because there were no 'apps', unless you count what was run on the Cybiko, also ahead of its time (despite its use of a serial cable).
The RIAA was all-in on DRM, and Apple would neither license FairPlay, nor would they allow DRM'd WMA files on iPods. In the coming years, the iPod would basically be the standard in portable audio players; it was basically 80% Apple, with the other 20% split between Creative, iRiver, Sandisk, and everyone else who was making MP3 players...and only a subset of players by those manufacturers could support Microsoft's DRM. So, Napster was trying to compete with Apple when Apple cornered the hardware market and wouldn't let Napster's music play on it. That simply wasn't going to work out too well.
Then, Napster preempted Spotify by five years, in a pre-iPhone, pre-cellular data world - $15/month allowed for users to download as many music files as they wanted onto their devices, and they would work for 30 days. Slashdot decryed the Janus DRM that enabled this sytem to exist, but really there is no meaningful way to have digital rentals without DRM. No matter; Dell and Creative made a handful of players that worked with it (sidebar: the Creative Zen Vision:M was/is an epic portable media player and could have been #2 to the iPod if they didn't make some really dumb design choices), so basically the use of the service was contingent on users explicitly purchasing compatible hardware, but by then the iPod and iTunes were so well-entrenched that its potential market was "people who didn't buy an iPod and who also didn't have a philosophical objection to DRM files in the context of a rental and who also were willing to pay for stuff rather than downloading from Limewire"...so, like, 6 people...and yes, I was one of them.
So, now we have Youtube streaming taking up the I-have-no-money-but-want-to-hear-this-song-in-particular folks, Spotify taking up the rent-any-song market, and Apple/Amazon/Google selling tracks for $1 a pop for those who want MP3/AAC downloads. Laugh all you want at how Napster wasn't able to achieve success, but these services owe a lot of their success to Napster doing it first.
...will it run Crysis?
Probably. Crysis was a game that required a Geforce 8800 to run suitably in 1080p, even with things sorta-high. However, the GPU in my current laptop mops the floor with it in specs, it wasn't the highest end GPU I could have chosen at the time, and it's over a year old. For that matter, the GPU of my last laptop largely outpaces it. I have no issues running Crysis at 1080p on ultra mode. Meanwhile, CryEngine has gotten more optimizations; the system requirements for Crysis 2 were similar but the performance was measurably better on similar hardware. Crysis 3 was a different kettle of fish.
So, unfortunately (or fortunately), we're at the point where even the higher end Intel Integrated GPUs can playably run Crysis (albeit at modest settings) - which is to be expected since the game is ten years old now. We need a new game that pushes the limits of GPUs again. My experience is that Mass Effect Andromeda has pushed my GPU pretty heavily, but I don't think it's quite 'it' yet.
If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless.
Unless you often need to connect the drives to different computers (and no, network file sharing doesn't count), internal storage is much better than external.
I think it's a horses-for-courses thing. Don't get me wrong, my laptop has more onboard storage than most and I don't walk around with external drives, but I also have a NAS for a reason.
Less expensive
Well, yes...but a half decent RAID controller evens the score pretty quickly.
less cables
Technically, yes...but it's not like one power cable and one bus cable is in itself going to be a dealbreaker.
less bulky
Depends on how many drives are needed and a few other factors. If a desktop can only handle two internal drives, a 4-bay NAS isn't bad at all.
no need for a second power supply
Can't argue that one.
you get the full speed of the native hard drive bus.
In theory, yes. In practice, a 4-bay Synology with link aggregation and 7200RPM disks will sustain a good 240MBytes/sec, which certainly isn't a slouch. Conversely, I've got a server at a client's office that's using on of those wretched Dell H310 RAID controllers and it makes me cry because of how terrible the performance is. If you're doing software RAID that's not necessarily the worst thing ever, but it still involves an abstraction layer and other areas of compromise.
Instead of having a dedicated NAS device it's often a better idea to get a tower with built-in hard drives, and share them over the network.
So, a NAS then, just not a storage appliance ;-).
I love my FreeNAS, which is basically what you're describing here. I'm just saying that there are circumstances where more than two internal hard drives can get very messy, very quickly.
If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless. The problem is that the recent Macs have performed the paradoxical task of both pigeon-holing and fragmenting the market for such things.
For users where disk I/O isn't critical (photographers, etc.), NAS units like Synology or QNAP are great, plentiful, and relatively inexpensive. They'd be more useful if there were 10gbit NICs on their computers or even if the Thunderbolt adapters that were either 10g or dual-head gig weren't $400+. They work well enough for bulk storage for folks who are okay with wireless speeds, but even 802.11ac isn't a bargain unless you're in the same room with your router - the only choice for those who have Macs which sport the lack of a network connector.
Thunderbolt arrays are a thing, but $400 for an 4-bay dumb enclosure is only a bargain when compared to $1,600 for an 8-bay unit...and those are the prices on diskless models.
Since Apple is all-in with USB-C now, the industry is just starting to cater to the folks who are in this camp...meaning that my cursory Google searches were only able to find 2-bay units so far. Users who want faster speeds and capacities are getting their fix with some sort of dongle.
I'm not saying Apple needs to ship every computer with every port they ever standardized on, but it's clear that while PC users have no shortage of options (USB3, eSATA, internal RAID, affordable >1gbit network) while Mac users do not.
How about you let your personal morals dictate your decisions, admit that in a large society you're going to have to accept that you're side doesn't automatically win and further accept that conflicts of liberty are inevitable and complex.
Where did I say that my side automatically wins? I went to great lengths to indicate that the situation is more nuanced than "a unified group of people who believe that abortion recipients deserve the death penalty".
As to martyrdom, spare me. They doctored their recordings. That isn't just breaking what they may feel is an unjust law, that's a violation of one of the Ten Commandments; thought shalt not bear false witness.
If the recordings were doctored in a way that is misleading, then by all means, I concur with you. However, I submit that it's not false witness if the editing was not manipulative or intended to be misleading, and that the illegality of the recordings is a result of the two-party consent requirement. Moreover, if they were manipulatively edited, then by all means, slander charge, maximum sentence. The Pro-Life movement does not need that sort of behavior for the very reasons you've specified.
At any rate, you seem keen to hand wave away bastards who insist impregnated victims of incest and rape are examples of God's mysterious ways, meanwhile basically asserting anyone who is pro choice is an uninformed ignoramus.
How about this. You don't tell me what my personal medical choices will be, and I will keep my nose out of yours.
I have done neither. I have admitted that there are those who are extremists, but focusing on extremists is a guaranteed way to avoid the possibility of productive discussion as we find common ground on the unacceptability of the extremism while neglecting to address the more rational points of the discord. I did not use an ad hominem attack of any kind on anyone who is Pro-Choice, I did not tell anyone what their medical choices would be, and I did not advocate for any method, legislative or otherwise, which would give me such a 'right'.
Here's a way you can do it: Disavow some of your crazies, there are more than a few of them around, including the submitter. Instead of ignoring, confront them and dissuade them from their madness. They're not hard to find, here in this thread, and you can make a good start by standing against them.
That's a suggestion for you. Even these "activists" would be a good target. Denounce them. Condemn them as enemies to your movement. Because they are, same as Trump lying about abortions in the debate, or Fiorina making up a story about seeing an abortion video, or Eric Harris committing an act of terrorism.
You lose the moral high ground with every lie, every deceit, and every act of violence.
And do look at the abuses at Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They're as bad as the Catholic ones in Ireland.
No problem. I disavow those who who cause harm to others, direct or indirect, specifically in the context of the movement which wishes to defend the lives of those who are not yet born They are enemies to the movement.
I have never lied about anything regarding those in Planned Parenthood or the nature of abortions, I have never harmed anyone with whom I have disagreed on the topic, and I have never knowingly supported, directly or indirectly, any group, organization, or facility which has done so, and have researched the groups and facilities I have supported to ensure that, to the best of my knowledge, they are providing assistance and services with dignity and respect to their recipients.
If that counts, you have what you want. If it does not count because I have not single-handedly silenced every individual who has caused harm, then the suggestion requires clarification.
As one of the handful of Christians on Slashdot, hopefully I can provide a reasonable, rational counterargument to the string of assumptions about "Pro-Lifers"...
1. Yes, there are crazies. We have them. The left has their SJWs, and the right has the weekly Pro-Life protesters whose concern ends on delivery day. Yes, I know. Extremism on *any* cause is invariably going to make a mess of the initial concern. Moreover, it's not helpful that the extremists tend to make the headlines, while the majority of people who adhere to a cause tend to be willing to avoid making waves despite agreement with the core principle. If, for the sake of argument, we could ignore the third standard deviation for a few minutes, I'd appreciate it.
2. As has been discussed elsewhere in the thread, the core question involved here is this: "At what point is it 'human'?". Is it at birth, and not a minute before? Is it 'human' the day before? Is it third trimester (i.e. where the fetus can generally survive outside the womb)? Is it when it can feel pain, when there's a heartbeat, detectable brainwave patterns, when RNA recombinates, when the zygote attaches to the uteran wall, or when the egg is fertilized? Right now, the legal limit is 'birth', but I submit that there's at least some validity to the notion that a child should be legally protected as much on the day before its birth as the day after. Disregarding the rhetoric and talking points, the core question at hand is where the line should be drawn.
3. Many Christians *do* provide help and care to mothers amidst crisis pregnancies. CareNet is a network of crisis pregnancy centers that are completely donor supported and provide assistance for women amidst crisis pregnancies both before and after their birth. Diapers and formula are freely given to those who need it. Most have a skeleton crew of paid staff with the majority being volunteers, all of whom go through formal training, medical services are being provided by licensed medical doctors, and they're hella quick to dismiss anyone who treats those who come for care with anything but dignity and respect. There are lots of Christians who are looking to solve the problem, rather than legislate it into a criminal act.
4. Yes, chauvinists are still a thing. However, pursuant to point #2, there's some middle ground between "it's not worth protecting until after birth" and "women belong barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen".
Yes, we can do better, and I (and many like me) am working on it. However, I have a completely sincere question: The elected officials who say dumb things and the protesters who clearly haven't done a lick of critical thinking get a whole lot of airtime, for free, and it echoes far and long. What should those who are trying to address the matter in the right way supposed to do? Put a camera in the face of every woman who walks in? Facebook Live every time a pro-life individual calls out a wreckless protester? Burn people at the stake if they say mean things to someone amidst a crisis pregnancy? Or, on the other hand, not act in accordance to a held set of beliefs, even if it's in a way that does not impose upon others? If doing the wrong thing gets publicity and doing the right thing doesn't, the narrative is going to be swayed as a result. I'm perfectly content helping out in the shadows and not claiming any sort of credit for it (happy to give any credit to God to whom it's due), but I honestly wish it were possible to realistically counterbalance the "Pro-Lifers are hypocritical jerks" narrative without publicity whoring and am completely open to suggestions in that respect.
On the topic at hand, if they took the videos in a state which requires both parties consent to recordings, then yes, they should have acted in accordance with the law. The situation they're in now is what it means to be a martyr, and if they did what they did because they believed in it enough to break the law, then this is the consequence and I while I wish them the best in court (due process is everyone's right), if the court does not rule in their favor, then that is the nature of martyrdom.
Thanks for reading.
Why can't any of these hot, new companies push open protocols and interoperating standards?
To be blunt, because it's boring work that, by definition, other people can make money off of.
Who makes money off SMTP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
Who makes money off HTTP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
Who makes money off SIP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
Who makes money off SSH? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
Nobody who makes interoperable standards is going to do so in a way that doesn't make them vulnerable to EEE by someone else, and you're basically signing up to allow any installed base to leave and take their data with them. These things are features to us (otherwise the world would still be using AOL e-mail), but for investors willing to value a company with a ten-figure dollar amount, minimizing the likelihood of a mass exodus instills a level of safety that straight protocols don't enable.
If you make something anyone can use, you won't be a rockstar. If you want to be a rockstar, you can't become one making a standardized protocol. ...but that's just how I see it.
When "2.2.1" is one of the Google Autocomplete terms for "utorrent", it basically sums up the fact that uTorrent was 'done' at about that time. Meanwhile, uTorrent qBittorrent and Transmission have nearly all the same features, and seedbox providers have more-or-less standardized on rTorrent/ruTorrent (RIP Torrentflux).
What is going to make the next version of uTorrent preferable to what's already there? I'm thinking that uTorrent's best days are behind it, and as long as 2.2.1 lives on Oldversion or OldApps, that is its legacy.
Hey
What about us into BDSM? I need something to keep middle aged issues from keeping in. My wife loves patch Tuesdays particular after my work hours
Don't become a Drupal developer.
Because everybody knows there's nothing like a self-selected sample to get accurate insights into your product.
This is what I find hypocritical of Microsoft. The people who are going to sign up to get prerelease versions of Windows are going to be the more tech savvy crowd who are going to articulate what they want, and then get summarily ignored...
"Provide a means to actually-disable telemetry!" ...Because that's what I think they seem to want.
"No."
"Let me control my update cadence!"
"No."
"Provide a classic mode for the Start Menu, even if it's not by default!"
"No."
"...At least let me leave Classic Shell in after the different major updates?"
"No."
"Let me use Chrome without Edge acting like a clingy ex-girlfriend?"
"No."
"Stop auto-downloading apps I didn't ask for?"
"No."
"Can we use ZFS or at least ReFS in desktop Windows?"
"No."
"Could you stop changing my default PDF reader?"
"No."
"Could you make the control panel situation a bit more consistent?"
"No."
"Could you integrate more cloud storage providers, rather than plastering me with OneDrive ads?"
"No."
"Could we have our integrated backup tools back like we used to have in Windows 7?"
"No."
"Could my installed drivers be set to be excluded from auto-updates in Windows Update?"
"No."
"Then what feedback *do* you want?"
"The kind your computer provides to us automatically."
"So, you don't want actual human feedback, then?"
"No."
Because Cloud != open and public necessarily.
Perhaps not - that's why there's Spideroak and a few others whose MO is storing data on someone else's hard disk, but not the means of accessing it. It may well be possible to use Google Docs and OneDrive and Docs.com and Dropbox securely, but while it's possible to point to individuals and organizations who have had data compromised inadvertently, it's far less common for that to happen to data kept internally. "Default Distrust" is not paranoia, it's a response to reality.
And this is just an example of that. Only documents which were set to public were shared.
Now why the defaults on cloud providers don't err majorly on the side of caution is another story,
I'd argue that it's the same story. If the issue that documents needed to be set to 'private', rather than being set to 'public' without a default-private setting, the distinction between incompetence and malice is basically academic.
but as always there's more too this than "cloud bad hurr hurr hurr"
The cloud isn't all bad, but there do need to be very heavily leveraged expectations.
Okay, so...the first thing is far the best bang for the buck you'll get is a SiliconDust Homerun HD Prime. Get a CableCard from your provider, and give it a coax line, an Ethernet cable, and some power.
Now, any computer on your network is a DVR. Still running Windows 7? Windows Media Center is amazing. MythTV is excellent, and Plex just released a DVR module.
These (and a few more) can run on whatever computer is convenient, but the bigger question is playback - if your DVR computer isn't hooked up to your TV, you're looking at a client/server model. MythTV does this pretty well, and WMC is also capable of it.
Be aware that if you have HBO (or your cable company is terrible enough to introduce the copy protect flags), most OSS applications won't be able to record the stream.
It'll probably take a Saturday afternoon to iron everything out, but it's *so* worth it.
But the cable co's are now encrypting to make cable on all but a few channels making it impossible for me to view on the platform of my choice.
The reason for the cableCard you claim you have more than one of is to do the decryption of content. If your cableCard isn't decrypting the content you are paying for, it is broken. Call the cable company and get it fixed.
I have an HDHomeRun with a cable card, and VLC talks to it just great on Linux. At the point it hits the net it is unencrypted and ready for many different viewing programs. I've even got a DLNA (IIRC) app on one of my Android tablets that can view the content from the HDHR.
Fellow HDHomeRun owner here. It was my hope that your description would be the case. I initially made my setup with Mythbuntu, and then I learned about the CopyOnce flag. The use of the CopyOnce flag is prohibited on the broadcast channels, but on actual-cable channels (not even HBO/Showtime/Starz), it's up to the cable company as to whether they want to use it. My cable company (Altice, formerly Cablevision) sets that flag on all their non-broadcast HD channels, and over half of the SD ones, not including premium channels. It worked for the two dozen or so channels that didn't have the flag, as did VLC, but virtually every non-network show I wanted to watch was on a C1 channel. Mythbuntu can't use signals with the CopyOnce flag, and it never will because of the licensing requirements (no one is giving the decryption methods to an OSS project). and neither can the bundled SiliconDust software or mobile apps, meaning that my only option was Windows Media Center. This was amusing, as in my 4-5 calls to activate my CableCard, none of the reps I spoke with had ever spoken with someone using Windows Media Center and I had to describe it to them a bit.
Win7 worked for a month until it didn't and wouldn't start working again (bizarrely, even after a machine format), leaving me to spend a weekend hacking WMC into Windows 10 on my DVR. It's definitely off the beaten path, but it works. Hopefully the new SiliconDust DVR software won't suck, because I have a gut feeling my setup will only work until Win7 support ends.
So, tl;dr, the GP can absolutely be right in that his CableCard is decrypting the stream properly, but the broadcast flags are prohibiting him from using an OSS application.
No, I'm not worried about a boogeyman. I am worried about my country being at a disadvantage in a war. Cause, you know, they happen.
So, literally the only thing that matters is being in a position to win a war? An absolute dictatorship would be the most efficient means of ensuring this outcome*. If we want to have some level of liberty in the process, then liberty itself must be defended. It's not just "terrorists" or "communists" or "China" that is a threat to liberty unless we define "threats to liberty" as only coming from external entities.
*Yes, it didn't work out so well for Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini...but each had their own reasons for failure that had very little to do with the fact that they were indeed dicatators.
This feature is obviously disabled by default, but users can enable it really easily if they want.
Until it's not. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft sets this by default to try and force users to buy apps from the Windows store.
On the one hand, I accused Apple of exactly this within the past few weeks, so I'm certainly not above believing that Microsoft would follow this very path.
On the other hand, I see this being a much rougher sell for Microsoft than Apple. Apple hasn't been to court for web browser choice, and isn't under the same EU scrutiny. I also think the number of niche, high-priced LoB applications for Windows far outnumbers those for OSX, so trying to make sure every critical application on Main Street is still working is going to be about as tough a sell as having every one of those businesses formatting their computers to then pay $10/month for LTSB Windows is going to make a mess.
Ultimately, I see it this way: The moment Microsoft makes it impossible to install legacy applications on Windows 10 is the day that Linux starts making inroads. If the options are "pay monthly for an OS that doesn't run Windows applications" or "get an OS that doesn't run Windows applications for free", I have a sneaky guess which will win that contest.
We'll see...
(let's not even get into the contrast between /. and the BBS code I wrote to run over a 300 baud modem...)
The BBS code loaded faster?
We really take our faster computers for granted, and our code is far from the level of optimization we were once required to achieve.
And that's a good thing too; now we can focus on more important things.
Admittedly not a coder, but I'm in partial agreement with this. True, the ability to throw hardware at a performance problem is easier now than it used to be, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a benefit to optimization.
Even if not formal QA, it's worth going to Best Buy and getting the absolute cheapest computer they have (probably a Celeron with 4GB of RAM, a slow hard disk, and no GPU of consequence), along with Norton Internet Security, and no uninstalling anything that shipped with the machine. Use your program on that and see how it runs. A measurable number of your users will try using your software on that. If it's not usable, it's worth optimizing.
You might have a development workstation with 32GB of RAM and a core i7 and a Quadro card and an SSD, but not all of your users are. Even if they do, they may well be running Photoshop, AutoCAD, and a VM or two. "Lots of hardware" and "Lots of hardware for you to use" are two different things. Sure, far less necessary to optimize programs as much as they used to be, but there is still value to keeping system resource usage as low as it can.
Nope.
For starters, there's a limit to apps in the Mac App Store. They can't install device drivers, nor can they be "demo" apps.
Admittedly I'm not a daily Mac user, but I'm having a rough time coming up with hardware that fits the limitations. Device drivers? I'm having trouble coming up with one that doesn't come from Apple directly. Even specialty/media hardware tends to either be class compliant or properly autodiscovered, and typically the super-specialty hardware (like MRI machines or factory floor operations equipment) tends to be PC specific.
And then those apps are sandboxed - they do not have full access to the filesystem. So this excludes a whole bunch of utilities.
Okay, so WinDirStat and XYplorer and Defraggler are out...
Finally, Gatekeeper only pops up the message when a app is copied from "untrusted" sources. What's untrusted? Stuff downloaded from the internet. Not stuff obtained from USB sticks or optical media, or even... the compiler.
Apple doesn't sell machines with optical drives anymore, and very few pieces of software made it to flash drive distribution. Basically everything is download now, so Gatekeeper is going to apply to like 99% of software installed that isn't from the MAS. The compiler makes sense, because it's the same user account doing the compiling as is approving the message from Gatekeeper...and again, applies to developers and basically nobody else.
And the Mac App Store has a $1000 limit on pricing.
That's where IAPs come into play. The kitchen sink edition of the Waves plug-ins costs about $7,000, but one at a time they're like $800. People regularly spend more than $1,000 on phone apps; desktop app devs aren't going to let something like that slow them down.
And there's the few developers who will never be on there - Adobe and Microsoft, in particular.
So as long as people want to use Photoshop, Office on Mac, keeps it open.
This is probably the best case made. Part of me is thinking that Apple and Microsoft can absolutely come to some sort of arrangement, and that while Adobe may largely be in the same boat, they've managed to figure out how to make annual releases of Photoshop Elements a thing for a decade beyond its feature-completeness. Serif has got a bullseye on Photoshop with their $40 Affinity Photo, and Apple's gutting of the 'pro' versions of their products to be on par with midrange PCs makes me wonder how much they care about pissing off pro photographers.
As long as AutoCAD costs more than $1000, it will be open. (AutoCAD LE, though, is sold through the Mac App Store. Autodesk has said they make more per copy of AutoCAD LE than through their resellers).
AutoCAD is far from an OSX staple. it spent about 30 years being PC-only prior to its release on the Mac in 2011, and only a very small number of the very expensive Mac Pros have Firepro or Quadro cards to take advantage of the rendering capabilities beyond the LE version.
Macs have never had a "Walled Garden" approach. The vast majority of Mac software is still sold independently of the Mac App Store.
For now.
First, the Mac App Store was opt-in.
Then, it was opt-out.
Then, it prompted when applications were run if they weren't installed from the App Store.
Then it required admin access to allow sideloaded applications.
It's abundantly clear that Apple is using the winning formula from iOS and applying it to OSX. Slowly, of course, but mark my words: within the next release or two of OSX, you'll see at least a few of these:
-require a terminal command to enable sideloaded apps,
-prompt every time a sideloaded app is run without the ability to suppress it.
-require a third party patch of some kind.
-require some sort of jailbreaking procedure.
-threat of voided warranty if sideloaded apps are found.
OSX isn't a walled garden yet...but Tim Cook is absolutely building a wall. And his customers are paying for it.