So, I'm thinking this through a bit further, and I'm wondering whether encrypted e-mail still makes sense...
How many people actually-communicate via e-mail anymore? Yes, e-mail is still necessary as it's a de facto identification method - virtually every sign-up form uses e-mail addresses in this manner, but it's highly irregular that I send an e-mail to another human after I leave work. Most of that communication takes place via Facebook (known insecure) or WhatsApp/Viber/Kik/Line/BBM/SMS, and most of that communication needn't be terribly secure - for most people, "I have nothing to hide" is a valid reason to not care that Facebook reads their messages.
But what about people who do care? Well, there's Telegram, there's Retroshare, and there's self-hosted RocketChat, offering different levels of security and functionality depending on the particular use case required. Sure, it requires agreement of protocol, but most of the go-to use cases would have defined endpoints that could agree on a secure messaging method beforehand, whereby these tools would make sense.
Now, let's get back to the "after work" qualifier. During work, yes, e-mail is still the way businesses communicate with each other. They don't need security from government actors, they need security largely for compliance purposes and liability. Letting Barracuda or Microsoft deal with the secure transmission is just fine, because most businesses would hand over records to government actors if asked anyway, so as long as their insurance company says "good enough for us", that's typically all that matters.
So, given the fact that virtually every use case is covered already, why is encrypted e-mail a problem worth solving? When it's not that serious, e-mail is fine. When it is that serious, it's not like there is still a lack of things like Retroshare that can provide the needed security. That covers basically everything, doesn't it?
It's not a matter of people being angry over a matter of $20 a month to get superior service. Here are some of the more rational issues...
1.) Instead of throttling once a data cap has been reached, Verizon does overage charges...except they changed that recently, but you have to ask for it... 2.) Verizon requires locked bootloaders to sell phones through their retail locations, and are the only provider with this requirement. 3.) Verizon is the slowest to provide updates to Android phones. 4.) Verizon installs more bloatware than any other carrier. 5.) Verizon heralds "moar speed!!11" while still having some of the most stringent data caps in the industry (XLTE, I'm looking at you...). 6.) On a number of devices, they indicate that they are SIM unlocked while also disabling the ability to manually add APNs.
Now, you're right, that in the middle of west bumblef'k, you'll have better luck with Verizon than T-Mobile when it comes to getting a signal. For those who live in those areas or travel there regularly, Verizon absolutely makes more sense for the reasons you specify. In my most commonly traveled 50 mile radius, however, T-Mobile actually has better coverage (I have both), and I've consistently seen better speeds and lower latency from T-Mo than Verizon. Thus, in my case, and in the case of about two million people who live in that 50-mile radius, Verizon isn't just more money, it's more money for inferior service.
Verizon has definitely improved from the days when they'd intentionally disable Bluetooth profiles and custom ringtones, and had terrible data speeds because they used CDMA. If you recall correctly, they did everything they could to weasel unlimited data customers out of their contracts, including making it so those plans died with the handset they were used on, even if they got the same handset through an Asurion replacement.
As an aside, T-Mobile has consistently been the most root/mod friendly carriers available, always willing to provide support even for rooted or modded phones.
Hopefully that explains a bit more as to why Verizon doesn't have much love.
Seriously, anyone using animation in a presentation is a disaster himself.
Found the Slashdotter who lacks imagination. Yes, the formula in the boardroom is basically that quantity of animations are inversely proportional to useful information. However, Powerpoint is used beyond the boardroom. My mother is a children's librarian. She does all kinds of things with animations and layers and her monthly story times are amongst the most well attended in the district. On the other hand, Steve Jobs used the "slam in and make dust/smoke" effect on a number of his annual product release presentations (yes, he was probably using Keynote, not the point). The "Animations" area is also used to manipulate timing and audio playback - even if you're not using "Fly from Right", a slide transitioning in, playing audio clips in succession, and transitioning out, is all done as an animation. Finally, if moving an object on a screen along a multipoint bezier curve is acceptable in After Effects or Motion, but not Powerpoint, that's simply shortsighted.
99% of presenters I've seen use Powerpoint, use it badly. We're taught how to make Powerpoint documents rather than how to visually reinforce presentations, so the latter skill is rare indeed...but bad Powerpoints don't make Powerpoint a bad tool any more than bad Python code makes Eclipse a bad IDE.
Obviously, the go-to assumption is that there was a deal made on a golf course somewhere. It's entirely possible - probable, even...but let's take a moment to suspend the "crucify Microsoft" direction and consider a possible alternative...
Libreoffice is a solid product. I do not mind it one bit; in some cases I even prefer it to MS Office. Munich probably did save a bundle in licensing costs for Office. However, that's not the whole story. Integration with Office can frequently be a mission-critical requirement. There's a whole lot of reporting software, calculation software, CRM software, and document management software that integrates with Office. These vendors do not typically include integrations for LibreOffice, which means there are two options:
1. use products that work with LibreOffice. 2. roll your own.
Option 1 is a bit of a quagmire because it's not like they were moving to a computerized system from filing cabinets and typewriters, so it's not like they could just start with "linux/LO compatibility required" as a bidding condition. If they did, it probably would have been better for OSS as a whole, but alas, there is data residing in incumbent systems which need to be considered. Thus, we land at option #2.
How many programmers would be required to make a LibreOffice/LogicalDoc rollout roughly comparable to MSO/Sharepoint, move all the data over, access the same set of databases and workflows, etc., and do it in a timeframe that doesn't bring the city to a halt? Well, that needs to be compared to the cost of just using MSO, and do so favorably...but let's say that it did, and we ignore the user training side of things. What about the server side of things? Were they still using Windows Server and Active Directory, or migrate all that over to LDAP? Same with Exchange and Dovecot? MS SQL and Postgres? It's a bundle of money, but moving everything over, everywhere, ever, is almost as challenging as getting Linux desktops to work flawlessly with a Microsoft backend.
Now, let's head back to the golf course. Who called the meeting? If it was Microsoft, that's a good thing. Do you really think that Microsoft will be able to convince the city to migrate back without giving them one hell of a good price on it? If MS wants the contract back, you know they're taking pennies on the dollar for it.
If the takeaway of this exercise is that Microsoft is giving the city of Munich a software contract at 70% off for the next decade and that the OSS community ends up with a to-do list of functions that were considered shortcomings, then it sounds like some good ultimately came out of it. If it really was an offer they couldn't refuse, then by all means, crucify them.
If I might make a suggestion, if you have an old(ish) desktop and a spare NIC around, check out Untangle. It's a router distribution, and their $5/month home license will likely be super helpful to you. Its web filter can be configured to nix virtually all advertising, and its transparent web caching features can help minimize downloads for content that is requested repeatedly. You can also have a custom set of blocked domains if you'd like, and all the rules apply to all the devices in your home, even if they update or modify hosts files or whatever. You can also look at reports that will tell you what the biggest offenders are, so you can manage accordingly.
With respect to the Win10 hosts file situation, the 'gotcha' is that the inability to edit hosts files is a function of Windows Defender (which, to be fair, there were a number of malware strains that were redirecting Google and Bing to malware servers). Disable Defender and you're probably fine, but it's probably worth installing a third party antivirus instead - NOD32 is my weapon of choice, personally.
It is absurd how much computing power is wasted on dynamically generating what is effectively static content, like blogs. A simple blog should not require an SQL database and complex software stacks that are executed whenever someone visits the site.
I absolutely agree with this...in theory.
Instead, consider using a static website generator like Pelican, or one of the many alternatives.
Okay, let's do that. Hrmm...not in Softaculous, or the other one-click install options at Godaddy or Hostgator. That's annoying, but it's only one time, so let's check the website...Hrmmm...no 'download' area from the front page...documentation I guess? Great! They have an install instructions area!...that is full of CLI installation commands and doesn't provide a download link at all for shared hosting environments. Also, while PHP support is near-universal on shared hosting, is Python? Well, we'll assume for a minute that it is and go from there. Okay, let's head over to the section about installing themes...oh look! *more* CLI stuff! Yes, Pelican assumes that users want to use a CLI to decide how their website appears. When I did look at their themes area, I saw a Github listing. Github. No screenshots, no galleries. A list of files and folders. Now, writing a blog post should be simple, right? Oh...there's a markdown language I have to use, a series of inline commands for formatting and links and content embedding requires a specific file system? Wait...this was addressed in your statement earlier...
Write articles and blog posts in a simple, human-readable markup language such as Markdown or ReStructuredText. Manage your documents in git. Run the generator to recreate the HTML and update Atom/RSS feeds. The resulting website is blazing fast and can be hosted on dirt cheap servers.
More simplicity on the Internet please.
I am pretty sure that you have a different concept of "simple" than 99.9999% of bloggers out there. From a technical level and the amount of data ultimately transferred, no question whatsoever. For someone who can run circles around you with respect to gardening or keeping bees or fashion or a thousand other topics that don't involve software development, the usage here is the absolute furthest thing from "simple". Articles and blog posts are written in English, or whatever the native tongue of the author is. People writing blogs are writing down thoughts and observations for humans, by humans, using languages that facilitate communications between humans. Only on Slashdot does that need to be specified.
Let's compare this with the Wordpress experience:
Wordpress: One-click installation from basically every major shared web hosting provider on the market. Once installed, enter the username and password to the backend. Click 'themes', then 'get themes'. Browse around for hours, finding one that looks the prettiest. Customize it using point-and-click options that are reflected instantly. Many themes automatically handle mobile layouts with zero user intervention. Depending on needs, add a few helpful plug-ins. Don't know what to get? Ask Aunt Google, and there will be no shortage of recommendations! Want to write a blog post? Click add-> post, and you've got a simple-to-use box to type in that automatically saves drafts, looks and works pretty similar to Microsoft Word, has a list of categories on the right for easy filing, and a big "publish" button for when you're done. Did I mention there's a mobile app for real-time posting or that Pelican doesn't seem to have a comments section at all, or that literally everything I've described here has required ZERO command line usage or PHP coding and are all stock functions with zero plugins or extensions required?
Slashdot can piss on Wordpress all it wants, and yes, security/hardening plugins are the first thin
In my experience, the answer is "custom code and plugins". If you're running a bog standard Wordpress install with Akismet, FormNinja, Gallery, and a handful of the other top-20 plugins, auto-update is just fine and won't bother you at all. If you have a lot of custom layout code, or specialized plugins that are mission critical but not regularly updated, updating Wordpress can break them, thus breaking the website. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, this situation should not be the case. However, you asked thy people don't enable auto-update. That would, in fact, be why.
As an aside, shameless plug for the super awesome Shield Plugin. It's free, and when properly configured, can prevent nearly all of the major forms of automated attack. I've also used iQ Block Country to nix traffic from most of the usual purveyors of such attacks. Not a dev or an investor, just a super happy user of both.
Now, to go one further, Slashdot seems to be back-and-forth regarding mandatory auto-updating. Wordpress has a flaw, and the response is, "why isn't auto-update just how the thing works?". Microsoft implements this with Windows 10, and the response is, "How dare they tell me when I have to update!". Which is it?
That would make sense if they were were doing something positive, just not what Microsoft wanted. There weren't a whole lot of user facing hardware innovations, just a race to the cheapest clamshell available, an initial boot time of four minutes or so, and half a dozen pop-ups on the first start from all the shovelware vendors, trying to meet the $300, $400, $650 price points. HP was busy photocopying MacBook Pro stylings with terrible heat dissipation and abhorrent touchpads, Dell was flirting with Android and the tablet market but couldn't commit, Acer was making their usual plastic, Asus was half decent if you were super careful about your DC jack, and Lenovo was going through that phase where they tried selling Acer-grade laptops with ThinkPad logos, with the sole exception of the dual-monitor W700 series that was epic if you could carry the 10-pound workstation after paying its $4,000+ price tag. The major PC vendors were busy cutting corners while Apple was making hardware people actually wanted...so yes, MS tried something different and soon after, the PC market started to rally.
I half agree, and I half don't. The 30% CPU speed increases were far more noticeable in the late 90's and early 2000s, but I think you'd be comfortably within the second standard deviation of users who would be able to meaningfully distinguish between 4x2.5ghz cores and 16x3.5ghz cores. Hardware used to matter more then, in no small part because the things that mattered were all local. I remember the days of checking out software on CD-ROM from the library, and a mindset where "logging into the internet" was done for AIM and email/nntp sync, but little else. Today, a laptop without Wi-Fi is basically considered a typewriter. Now, I'm right there with you in wanting ever-faster computers, but Slashdot is a self-selecting group in terms of that sort of thing being valued. For most people, desktops resemble toaster ovens. They have one in the house, some people use it more than others, they're better at certain tasks than the far-more-convenient microwave, and they're basically mature technology where the primary reason for replacement is breakage.
I think there's less of a push for traditional computing because the functions simply aren't there anymore. Games, media production, and IDEs are basically the hardware-demanding desktop tasks, and simplistic iterations of those tasks can be done on an iPad. Tripling CPU power would be great for Steam games, but users who are satisfied with Candy Crush are not going to be looking for a new desktop to do it, even though Microsoft has shoehorned it into Windows 10.
I'm unfortunately in the same boat, but I think it does also depend on what you're looking for. I'd wager that if a lot of people had their default search engine changed to DDG, they'd probably fine. Let's be real, "facebook" and "facebook.com" are very common searches because most people have forgotten the distinction between a search bar and an address bar, so typing URLs in a Google/MSN search is probably a solid third of their traffic. DDG would probably be just fine for this sort of thing; people sure didn't notice when their default search got changed to Trivoli or the dozen other browser hijackers that were making their rounds a few years ago.
Where DDG comes up very short, however, is in more specialized searches. If you're looking for a code snippet or an outdated version of some app or something more specific and technical, DDG is a crapshoot at best and useless at worst. I mean, I can't really blame them - Bing is still inferior at this point and they have thrown Microsoft quantities of money at the problem. Search is hard - there was a decade prior to Google where Altavista and Lycos were doing their best with plenty of money and lots of talent, and they were still beaten by Google.
Ironically, DDG might get better relative to Google because Google results have continued their downward spiral toward the lowest common denominator. Just yesterday, I was trying to find out if anyone else with my particular TV was able to get the Android app "AnyRemote" to send the right IR code. I went to Google to search the model number with 'anyremote', and Google seemed to thoroughly ignore the existence of 'anyremote' in my search query, instead showing me physical remote controls, even when I put anyremote in quotes.
If Google continues this behavior, it's only a matter of time before they end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, giving DDG inroads to increase their market share. The ultimate question is, however, whether the revenue they get while retaining their staunch privacy directives is enough to keep them profitable, or if they will have to compromise their privacy policy, be bought out by someone who does not share their values, or make some other rough choices to keep themselves afloat.
It is quite ridiculous. It seems that despite political correctness advancements, it would still be impossible for an atheist (that is, anyone who is not terminally insane yapping about jebus and imaginary sky fairies) to become president in the USA.
With this attitude, you're probably right. Yes, I'm one of the handful of Christians that frequent Slashdot; there are indeed a handful of us. If you don't share the same set of beliefs as I do, that is absolutely you're right. If you are unhappy that there aren't more atheists in government, I completely understand that (to an extent, I'd even agree). If you're going to be insulting and degrading in the process, then you're going to find sympathy pretty hard to come by.
Lets get this straight, people: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GOD!
I disagree. I also know that I cannot empirically prove my stance, and thus cannot and will not fault you from arriving at a different conclusion. Telling me what I should believe, however, is the very behavior your post seems to find unacceptable.
One has to be pretty drooling stupid to believe in that child-molesting garbage
Yes, the Christian/Catholic church has had issues with this in the past, and I do not for a moment defend them. However, molesting children is far from a core tenet of the belief system, and millions upon millions of Christians manage to go through life, pursuing their faith, and are successful in doing so without molesting children. Moreover, a spiritual belief system need not be a direct reflection upon intelligence. A successful heart surgeon who has gotten a Ph.D. is, in all likelihood, a pretty intelligent person. If they also happen to believe in Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, or an faith derived from a tribe of Indigenous Americans, that doesn't mean they aren't intelligent or that I wouldn't let them operate on me if I needed open heart surgery, only that they do not share my faith.
yet in front of the people who are supposed to be running this country they have these retarded blathering idiots going on about their magic sky daddies and friends.
1. So don't watch it? Or DVR it and fast forward the religious leaders? 2. For what it's worth, I'm of the persuasion that this is far more a matter of pandering than an intent to set the course for the country. If the majority of people who voted for the winner were another group, there probably would have been people pandering to them instead.
It is one thing to make a president swear on some 2000 year old book of BS because tradition. But there no excuse for the rest. None at all.
See above.
As an atheist it reminds me that I am not represented and that people would still be happy to come at me with their torches and pitchforks.
Has anybody threatened your life on the sole basis of your faith? If not, are you honestly of the persuasion that the only reason people have not done so is because it's illegal? There's some credibility to the point that there are few (if any) atheists in Congress, but would you vote for somebody on the sole basis that they share your views regarding God (or a lack thereof), even if your views were opposite on foreign policy, NSA wiretapping, gun legslation, health care, economic changes, the educational system, and other things that they would actually be responsible to address and legislate?
Every indication points to the entertainment market being completely over-saturated. What makes Apple think they can do better than the existing studios?
They don't have to be "better". Apple hardware tends to be one-at-a-time kit - there aren't *that* many people who will own and use multiple laptops or smartphones at the same time. However, it's entirely practical (and common) for a Netflix subscriber to also purchase a season of a TV series from the iTunes Store. Apple focusing a bit more on services allows them to widen their potential customer base by creating a product whose competitors can all coexist, which isn't nearly as easy for laptops and smartphones. Therefore, they don't need to out-Netflix Netflix, they just have to have a TV show that a million people are willing to spend $20/season on, irrespective if those people are also Netflix subscribers.
On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one.
just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time. the term "cult of mac" became known for a reason
Oh, the memories that have been lost to history...
Okay, first off, remember that in 2007, iTunes libraries were expansive, encompassing, and well-curated. Virtually everyone had an iPod, which synced with iTunes. DRM had only *just* come off the files they sold, meaning that plenty of users still had hundreds of purchased songs that couldn't play on anything else.
The iPhone didn't do *lots* of things that contemporary smartphones did...but the iPhone wasn't competing with them. The iPhone was competing with Feature Phones - the LG Chocolate and similar handsets that were popular at the time, and shared pocket space with the iPod. Consolidating the two devices into a single gadget was one of a few major things the iPhone brought to the table.
Bluetooth file transfer was used by a handful of people...but keep in mind that Verizon had a habit of blocking that from most of their phones at the time, so it wasn't missed. Even if it was, if Apple loses points for Bluetooth file transfer, Blackberry loses points for making the Blackberry Curve without WiFi. What was sorely needed though, was a phone that did mobile web browsing and didn't suck. Internet Explorer Mobile sucked, horridly. Every attempt it made to lay out a page on a 320x240 screen was basically an exercise in shuffling cards - it never, ever worked right...but miraculously, even it was a step up from the Blackberry browser, which couldn't do anything right. Showing a full website and pinching in and out to navigate it? That really was incredible for the time. We have mobile website *now*, which is nice, but no one cared about cell phone web traffic in 2007.
Threaded messaging was available in BBM, but even Blackberry made it nearly impossible to split longer SMS messages. They made their name on e-mail, but didn't do HTML mail in any meaningful sense. Blackberry did music, but it was the "drag-and-drop MP3s to a MicroSD card" method that negated most of the benefits of iTunes like playlists and play counts and automatically syncing new purchases. The iPhone, by contrast, had beautiful threaded messaging with few functional limits - many feature phones at the time could only store a few hundred messages so deleting old messages by hand was a common task. We take kinetic scrolling for granted now, since everyone has it but it was truly a "wow" moment during Steve's keynote. Visual Voicemail was also something new to the masses and took years for others to implement.
The initial release of the iPhone wasn't about having a massive amount of features to compete with every bullet point on the box of the Curve or the Q or the Blackjack, it was about the ability to go from carrying around two devices to just one, with a solid web browsing experience, in a package far more streamlined and polished than anyone else on the market.
So yes, it couldn't use 3G or map, but I will definitely give credit where it is due. The iPhone didn't do everything, but what it did do was done right, given what was prevalent amongst users at the time of its release.
I'm not surprised LG is doing this. Whether it's for raw competitive reasons ("Look Phil! This one has the Wi-Fi and a touchscreen!") or less-than-desirable reasons (acquiring information regarding the use of the product / making it less serviceable by techs without specialized equipment), the fact is that this sort of thing was basically inevitable.
Whether it's worth caring about depends on whether the devices will perform their intended function without internet access. Sure, some people will find it nifty to have an app notify them when preheating is done or to be able to check that they turned the stove off as they drive away (and turn it off if they didn't), but the real question is whether I'll be required to sign up for an LG account in order to set it to 375 to bake cookies.
Internet connectivity as a bonus, I'm fine with. Internet connectivity to do the functions that have been served for the last hundred years with a knob...not so much.
Depends on the kind of security you're looking for. I'm generally a fan of the Asus family of routers that support the Padavan firmware - they all support DD-WRT as well if that's your thing.
What makes this router something warranting a slashdot discussion is the fact that it does unified threat management, something that tends to require an appliance beyond a simple router/switch/AP combo. The cheapest ones with integrated Wi-Fi are from Sonicwall, but they're all kinds of awkward to have in a home setting (NAT translation is a pain, no UPnP, etc.). Fortinet also has some prosumer units, but good luck getting one - it tends to involve a whole lot of middlemen and quotes and all that other sales red tape that's quite obnoxious.
If you're cool with a more DIY solution, break it out. A gigabit switch is more or less a gigabit switch; 8-port units are $40 or less now. Most routers can function as a simple access point (aforementioned Asus being among them), but if you're looking for multiple access points, Ubiquiti is my favorite as the $130 access points do AC1750, there's a central configuration utility, they handle roaming and frequency hopping quite well, and they're a whole lot less expensive than most of the alternatives. As far as the router itself, get a desktop and a second NIC, and you've got choices. I'm an Untangle fan myself, and $5/month for the home version gets you the kitchen sink for your home - virus checking, content filtering, ad blocking, spam filtering, multi-wan, VPN, the whole shooting match, in the simplest configuration console I've used. pfSense (and its recent fork opnsense) is free, and gives nearly all the same features, but in a somewhat more Spartan interface with more manual control required. Sophos has an excellent UTM, though it has a 50-endpoint limit and resembles Sonicwall in its NAT configuration. Other honorable mentions worth exploring would be Endian (simplest past Untangle), Smoothwall (best QoS), and IPFire (runs on a 133mhz Pentium), again, depending on the feature set you're looking for.
A friend of mine told me about VidAngel a few weeks ago, and my feeling is that they're trying to do a tightrope walk, blindfolded, while wearing ice skates.
Their business model hinges on the sell/resell gimmick that solely exists on a balance sheet. It's shaky ground to stand on.
CleanFlicks lost out because they altered the movies, which either fell under "derivative work" or "CSS decryption", either way not a good idea. They lost in court. RealNetworks (still a thing, apparently) tried having a product that allowed movies to be ripped to one's own computer, but included more DRM than the original DVD. They lost in court. Aereo distance-shifted OTA broadcasts, limited to one viewing per antenna, and one antenna per user. They lost in court. Zediva bought DVD players and DVDs, paired them 1:1, and allowed one user to stream a movie from an available DVD player. They lost in court.
Vidangel is walking a trail blazed by dead bodies, forged by lawyers who have no intention of providing a compromise that reflects reality. Once they get big enough, the MPAA will come after them as well. They might win against Miramax and MAYBE Universal, but once the sleeping Mouse is awakened by their family-friendly edit of Rogue One, I wouldn't bet a counterfeit wooden nickel on them willing that court case - Disney will win on attrition alone.
After all, it is power, not money, that perpetuates this behavior.
I think it was Stephen Colbert who made an attempt to describe the Lincoln Tunnel to people who didn't live in New York:
Imagine trying to get that contents of this container of jelly beans into this bucket, putting them all through these two drinking straws...Also, all of those jelly beans are late to work.
A major problem is when accidents happen in tunnels. There is literally nowhere for anyone - including emergency vehicles - to go. Now, accidents in tunnels tend to be of the fender bender variety, but when a vehicle is rendered inoperable, you're just plain screwed. Making tunnels the way roads are built as a general rule is not the best of ideas - it's why subways make more sense as long as the stops can pick up and drop off enough people to nudge the needle of the rest of traffic. Manhattan would be utterly impassable without the subway moving half a million people a day.
Nobody likes traffic, and nobody likes parking. LA has its problems due not simply to cost, but the lack of a useful alternative when dealing when that level of population density independent of a useful mass transit system.
No, so that if the issue is expanding batteries, the batteries can be made thinner, or they'll pop the back off, prompting the need to have the battery replaced, or so users can buy batteries from Anker or ZeroLemon (or LG), or so Samsung can ship a box of batteries to each Verizon store and let users swap them with be batteries as a 45-second exchange rather than spending an obscene amount of money for RMAs in hazmat boxes...really, the only reason the phone needed to be recalled as a complete unit is because the batteries weren't removable.
While yes, Apple, LG, and Samsung have produced unibody phones that didn't blow up, I've yet to hear a reason why removable batteries are a bad thing for consumers with the sole exception of anorexia.
With respect to the 'business class tax', it's obnoxious to pay twice the price for internet...but business customers get better support and the option for an SLA, as well as static IP addresses. Now, I wouldn't be opposed to an 'enthusiast' tier with consumer-grade support and open ports 80/25 on a single static IP, but it's not a thing for the moment...which is why no-IP's port 80 redirect is helpful. Similarly, very few ISPs block 443, so https + reverse proxy = green pastures of self-hosting on a residential line.
"Everyone hosting a mail server" is a bad idea. Most don't know how to configure or administer one, nor have the desire to do so. The problem with e-mail as a bastion of free speech is that it requires the recipient to listen, a premise compromised at the outset. Meanwhile, the majority of e-mail sent and received today is spam, so increasing the avenues for spam just sounds like a horried idea all around. As a final point, the gatekeepers move from "who moderates Facebook" to "who decides what is and isn't spam at Spamhaus".
We need middlemen for certain things. Making technical competency a de facto requirement for exercising freedom of speech is itself an example of censoring in practice. I hate the cloud as much as you do, but there are certain people who will always need a tech person in order for their idea to be heard. There's no reason they should be required to get a server, install a LAMP stack and CMS, register a domain and configure its DNS, leave their computer on all the time, and be comfortable in tweaking a few lines in Javascript, just to interact with others about knitting.
Absofuckingloutely entirely this. Little BIOS updates to old hardware, links found on some obscure forum and files obscenely difficult to find. I stumble across at LEAST 10 of these kinds of files a year and those are the ones I notice.
So, genuine question here...this problem did not start existing after Dropbox - in fact, it dates back to when drivers were delivered on floppy disks and downloads varied from OEM to OEM, so FTP repositories were how this was dealt with for decades prior to Dropbox. The question is this: at what point did this fall out of vogue? Sure, Dropbox is prettier and all, but it's not like FTP stopped working, or that FTP's lack of security is such a travesty for a manual or a driver. Sure, GoDaddy might not be cool with hosting 2016's rebirth of ftp.cdrom.com on their base level shared hosting tier, but is 'hosting an FTP server' such an insurmountable undertaking for scenarios like these?
You're absolutely right in that Cisco is not a company with any concept of how to compete on price. I'll do one better though - there's no integration with anything, and thus no reason to use Cisco over AWS/Azure/GCC. Those companies have massive scale, and playing catch-up isn't cheap without a reason to not just use one of them. VMWare can do hybrid cloud better than Google can, so they can successfully charge a bit more to companies who need certain things on-prem while cloudifying others as they decommission old servers. Oracle is run by Satan himself. Data that ends up in an Oracle database doesn't come out barring a miracle, so they can sell to companies who have already sold them their soul pretty well. Speaking of companies run by Satan, Intuit can do their SaaS thing because it's still pretty profitable to have 80% of Main Street businesses dependent on their product, to the point that raising the cost of their Quickbooks Online by $1/year will never be a reason to switch away from them, but is still millions a year in money-for-nothing.
Cisco sells routers and switches and phone systems. There's no springboard, no inertia, no existing customer base to move to the cloud (maybe the phone systems a bit). If they can't leverage their existing customers, then they are left competing with Amazon, the Wal-Mart of the internet, Microsoft, who can still flex muscle with Windows and Exchange server and make those cutovers easier than anyone else, and Google, the company who data mines for a living. Cisco can't compete on price, they can't really compete on features, and they don't have an explicit market for which keeping with their existing vendor makes sense for IaaS.
"Microsoft's response to the Amazon Echo and Google Home is Home Hub, a software update for Windows 10's Cortana personal assistant that turns any Windows PC into a smart speaker of sorts."
No it's not. Based on Microsoft's track record it will be a poorly-designed, late-to-market, barely functional piece of shit that will garner no market share except for that of the die-hard Windows fanbois. After a year or two of disappointing reviews and craptastic software updates they'll discontinue it.
That may well be true...but there's a one-in-a-billion chance that Microsoft will be able to make it stick if they can successfully court the XDA community. If a device is mod-friendly, and it becomes "the Echo you can mod", it's possible that it'll carve out a niche for itself...because both Google and Amazon have taken steps to ensure that the modding community isn't welcome.
Microsoft clearly has no recent evidence of this path, which is why I'm perfectly aware that it's such a remote possibility. However, it's a market hole that neither Google nor Amazon have any chance of filling.
Seriously, Facebook Messenger is basically becoming its own all-consuming entity at this point. It does text chat, voice chat, video chat, image exchange (complete with filters, IIRC), payment exchanges, stickers, and now video games. It's either an overly bloated chat client, or a really slimmed down fork of systemd.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I'm thinking this through a bit further, and I'm wondering whether encrypted e-mail still makes sense...
How many people actually-communicate via e-mail anymore? Yes, e-mail is still necessary as it's a de facto identification method - virtually every sign-up form uses e-mail addresses in this manner, but it's highly irregular that I send an e-mail to another human after I leave work. Most of that communication takes place via Facebook (known insecure) or WhatsApp/Viber/Kik/Line/BBM/SMS, and most of that communication needn't be terribly secure - for most people, "I have nothing to hide" is a valid reason to not care that Facebook reads their messages.
But what about people who do care? Well, there's Telegram, there's Retroshare, and there's self-hosted RocketChat, offering different levels of security and functionality depending on the particular use case required. Sure, it requires agreement of protocol, but most of the go-to use cases would have defined endpoints that could agree on a secure messaging method beforehand, whereby these tools would make sense.
Now, let's get back to the "after work" qualifier. During work, yes, e-mail is still the way businesses communicate with each other. They don't need security from government actors, they need security largely for compliance purposes and liability. Letting Barracuda or Microsoft deal with the secure transmission is just fine, because most businesses would hand over records to government actors if asked anyway, so as long as their insurance company says "good enough for us", that's typically all that matters.
So, given the fact that virtually every use case is covered already, why is encrypted e-mail a problem worth solving? When it's not that serious, e-mail is fine. When it is that serious, it's not like there is still a lack of things like Retroshare that can provide the needed security. That covers basically everything, doesn't it?
It's not a matter of people being angry over a matter of $20 a month to get superior service. Here are some of the more rational issues...
1.) Instead of throttling once a data cap has been reached, Verizon does overage charges...except they changed that recently, but you have to ask for it...
2.) Verizon requires locked bootloaders to sell phones through their retail locations, and are the only provider with this requirement.
3.) Verizon is the slowest to provide updates to Android phones.
4.) Verizon installs more bloatware than any other carrier.
5.) Verizon heralds "moar speed!!11" while still having some of the most stringent data caps in the industry (XLTE, I'm looking at you...).
6.) On a number of devices, they indicate that they are SIM unlocked while also disabling the ability to manually add APNs.
Now, you're right, that in the middle of west bumblef'k, you'll have better luck with Verizon than T-Mobile when it comes to getting a signal. For those who live in those areas or travel there regularly, Verizon absolutely makes more sense for the reasons you specify. In my most commonly traveled 50 mile radius, however, T-Mobile actually has better coverage (I have both), and I've consistently seen better speeds and lower latency from T-Mo than Verizon. Thus, in my case, and in the case of about two million people who live in that 50-mile radius, Verizon isn't just more money, it's more money for inferior service.
Verizon has definitely improved from the days when they'd intentionally disable Bluetooth profiles and custom ringtones, and had terrible data speeds because they used CDMA. If you recall correctly, they did everything they could to weasel unlimited data customers out of their contracts, including making it so those plans died with the handset they were used on, even if they got the same handset through an Asurion replacement.
As an aside, T-Mobile has consistently been the most root/mod friendly carriers available, always willing to provide support even for rooted or modded phones.
Hopefully that explains a bit more as to why Verizon doesn't have much love.
Seriously, anyone using animation in a presentation is a disaster himself.
Found the Slashdotter who lacks imagination. Yes, the formula in the boardroom is basically that quantity of animations are inversely proportional to useful information. However, Powerpoint is used beyond the boardroom. My mother is a children's librarian. She does all kinds of things with animations and layers and her monthly story times are amongst the most well attended in the district. On the other hand, Steve Jobs used the "slam in and make dust/smoke" effect on a number of his annual product release presentations (yes, he was probably using Keynote, not the point). The "Animations" area is also used to manipulate timing and audio playback - even if you're not using "Fly from Right", a slide transitioning in, playing audio clips in succession, and transitioning out, is all done as an animation. Finally, if moving an object on a screen along a multipoint bezier curve is acceptable in After Effects or Motion, but not Powerpoint, that's simply shortsighted.
99% of presenters I've seen use Powerpoint, use it badly. We're taught how to make Powerpoint documents rather than how to visually reinforce presentations, so the latter skill is rare indeed...but bad Powerpoints don't make Powerpoint a bad tool any more than bad Python code makes Eclipse a bad IDE.
Obviously, the go-to assumption is that there was a deal made on a golf course somewhere. It's entirely possible - probable, even...but let's take a moment to suspend the "crucify Microsoft" direction and consider a possible alternative...
Libreoffice is a solid product. I do not mind it one bit; in some cases I even prefer it to MS Office. Munich probably did save a bundle in licensing costs for Office. However, that's not the whole story. Integration with Office can frequently be a mission-critical requirement. There's a whole lot of reporting software, calculation software, CRM software, and document management software that integrates with Office. These vendors do not typically include integrations for LibreOffice, which means there are two options:
1. use products that work with LibreOffice.
2. roll your own.
Option 1 is a bit of a quagmire because it's not like they were moving to a computerized system from filing cabinets and typewriters, so it's not like they could just start with "linux/LO compatibility required" as a bidding condition. If they did, it probably would have been better for OSS as a whole, but alas, there is data residing in incumbent systems which need to be considered. Thus, we land at option #2.
How many programmers would be required to make a LibreOffice/LogicalDoc rollout roughly comparable to MSO/Sharepoint, move all the data over, access the same set of databases and workflows, etc., and do it in a timeframe that doesn't bring the city to a halt? Well, that needs to be compared to the cost of just using MSO, and do so favorably...but let's say that it did, and we ignore the user training side of things. What about the server side of things? Were they still using Windows Server and Active Directory, or migrate all that over to LDAP? Same with Exchange and Dovecot? MS SQL and Postgres? It's a bundle of money, but moving everything over, everywhere, ever, is almost as challenging as getting Linux desktops to work flawlessly with a Microsoft backend.
Now, let's head back to the golf course. Who called the meeting? If it was Microsoft, that's a good thing. Do you really think that Microsoft will be able to convince the city to migrate back without giving them one hell of a good price on it? If MS wants the contract back, you know they're taking pennies on the dollar for it.
If the takeaway of this exercise is that Microsoft is giving the city of Munich a software contract at 70% off for the next decade and that the OSS community ends up with a to-do list of functions that were considered shortcomings, then it sounds like some good ultimately came out of it. If it really was an offer they couldn't refuse, then by all means, crucify them.
If I might make a suggestion, if you have an old(ish) desktop and a spare NIC around, check out Untangle. It's a router distribution, and their $5/month home license will likely be super helpful to you. Its web filter can be configured to nix virtually all advertising, and its transparent web caching features can help minimize downloads for content that is requested repeatedly. You can also have a custom set of blocked domains if you'd like, and all the rules apply to all the devices in your home, even if they update or modify hosts files or whatever. You can also look at reports that will tell you what the biggest offenders are, so you can manage accordingly.
With respect to the Win10 hosts file situation, the 'gotcha' is that the inability to edit hosts files is a function of Windows Defender (which, to be fair, there were a number of malware strains that were redirecting Google and Bing to malware servers). Disable Defender and you're probably fine, but it's probably worth installing a third party antivirus instead - NOD32 is my weapon of choice, personally.
It is absurd how much computing power is wasted on dynamically generating what is effectively static content, like blogs.
A simple blog should not require an SQL database and complex software stacks that are executed whenever someone visits the site.
I absolutely agree with this...in theory.
Instead, consider using a static website generator like Pelican, or one of the many alternatives.
Okay, let's do that. Hrmm...not in Softaculous, or the other one-click install options at Godaddy or Hostgator. That's annoying, but it's only one time, so let's check the website...Hrmmm...no 'download' area from the front page...documentation I guess? Great! They have an install instructions area! ...that is full of CLI installation commands and doesn't provide a download link at all for shared hosting environments. Also, while PHP support is near-universal on shared hosting, is Python? Well, we'll assume for a minute that it is and go from there.
Okay, let's head over to the section about installing themes...oh look! *more* CLI stuff! Yes, Pelican assumes that users want to use a CLI to decide how their website appears. When I did look at their themes area, I saw a Github listing. Github. No screenshots, no galleries. A list of files and folders.
Now, writing a blog post should be simple, right? Oh...there's a markdown language I have to use, a series of inline commands for formatting and links and content embedding requires a specific file system? Wait...this was addressed in your statement earlier...
Write articles and blog posts in a simple, human-readable markup language such as Markdown or ReStructuredText.
Manage your documents in git. Run the generator to recreate the HTML and update Atom/RSS feeds.
The resulting website is blazing fast and can be hosted on dirt cheap servers.
More simplicity on the Internet please.
I am pretty sure that you have a different concept of "simple" than 99.9999% of bloggers out there. From a technical level and the amount of data ultimately transferred, no question whatsoever. For someone who can run circles around you with respect to gardening or keeping bees or fashion or a thousand other topics that don't involve software development, the usage here is the absolute furthest thing from "simple". Articles and blog posts are written in English, or whatever the native tongue of the author is. People writing blogs are writing down thoughts and observations for humans, by humans, using languages that facilitate communications between humans. Only on Slashdot does that need to be specified.
Let's compare this with the Wordpress experience:
Wordpress: One-click installation from basically every major shared web hosting provider on the market. Once installed, enter the username and password to the backend. Click 'themes', then 'get themes'. Browse around for hours, finding one that looks the prettiest. Customize it using point-and-click options that are reflected instantly. Many themes automatically handle mobile layouts with zero user intervention. Depending on needs, add a few helpful plug-ins. Don't know what to get? Ask Aunt Google, and there will be no shortage of recommendations! Want to write a blog post? Click add-> post, and you've got a simple-to-use box to type in that automatically saves drafts, looks and works pretty similar to Microsoft Word, has a list of categories on the right for easy filing, and a big "publish" button for when you're done. Did I mention there's a mobile app for real-time posting or that Pelican doesn't seem to have a comments section at all, or that literally everything I've described here has required ZERO command line usage or PHP coding and are all stock functions with zero plugins or extensions required?
Slashdot can piss on Wordpress all it wants, and yes, security/hardening plugins are the first thin
In my experience, the answer is "custom code and plugins". If you're running a bog standard Wordpress install with Akismet, FormNinja, Gallery, and a handful of the other top-20 plugins, auto-update is just fine and won't bother you at all. If you have a lot of custom layout code, or specialized plugins that are mission critical but not regularly updated, updating Wordpress can break them, thus breaking the website. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, this situation should not be the case. However, you asked thy people don't enable auto-update. That would, in fact, be why.
As an aside, shameless plug for the super awesome Shield Plugin. It's free, and when properly configured, can prevent nearly all of the major forms of automated attack. I've also used iQ Block Country to nix traffic from most of the usual purveyors of such attacks. Not a dev or an investor, just a super happy user of both.
Now, to go one further, Slashdot seems to be back-and-forth regarding mandatory auto-updating. Wordpress has a flaw, and the response is, "why isn't auto-update just how the thing works?". Microsoft implements this with Windows 10, and the response is, "How dare they tell me when I have to update!". Which is it?
That would make sense if they were were doing something positive, just not what Microsoft wanted. There weren't a whole lot of user facing hardware innovations, just a race to the cheapest clamshell available, an initial boot time of four minutes or so, and half a dozen pop-ups on the first start from all the shovelware vendors, trying to meet the $300, $400, $650 price points. HP was busy photocopying MacBook Pro stylings with terrible heat dissipation and abhorrent touchpads, Dell was flirting with Android and the tablet market but couldn't commit, Acer was making their usual plastic, Asus was half decent if you were super careful about your DC jack, and Lenovo was going through that phase where they tried selling Acer-grade laptops with ThinkPad logos, with the sole exception of the dual-monitor W700 series that was epic if you could carry the 10-pound workstation after paying its $4,000+ price tag.
The major PC vendors were busy cutting corners while Apple was making hardware people actually wanted...so yes, MS tried something different and soon after, the PC market started to rally.
I half agree, and I half don't. The 30% CPU speed increases were far more noticeable in the late 90's and early 2000s, but I think you'd be comfortably within the second standard deviation of users who would be able to meaningfully distinguish between 4x2.5ghz cores and 16x3.5ghz cores. Hardware used to matter more then, in no small part because the things that mattered were all local. I remember the days of checking out software on CD-ROM from the library, and a mindset where "logging into the internet" was done for AIM and email/nntp sync, but little else. Today, a laptop without Wi-Fi is basically considered a typewriter.
Now, I'm right there with you in wanting ever-faster computers, but Slashdot is a self-selecting group in terms of that sort of thing being valued. For most people, desktops resemble toaster ovens. They have one in the house, some people use it more than others, they're better at certain tasks than the far-more-convenient microwave, and they're basically mature technology where the primary reason for replacement is breakage.
I think there's less of a push for traditional computing because the functions simply aren't there anymore. Games, media production, and IDEs are basically the hardware-demanding desktop tasks, and simplistic iterations of those tasks can be done on an iPad. Tripling CPU power would be great for Steam games, but users who are satisfied with Candy Crush are not going to be looking for a new desktop to do it, even though Microsoft has shoehorned it into Windows 10.
I'm unfortunately in the same boat, but I think it does also depend on what you're looking for. I'd wager that if a lot of people had their default search engine changed to DDG, they'd probably fine. Let's be real, "facebook" and "facebook.com" are very common searches because most people have forgotten the distinction between a search bar and an address bar, so typing URLs in a Google/MSN search is probably a solid third of their traffic. DDG would probably be just fine for this sort of thing; people sure didn't notice when their default search got changed to Trivoli or the dozen other browser hijackers that were making their rounds a few years ago.
Where DDG comes up very short, however, is in more specialized searches. If you're looking for a code snippet or an outdated version of some app or something more specific and technical, DDG is a crapshoot at best and useless at worst. I mean, I can't really blame them - Bing is still inferior at this point and they have thrown Microsoft quantities of money at the problem. Search is hard - there was a decade prior to Google where Altavista and Lycos were doing their best with plenty of money and lots of talent, and they were still beaten by Google.
Ironically, DDG might get better relative to Google because Google results have continued their downward spiral toward the lowest common denominator. Just yesterday, I was trying to find out if anyone else with my particular TV was able to get the Android app "AnyRemote" to send the right IR code. I went to Google to search the model number with 'anyremote', and Google seemed to thoroughly ignore the existence of 'anyremote' in my search query, instead showing me physical remote controls, even when I put anyremote in quotes.
If Google continues this behavior, it's only a matter of time before they end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, giving DDG inroads to increase their market share. The ultimate question is, however, whether the revenue they get while retaining their staunch privacy directives is enough to keep them profitable, or if they will have to compromise their privacy policy, be bought out by someone who does not share their values, or make some other rough choices to keep themselves afloat.
It is quite ridiculous. It seems that despite political correctness advancements, it would still be impossible for an atheist (that is, anyone who is not terminally insane yapping about jebus and imaginary sky fairies) to become president in the USA.
With this attitude, you're probably right. Yes, I'm one of the handful of Christians that frequent Slashdot; there are indeed a handful of us. If you don't share the same set of beliefs as I do, that is absolutely you're right. If you are unhappy that there aren't more atheists in government, I completely understand that (to an extent, I'd even agree). If you're going to be insulting and degrading in the process, then you're going to find sympathy pretty hard to come by.
Lets get this straight, people: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GOD!
I disagree. I also know that I cannot empirically prove my stance, and thus cannot and will not fault you from arriving at a different conclusion. Telling me what I should believe, however, is the very behavior your post seems to find unacceptable.
One has to be pretty drooling stupid to believe in that child-molesting garbage
Yes, the Christian/Catholic church has had issues with this in the past, and I do not for a moment defend them. However, molesting children is far from a core tenet of the belief system, and millions upon millions of Christians manage to go through life, pursuing their faith, and are successful in doing so without molesting children. Moreover, a spiritual belief system need not be a direct reflection upon intelligence. A successful heart surgeon who has gotten a Ph.D. is, in all likelihood, a pretty intelligent person. If they also happen to believe in Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, or an faith derived from a tribe of Indigenous Americans, that doesn't mean they aren't intelligent or that I wouldn't let them operate on me if I needed open heart surgery, only that they do not share my faith.
yet in front of the people who are supposed to be running this country they have these retarded blathering idiots going on about their magic sky daddies and friends.
1. So don't watch it? Or DVR it and fast forward the religious leaders?
2. For what it's worth, I'm of the persuasion that this is far more a matter of pandering than an intent to set the course for the country. If the majority of people who voted for the winner were another group, there probably would have been people pandering to them instead.
It is one thing to make a president swear on some 2000 year old book of BS because tradition. But there no excuse for the rest. None at all.
See above.
As an atheist it reminds me that I am not represented and that people would still be happy to come at me with their torches and pitchforks.
Has anybody threatened your life on the sole basis of your faith? If not, are you honestly of the persuasion that the only reason people have not done so is because it's illegal? There's some credibility to the point that there are few (if any) atheists in Congress, but would you vote for somebody on the sole basis that they share your views regarding God (or a lack thereof), even if your views were opposite on foreign policy, NSA wiretapping, gun legslation, health care, economic changes, the educational system, and other things that they would actually be responsible to address and legislate?
Every indication points to the entertainment market being completely over-saturated. What makes Apple think they can do better than the existing studios?
They don't have to be "better". Apple hardware tends to be one-at-a-time kit - there aren't *that* many people who will own and use multiple laptops or smartphones at the same time. However, it's entirely practical (and common) for a Netflix subscriber to also purchase a season of a TV series from the iTunes Store. Apple focusing a bit more on services allows them to widen their potential customer base by creating a product whose competitors can all coexist, which isn't nearly as easy for laptops and smartphones. Therefore, they don't need to out-Netflix Netflix, they just have to have a TV show that a million people are willing to spend $20/season on, irrespective if those people are also Netflix subscribers.
On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one.
just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time. the term "cult of mac" became known for a reason
Oh, the memories that have been lost to history...
Okay, first off, remember that in 2007, iTunes libraries were expansive, encompassing, and well-curated. Virtually everyone had an iPod, which synced with iTunes. DRM had only *just* come off the files they sold, meaning that plenty of users still had hundreds of purchased songs that couldn't play on anything else.
The iPhone didn't do *lots* of things that contemporary smartphones did...but the iPhone wasn't competing with them. The iPhone was competing with Feature Phones - the LG Chocolate and similar handsets that were popular at the time, and shared pocket space with the iPod. Consolidating the two devices into a single gadget was one of a few major things the iPhone brought to the table.
Bluetooth file transfer was used by a handful of people...but keep in mind that Verizon had a habit of blocking that from most of their phones at the time, so it wasn't missed. Even if it was, if Apple loses points for Bluetooth file transfer, Blackberry loses points for making the Blackberry Curve without WiFi. What was sorely needed though, was a phone that did mobile web browsing and didn't suck. Internet Explorer Mobile sucked, horridly. Every attempt it made to lay out a page on a 320x240 screen was basically an exercise in shuffling cards - it never, ever worked right...but miraculously, even it was a step up from the Blackberry browser, which couldn't do anything right. Showing a full website and pinching in and out to navigate it? That really was incredible for the time. We have mobile website *now*, which is nice, but no one cared about cell phone web traffic in 2007.
Threaded messaging was available in BBM, but even Blackberry made it nearly impossible to split longer SMS messages. They made their name on e-mail, but didn't do HTML mail in any meaningful sense. Blackberry did music, but it was the "drag-and-drop MP3s to a MicroSD card" method that negated most of the benefits of iTunes like playlists and play counts and automatically syncing new purchases. The iPhone, by contrast, had beautiful threaded messaging with few functional limits - many feature phones at the time could only store a few hundred messages so deleting old messages by hand was a common task. We take kinetic scrolling for granted now, since everyone has it but it was truly a "wow" moment during Steve's keynote. Visual Voicemail was also something new to the masses and took years for others to implement.
The initial release of the iPhone wasn't about having a massive amount of features to compete with every bullet point on the box of the Curve or the Q or the Blackjack, it was about the ability to go from carrying around two devices to just one, with a solid web browsing experience, in a package far more streamlined and polished than anyone else on the market.
So yes, it couldn't use 3G or map, but I will definitely give credit where it is due. The iPhone didn't do everything, but what it did do was done right, given what was prevalent amongst users at the time of its release.
I'm not surprised LG is doing this. Whether it's for raw competitive reasons ("Look Phil! This one has the Wi-Fi and a touchscreen!") or less-than-desirable reasons (acquiring information regarding the use of the product / making it less serviceable by techs without specialized equipment), the fact is that this sort of thing was basically inevitable.
Whether it's worth caring about depends on whether the devices will perform their intended function without internet access. Sure, some people will find it nifty to have an app notify them when preheating is done or to be able to check that they turned the stove off as they drive away (and turn it off if they didn't), but the real question is whether I'll be required to sign up for an LG account in order to set it to 375 to bake cookies.
Internet connectivity as a bonus, I'm fine with. Internet connectivity to do the functions that have been served for the last hundred years with a knob...not so much.
How was it NOT extortion before the law?
Because this is extortion...on the Internet.
Depends on the kind of security you're looking for. I'm generally a fan of the Asus family of routers that support the Padavan firmware - they all support DD-WRT as well if that's your thing.
What makes this router something warranting a slashdot discussion is the fact that it does unified threat management, something that tends to require an appliance beyond a simple router/switch/AP combo. The cheapest ones with integrated Wi-Fi are from Sonicwall, but they're all kinds of awkward to have in a home setting (NAT translation is a pain, no UPnP, etc.). Fortinet also has some prosumer units, but good luck getting one - it tends to involve a whole lot of middlemen and quotes and all that other sales red tape that's quite obnoxious.
If you're cool with a more DIY solution, break it out. A gigabit switch is more or less a gigabit switch; 8-port units are $40 or less now. Most routers can function as a simple access point (aforementioned Asus being among them), but if you're looking for multiple access points, Ubiquiti is my favorite as the $130 access points do AC1750, there's a central configuration utility, they handle roaming and frequency hopping quite well, and they're a whole lot less expensive than most of the alternatives.
As far as the router itself, get a desktop and a second NIC, and you've got choices. I'm an Untangle fan myself, and $5/month for the home version gets you the kitchen sink for your home - virus checking, content filtering, ad blocking, spam filtering, multi-wan, VPN, the whole shooting match, in the simplest configuration console I've used. pfSense (and its recent fork opnsense) is free, and gives nearly all the same features, but in a somewhat more Spartan interface with more manual control required. Sophos has an excellent UTM, though it has a 50-endpoint limit and resembles Sonicwall in its NAT configuration. Other honorable mentions worth exploring would be Endian (simplest past Untangle), Smoothwall (best QoS), and IPFire (runs on a 133mhz Pentium), again, depending on the feature set you're looking for.
Happy exploring!
A friend of mine told me about VidAngel a few weeks ago, and my feeling is that they're trying to do a tightrope walk, blindfolded, while wearing ice skates.
Their business model hinges on the sell/resell gimmick that solely exists on a balance sheet. It's shaky ground to stand on.
CleanFlicks lost out because they altered the movies, which either fell under "derivative work" or "CSS decryption", either way not a good idea. They lost in court.
RealNetworks (still a thing, apparently) tried having a product that allowed movies to be ripped to one's own computer, but included more DRM than the original DVD. They lost in court.
Aereo distance-shifted OTA broadcasts, limited to one viewing per antenna, and one antenna per user. They lost in court.
Zediva bought DVD players and DVDs, paired them 1:1, and allowed one user to stream a movie from an available DVD player. They lost in court.
Vidangel is walking a trail blazed by dead bodies, forged by lawyers who have no intention of providing a compromise that reflects reality. Once they get big enough, the MPAA will come after them as well. They might win against Miramax and MAYBE Universal, but once the sleeping Mouse is awakened by their family-friendly edit of Rogue One, I wouldn't bet a counterfeit wooden nickel on them willing that court case - Disney will win on attrition alone.
After all, it is power, not money, that perpetuates this behavior.
I can never find things in Outlook, Word or Excel 2010. The old style drop-down menus make it much easier to find what I want.
To be fair, they added a search box in 2016 so any commands you can't find are searchable.
I think it was Stephen Colbert who made an attempt to describe the Lincoln Tunnel to people who didn't live in New York:
Imagine trying to get that contents of this container of jelly beans into this bucket, putting them all through these two drinking straws...Also, all of those jelly beans are late to work.
A major problem is when accidents happen in tunnels. There is literally nowhere for anyone - including emergency vehicles - to go. Now, accidents in tunnels tend to be of the fender bender variety, but when a vehicle is rendered inoperable, you're just plain screwed. Making tunnels the way roads are built as a general rule is not the best of ideas - it's why subways make more sense as long as the stops can pick up and drop off enough people to nudge the needle of the rest of traffic. Manhattan would be utterly impassable without the subway moving half a million people a day.
Nobody likes traffic, and nobody likes parking. LA has its problems due not simply to cost, but the lack of a useful alternative when dealing when that level of population density independent of a useful mass transit system.
No, so that if the issue is expanding batteries, the batteries can be made thinner, or they'll pop the back off, prompting the need to have the battery replaced, or so users can buy batteries from Anker or ZeroLemon (or LG), or so Samsung can ship a box of batteries to each Verizon store and let users swap them with be batteries as a 45-second exchange rather than spending an obscene amount of money for RMAs in hazmat boxes...really, the only reason the phone needed to be recalled as a complete unit is because the batteries weren't removable.
While yes, Apple, LG, and Samsung have produced unibody phones that didn't blow up, I've yet to hear a reason why removable batteries are a bad thing for consumers with the sole exception of anorexia.
Good news, Mr. AC: There are people who are doing lots of work to enable just that sort of configuration:
https://github.com/Kickball/aw...
https://turnkeylinux.org/
https://bitnami.com/
With respect to the 'business class tax', it's obnoxious to pay twice the price for internet...but business customers get better support and the option for an SLA, as well as static IP addresses. Now, I wouldn't be opposed to an 'enthusiast' tier with consumer-grade support and open ports 80/25 on a single static IP, but it's not a thing for the moment...which is why no-IP's port 80 redirect is helpful. Similarly, very few ISPs block 443, so https + reverse proxy = green pastures of self-hosting on a residential line.
"Everyone hosting a mail server" is a bad idea. Most don't know how to configure or administer one, nor have the desire to do so. The problem with e-mail as a bastion of free speech is that it requires the recipient to listen, a premise compromised at the outset. Meanwhile, the majority of e-mail sent and received today is spam, so increasing the avenues for spam just sounds like a horried idea all around. As a final point, the gatekeepers move from "who moderates Facebook" to "who decides what is and isn't spam at Spamhaus".
We need middlemen for certain things. Making technical competency a de facto requirement for exercising freedom of speech is itself an example of censoring in practice. I hate the cloud as much as you do, but there are certain people who will always need a tech person in order for their idea to be heard. There's no reason they should be required to get a server, install a LAMP stack and CMS, register a domain and configure its DNS, leave their computer on all the time, and be comfortable in tweaking a few lines in Javascript, just to interact with others about knitting.
Absofuckingloutely entirely this. Little BIOS updates to old hardware, links found on some obscure forum and files obscenely difficult to find. I stumble across at LEAST 10 of these kinds of files a year and those are the ones I notice.
So, genuine question here...this problem did not start existing after Dropbox - in fact, it dates back to when drivers were delivered on floppy disks and downloads varied from OEM to OEM, so FTP repositories were how this was dealt with for decades prior to Dropbox. The question is this: at what point did this fall out of vogue? Sure, Dropbox is prettier and all, but it's not like FTP stopped working, or that FTP's lack of security is such a travesty for a manual or a driver. Sure, GoDaddy might not be cool with hosting 2016's rebirth of ftp.cdrom.com on their base level shared hosting tier, but is 'hosting an FTP server' such an insurmountable undertaking for scenarios like these?
You're absolutely right in that Cisco is not a company with any concept of how to compete on price. I'll do one better though - there's no integration with anything, and thus no reason to use Cisco over AWS/Azure/GCC. Those companies have massive scale, and playing catch-up isn't cheap without a reason to not just use one of them. VMWare can do hybrid cloud better than Google can, so they can successfully charge a bit more to companies who need certain things on-prem while cloudifying others as they decommission old servers. Oracle is run by Satan himself. Data that ends up in an Oracle database doesn't come out barring a miracle, so they can sell to companies who have already sold them their soul pretty well. Speaking of companies run by Satan, Intuit can do their SaaS thing because it's still pretty profitable to have 80% of Main Street businesses dependent on their product, to the point that raising the cost of their Quickbooks Online by $1/year will never be a reason to switch away from them, but is still millions a year in money-for-nothing.
Cisco sells routers and switches and phone systems. There's no springboard, no inertia, no existing customer base to move to the cloud (maybe the phone systems a bit). If they can't leverage their existing customers, then they are left competing with Amazon, the Wal-Mart of the internet, Microsoft, who can still flex muscle with Windows and Exchange server and make those cutovers easier than anyone else, and Google, the company who data mines for a living. Cisco can't compete on price, they can't really compete on features, and they don't have an explicit market for which keeping with their existing vendor makes sense for IaaS.
"Microsoft's response to the Amazon Echo and Google Home is Home Hub, a software update for Windows 10's Cortana personal assistant that turns any Windows PC into a smart speaker of sorts."
No it's not. Based on Microsoft's track record it will be a poorly-designed, late-to-market, barely functional piece of shit that will garner no market share except for that of the die-hard Windows fanbois. After a year or two of disappointing reviews and craptastic software updates they'll discontinue it.
That may well be true...but there's a one-in-a-billion chance that Microsoft will be able to make it stick if they can successfully court the XDA community. If a device is mod-friendly, and it becomes "the Echo you can mod", it's possible that it'll carve out a niche for itself...because both Google and Amazon have taken steps to ensure that the modding community isn't welcome.
Microsoft clearly has no recent evidence of this path, which is why I'm perfectly aware that it's such a remote possibility. However, it's a market hole that neither Google nor Amazon have any chance of filling.
Seriously, Facebook Messenger is basically becoming its own all-consuming entity at this point. It does text chat, voice chat, video chat, image exchange (complete with filters, IIRC), payment exchanges, stickers, and now video games. It's either an overly bloated chat client, or a really slimmed down fork of systemd.