Windows has 'the registry'...which for all its hate and faults is, from an objective standpoint, about as difficult to work with as.conf files.
And what is it about this GUI obsession with you millennials?
The GUI changes the paradigm from 'fill in the blank' to 'multiple choice'. I can find what I want to do and figure it out pretty simply, between programs, even ones I haven't used before. The CLI is great when you know all the switches, but I personally can never remember if it's chmod 644 -R/dev/null, or chmod -R 644/dev/null. CLIs don't scale down well - something like 'creating a mailbox in Exchange' requires a massively long command that takes far longer to type than to click through the GUI wizard, so while making 100 mailboxes is faster in a CLI because it can be scripted or copy/pasted, making 1 mailbox without copy/pasting will always be quicker in a GUI...and there are endless examples of this sort of thing.
A good terminal (like bash) lets you do stuff faster and easier than any GUI.
So...photo editing then? Or audio editing? Did you type this comment in Lynx, or Chrome/Firefox/Whatever? PC games? Again, it's only "faster and easier" if you already know the commands. If you don't know the commands, add in all the time it takes to discover the commands, read the man page to figure out what order the arguments go in, and then input it while substituting your own data properly. Also, how do commands deal with spaces and special characters? The command line absolutely has its place, but eschewing the GUI wholesale is just as ignorant as eschewing the CLI in its proper context.
It's also damn easier to give the advice to "open terminal, copy past these lines" than it is to have to create multiple screen shots of how to do the same thing in a GUI and then hope and pray that the end user is using the same language and version of OS as you do.
Yes. And in those cases where that is properly done, it most definitely is preferable. However, anything other than a perfect set of copy/paste lines gets very complicated, very quickly. I tried five times to get Rocket.Chat installed in a Linux VM, before I gave up and asked my friend to help. He did, and the server is up now, but when the copy/paste directions are incorrect, change between versions, make assumptions that aren't there, or are otherwise ineffective, now any advantage to a CLI over a GUI is completely gone.
Ardour is great, and so is Reaper. The existence of a solid DAW on Linux isn't the issue at this point.
First, one of the major issues is inertia - Logic Pro, Ableton, ProTools, Cubase, Sonar, and FL Studio are all respected names in the field, with lots of users, forums, and ecosystems around them. Audio engineering is very susceptible to a herd mentality, because anyone who uses something different will be told to join the herd, rather than getting actual support.
Next, audio engineering is much more hardware dependent than most CS/IT disciplines. For us, 'input' basically consists of keyboards and NICs, which are interchangeable. Pro audio involves audio interfaces from Tascam, Presonus, M-Audio, and FocusRite, with MIDI controllers ranging from Korg/Yamaha keyboards to guitar pedals and drum pads. We'll circle back to the interface problems in a moment, but the MIDI controllers are largely USB now, meaning there are abstraction layers that may require specialized drivers, mapping software, and plug-ins.
Back to the audio interface question, amongst the major things we have here is that Jack/Alsa are fine for desktops with Realtek chipsets, but when you're dealing with thousand dollar interfaces that can record sixteen channels of audio in real-time with 1ms latency, Jack and Alsa just don't cut it. OSX has CoreAudio and Windows has ASIO, both of which are industry standards that work with those interfaces. Linux would need something similar to it, but even if such a thing were to come into existence, support by the hardware OEMs is certainly not coming into place overnight. Meanwhile, those OEMs need to sell gear, which means that CoreAudio and ASIO handle over 99% of the market, and no one seems to be chomping at the bit to write yet another audio system for Linux to even provide a viable target. Reaper and Ardour could well start on that, but now you have DAW devs stuck writing middleware that already exists on Windows and OSX.
I look forward to it happening, but it's a pipe dream right now. Hardware OEMs are targeting ASIO and CoreAudio, plug-in writers are targeting Ableton, Protools, and VST hosts, industry standard DAWs are targeting Windows and OSX, and a soup-to-nuts Linux ecosystem would require cooperation from everyone at the same time for a market segment that's super picky at best.
Your questions is why this is a very sticky situation...
They 'detect' the streams in that streaming providers need to meet some sort of requirements to qualify. According to statements made, they're purely technical. Basically, if you can provide them a few IP addresses and the ability to respond to T-Mobile saying '480p please', you're in, I'm unaware of an instance where T-Mobile has discriminated against any provider that has met these purely technical requirements, nor am I aware of anyone coming forward to say that there was a hookers-and-blow requirement, including Google, which is notable because Youtube was last to the party of the majors.
Users are perfectly allowed to disable BingeOn, and CSRs are trained to help users disable it. Anyone running a streaming service can qualify. T-Mobile isn't 'prioritizing' internet traffic from one provider over another from a bandwidth standpoint, but they *are*, at some level, doing so from a billing standpoint, since my self-hosted MediaGoblin server uses more of my data plan than Netflix does (I have an unlimited data plan so I don't care, but the point remains).
So, we have a really sticky situation: Users who are okay with 480p streams can be okay with 480p streams and not have it count against their data plan. Companies who want to offer 480p streams can call up T-Mobile and be added without being prohibited from doing so. Is it *really* net neutrality, or is it the neutral zone?
iPhones are manufactured in China, and so are plenty of Samsung's components. Xiaomi could well battle HTC and Huewei for a solid third place slot, and that slot really is up for grabs right now. "Chinese" tends to mean "flimsy", "poorly constructed", and/or "knockoff product" in context, but Xiaomi has had a few well-constructed handsets that indicate a potential for doing alright in the market. Honestly, what the bigger concern is for them is whether they'll be able to play the carrier game and not get screwed over by Verizon and AT&T in the quest for shelf space along with the premium handsets.
It's 'mostly unlimited'. It's fast-as-you-can-go up to 26GB. After that, they won't actually throttle you, but they'll deprioritize you - not "2G speed", just "other people get to cut the line, so if you're on a busy tower, you're the first to get slowed down, but if you're on a tower with plenty of unused bandwidth, you won't notice a difference". Also, I'm wagering their 14GB tethering limit is still in place.
I concur that Linux is *starting* to become a viable platform for creative production. Reaper is excellent, as is DarkTable. Krita is an impressive 1.0 application, Blender is everywhere, and though Scribus seems to be stuck in that awkward valley between Publisher and InDesign, it's very much possible to get some nice print layouts out of it.
Linux's problems in becoming a de facto standard for multimedia production are still waiting for a solution, though. The Jack/Alsa debacle is mostly-stabilized for listening to tracks in Amarok, but when one needs multiple streams of low-latency audio I/O, they're not consistent. Moreover, there's no shortage of Tascam/Presonus/Rane/Focusrite audio interfaces for which drivers were not specifically written. Sure, they might work with some sort of class compliant driver set, but while I can get 2ms latency from my Rane SL3 in Windows via ASIO, I can't get that from Alsa. Even if I could, telling musicians that their Waves/iZotope/Maschine plugins won't work is a guaranteed way to get a door slammed in your face; akin to telling a secretary Outlook won't work or the accountant Quickbooks won't work - it's a flat out nonstarter for them. The video side is its own mess, because patent-encumbered codecs are still very much a thing in video world, and the ability to encode/decode in those formats is foundationally incompatible with Free Software. Once again, BorisFX, NewBlue, Pixelan, and GenArts plug-ins are frequently as critical as the applications themselves.
I very, very much look forward to being able to use Linux full time. I hate the amount of tweaking I have to do to beat Windows into submission, and I love using KDE. The problem is simply that the amount of functionality that one must give up to perform the same work on Linux is still higher than the benefits realized. This isn't true in every industry - plenty of server applications rightfully treat Windows Server as a second class citizen. Creative Development is nowhere near the same kettle of fish as software development, and years of inertia aren't going to go away just because Linux is "getting there". The gap is getting ever smaller as Adobe has long reached maturity with most of its applications, leaving plenty of room for catch-up. It'll happen. I'm waiting.
Apparently, a few people here agree that converting to Windows, from OSX, for a specific demographic, isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a certain amount of 'right tool for the job' that's in play here.
Hackint0sh options aren't exactly the most viable thing in the creative field. Legalities of using OSX on non-Apple hardware notwithstanding, I was speaking primarily of laptops, and the number of laptops that are sufficiently compatible with OSX to provide a stable alternative while also providing greater performance than an MBP are very, very few - and building such a laptop isn't terribly practical. It's a bit better in desktop world, but even that involves lots of trial and error. As a hardware tinkerer I'd have no problem building such a machine, but I'd be incredibly wary of running my business on one if I were a graphic designer or video editor who had to deal with deadlines on a regular basis. Any OSX updates would be terrifying, and OSX has gone to iOS levels of 'upgrade now' that make it difficult to avoid.
Any public communication platform will, sooner or later, find itself at a crossroads where it must decide exactly how committed to free speech it is. A quick perusal over on Usenet or the Retroshare forums will yield plenty of generally-undesirable content, from bomb making instructions and targeted verbal abuse to racism and anti-semitism. A forum that allows truly free speech - as those networks do - will unfortunately attract those kinds of users. Twitter is stuck deciding whether it's better to start moving the line of acceptability as to limit speech 'for the greater good' (a case reasonably made for death threats and verbal abuse), but then be in charge of constantly deciding what falls on either side of that line, a task from which they will never be able to free themselves thereafter.
Users expect Twitter to filter undesirable speech. Twitter expects users to do their own filtering. Back in the Usenet and IRC days, only the latter was technologically possible, and today it is only technologically possible for Twitter to perform the filtering because they've opted to be the repository of the content - a model that can make them money, but in doing so leaves them stuck trying to decide who's being thin-skinned, who's being genuinely threatening, who's exercising their freedom of speech, and who's costing them the good will of their userbase.
I genuinely wonder exactly how much Apple cares about the creative segment anymore. You're right that PCIe SSDs are great for video editing (and even high counts of multitrack audio editing), but 1TB (the highest available in a MacBook at any price) gets really cramped, really fast. If Apple weren't trying to make their laptops look like a supermodel on a hunger strike, having a PCIe system disk and a 2TB, 7200RPM storage disk would be great...at the very least, two USB ports is ridiculous. The new GPUs are a welcome update, since the existing chipsets were being overtaken by even midrange, $800 Asus laptops...but it'll be interesting to see how Apple balances 'thin', 'heat dissipation', 'battery life', and 'performance'; I have a gut feeling that 'performance' is going to be the weak link.
On the software front, Aperture was discontinued, there's been no update to iDVD to allow Blu-Ray burning, Final Cut folks are starting to look into Adobe Premiere, and Logic Pro and Garageband are starting to become increasingly blurry; Ableton and FL Studio are both becoming solid contenders in the space while ProTools has become a lot more afforable than when Logic started making inroads.
I'd argue that the creative fields are more in a place where they need Apple more than Apple needs them. Windows (Win10 upgrade hell and telemetry concerns not withstanding) has done plenty of growing up since the Win9x days when Apple dominated the creative market for good reason, and with the exception of the first party Apple applications (Logic, FCP, Motion) nearly all the major creative production applications (Adobe Everything, Quark, Avid, Ableton) are cross platform, so it's not even that there's a whole lot of revamping established workflows or losing access to past projects that's much of a problem.
Switching to Windows, where hardware choices abound from the $600 budget-friendly Asus machines to the $3,000+ Origin/FalconNW/Sager hardware behemoths, has never been easier, meaning that plenty of the aversion to switching is the Apple lock-in, whether literal (e.g. an extensive backlog of Final Cut projects) or perceived (the file management learning curve between OSX and Windows), meaning that all Apple has to do to keep the Apple-or-bust creative market is to make sure the past 2-3 releases of those applications keep working with OSX, and as long as that takes place, Apple can keep slimming down their laptops to cater to the Facebook/Youtube crowd with little to no consequence. I'd wager that even if Apple went down to Intel Integrated graphics across their Pro line of MacBooks, Apple would probably still make more money than keeping dedicated nVidia/AMD chipsets, because they could tout "thinner", "doesn't run as hot", and "longer battery life" as features, all three of which matter a lot more to the majority of the present day Macbook purchasing crowd than disk I/O or render times.
"Where are the damn synergies? I was told there would be synergies!"
Johnson: "Sir, the synergies are configured, just as you ordered. When one part of the system goes down, the whole system goes down. They work together that way, just like you asked."
Two PowerShell commands = no more Metro apps at all. Unfortunately, it takes more precision to avoid removing the calculator app, but if you can live without it, removing everything is indeed possible.
As for Cortana, my procedure to shut her up is to go to task manager, right click the Cortana process, click "open file location", go up a level in the file system...and deny all file permissions to the system accounts to the entire folder. The system can't access the file, so no respawning process.
I understand the concern, but there's really no evidence for it. Your examples of what Samsung and Microsoft have done aren't evidence... and Google has little more control over Samsung than over Microsoft. Could Google decide that it no longer cares about openness? Sure. But we're actually working quite hard to push it the other direction, and I see no reason to expect that to change.
What is the thing you're saying Google has done "in firmware" for Android for Work, but hasn't "flipped the switch"? Android for Work does nothing in firmware, it's all in Android; the only thing remotely close to that is the use of TrustZone for authentication and crypto key management -- and I'm the engineer responsible for those TrustZone components, and I can't figure out what "switch" you're talking about.
I've been meaning to reply for some time; feel free to e-mail me as I know this discussion will be archived soon.
You're right that Google has relatively little control over Samsung. What they do have is control over the Android trademark, etc., and if Google can require that the Play Store be within one swipe's distance of the home screen when shipped, Google can make other requirements that reflect dedication to ensuring that devices are able to be flashed with AOSP software. Unless I misunderstand how the Nexus system works, Google *does* have say over how those function, and those have a locked bootloader
. However, in doing some research for this post, I will concede that the Knox components that rely on the eFuse and other hardware-based, root-resistant functions are still Samsung specific, so I certainly admit fault there.
I guess I feel like how Brutus must have felt. Julius Caesar had done nothing wrong, and was well liked by the people he served. Brutus saw Julius was doing the right thing completely out of self control, rather than any form of checks and balances, or other such accountability. Now, I'm certainly not looking to kill anybody, but if Google decides to mandate locked bootloaders or bring an end to the work done by the folks at XDA-Dev, there's just no reason whatsoever for them not to...and that does, in fact scare me.
Thanks! Your check is in the mail! Oh, just a heads up: our typing records say your password for hotmidgetongoataction.com is pretty weak. I think you should add another exclamation mark to the end of it.
Thanks again, Microsoft
Windows PowerShell Copyright (C) 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
PS C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0> ping hotmidgetongoataction.com Ping request could not find host hotmidgetongoataction.com. Please check the name and try again. PS C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0>
...just in case anyone else wondered if hotmidgetongoataction.com was actually a website that existed.
Come on Microsoft!!!! make Windows 11 an updated, business usable Windows 7 Pro lookalike! Otherwise, I don't see how business will continue down the Microsoft road.
It's simple, really. As long as a whole lot of companies run their businesses on Windows-only software, the answer will likely end up being something like, "Use Windows 10, 'deny any any' to all known Microsoft IP blocks, and run patches with WSUSOffline once a month". Moreover, I wouldn't be surprised if Sonicwall and Untangle started adding anti-telemetry add-ons to their firewalls to streamline the process.
Conversely, some businesses simply don't care if their data goes back to the mothership. Should they? sure. Do they? Not in practice.
Yet. Give it time. Android isn't at that step yet, but I have seen absolutely no indications that Android will not end up at step 8 in due course. At the very least, Google isn't defending openness very well, either. Google has done little (if anything) to discourage locking bootloader. Google not only failed to discourage Samsung's Knox e-Fuse, they integrated that feature, along with several others, into recent releases of Android. These are not steps to preserve the modding community.
I'm a member of the Android security team, and worked around the edges of this feature. We (I'll use that pronoun for simplicity, but please note that I'm not claiming credit) put a great deal of additional effort into making sure that it supported modders who unlock their bootloaders and install custom software. We even made sure that they can use the verified boot feature to ensure that their self-signed images are not modified without their knowledge.
I appreciate the consideration put into this. Sincerely, honestly, and genuinely - it is nice to hear that these cases are still a part of the development process. At the same time, Microsoft required that Windows 8 motherboards both had secure boot, as well as a user-facing option to disable it in the BIOS. Windows 10 certification kept the former, but not the latter. Do I blame Google for the tresspasses of Microsoft? Of course not...but given that the outcry over this was basically limited to a few strongly worded Slashdot comments, I do not see Google as a company so principled as to actively avoid step 8 when there was clearly no blowback.
The goal is not to prevent modding, the goal is to improve security by ensuring that malicious images can't be installed.
The goal isn't to prevent modding *now*. Android At Work's core features were a solved problem by Nitrodesk with Touchdown, which could be configured to require its own passcode and disable screenshots and respect Exchange wipes and determine if the device was rooted...and these were solved in the Froyo days. Google chose to deal with this in firmware. The switch has not been flipped, but the infrastructure went from "not being there" to "being there", changing the trust requirement from being "they can't" to "they won't"...and I'm very hard pressed to find a "they wouldn't" that didn't eventually become a "they did".
I understand where you're coming from, and I do appreciate your response. I hope you can understand my hesitance and concern.
It's almost like Google wants everyone to stop using Android.
I don't think that's it. I think it is simply 'the pattern'...
1.) A company releases software or a device. It adheres to standards very well, and although it's a bit rough around the edges, it's open enough that an enthusiast community develops that picks up the slack for those willing to tinker with it. Thus, it requires a bit of understanding to become useful, and it may lack some polish, but the community picks up steam. 2.) The modding community recommends the item to others. The technologically illiterate will stick with 'what works' for now, but other enthusiasts come on board. A few forward thinking companies develop software/addons for the item, which help legitimize the platform. 3.) The item gets an iteration or two, implementing popular features from mods, squashing bugs, and improving its utility. The item is headed toward critical mass, and more companies leverage the item. 4.) Between a few malicious actors and a few technologically illiterate folks who have loud mouths and no patience, things get a bit more messy. Overall though, the item is still on the rise as step 3 continues to grow the item. 5.) As the item gains more legitimacy and experiences some mainstream success, more of step 4 happens, to the point where the manufacturer needs to do something about it. In many cases, the openness of the item has a number of avenues of attack for malice to be successful, so a few of the mods stop working in the name of security. 6.) As mainstream acceptance becomes the norm, the modding community becomes more of a liability than an asset. With mainstream acceptance comes lots of money, in contrast to the modding community's inherent DIY mentality. 7.) Protection of the revenue stream well exceeds the value of the modding community. Thus, protecting the item is a much bigger deal. Openness becomes more and more difficult to leverage; after a few iterations of progressively removing openness without revolt, the dev team is given less of a voice than the accountants. Frequently prices are increased, and sometimes the ability to export data is removed. 8.) Openness is formally removed. A few principled holdouts of the original modding community leave, but since the product has integrated into mainstream usage so effectively, many mainstream users require functions to be performed that only the item can perform, in either a primary or secondary capacity. In many cases, the item holds mission critical data, ensuring its continued usage for some time. 9.) Litigation of those who force openness begins. 10.) A company introduces an item....
I only see one idiot here. I'm guessing you're either too young to remember the early days of PC gaming, or you simply forgot because of the past decade of Apple lauding their monoculture as a panacea.
In the late 80's and early 90's, fragmentation was a bit more of a problem. Going from the internal PC speaker to actual audio cards was a mess, with games needing code written for several popular cards, until we ended up with "Sound Blaster Compatible" becoming the de facto standard before Windows 95 gave us a universal abstraction layer that works well enough that offboard/external audio cards are either for enthusiasts (there's still a few sound blaster cards floating around Newegg) or audio professionals (Tascam/Presonus/M-Audio/Rane).
In the early days of graphics cards, games once again frequently needed code for individual GPUs. Grab a copy of "Forsaken" off eBay and you'll have to specify whether you have a TNT2 card, 3dfx card, and one or two others. Again, this was commonplace until DirectX and OpenGL provided an intermediate solution that allowed game designers to target the abstraction layer, rather than the hardware.
Now, things have gotten even simpler on the PC side, because developers don't even necessarily have to write code to DirectX, but because they can code to the engines - Unity, Unreal, Source, Crytek, or in-house ones like Frostbite. Code to the engine, and the engine worries about ensuring DirectX compatibility, which in turn worries about hardware.
Finally, cross-platform development has brought its own cancers to the PC side. I could have a bad encounter with a table saw and still be able to count on one hand how many AAA games released in the past two years allow for dedicated servers. Console folk can't be bothers to configure port forwarding on their routers, and to be fair, it's not like consoles work all that great with that paradigm, which is why XBL and PSN exist. I don't begrudge those services in the least, but dedicated servers were a standard component for multiplayer PC games for over a decade, but are now an endangered species. Games used to frequently ship with level editors and modding kits, that allowed for new characters and maps to be community created (DLC used to be DIY, and free). Again, this is a highly exceptional state of affairs now, and I'm patently unconvinced it's a positive direction for PC gaming.
So yeah, there are near-infinite hardware variations. There are also time-tested methods of addressing them.
But couldn't they still offer a VPN client that connects to a server outside the country with a "dynamic" IP of sorts to keep it from from being blocked by the ISP? [snip] We need some good news, and we just aren't getting any yet.
They do. That is the good news. Here's the summary...
Private Internet Access owns about 3,000 servers in 34 countries. You pay $7/month, and you set up a PPTP/IPSEC/OpenVPN client with the credentials they specify. When you log into your account on their website, you can pick which country you want your data to be originating from, and that is your endpoint. If they have a server in France, then your traffic is VPN'd from your computer to their servers in France. If you connect to their VPN and then head over to IPChicken, you'll see a French IP address from the block of IPs they own from that region. If tomorrow you want your traffic to come from Kansas, you pick your server there, and your IPChicken will reflect that IP instead. Meanwhile, those IPs are used by dozens of other users, so it's neigh impossible to tell exactly which user was responsible for a given piece of traffic...unless you explicitly configure those server to log which users were logged in and sent what traffic where, which is what Russia is looking for.
Spam-free??? Can you give an example? Last time I checked (it *has* been a while) misc.rural, comp.lang.pascal.borland and others were a cesspool of spam.
The first thing to note is that a lot of spam is quite old. It's not at all uncommon for unused groups to have a lot of spam listed from ten years ago, if you're using a provider that has 2,500 days retention or something like that. Imagine how much spam your inbox would have if you scrolled for ten years and neither deleted anything nor had much in the way of filtering at that time. I'm not saying it doesn't still happen, but 'sort by date' is your friend.
That said, comp.misc has lots of active users, as does alt.comp.os.windows-10 and alt.windows7.general. If you're of the non-Microsoft persuasion, alt.os.linux.ubuntu is pretty active, as is alt.os.linux.debian, comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, and comp.mobile.android. I'll concede that none of the Pascal groups I looked through seemed to be anywhere I'd like to actually invest my time. On the non-computer related front, rec.arts.drwho.moderated gets reasonably active during the broadcast season, and misc.legal.moderated has some really interesting discussion regarding case laws and has a number of actual-lawyers who participate.
Yes, virtually every topic one would potentially look at on Usenet has a metric ton more activity on a comparable vBulletin forum somewhere. Much as the 'Eternal September' is still referenced here and there, the masses seemed to have left Usenet and camp out on Facebook and Twitter, leaving a much smaller group of technically inclined people an experience reminiscent of the early days once again. Eternal September provides free text-based NNTP access, with most paid providers providing block accounts for which even the smallest block will likely provide years of message board activity.
Because Archfield and the Anonymous Coward missed the point, I submit the following rephrasing...
Why would a person/company who is using a commercial VPN service actually want their internet traffic to originate from Russia?
An employer requiring a VPN to the home office? Makes perfect sense, and happens every day. An employer requiring their remote-working employees who are probably working from home (e.g. likely within 50 miles and 10 hops of that office) to connect via Sonicwall NetXtender or Cisco VPN to their front-facing router? Absolutely. However, what possible security could be accomplished by having remote employees use a commercial VPN service to encapsulate traffic making a 50(ish) mile trip or less by making it traverse through Russia before getting to the home office?
A multinational company having a site-to-site VPN also makes plenty of sense. Even if it's to their office in Russia, it still makes sense, but it's not what Hagbard was referring to, because in that context its from their company, to their company. The question implicitly doesn't apply. If you're in China or Iran and VPNing due to government oppression, doesn't it make a lot more sense to send your traffic through the US or UK or Japan or some other country with less draconian oversight of internet traffic? Actually, that proves the point of the article - the company pulled out of Russia because Russia was implementing that very level of oppression for which a VPN would be needed. Finally, latency alone would be reason enough not to VPN through Russia for remote viewing of a security camera.
Nobody is asking whether VPNs are useful. The question being asked is whether there's any utility for the endpoint to be in a country that is beginning to require a year's retention on connectivity logs.
Slashdot Mirror
When will Windows get rid of the registry?
Windows has 'the registry'...which for all its hate and faults is, from an objective standpoint, about as difficult to work with as .conf files.
And what is it about this GUI obsession with you millennials?
The GUI changes the paradigm from 'fill in the blank' to 'multiple choice'. I can find what I want to do and figure it out pretty simply, between programs, even ones I haven't used before. The CLI is great when you know all the switches, but I personally can never remember if it's chmod 644 -R /dev/null, or chmod -R 644 /dev/null. CLIs don't scale down well - something like 'creating a mailbox in Exchange' requires a massively long command that takes far longer to type than to click through the GUI wizard, so while making 100 mailboxes is faster in a CLI because it can be scripted or copy/pasted, making 1 mailbox without copy/pasting will always be quicker in a GUI...and there are endless examples of this sort of thing.
A good terminal (like bash) lets you do stuff faster and easier than any GUI.
So...photo editing then? Or audio editing? Did you type this comment in Lynx, or Chrome/Firefox/Whatever? PC games? Again, it's only "faster and easier" if you already know the commands. If you don't know the commands, add in all the time it takes to discover the commands, read the man page to figure out what order the arguments go in, and then input it while substituting your own data properly. Also, how do commands deal with spaces and special characters? The command line absolutely has its place, but eschewing the GUI wholesale is just as ignorant as eschewing the CLI in its proper context.
It's also damn easier to give the advice to "open terminal, copy past these lines" than it is to have to create multiple screen shots of how to do the same thing in a GUI and then hope and pray that the end user is using the same language and version of OS as you do.
Yes. And in those cases where that is properly done, it most definitely is preferable. However, anything other than a perfect set of copy/paste lines gets very complicated, very quickly. I tried five times to get Rocket.Chat installed in a Linux VM, before I gave up and asked my friend to help. He did, and the server is up now, but when the copy/paste directions are incorrect, change between versions, make assumptions that aren't there, or are otherwise ineffective, now any advantage to a CLI over a GUI is completely gone.
Ardour is great, and so is Reaper. The existence of a solid DAW on Linux isn't the issue at this point.
First, one of the major issues is inertia - Logic Pro, Ableton, ProTools, Cubase, Sonar, and FL Studio are all respected names in the field, with lots of users, forums, and ecosystems around them. Audio engineering is very susceptible to a herd mentality, because anyone who uses something different will be told to join the herd, rather than getting actual support.
Next, audio engineering is much more hardware dependent than most CS/IT disciplines. For us, 'input' basically consists of keyboards and NICs, which are interchangeable. Pro audio involves audio interfaces from Tascam, Presonus, M-Audio, and FocusRite, with MIDI controllers ranging from Korg/Yamaha keyboards to guitar pedals and drum pads. We'll circle back to the interface problems in a moment, but the MIDI controllers are largely USB now, meaning there are abstraction layers that may require specialized drivers, mapping software, and plug-ins.
Back to the audio interface question, amongst the major things we have here is that Jack/Alsa are fine for desktops with Realtek chipsets, but when you're dealing with thousand dollar interfaces that can record sixteen channels of audio in real-time with 1ms latency, Jack and Alsa just don't cut it. OSX has CoreAudio and Windows has ASIO, both of which are industry standards that work with those interfaces. Linux would need something similar to it, but even if such a thing were to come into existence, support by the hardware OEMs is certainly not coming into place overnight. Meanwhile, those OEMs need to sell gear, which means that CoreAudio and ASIO handle over 99% of the market, and no one seems to be chomping at the bit to write yet another audio system for Linux to even provide a viable target. Reaper and Ardour could well start on that, but now you have DAW devs stuck writing middleware that already exists on Windows and OSX.
I look forward to it happening, but it's a pipe dream right now. Hardware OEMs are targeting ASIO and CoreAudio, plug-in writers are targeting Ableton, Protools, and VST hosts, industry standard DAWs are targeting Windows and OSX, and a soup-to-nuts Linux ecosystem would require cooperation from everyone at the same time for a market segment that's super picky at best.
Your questions is why this is a very sticky situation...
They 'detect' the streams in that streaming providers need to meet some sort of requirements to qualify. According to statements made, they're purely technical. Basically, if you can provide them a few IP addresses and the ability to respond to T-Mobile saying '480p please', you're in, I'm unaware of an instance where T-Mobile has discriminated against any provider that has met these purely technical requirements, nor am I aware of anyone coming forward to say that there was a hookers-and-blow requirement, including Google, which is notable because Youtube was last to the party of the majors.
Users are perfectly allowed to disable BingeOn, and CSRs are trained to help users disable it. Anyone running a streaming service can qualify. T-Mobile isn't 'prioritizing' internet traffic from one provider over another from a bandwidth standpoint, but they *are*, at some level, doing so from a billing standpoint, since my self-hosted MediaGoblin server uses more of my data plan than Netflix does (I have an unlimited data plan so I don't care, but the point remains).
So, we have a really sticky situation: Users who are okay with 480p streams can be okay with 480p streams and not have it count against their data plan. Companies who want to offer 480p streams can call up T-Mobile and be added without being prohibited from doing so. Is it *really* net neutrality, or is it the neutral zone?
iPhones are manufactured in China, and so are plenty of Samsung's components. Xiaomi could well battle HTC and Huewei for a solid third place slot, and that slot really is up for grabs right now. "Chinese" tends to mean "flimsy", "poorly constructed", and/or "knockoff product" in context, but Xiaomi has had a few well-constructed handsets that indicate a potential for doing alright in the market. Honestly, what the bigger concern is for them is whether they'll be able to play the carrier game and not get screwed over by Verizon and AT&T in the quest for shelf space along with the premium handsets.
So when they ask me shit like "What elementary school did you go to?", I put something like, "Jm36*gdt22(ILD$".
No amount of detective work is going to "uncover" that.
Well, that USED to be the case....
1. Self-Driving Cars: Someone Else's Car.
2. Clean Energy: Someone Else's Wealth.
3. Virtual and Augmented Reality: Someone Else's data, displayed.
4. Drones and Flying Cars: Someone Else's "paperless office" or "alternatively fueled car".
5. Artificial Intelligence: Someone Else's algorithm on Someone Else's CPU.
6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone: Someone Else's data collection.
7. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: Someone Else's wealth.
8. High-Quality Online Education: Someone Else's knowledge...that no employer will ever esteem as highly as a degree.
9. Better Food through Science: Someone Else's farm.
10. Computerized Medicine: Someone Else's algorithm.
11. A New Space Age: Someone Else's patent.
How The US Will Likely Respond To Shadow Brokers Leak
Liara needed that intel so Commander Shepard could thwart actual terrorist attacks.
It's 'mostly unlimited'. It's fast-as-you-can-go up to 26GB. After that, they won't actually throttle you, but they'll deprioritize you - not "2G speed", just "other people get to cut the line, so if you're on a busy tower, you're the first to get slowed down, but if you're on a tower with plenty of unused bandwidth, you won't notice a difference". Also, I'm wagering their 14GB tethering limit is still in place.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/t...
I concur that Linux is *starting* to become a viable platform for creative production. Reaper is excellent, as is DarkTable. Krita is an impressive 1.0 application, Blender is everywhere, and though Scribus seems to be stuck in that awkward valley between Publisher and InDesign, it's very much possible to get some nice print layouts out of it.
Linux's problems in becoming a de facto standard for multimedia production are still waiting for a solution, though. The Jack/Alsa debacle is mostly-stabilized for listening to tracks in Amarok, but when one needs multiple streams of low-latency audio I/O, they're not consistent. Moreover, there's no shortage of Tascam/Presonus/Rane/Focusrite audio interfaces for which drivers were not specifically written. Sure, they might work with some sort of class compliant driver set, but while I can get 2ms latency from my Rane SL3 in Windows via ASIO, I can't get that from Alsa. Even if I could, telling musicians that their Waves/iZotope/Maschine plugins won't work is a guaranteed way to get a door slammed in your face; akin to telling a secretary Outlook won't work or the accountant Quickbooks won't work - it's a flat out nonstarter for them. The video side is its own mess, because patent-encumbered codecs are still very much a thing in video world, and the ability to encode/decode in those formats is foundationally incompatible with Free Software. Once again, BorisFX, NewBlue, Pixelan, and GenArts plug-ins are frequently as critical as the applications themselves.
I very, very much look forward to being able to use Linux full time. I hate the amount of tweaking I have to do to beat Windows into submission, and I love using KDE. The problem is simply that the amount of functionality that one must give up to perform the same work on Linux is still higher than the benefits realized. This isn't true in every industry - plenty of server applications rightfully treat Windows Server as a second class citizen. Creative Development is nowhere near the same kettle of fish as software development, and years of inertia aren't going to go away just because Linux is "getting there". The gap is getting ever smaller as Adobe has long reached maturity with most of its applications, leaving plenty of room for catch-up. It'll happen. I'm waiting.
Apparently, a few people here agree that converting to Windows, from OSX, for a specific demographic, isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a certain amount of 'right tool for the job' that's in play here.
Hackint0sh options aren't exactly the most viable thing in the creative field. Legalities of using OSX on non-Apple hardware notwithstanding, I was speaking primarily of laptops, and the number of laptops that are sufficiently compatible with OSX to provide a stable alternative while also providing greater performance than an MBP are very, very few - and building such a laptop isn't terribly practical. It's a bit better in desktop world, but even that involves lots of trial and error. As a hardware tinkerer I'd have no problem building such a machine, but I'd be incredibly wary of running my business on one if I were a graphic designer or video editor who had to deal with deadlines on a regular basis. Any OSX updates would be terrifying, and OSX has gone to iOS levels of 'upgrade now' that make it difficult to avoid.
Any public communication platform will, sooner or later, find itself at a crossroads where it must decide exactly how committed to free speech it is. A quick perusal over on Usenet or the Retroshare forums will yield plenty of generally-undesirable content, from bomb making instructions and targeted verbal abuse to racism and anti-semitism. A forum that allows truly free speech - as those networks do - will unfortunately attract those kinds of users. Twitter is stuck deciding whether it's better to start moving the line of acceptability as to limit speech 'for the greater good' (a case reasonably made for death threats and verbal abuse), but then be in charge of constantly deciding what falls on either side of that line, a task from which they will never be able to free themselves thereafter.
Users expect Twitter to filter undesirable speech. Twitter expects users to do their own filtering. Back in the Usenet and IRC days, only the latter was technologically possible, and today it is only technologically possible for Twitter to perform the filtering because they've opted to be the repository of the content - a model that can make them money, but in doing so leaves them stuck trying to decide who's being thin-skinned, who's being genuinely threatening, who's exercising their freedom of speech, and who's costing them the good will of their userbase.
This is how you deal with things you don't like on the internet. Twitter users have forgotten this.
Gaming is growing so big and complex, the next version of Solitaire will require government funding, just like Hoover Dam.
Well, since Microsoft is requiring a subscription for Solitaire now, I'd say that they're well on their way.
I genuinely wonder exactly how much Apple cares about the creative segment anymore. You're right that PCIe SSDs are great for video editing (and even high counts of multitrack audio editing), but 1TB (the highest available in a MacBook at any price) gets really cramped, really fast. If Apple weren't trying to make their laptops look like a supermodel on a hunger strike, having a PCIe system disk and a 2TB, 7200RPM storage disk would be great...at the very least, two USB ports is ridiculous. The new GPUs are a welcome update, since the existing chipsets were being overtaken by even midrange, $800 Asus laptops...but it'll be interesting to see how Apple balances 'thin', 'heat dissipation', 'battery life', and 'performance'; I have a gut feeling that 'performance' is going to be the weak link.
On the software front, Aperture was discontinued, there's been no update to iDVD to allow Blu-Ray burning, Final Cut folks are starting to look into Adobe Premiere, and Logic Pro and Garageband are starting to become increasingly blurry; Ableton and FL Studio are both becoming solid contenders in the space while ProTools has become a lot more afforable than when Logic started making inroads.
I'd argue that the creative fields are more in a place where they need Apple more than Apple needs them. Windows (Win10 upgrade hell and telemetry concerns not withstanding) has done plenty of growing up since the Win9x days when Apple dominated the creative market for good reason, and with the exception of the first party Apple applications (Logic, FCP, Motion) nearly all the major creative production applications (Adobe Everything, Quark, Avid, Ableton) are cross platform, so it's not even that there's a whole lot of revamping established workflows or losing access to past projects that's much of a problem.
Switching to Windows, where hardware choices abound from the $600 budget-friendly Asus machines to the $3,000+ Origin/FalconNW/Sager hardware behemoths, has never been easier, meaning that plenty of the aversion to switching is the Apple lock-in, whether literal (e.g. an extensive backlog of Final Cut projects) or perceived (the file management learning curve between OSX and Windows), meaning that all Apple has to do to keep the Apple-or-bust creative market is to make sure the past 2-3 releases of those applications keep working with OSX, and as long as that takes place, Apple can keep slimming down their laptops to cater to the Facebook/Youtube crowd with little to no consequence. I'd wager that even if Apple went down to Intel Integrated graphics across their Pro line of MacBooks, Apple would probably still make more money than keeping dedicated nVidia/AMD chipsets, because they could tout "thinner", "doesn't run as hot", and "longer battery life" as features, all three of which matter a lot more to the majority of the present day Macbook purchasing crowd than disk I/O or render times.
"Where are the damn synergies? I was told there would be synergies!"
Johnson: "Sir, the synergies are configured, just as you ordered. When one part of the system goes down, the whole system goes down. They work together that way, just like you asked."
Get-AppXProvisionedPackage -online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -online
Get-AppXPackage | Remove-AppxPackage
Two PowerShell commands = no more Metro apps at all. Unfortunately, it takes more precision to avoid removing the calculator app, but if you can live without it, removing everything is indeed possible.
As for Cortana, my procedure to shut her up is to go to task manager, right click the Cortana process, click "open file location", go up a level in the file system...and deny all file permissions to the system accounts to the entire folder. The system can't access the file, so no respawning process.
I understand the concern, but there's really no evidence for it. Your examples of what Samsung and Microsoft have done aren't evidence... and Google has little more control over Samsung than over Microsoft. Could Google decide that it no longer cares about openness? Sure. But we're actually working quite hard to push it the other direction, and I see no reason to expect that to change.
What is the thing you're saying Google has done "in firmware" for Android for Work, but hasn't "flipped the switch"? Android for Work does nothing in firmware, it's all in Android; the only thing remotely close to that is the use of TrustZone for authentication and crypto key management -- and I'm the engineer responsible for those TrustZone components, and I can't figure out what "switch" you're talking about.
I've been meaning to reply for some time; feel free to e-mail me as I know this discussion will be archived soon.
You're right that Google has relatively little control over Samsung. What they do have is control over the Android trademark, etc., and if Google can require that the Play Store be within one swipe's distance of the home screen when shipped, Google can make other requirements that reflect dedication to ensuring that devices are able to be flashed with AOSP software. Unless I misunderstand how the Nexus system works, Google *does* have say over how those function, and those have a locked bootloader
. However, in doing some research for this post, I will concede that the Knox components that rely on the eFuse and other hardware-based, root-resistant functions are still Samsung specific, so I certainly admit fault there.
I guess I feel like how Brutus must have felt. Julius Caesar had done nothing wrong, and was well liked by the people he served. Brutus saw Julius was doing the right thing completely out of self control, rather than any form of checks and balances, or other such accountability. Now, I'm certainly not looking to kill anybody, but if Google decides to mandate locked bootloaders or bring an end to the work done by the folks at XDA-Dev, there's just no reason whatsoever for them not to...and that does, in fact scare me.
Thanks! Your check is in the mail! Oh, just a heads up: our typing records say your password for hotmidgetongoataction.com is pretty weak. I think you should add another exclamation mark to the end of it.
Thanks again,
Microsoft
Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
PS C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0> ping hotmidgetongoataction.com
Ping request could not find host hotmidgetongoataction.com. Please check the name and try again.
PS C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0>
...just in case anyone else wondered if hotmidgetongoataction.com was actually a website that existed.
It originated from a dilapatated Coney Island arcade with a busted up sign and an illegal connection to the power grid.
Yes!! ...but where do they get their internet?
Come on Microsoft!!!! make Windows 11 an updated, business usable Windows 7 Pro lookalike! Otherwise, I don't see how business will continue down the Microsoft road.
It's simple, really. As long as a whole lot of companies run their businesses on Windows-only software, the answer will likely end up being something like, "Use Windows 10, 'deny any any' to all known Microsoft IP blocks, and run patches with WSUSOffline once a month". Moreover, I wouldn't be surprised if Sonicwall and Untangle started adding anti-telemetry add-ons to their firewalls to streamline the process.
Conversely, some businesses simply don't care if their data goes back to the mothership. Should they? sure. Do they? Not in practice.
8.) Openness is formally removed.
Android is *not* removing openness.
Yet. Give it time. Android isn't at that step yet, but I have seen absolutely no indications that Android will not end up at step 8 in due course. At the very least, Google isn't defending openness very well, either. Google has done little (if anything) to discourage locking bootloader. Google not only failed to discourage Samsung's Knox e-Fuse, they integrated that feature, along with several others, into recent releases of Android. These are not steps to preserve the modding community.
I'm a member of the Android security team, and worked around the edges of this feature. We (I'll use that pronoun for simplicity, but please note that I'm not claiming credit) put a great deal of additional effort into making sure that it supported modders who unlock their bootloaders and install custom software. We even made sure that they can use the verified boot feature to ensure that their self-signed images are not modified without their knowledge.
I appreciate the consideration put into this. Sincerely, honestly, and genuinely - it is nice to hear that these cases are still a part of the development process. At the same time, Microsoft required that Windows 8 motherboards both had secure boot, as well as a user-facing option to disable it in the BIOS. Windows 10 certification kept the former, but not the latter. Do I blame Google for the tresspasses of Microsoft? Of course not...but given that the outcry over this was basically limited to a few strongly worded Slashdot comments, I do not see Google as a company so principled as to actively avoid step 8 when there was clearly no blowback.
The goal is not to prevent modding, the goal is to improve security by ensuring that malicious images can't be installed.
The goal isn't to prevent modding *now*. Android At Work's core features were a solved problem by Nitrodesk with Touchdown, which could be configured to require its own passcode and disable screenshots and respect Exchange wipes and determine if the device was rooted...and these were solved in the Froyo days. Google chose to deal with this in firmware. The switch has not been flipped, but the infrastructure went from "not being there" to "being there", changing the trust requirement from being "they can't" to "they won't"...and I'm very hard pressed to find a "they wouldn't" that didn't eventually become a "they did".
I understand where you're coming from, and I do appreciate your response. I hope you can understand my hesitance and concern.
Hmmm...
It's almost like Google wants everyone to stop using Android.
I don't think that's it. I think it is simply 'the pattern'...
1.) A company releases software or a device. It adheres to standards very well, and although it's a bit rough around the edges, it's open enough that an enthusiast community develops that picks up the slack for those willing to tinker with it. Thus, it requires a bit of understanding to become useful, and it may lack some polish, but the community picks up steam.
2.) The modding community recommends the item to others. The technologically illiterate will stick with 'what works' for now, but other enthusiasts come on board. A few forward thinking companies develop software/addons for the item, which help legitimize the platform.
3.) The item gets an iteration or two, implementing popular features from mods, squashing bugs, and improving its utility. The item is headed toward critical mass, and more companies leverage the item.
4.) Between a few malicious actors and a few technologically illiterate folks who have loud mouths and no patience, things get a bit more messy. Overall though, the item is still on the rise as step 3 continues to grow the item.
5.) As the item gains more legitimacy and experiences some mainstream success, more of step 4 happens, to the point where the manufacturer needs to do something about it. In many cases, the openness of the item has a number of avenues of attack for malice to be successful, so a few of the mods stop working in the name of security.
6.) As mainstream acceptance becomes the norm, the modding community becomes more of a liability than an asset. With mainstream acceptance comes lots of money, in contrast to the modding community's inherent DIY mentality.
7.) Protection of the revenue stream well exceeds the value of the modding community. Thus, protecting the item is a much bigger deal. Openness becomes more and more difficult to leverage; after a few iterations of progressively removing openness without revolt, the dev team is given less of a voice than the accountants. Frequently prices are increased, and sometimes the ability to export data is removed.
8.) Openness is formally removed. A few principled holdouts of the original modding community leave, but since the product has integrated into mainstream usage so effectively, many mainstream users require functions to be performed that only the item can perform, in either a primary or secondary capacity. In many cases, the item holds mission critical data, ensuring its continued usage for some time.
9.) Litigation of those who force openness begins.
10.) A company introduces an item....
I only see one idiot here. I'm guessing you're either too young to remember the early days of PC gaming, or you simply forgot because of the past decade of Apple lauding their monoculture as a panacea.
In the late 80's and early 90's, fragmentation was a bit more of a problem. Going from the internal PC speaker to actual audio cards was a mess, with games needing code written for several popular cards, until we ended up with "Sound Blaster Compatible" becoming the de facto standard before Windows 95 gave us a universal abstraction layer that works well enough that offboard/external audio cards are either for enthusiasts (there's still a few sound blaster cards floating around Newegg) or audio professionals (Tascam/Presonus/M-Audio/Rane).
In the early days of graphics cards, games once again frequently needed code for individual GPUs. Grab a copy of "Forsaken" off eBay and you'll have to specify whether you have a TNT2 card, 3dfx card, and one or two others. Again, this was commonplace until DirectX and OpenGL provided an intermediate solution that allowed game designers to target the abstraction layer, rather than the hardware.
Now, things have gotten even simpler on the PC side, because developers don't even necessarily have to write code to DirectX, but because they can code to the engines - Unity, Unreal, Source, Crytek, or in-house ones like Frostbite. Code to the engine, and the engine worries about ensuring DirectX compatibility, which in turn worries about hardware.
Finally, cross-platform development has brought its own cancers to the PC side. I could have a bad encounter with a table saw and still be able to count on one hand how many AAA games released in the past two years allow for dedicated servers. Console folk can't be bothers to configure port forwarding on their routers, and to be fair, it's not like consoles work all that great with that paradigm, which is why XBL and PSN exist. I don't begrudge those services in the least, but dedicated servers were a standard component for multiplayer PC games for over a decade, but are now an endangered species. Games used to frequently ship with level editors and modding kits, that allowed for new characters and maps to be community created (DLC used to be DIY, and free). Again, this is a highly exceptional state of affairs now, and I'm patently unconvinced it's a positive direction for PC gaming.
So yeah, there are near-infinite hardware variations. There are also time-tested methods of addressing them.
But couldn't they still offer a VPN client that connects to a server outside the country with a "dynamic" IP of sorts to keep it from from being blocked by the ISP? [snip] We need some good news, and we just aren't getting any yet.
They do. That is the good news. Here's the summary...
Private Internet Access owns about 3,000 servers in 34 countries. You pay $7/month, and you set up a PPTP/IPSEC/OpenVPN client with the credentials they specify. When you log into your account on their website, you can pick which country you want your data to be originating from, and that is your endpoint. If they have a server in France, then your traffic is VPN'd from your computer to their servers in France. If you connect to their VPN and then head over to IPChicken, you'll see a French IP address from the block of IPs they own from that region. If tomorrow you want your traffic to come from Kansas, you pick your server there, and your IPChicken will reflect that IP instead. Meanwhile, those IPs are used by dozens of other users, so it's neigh impossible to tell exactly which user was responsible for a given piece of traffic...unless you explicitly configure those server to log which users were logged in and sent what traffic where, which is what Russia is looking for.
Spam-free??? Can you give an example? Last time I checked (it *has* been a while) misc.rural, comp.lang.pascal.borland and others were a cesspool of spam.
The first thing to note is that a lot of spam is quite old. It's not at all uncommon for unused groups to have a lot of spam listed from ten years ago, if you're using a provider that has 2,500 days retention or something like that. Imagine how much spam your inbox would have if you scrolled for ten years and neither deleted anything nor had much in the way of filtering at that time. I'm not saying it doesn't still happen, but 'sort by date' is your friend.
That said, comp.misc has lots of active users, as does alt.comp.os.windows-10 and alt.windows7.general. If you're of the non-Microsoft persuasion, alt.os.linux.ubuntu is pretty active, as is alt.os.linux.debian, comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, and comp.mobile.android. I'll concede that none of the Pascal groups I looked through seemed to be anywhere I'd like to actually invest my time. On the non-computer related front, rec.arts.drwho.moderated gets reasonably active during the broadcast season, and misc.legal.moderated has some really interesting discussion regarding case laws and has a number of actual-lawyers who participate.
Yes, virtually every topic one would potentially look at on Usenet has a metric ton more activity on a comparable vBulletin forum somewhere. Much as the 'Eternal September' is still referenced here and there, the masses seemed to have left Usenet and camp out on Facebook and Twitter, leaving a much smaller group of technically inclined people an experience reminiscent of the early days once again.
Eternal September provides free text-based NNTP access, with most paid providers providing block accounts for which even the smallest block will likely provide years of message board activity.
Because Archfield and the Anonymous Coward missed the point, I submit the following rephrasing...
Why would a person/company who is using a commercial VPN service actually want their internet traffic to originate from Russia?
An employer requiring a VPN to the home office? Makes perfect sense, and happens every day. An employer requiring their remote-working employees who are probably working from home (e.g. likely within 50 miles and 10 hops of that office) to connect via Sonicwall NetXtender or Cisco VPN to their front-facing router? Absolutely. However, what possible security could be accomplished by having remote employees use a commercial VPN service to encapsulate traffic making a 50(ish) mile trip or less by making it traverse through Russia before getting to the home office?
A multinational company having a site-to-site VPN also makes plenty of sense. Even if it's to their office in Russia, it still makes sense, but it's not what Hagbard was referring to, because in that context its from their company, to their company. The question implicitly doesn't apply. If you're in China or Iran and VPNing due to government oppression, doesn't it make a lot more sense to send your traffic through the US or UK or Japan or some other country with less draconian oversight of internet traffic? Actually, that proves the point of the article - the company pulled out of Russia because Russia was implementing that very level of oppression for which a VPN would be needed. Finally, latency alone would be reason enough not to VPN through Russia for remote viewing of a security camera.
Nobody is asking whether VPNs are useful. The question being asked is whether there's any utility for the endpoint to be in a country that is beginning to require a year's retention on connectivity logs.