The problem is that it works both ways. For example, if a non-admin user has smb://foo/bar mapped to z:, but the admin user does not, attempting to make a scheduled task running as admin that involves data in z: will fail, because admin doesn't have it mapped. If you go to %userprofile% in an elevated command prompt, you go to Administrator's profile folder, not the currently logged in user. "non-elevated being unable to talk to elevated" is the 'by design' situation you speak of. 'elevated being unable to talk to non-elevated' is another.
First, T9 was "clearly to the left of the uncanny valley" - the number pad is clearly not a rearranged QWERTY arrangement of keys, so the existing muscle memory doesn't apply. Moreover, the use of the letters on the phone keypad, while not a regular way of entering text up until that point, was still at least loosely familiar to anyone who needed to dial a vanity 800-number.
Second, the fact that "feature phones", aka "messaging phones" or "dumb phones with a QWERTY keyboard" were a huge market in the 2004(ish)-2009(ish) period indicates that T9 was very clearly considered nothing more than a stopgap measure. Alternatively, the mass adoption of feature phones and smartphones would lend credence to the possibility that T9 was an acceptable means of text entry for the very small amount of text that was generally going into a phone at that time, but the ceiling was quickly reached.
Bonus round: People will adopt an optimization to Swype and Swiftkey, just as they were adopted as an extension of the iPhone and older Android keyboards...as long as their existing knowledge is still useful. Knowing how to type on a QWERTY keyboard is useful when you need to type in a last name, and number pad dialing is still used for good ol' fashioned phone calls. If an optimized arrangement of the keys is genuinely helpful, then we'd be seeing an arrangement of keys that puts the vowels toward the edges to facilitate thumb typing...but we don't see keyboards like that gaining any meaningful traction. "Flow" (discussed by me and a few others further down in the thread) largely solves these problems, but it's in the 10K-50K range, rather than Swype and Swiftkey, in the 10M-100M realms.
I used that app back in 2012, and it wasn't just-out-of-beta then, either. When I used it, it effectively solved all of its intended problems: common letter combinations were in close proximity, and there were fewer "word collisions" than with Swype ("or" vs "our" immediately coming to mind).
The problem I found was the fact that while Flow is more accurate, it took me significantly longer to type out a message because I wasn't used to the layout. I've spent over 20 years on a QWERTY keyboard, and even though Flow is more efficient, QWERTY is basically like breathing for me, so any statistically-better keyboard would still be slower because I'd be re-learning to type all over again. Even with errors, I'm personally still a Swype person at heart. I've even tried Swiftkey and Go, but even there what holds me back is knowing where the punctuation keys are. The only alternate keyboard I'll use is "Hacker's Keyboard" when I find myself in an SSH session, but other than that, Swype got me in early in the WinMo 6.5 days, and has never let go.
Because they run the repository. It's not Google saying, "only these extensions may install", it's them having a centralized location for the ones they've approved.
The faster they remove bad stuff, the more false positives they get in their removal process
As long as the appeals process is clear and genuine false positives are handled in a timely manner, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
and independent developers will lose out in the process.
Github, Sourceforge, and "a Godaddy domain with the free-tier hosting" will happily enable independent developers to avail their Chrome extensions for download. If that's not okay, Firefox still has a viable market share, even IE supports add-ons. Depending on 1.) Google, 2.) Chrome, and 3.) the first party Chrome repo to distribute one's browser extension seems foolish, especially when it's still perfectly viable to take any combination of those away from the equation and still get a browser extension into the hands of end users. When Chrome sections off the greater internet...then we can talk.
Also, if I sound crabby and one sided about this, it's because half the users who have browser extensions have the malware-based ones that I need to remove because it keeps hijacking their search providers and home pages, injecting ads, and generally making a mess. I see this across every browser that supports extensions. While users should indeed be more vigilant about what they allow on their computer, I'll be okay with any measure to mitigate this problem that doesn't involve removing a manual override.
holder ceases to publish, market, support and profit from a product
Its a nice idea but kinda hard to enforce. Suppose Microsoft wants to make sure XP's copyright does not expire early. They gather up 20 retail copies of "new old stock" they have somewhere an set an Outlook reminder to put one on Ebay once a year. Does that count?
If they're selling them as new products, with the support entitlements that any new copy of Windows XP should expect, and Microsoft keeps their activation servers up indefinitely, then I'd say yes. If they're selling copies of Windows XP that won't activate...not so much. More to the point, the essence of what's being asked is that Microsoft can't sue someone for running
What if its a small ISV with a shareware product that they maybe only sell a handful of license for per year. Its not a product they pay much attention to but hey once in a while someone decides to toss them $50 to make the nag screen go away, it costs them nothing to leave the license generator and sales page up on their site, so what not? Should they not be allowed to do that as long as they care to?
If the ISV doesn't have any server-side requirements and it's a matter of a simple keygen that displays or e-mails a serial number, then this request doesn't apply. Moreover, if the ISV does have a server side requirement, this request, if honored, simply means that the ISV can't file a lawsuit, citing the DMCA, should someone reverse engineer their software enough to enable the software to continue to perform its intended purpose. Conversely, if the software is reverse engineered in order to remove the requirement for the serial number to be entered, then that's already covered under garden variety copyright laws.
We you make to many rules it just creates to many questions and to many competing interpretations.
"Can the software perform its intended purpose after the vendor labels it end-of-life and deactivates the server side requirements?" IF "yes" THEN request.applies = "false" IF "no" THEN request.applies = "true"
About the only place where there's room for interpretation is in the term "indended purpose" - in the context of games, the continued availability of a single player campaign without multiplayer capability would be a point of contention for the lawyers to debate.
It leaves everyone wonder what really is allowed and what isn't and the real beneficiaries end up being the attorneys.
Such is the cross bore by a legal framework, and it's why "court judge" is an actual profession.
I think we need to keep it simple like, authors lifetime + 15 or just strait 75 years where author is a nonhuman legal entity. No ifs, ands, or buts, no renewals, sorry Disney you can't own Micky for ever.. type system.
Copyright isn't, strictly speaking, in question here. The question is whether software under copyright that is symbiotically dependent upon a publisher that can unilaterally disable some form of authentication and/or data processing can be altered by the end user in order to restore the functionality that was initially paid for. Ordinarily, reverse engineering of that nature isn't legal...but it's also not necessary. The request is intended to decriminalize the situations where such reverse enginerring/is/ necessary.
But if you sync to the cloud, that is, transmit your incriminating video from you registered phone through a cell provider who has your credit card information to a storage provider who also has your credit card information, the cops can show up at your door, follow your car, and get "in your face" until they find something to hang you with.
The single simplest answer I can come up with is "no exceptions". English is dumb like that: "i before e, except after 'c'...or when you run a feisty heist on a weird, caffeinated, foreign, beige, Atheist neighbor". We make a word plural by adding an 's' at the end...except for womans, childs, mans, oxs, mouses, mooses, gooses, and about 1,001 other 'exceptions'. Verb conjugation is a mess, typically using "helping verbs" to establish tense, except when you don't. Then, there are vowels. Spanish has this right "a" (ah), "e" (eh), "i" (ee), "o" (oh), "u" (oo), no exceptions. English has a "short" and "long" sound for each, and then there's the "schwa" sound, because apparently simply using a "short u" when you need one is too complicated for English. And then, there's this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annane....
Trying to find a common denominator between Mandarin, Hungarian, Creole, and English is highly unlikely to happen. So, from my experience with languages, which is "English, with a high school understanding of Spanish and a handful of core phrases in other European languages (i.e. I can ask for a bathroom throughout Europe), my core answer would be consistency. This letter makes this sound, no exceptions. This word ending means that the word is in this tense, no exceptions.
Finally, minimize the "through context" words-with-multiple-meanings situation; "love" being a great example. If you love your mother, your super-fast computer, bacon, and your spouse the same way, then the language is the least of your problems....
Depends where it lives with respect to the infrastructure. As a web server with a public IP and nothing in front of it, running IIS? Probably not (though, to be fair, IIS8.5 has come a long way from versions 5 and 6). Running an application for an industry specific vertical product that is built on the IIS/ASP/MSSQL stack? I don't have a problem with that. Doing internal DHCP/DNS/AD/Exchange? I'm fine with that, too.
Microsoft's issue is that they made it very easy to configure in an insecure way. Similarly, they didn't give much help when it came to giving novice server admins enough guidance to fix their issues without disabling the security measures wholesale. Now, the natural Slashdot argument would be the very concept of a "novice server admin", but the alternative is that certain small businesses don't have a server, so they can't run their applications, so things get messy.
Think of a nail salon with two locations in neighboring towns. Not a large enough business to warrant an IT staff, but big enough to need a client/server model scheduling system, and not the kind of place likely to have an employee technical enough to really do the job right. Cloud vendors are starting to crop up to fill this kind of niche, but even five years ago, that was much less common. Back then, we'd get a server and a point to point VPN system up and running, but if the application runs on IIS/ASP/MSSQL, having a Linux server isn't an option, and the people in charge of choosing the product are unlikely to pick it based on platform. Situations of this nature are incredibly common on Main Street.
I love using Linux and BSD where appropriate, but sometimes Windows is the right tool for the job. Other times, it isn't. No sense in turning it into a religious debate.
Techno-machismo teens playing games trying to get their code into the least number of characters and the least amount of memory.
Given how many programs I've used over the past decade that have required unreasonably high amounts of RAM, and/or were subsequent releases of software that solved a particular problem in earlier iterations but required 1/10th the memory to do it, I wouldn't mind a handful of these guys getting their desks back. Adobe is a great place to start.
I've had to fix or test so much of this junk and it's still just plain stupid.
I'm by no means a programmer, but from the handful of times I've seen what you're talking about, I'll say this: if it's possible to save 10% of RAM by shifting the ease-of-use burden to the comments instead of the actual code, then as an end user, I'm 100% in favor of commenting the everloving hell out of difficult to read code that saves RAM when users are running it.
You don't have to save memory! Memory is there to make your code readable. Use it!
Wrong. Use as much as necessary, but no more. I might have 12GB of RAM in my laptop, but it's not all for you. It's for EVERYTHING I do, and when I start adding VMs or large After Effects projects to what I'm doing, 12GB starts to get pretty cramped. Some RAM usage will be inevitable, but wasteful RAM usage is wasteful.
I most certainly have plenty of admiration for the Demoscene.
Seriously guys, when Microsoft 1.) had the idea years ago, 2.) has the investment capital to give this a viable shot, and 3.) with Azure, has an immediately viable and marketable need for a set of servers that can be dynamically powered up and down...and THEY haven't gotten it to be a viable idea...I sincerely doubt that a startup in the Netherlands will have greater success.
To be fair though, one would imagine that the Netherlands is colder, for more of the year, than the majority of the continental US. Still, servers coming up and down with the thermostat does not seem to be a good enough idea to be of real assistance.
Due to the laws of nature messages can safely be assumed to have been transmitted no later than the time of reception.
I wonder if I should patent this...
Yes, patent it. However, be sufficiently ambiguous in your patent that it will somehow apply to time machines. If the patent passes muster, you'll obviously receive a visit from either your future self, or a beta testing team that needs you to not file that patent. Either way, you'll likely end up either very rich, or very dead.
Sure, desktops for office use will never have a problem. However, the inability to use desktop hardware for any number of other dedicated services is most decisively a bad thing, and the inability to boot into some form of a recovery environment is even worse.
If you're buying the desktops for internal corporate use, leave secure boot on and password the BIOS, everyone's happy.
I can already not play my 16bit DOS games on a modern computer without fancy emulation and that is less than 20 years.
Machine code may get a bit dicey, but also keep in mind that a lot of the development then was at a much lower level (frequently based on CPU cycle, not multicore, etc.). Around that era, WordPerfect 5.1 ruled the roost of word processing, and I bet you that you could open one of those documents in 15 minutes or less today.
NASA themselves have had issues with recovering data from moon landings and other missions that have been kept in storage.
...because they taped over them. That's a smidge different than being unable to read their own tapes.
Then take into account proprietary codecs. Just think back 15 years ago where everything online was Realmedia
Not only was Realmedia much more likely to be streamed than downloaded, but Realplayer is still around, as is RealAlternative, and VLC can read several flavors as well. "uncommon" and "unable to be used" are two different things.
what makes you think that MP3s will be around in 100 years?
Ubiquity. Portable MP3 players have been around for nearly 15 years. The format itself is about 25 years old. You can play back an MP3 on almost literally every OS ever written, there are a dozen FOSS applications to do so, and aside from iTunes going all AAC by default, MP3 is what everyone else uses. Admittedly, media formats are difficult to extrapolate for 100 years, but I'd bet that if one digital format was going to make it to its 100th birthday, MP3 would be the most likely contender (depending on whether ASCII text would be considered a "media format"; JPEG would be my second guess).
What about Quicktime or the heavily patent incumbered h.264 which every man and their dog are working to replace?
they're likely to die.
At the very least we would need to store with it a complete description of the coded format and the algorithm to decode it.
Then there's the hardware issues. What kind of hardware has a really long term data storage capability? Flash memory doesn't and there's evidence that some forms of flash memory need constant data refresh to prevent bit-rot. CDs don't and even if they do it's unlikely that the CD drive will be operational 100 years later. Harddrives suffer the same mechanical problems but even if they didn't how do we interface them? SATA? USB-C? Thunderbolt?
100 years is a VERY long time.
You're correct in this. One very possible method would be to store the same thing on 100 different flash drives, each of a different make and model - it's possible that the data would survive at least one of them. In the case of video, it's possible that the answer is "include a handful of DVD players" - specifically, one with an analog output. From there, it might be possible to include two flavors of disc - one with a garden variety DVD video (in the event it's possible to output a composite signal to something in 100 years), and the other specifically formatted to be visible from an oscilloscope - odds are good that those will still be around in 100 years, and analog video will be somewhat visible that way. One other nice thing about DVD is that the logo is fairly distinctive - even if the people who dig it up need to go to an antique shop or an outright landfill, it'd at least be a distinctive way to give a glimmer of hope.
Here's yet another question to ask - what do we say, and how do we say it? Language itself is likely to morph over that time. Time capsules are interesting for this reason - it gives a glimpse into what society thought was important then, and what the society of yesterday thought would be relevant upon reopening.
Older versions could fit on a floppy disk, and didn't require an Installshield Wizard. Now, it's not at Vuze levels of bloatedness (though Vuze beats to a different drum and has a pretty nice "content store" for Creative Commons content and similar), but it's gotten big and annoying. Transmission works on Windows (...and OSX...and *nix...and plenty of routers and NASes...) and is nice if you don't need RSS feeds. QBittorrent does RSS and is simple to use. Deluge, while being a bit awkward, does a good job. if you're into a super-configurable ecosystem, rTorrent has 101 plugins and browser based frontends, but can also run exclusively from the CLI if that's your thing. The list goes on and on, but utorrent seems to be coasting on inertia, nothing more, nothing less.
The interesting thing is that a similar "we'll borrow some unused CPU cycles" method of revenue generation caused a huge mess with Digsby, an IM client that was great and had a pretty good following until that point. Then again, with most technical folks opting for one of the plentiful alternatives to utorrent, I don't see this being a major impact.
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
The foundational problem we're dealing with here is that the majority of the public doesn't understand how the internet works. The Slashdot crowd has long since learned to deal with that at a micro level. However, we hear different things than the rest of society. Net Neutrality to us means "the bandwidth and throughput of internet traffic won't be artificially limited based on its source or destination." To them, it means "The government will tell me what I can and can't post on my Tumblr blog". With no concept of IP routing, peering, or the Comcast vs. Netflix case that brought Net Neutrality into common vernacular.
Whether this is because "understanding how the internet works and what net neutrality does and doesn't impact" is a genuinely complicated topic, or because the Kardashians have killed far too many American neurons, is a separate topic entirely. To be fair though, if the government was indeed regulating what we could and couldn't post, could and couldn't say, or how we were allowed to say it...we'd be up in arms, too.
Let's face it, people: Hacking is boring to watch.
I'd concur with that - for most people, IT work is both boring and difficult to grasp. Part of it is laziness and stupidity, but it'd be unfair to place all of it under that umbrella - lots of what we do involves having some understanding of a dozen different other concepts that aren't immediately obvious.
I just watched the episode.(spoiler warnings) For the reasons stated above, I'll cut them slack for having the malware code glow red in their visualization - malware isn't always clear. However, I won't cut them slack for things like saying that game consoles have unique identifiers that enable the console companies to track pedophiles, while simultaneously showing the bad guy being tracked by that system where a bad guy is both smart enough to hack the firmware of baby monitors and dumb enough to use a system that could easily trace him that way, especially AFTER he becomes aware that the FBI is after him. I'll cut them slack for the concept of the baby monitor hack - its got its own list of messes, but y'need a story somewhere. I won't cut 'em slack for having the password tattooed on one of the guys - they're running that kind of operation, and they're never going to change the password? Not even partially obfuscate it by adding zeroes to single digits where everyone knows that you don't type the zeroes? On a more practical note, is that guy guaranteed to be there all the time so they could reference the password? Bonus round: the guy showed a holographic representation of a cadaver...because that was really necessary and couldn't have been done with a garden variety photograph...
At least for me, the general list of things I'm willing to overlook: -UI mockups. CLI output only makes sense if you know what you're looking at, and the last thing anyone wants is more expository dialogue that doesn't advance the plot. -Simplifying of IP addresses and their "tracing". I've seen enough Google Maps dots on machines without GPS to know that it's at least "close enough", unfortunately. "inadmissible in court" doesn't necessarily mean "useless", and again, we need a plot device. -Character tropes. I don't look like a stereotypical nerd (no beard, not overweight, no glasses, don't live in the basement, don't have a game console), but Hollywood's got their rack of characters: If there's a white male, approximately 50 years old, and isn't the father of another male character, he's the bad guy. If there's a good looking white girl, she's probably someone's love interest. If there's a mother, her role is, generally, "mother", unlikely to do anything to truly advance the plot independent of her maternal context. Hispanic guy on a motorcycle = gang member. Dad: clueless and aloof, though sometimes has a single pearl of wisdom. The list goes on, and though I'm not a fan of that being the case, it's not "computer techs at the expense of everyone else", and we've got characters like Skye, Chloe O'Brien, and Jake Foley that were generally positive, rounded characters.
Things I won't give a pass on: -logic fails, especially if I'm cutting slack for a part of one. -unreasonable expectations of technology. -unreasonable expectations of people (i.e. "make the situation dire enough, and time will never be necessary"). -simplistic love triangles (much as I love Fitz and Simmons, the "because they're both science" reason is annoying). -nonexistent database relations - "show me a list of 40 year old females in Spokane, who are of Irish descent and whose great grandparents came through Ellis Island in 1899 that have bought P90X and are allergic to gluten."
Stop rewarding them with your money for some shiny baubles which are doing nothing but spying on you and monitizing everything you do.
I do, actually, wonder if anyone has run this through Excel. Consider the following scenario: Acme TVs makes a "Smart TV", intending to monetize the information gained from viewing habits and similar. Suppose said TV retails for 400USD. Does that sticker price reflect a subsidy from the marketing data they're expecting to get? If so, then the best thing we can do is to buy these TVs, then never connect them to the internet. This way, they've spent $425 to sell me a TV for $400. Either TV prices will go up, or they'll sell 10,000 TVs with only 5,000 reporting data back...if that proportion goes low enough, is it possible that, paradoxically, voting with our wallets could mean buying things we don't want so that it stops being profitable?
The "G" in "gif" stands for "graphic" - hard 'g'. The word "gift" is pronounced with a hard 'g'. There are no other vowels in the word to alter pronunciation to be like 'giraffe'.
The inventor of the format can say what he wants. It's a hard 'g'.
Just thinking out loud here, the IE6 monoculture was terrible, and we all hated it...and justifiably so. However, with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all based on WebKit now, have we simply embraced a different monoculture? Admittedly the main difference here is that WebKit is more open than Trident, and the days of ActiveX and Java are more behind us than not...But is having an alternative render engine a better situation, or just redundant coding?
I wonder if you live near where I live. It's actually pretty funny. My new-ish employer and I go back and forth a bit; he's on Verizon and I'm on T-Mo. He laughed at me when I told him that I really liked T-Mo and that their coverage was great. As I go from place to place, I've never once been without coverage, no matter where. In the office, I have solid LTE...and they have a range extender (i.e. paying Verizon to use your own internet coverage). They've listed basements where they can't get signal, and I'm like, "wait...you don't have service there?" Every. Time. I was surprised when I was at one site where he said that service was sketchy. I had full coverage, and got 6.9MBytes (yes, bytes, not bits) per second downstream.
Now, in fairness, the last time I took an Amtrak ride (last year), there were PLENTY of dead spots, but Verizon had noticeably fewer of them. If "middle of nowhere" coverage is important, then Verizon is still probably the better bet. I sure won't be switching, though.
Blows the subscription model idea out of the water.
tl;dr: "supported lifetime" seems to be the easy cop out here, especially since it is a term that doesn't apply to desktops in the same ways that it does in mobile, and trying to force desktops to adhere in that manner isn't a good thing...
True, but it raises other questions instead. "supported lifetime of the device" is a highly suspect phrase here. We see Apple giving phones and tablets approximately three years of "supported lifetime". Apple can do that for a few reasons, but amongst the reasons why the customer base generally tolerates it is because Apple releases new devices mostly-annually, so getting three years of both hardware and software improvements is usually a worthwhile investment for consumers - the "supported lifetime" is acceptable because of trade-up.
Desktops are a completely different animal. I suspect that a significant minority (if not a majority) of iPad users have a desktop or laptop in active use that is older than their iPad, and I'd similarly suspect that the majority of them would prefer to upgrade their iPad this year, rather than their desktop, given the choice of only being able to spring for one or the other. What we've done with desktops is had two functional tiers of existence: in-warranty (where the OEM generally updates and fixes things), and out-of-warranty (where 'the computer guy' handles this stuff). Mobile devices are more disposable, in no small part because repairing them and upgrading them isn't always desirable - either expensive, impractical, or both. This is the area where traditional desktop/laptop computing has always had an edge.
Moreover, it is highly irregular for OEMs to provide OS upgrades to their computers. I had an HP laptop that I bought with XP after Vista's announcement (but not its release), so I registered the machine and HP sent me a Vista disk and key. That was highly irregular, and had to do with my purchase date, not my warranty length. I bought my Origin laptop with a three year, soup-to-nuts warranty in early 2011. That ran out last year, long after Windows 8's release. No Windows 8 disc in sight, and while admittedly I didn't ask, I sincerely doubt Origin would have sent it to me, despite the laptop being within the "supported lifetime of the device" by most practical definitions. The machine does, however, get regular security patches for the version of Windows that it/does/ run. Mobile devices' concept of "updates" involve both "security patches" and "OS version upgrades", whereas desktops do not.
So how does all this tie into Windows being a subscription or not? Well, both "OS updates" and "supported lifetime" are more clearly defined terms in mobile devices, and bringing that paradigm to the desktop yields yet another issue: the "broom problem". If you're a Doctor Who fan, there was an episode this season where The Doctor was saying that if you take a broom and replace the head when it wears out, and then you replace the handle because it breaks, and then replace the head again because it wears out, it's not the same broom anymore. With desktops, we have the same issue - the hard disk dies, we replace the disk. We upgrade a 4GB RAM module with an 8GB module, we add a video card to play games, and the PSU to power it, then we want to SLI, so we replace the motherboard, which mandates a different processor, and change the DVD burner to a Blu-Ray burner...If all these upgrades and replacements happen over three years, we end up with a completely different computer than the one we started with - at what point does the Windows license no longer apply? Microsoft has arbitrarily pointed to "the motherboard", which in fairness is about the closest thing one can get to a reasonable component definition (it's got the most hardware-as-detected-by-Windows of any single physical component), but even those die or have some sort of issue or whatever. What if the CPU is supported, but the motherboard is not? I sincerely doubt Gigabyt
Not trying to start a flame war, but what would companies use instead?
This is exactly the problem, and I'll underscore it with an inquiry to anyone who echoes the grandparent post...
Amongst the reasons Exchange is as readily used as it is, isn't because Exchange itself is some awesome piece of software. Exchange is part of a bigger ecosystem that incorporates a few major pieces:
--ActiveSync - and more to the point, ActiveSync support from billions of phones and tablets. --Active Directory - single sign-on through Outlook from a domain user, and the reverse: creating a mailbox also creates a user in AD. --Outlook - a mail/contact/calendar/task client that has a handful of competitors that excel in one area or another (IMO Zimbra coming pretty close), but still a program whose replacement will require a barricade on the door to keep out the execs who wish to use their torches and pitchforks. --Self-Hosted - Gmail and company don't count.
I've seen plenty of great answers to one or more of these solutions. I'm a fan of the super-easy-to-use-and-manage IceWarp, but the Icewarp mail client is lacking pretty notably. Google is great if you're okay with them having your mail (many are), but unless there's an on-site version of Gmail, it's not a fair comparison fight. Univention makes a pretty good PDC replacement, but using for its mail server isn't the greatest and mobile device support is lacking. Zentyal and ClearOS are also great for small environments, but scaling becomes a problem.
So, to those who say "Exchange Sucks", I say "fine. Show me a better system that satisfies all of the above criteria, and I will be MORE than happy to take a long, hard look at it." I don't like Exchange, or its CAL structure, either...but "worst except all the rest" seems to apply here.
Different apps. I haven't been in Cydia recently, but I'd wager that the variety of apps that leverage the "rootedness" of an Android phone outnumber what's on an iPhone. Similarly, there are a number of apps (Rocketdial, GoSMS, etc.) that require a jailbreak on iOS
I'm not sure that's the case... besides there are more app options for things that do not require jailbreaking (like custom keyboards for example).
The examples I provided were a replacement for the dialer and the SMS client; I'm unaware of there being unofficial replacements for them in Cydia, but I'm all but certain that there aren't any in the App Store proper.
As for the example of apps that require jailbreaking... since the basic assumption is rooted/jailbroken system, why is that an issue? You get to use them if you like either way then.
Because very few users of rooted phones use rooted apps in exclusivity. I like having Xprivacy, but it doesn't mean that I don't also play Angry Birds - I can't have booth without root, but they're not mutually exclusive. There are also apps for Android that don't exist on iOS (again, perhaps in Cydia, but certainly not in the App Store) - there are several torrent clients on Android - they don't require root there, but if they're available at all on iOS (I remember cTorrent being a thing on iOS; don't know if there's anything better that's been released there since like 2010), you most certainly need a jailbreak.
Well, at initial setup, there's not much that Google can ascertain - your Gmail address, your cell number, your phone carrier, and your location...
Whereas with an Apple tablet all it's going to get is your IP during activation (it asks on first run if you are OK with it collecting location info).
For the purposes of this post, I'll roll with the assumption that Apple doesn't collect that data anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you need an Apple account to use an iPhone, right? If there's no opt-out, then they get an e-mail address as well. iTunes always got my cell number when I would sync the phone (as well as being necessary for iMessage to work, I'd gather), and carrier is a fairly trivial thing to ascertain based on any number of things - a log file that indicates which.PNG file is accessed for the carrier logo, the aforementioned IP address, or even the serial number of the phone - I'd be shocked if they don't have some sort of record of which batch is sold for which carrier. This leaves us with location. Google also gives an opt-out on the location data, but I tend to not-trust them. The difference between iOS and Android in this respect is that Xprivacy gives a method by which to force an opt-out, completely irrespective of what any given application wants - including all of the system apps.
Because if you're rooting, and more specifically installing a custom ROM, carrier updates become irrelevant.
I'm not talking about carrier updates, I'm talking about installing new Google releases, which may have some new collection mechanisms you have not yet blocked or otherwise break your privacy software.
Xprivacy blocks access at a pretty low level and blocks them pretty effectively despite updates. I could see something interesting happening maybe at the driver level, but every time they update the Play Services, the "good luck with that" response from Xprivacy appears to hold thus far.
tl;dr: Android sucks, except for all the alternatives.
For out of the box privacy (esp. for the non-technical user) iOS is 1000x better than Android.
For jailbroken privacy for a very technical user, iOS is a tad better. But again it's a matter than the OS is not going to care that it's not collecting your data to transmit back.
I can't really dispute that, to be honest. Android, when properly beaten into submission, CAN have more privacy than iOS, but I'd completely agree that this is a very deliberate state that is not the easiest to obtain.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that it works both ways. For example, if a non-admin user has smb://foo/bar mapped to z:, but the admin user does not, attempting to make a scheduled task running as admin that involves data in z: will fail, because admin doesn't have it mapped. If you go to %userprofile% in an elevated command prompt, you go to Administrator's profile folder, not the currently logged in user. "non-elevated being unable to talk to elevated" is the 'by design' situation you speak of. 'elevated being unable to talk to non-elevated' is another.
T9 is a terrible example for two reasons.
First, T9 was "clearly to the left of the uncanny valley" - the number pad is clearly not a rearranged QWERTY arrangement of keys, so the existing muscle memory doesn't apply. Moreover, the use of the letters on the phone keypad, while not a regular way of entering text up until that point, was still at least loosely familiar to anyone who needed to dial a vanity 800-number.
Second, the fact that "feature phones", aka "messaging phones" or "dumb phones with a QWERTY keyboard" were a huge market in the 2004(ish)-2009(ish) period indicates that T9 was very clearly considered nothing more than a stopgap measure. Alternatively, the mass adoption of feature phones and smartphones would lend credence to the possibility that T9 was an acceptable means of text entry for the very small amount of text that was generally going into a phone at that time, but the ceiling was quickly reached.
Bonus round: People will adopt an optimization to Swype and Swiftkey, just as they were adopted as an extension of the iPhone and older Android keyboards...as long as their existing knowledge is still useful. Knowing how to type on a QWERTY keyboard is useful when you need to type in a last name, and number pad dialing is still used for good ol' fashioned phone calls. If an optimized arrangement of the keys is genuinely helpful, then we'd be seeing an arrangement of keys that puts the vowels toward the edges to facilitate thumb typing...but we don't see keyboards like that gaining any meaningful traction. "Flow" (discussed by me and a few others further down in the thread) largely solves these problems, but it's in the 10K-50K range, rather than Swype and Swiftkey, in the 10M-100M realms.
https://play.google.com/store/...
I used that app back in 2012, and it wasn't just-out-of-beta then, either. When I used it, it effectively solved all of its intended problems: common letter combinations were in close proximity, and there were fewer "word collisions" than with Swype ("or" vs "our" immediately coming to mind).
The problem I found was the fact that while Flow is more accurate, it took me significantly longer to type out a message because I wasn't used to the layout. I've spent over 20 years on a QWERTY keyboard, and even though Flow is more efficient, QWERTY is basically like breathing for me, so any statistically-better keyboard would still be slower because I'd be re-learning to type all over again. Even with errors, I'm personally still a Swype person at heart. I've even tried Swiftkey and Go, but even there what holds me back is knowing where the punctuation keys are. The only alternate keyboard I'll use is "Hacker's Keyboard" when I find myself in an SSH session, but other than that, Swype got me in early in the WinMo 6.5 days, and has never let go.
Why do we need Google to be our App Nanny?
Because they run the repository. It's not Google saying, "only these extensions may install", it's them having a centralized location for the ones they've approved.
The faster they remove bad stuff, the more false positives they get in their removal process
As long as the appeals process is clear and genuine false positives are handled in a timely manner, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
and independent developers will lose out in the process.
Github, Sourceforge, and "a Godaddy domain with the free-tier hosting" will happily enable independent developers to avail their Chrome extensions for download. If that's not okay, Firefox still has a viable market share, even IE supports add-ons. Depending on 1.) Google, 2.) Chrome, and 3.) the first party Chrome repo to distribute one's browser extension seems foolish, especially when it's still perfectly viable to take any combination of those away from the equation and still get a browser extension into the hands of end users. When Chrome sections off the greater internet...then we can talk.
Also, if I sound crabby and one sided about this, it's because half the users who have browser extensions have the malware-based ones that I need to remove because it keeps hijacking their search providers and home pages, injecting ads, and generally making a mess. I see this across every browser that supports extensions. While users should indeed be more vigilant about what they allow on their computer, I'll be okay with any measure to mitigate this problem that doesn't involve removing a manual override.
holder ceases to publish, market, support and profit from a product
Its a nice idea but kinda hard to enforce. Suppose Microsoft wants to make sure XP's copyright does not expire early. They gather up 20 retail copies of "new old stock" they have somewhere an set an Outlook reminder to put one on Ebay once a year. Does that count?
If they're selling them as new products, with the support entitlements that any new copy of Windows XP should expect, and Microsoft keeps their activation servers up indefinitely, then I'd say yes. If they're selling copies of Windows XP that won't activate...not so much. More to the point, the essence of what's being asked is that Microsoft can't sue someone for running
What if its a small ISV with a shareware product that they maybe only sell a handful of license for per year. Its not a product they pay much attention to but hey once in a while someone decides to toss them $50 to make the nag screen go away, it costs them nothing to leave the license generator and sales page up on their site, so what not? Should they not be allowed to do that as long as they care to?
If the ISV doesn't have any server-side requirements and it's a matter of a simple keygen that displays or e-mails a serial number, then this request doesn't apply. Moreover, if the ISV does have a server side requirement, this request, if honored, simply means that the ISV can't file a lawsuit, citing the DMCA, should someone reverse engineer their software enough to enable the software to continue to perform its intended purpose. Conversely, if the software is reverse engineered in order to remove the requirement for the serial number to be entered, then that's already covered under garden variety copyright laws.
We you make to many rules it just creates to many questions and to many competing interpretations.
"Can the software perform its intended purpose after the vendor labels it end-of-life and deactivates the server side requirements?"
IF "yes" THEN request.applies = "false"
IF "no" THEN request.applies = "true"
About the only place where there's room for interpretation is in the term "indended purpose" - in the context of games, the continued availability of a single player campaign without multiplayer capability would be a point of contention for the lawyers to debate.
It leaves everyone wonder what really is allowed and what isn't and the real beneficiaries end up being the attorneys.
Such is the cross bore by a legal framework, and it's why "court judge" is an actual profession.
I think we need to keep it simple like, authors lifetime + 15 or just strait 75 years where author is a nonhuman legal entity. No ifs, ands, or buts, no renewals, sorry Disney you can't own Micky for ever.. type system.
Copyright isn't, strictly speaking, in question here. The question is whether software under copyright that is symbiotically dependent upon a publisher that can unilaterally disable some form of authentication and/or data processing can be altered by the end user in order to restore the functionality that was initially paid for. Ordinarily, reverse engineering of that nature isn't legal...but it's also not necessary. The request is intended to decriminalize the situations where such reverse enginerring /is/ necessary.
But if you sync to the cloud, that is, transmit your incriminating video from you registered phone through a cell provider who has your credit card information to a storage provider who also has your credit card information, the cops can show up at your door, follow your car, and get "in your face" until they find something to hang you with.
http://www.freenas.org/downloa...
https://owncloud.org/install/
https://play.google.com/store/...
http://portforward.com/english...
http://www.startssl.com/
Or:
https://www.getsync.com/featur...
https://play.google.com/store/...
Either way, secured, real-time, SSL'd upload to your own server. No cloud vendors, and no credit cards.
The single simplest answer I can come up with is "no exceptions". English is dumb like that: "i before e, except after 'c'...or when you run a feisty heist on a weird, caffeinated, foreign, beige, Atheist neighbor". We make a word plural by adding an 's' at the end...except for womans, childs, mans, oxs, mouses, mooses, gooses, and about 1,001 other 'exceptions'. Verb conjugation is a mess, typically using "helping verbs" to establish tense, except when you don't. Then, there are vowels. Spanish has this right "a" (ah), "e" (eh), "i" (ee), "o" (oh), "u" (oo), no exceptions. English has a "short" and "long" sound for each, and then there's the "schwa" sound, because apparently simply using a "short u" when you need one is too complicated for English. And then, there's this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annane....
Trying to find a common denominator between Mandarin, Hungarian, Creole, and English is highly unlikely to happen. So, from my experience with languages, which is "English, with a high school understanding of Spanish and a handful of core phrases in other European languages (i.e. I can ask for a bathroom throughout Europe), my core answer would be consistency. This letter makes this sound, no exceptions. This word ending means that the word is in this tense, no exceptions.
Finally, minimize the "through context" words-with-multiple-meanings situation; "love" being a great example. If you love your mother, your super-fast computer, bacon, and your spouse the same way, then the language is the least of your problems....
Depends where it lives with respect to the infrastructure. As a web server with a public IP and nothing in front of it, running IIS? Probably not (though, to be fair, IIS8.5 has come a long way from versions 5 and 6). Running an application for an industry specific vertical product that is built on the IIS/ASP/MSSQL stack? I don't have a problem with that. Doing internal DHCP/DNS/AD/Exchange? I'm fine with that, too.
Microsoft's issue is that they made it very easy to configure in an insecure way. Similarly, they didn't give much help when it came to giving novice server admins enough guidance to fix their issues without disabling the security measures wholesale. Now, the natural Slashdot argument would be the very concept of a "novice server admin", but the alternative is that certain small businesses don't have a server, so they can't run their applications, so things get messy.
Think of a nail salon with two locations in neighboring towns. Not a large enough business to warrant an IT staff, but big enough to need a client/server model scheduling system, and not the kind of place likely to have an employee technical enough to really do the job right. Cloud vendors are starting to crop up to fill this kind of niche, but even five years ago, that was much less common. Back then, we'd get a server and a point to point VPN system up and running, but if the application runs on IIS/ASP/MSSQL, having a Linux server isn't an option, and the people in charge of choosing the product are unlikely to pick it based on platform. Situations of this nature are incredibly common on Main Street.
I love using Linux and BSD where appropriate, but sometimes Windows is the right tool for the job. Other times, it isn't. No sense in turning it into a religious debate.
Techno-machismo teens playing games trying to get their code into the least number of characters and the least amount of memory.
Given how many programs I've used over the past decade that have required unreasonably high amounts of RAM, and/or were subsequent releases of software that solved a particular problem in earlier iterations but required 1/10th the memory to do it, I wouldn't mind a handful of these guys getting their desks back. Adobe is a great place to start.
I've had to fix or test so much of this junk and it's still just plain stupid.
I'm by no means a programmer, but from the handful of times I've seen what you're talking about, I'll say this: if it's possible to save 10% of RAM by shifting the ease-of-use burden to the comments instead of the actual code, then as an end user, I'm 100% in favor of commenting the everloving hell out of difficult to read code that saves RAM when users are running it.
You don't have to save memory! Memory is there to make your code readable. Use it!
Wrong. Use as much as necessary, but no more. I might have 12GB of RAM in my laptop, but it's not all for you. It's for EVERYTHING I do, and when I start adding VMs or large After Effects projects to what I'm doing, 12GB starts to get pretty cramped. Some RAM usage will be inevitable, but wasteful RAM usage is wasteful.
I most certainly have plenty of admiration for the Demoscene.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Seriously guys, when Microsoft 1.) had the idea years ago, 2.) has the investment capital to give this a viable shot, and 3.) with Azure, has an immediately viable and marketable need for a set of servers that can be dynamically powered up and down...and THEY haven't gotten it to be a viable idea...I sincerely doubt that a startup in the Netherlands will have greater success.
To be fair though, one would imagine that the Netherlands is colder, for more of the year, than the majority of the continental US. Still, servers coming up and down with the thermostat does not seem to be a good enough idea to be of real assistance.
Due to the laws of nature messages can safely be assumed to have been transmitted no later than the time of reception.
I wonder if I should patent this...
Yes, patent it. However, be sufficiently ambiguous in your patent that it will somehow apply to time machines. If the patent passes muster, you'll obviously receive a visit from either your future self, or a beta testing team that needs you to not file that patent. Either way, you'll likely end up either very rich, or very dead.
Tell me why I don't want secure boot and an OS signed by Microsoft or one of the mainstream Linux distributions.
Acronis True Image/Clonezilla/Ghost/Veeam.
Hiren's Boot CD/Active@ Boot CD/UBCD4Win.
GPartEd/PartEd Magic.
FreeNAS/Nas4Free/OpenFiler/UnRAID.
Endian/Smoothwall/Untangle/IPFire.
FreePBX/PiaF/Trixbox.
Univention/Zentyal/ClearOS.
Sure, desktops for office use will never have a problem. However, the inability to use desktop hardware for any number of other dedicated services is most decisively a bad thing, and the inability to boot into some form of a recovery environment is even worse.
If you're buying the desktops for internal corporate use, leave secure boot on and password the BIOS, everyone's happy.
It just wasn't enough - apparently, there were seven more required.
I can already not play my 16bit DOS games on a modern computer without fancy emulation and that is less than 20 years.
Machine code may get a bit dicey, but also keep in mind that a lot of the development then was at a much lower level (frequently based on CPU cycle, not multicore, etc.). Around that era, WordPerfect 5.1 ruled the roost of word processing, and I bet you that you could open one of those documents in 15 minutes or less today.
NASA themselves have had issues with recovering data from moon landings and other missions that have been kept in storage.
...because they taped over them. That's a smidge different than being unable to read their own tapes.
Then take into account proprietary codecs. Just think back 15 years ago where everything online was Realmedia
Not only was Realmedia much more likely to be streamed than downloaded, but Realplayer is still around, as is RealAlternative, and VLC can read several flavors as well. "uncommon" and "unable to be used" are two different things.
what makes you think that MP3s will be around in 100 years?
Ubiquity. Portable MP3 players have been around for nearly 15 years. The format itself is about 25 years old. You can play back an MP3 on almost literally every OS ever written, there are a dozen FOSS applications to do so, and aside from iTunes going all AAC by default, MP3 is what everyone else uses. Admittedly, media formats are difficult to extrapolate for 100 years, but I'd bet that if one digital format was going to make it to its 100th birthday, MP3 would be the most likely contender (depending on whether ASCII text would be considered a "media format"; JPEG would be my second guess).
What about Quicktime or the heavily patent incumbered h.264 which every man and their dog are working to replace?
they're likely to die.
At the very least we would need to store with it a complete description of the coded format and the algorithm to decode it.
Then there's the hardware issues. What kind of hardware has a really long term data storage capability? Flash memory doesn't and there's evidence that some forms of flash memory need constant data refresh to prevent bit-rot. CDs don't and even if they do it's unlikely that the CD drive will be operational 100 years later. Harddrives suffer the same mechanical problems but even if they didn't how do we interface them? SATA? USB-C? Thunderbolt?
100 years is a VERY long time.
You're correct in this. One very possible method would be to store the same thing on 100 different flash drives, each of a different make and model - it's possible that the data would survive at least one of them. In the case of video, it's possible that the answer is "include a handful of DVD players" - specifically, one with an analog output. From there, it might be possible to include two flavors of disc - one with a garden variety DVD video (in the event it's possible to output a composite signal to something in 100 years), and the other specifically formatted to be visible from an oscilloscope - odds are good that those will still be around in 100 years, and analog video will be somewhat visible that way. One other nice thing about DVD is that the logo is fairly distinctive - even if the people who dig it up need to go to an antique shop or an outright landfill, it'd at least be a distinctive way to give a glimmer of hope.
Here's yet another question to ask - what do we say, and how do we say it? Language itself is likely to morph over that time. Time capsules are interesting for this reason - it gives a glimpse into what society thought was important then, and what the society of yesterday thought would be relevant upon reopening.
...because it's popular.
Older versions could fit on a floppy disk, and didn't require an Installshield Wizard. Now, it's not at Vuze levels of bloatedness (though Vuze beats to a different drum and has a pretty nice "content store" for Creative Commons content and similar), but it's gotten big and annoying. Transmission works on Windows (...and OSX...and *nix...and plenty of routers and NASes...) and is nice if you don't need RSS feeds. QBittorrent does RSS and is simple to use. Deluge, while being a bit awkward, does a good job. if you're into a super-configurable ecosystem, rTorrent has 101 plugins and browser based frontends, but can also run exclusively from the CLI if that's your thing. The list goes on and on, but utorrent seems to be coasting on inertia, nothing more, nothing less.
The interesting thing is that a similar "we'll borrow some unused CPU cycles" method of revenue generation caused a huge mess with Digsby, an IM client that was great and had a pretty good following until that point. Then again, with most technical folks opting for one of the plentiful alternatives to utorrent, I don't see this being a major impact.
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
The foundational problem we're dealing with here is that the majority of the public doesn't understand how the internet works. The Slashdot crowd has long since learned to deal with that at a micro level. However, we hear different things than the rest of society. Net Neutrality to us means "the bandwidth and throughput of internet traffic won't be artificially limited based on its source or destination." To them, it means "The government will tell me what I can and can't post on my Tumblr blog". With no concept of IP routing, peering, or the Comcast vs. Netflix case that brought Net Neutrality into common vernacular.
Whether this is because "understanding how the internet works and what net neutrality does and doesn't impact" is a genuinely complicated topic, or because the Kardashians have killed far too many American neurons, is a separate topic entirely. To be fair though, if the government was indeed regulating what we could and couldn't post, could and couldn't say, or how we were allowed to say it...we'd be up in arms, too.
Let's face it, people: Hacking is boring to watch.
I'd concur with that - for most people, IT work is both boring and difficult to grasp. Part of it is laziness and stupidity, but it'd be unfair to place all of it under that umbrella - lots of what we do involves having some understanding of a dozen different other concepts that aren't immediately obvious.
I just watched the episode.(spoiler warnings) For the reasons stated above, I'll cut them slack for having the malware code glow red in their visualization - malware isn't always clear. However, I won't cut them slack for things like saying that game consoles have unique identifiers that enable the console companies to track pedophiles, while simultaneously showing the bad guy being tracked by that system where a bad guy is both smart enough to hack the firmware of baby monitors and dumb enough to use a system that could easily trace him that way, especially AFTER he becomes aware that the FBI is after him. I'll cut them slack for the concept of the baby monitor hack - its got its own list of messes, but y'need a story somewhere. I won't cut 'em slack for having the password tattooed on one of the guys - they're running that kind of operation, and they're never going to change the password? Not even partially obfuscate it by adding zeroes to single digits where everyone knows that you don't type the zeroes? On a more practical note, is that guy guaranteed to be there all the time so they could reference the password? Bonus round: the guy showed a holographic representation of a cadaver...because that was really necessary and couldn't have been done with a garden variety photograph...
At least for me, the general list of things I'm willing to overlook:
-UI mockups. CLI output only makes sense if you know what you're looking at, and the last thing anyone wants is more expository dialogue that doesn't advance the plot.
-Simplifying of IP addresses and their "tracing". I've seen enough Google Maps dots on machines without GPS to know that it's at least "close enough", unfortunately. "inadmissible in court" doesn't necessarily mean "useless", and again, we need a plot device.
-Character tropes. I don't look like a stereotypical nerd (no beard, not overweight, no glasses, don't live in the basement, don't have a game console), but Hollywood's got their rack of characters: If there's a white male, approximately 50 years old, and isn't the father of another male character, he's the bad guy. If there's a good looking white girl, she's probably someone's love interest. If there's a mother, her role is, generally, "mother", unlikely to do anything to truly advance the plot independent of her maternal context. Hispanic guy on a motorcycle = gang member. Dad: clueless and aloof, though sometimes has a single pearl of wisdom. The list goes on, and though I'm not a fan of that being the case, it's not "computer techs at the expense of everyone else", and we've got characters like Skye, Chloe O'Brien, and Jake Foley that were generally positive, rounded characters.
Things I won't give a pass on:
-logic fails, especially if I'm cutting slack for a part of one.
-unreasonable expectations of technology.
-unreasonable expectations of people (i.e. "make the situation dire enough, and time will never be necessary").
-simplistic love triangles (much as I love Fitz and Simmons, the "because they're both science" reason is annoying).
-nonexistent database relations - "show me a list of 40 year old females in Spokane, who are of Irish descent and whose great grandparents came through Ellis Island in 1899 that have bought P90X and are allergic to gluten."
Stop rewarding them with your money for some shiny baubles which are doing nothing but spying on you and monitizing everything you do.
I do, actually, wonder if anyone has run this through Excel. Consider the following scenario:
Acme TVs makes a "Smart TV", intending to monetize the information gained from viewing habits and similar. Suppose said TV retails for 400USD. Does that sticker price reflect a subsidy from the marketing data they're expecting to get? If so, then the best thing we can do is to buy these TVs, then never connect them to the internet. This way, they've spent $425 to sell me a TV for $400. Either TV prices will go up, or they'll sell 10,000 TVs with only 5,000 reporting data back...if that proportion goes low enough, is it possible that, paradoxically, voting with our wallets could mean buying things we don't want so that it stops being profitable?
You pronounce GIF with a hard g, don't you?
The "G" in "gif" stands for "graphic" - hard 'g'.
The word "gift" is pronounced with a hard 'g'.
There are no other vowels in the word to alter pronunciation to be like 'giraffe'.
The inventor of the format can say what he wants. It's a hard 'g'.
So, what's Mass Effect 4 going to do when the premise that Charon is actually a "mass relay" is no longer usable for suspension of disbelief? =^-^=
Personally, I'm hoping that we find out that Charon is a mass relay...or at least, made out of cheese.
Just thinking out loud here, the IE6 monoculture was terrible, and we all hated it...and justifiably so. However, with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all based on WebKit now, have we simply embraced a different monoculture? Admittedly the main difference here is that WebKit is more open than Trident, and the days of ActiveX and Java are more behind us than not...But is having an alternative render engine a better situation, or just redundant coding?
I wonder if you live near where I live. It's actually pretty funny. My new-ish employer and I go back and forth a bit; he's on Verizon and I'm on T-Mo. He laughed at me when I told him that I really liked T-Mo and that their coverage was great. As I go from place to place, I've never once been without coverage, no matter where. In the office, I have solid LTE...and they have a range extender (i.e. paying Verizon to use your own internet coverage). They've listed basements where they can't get signal, and I'm like, "wait...you don't have service there?" Every. Time. I was surprised when I was at one site where he said that service was sketchy. I had full coverage, and got 6.9MBytes (yes, bytes, not bits) per second downstream.
Now, in fairness, the last time I took an Amtrak ride (last year), there were PLENTY of dead spots, but Verizon had noticeably fewer of them. If "middle of nowhere" coverage is important, then Verizon is still probably the better bet. I sure won't be switching, though.
Blows the subscription model idea out of the water.
tl;dr: "supported lifetime" seems to be the easy cop out here, especially since it is a term that doesn't apply to desktops in the same ways that it does in mobile, and trying to force desktops to adhere in that manner isn't a good thing...
True, but it raises other questions instead. "supported lifetime of the device" is a highly suspect phrase here. We see Apple giving phones and tablets approximately three years of "supported lifetime". Apple can do that for a few reasons, but amongst the reasons why the customer base generally tolerates it is because Apple releases new devices mostly-annually, so getting three years of both hardware and software improvements is usually a worthwhile investment for consumers - the "supported lifetime" is acceptable because of trade-up.
Desktops are a completely different animal. I suspect that a significant minority (if not a majority) of iPad users have a desktop or laptop in active use that is older than their iPad, and I'd similarly suspect that the majority of them would prefer to upgrade their iPad this year, rather than their desktop, given the choice of only being able to spring for one or the other. What we've done with desktops is had two functional tiers of existence: in-warranty (where the OEM generally updates and fixes things), and out-of-warranty (where 'the computer guy' handles this stuff). Mobile devices are more disposable, in no small part because repairing them and upgrading them isn't always desirable - either expensive, impractical, or both. This is the area where traditional desktop/laptop computing has always had an edge.
Moreover, it is highly irregular for OEMs to provide OS upgrades to their computers. I had an HP laptop that I bought with XP after Vista's announcement (but not its release), so I registered the machine and HP sent me a Vista disk and key. That was highly irregular, and had to do with my purchase date, not my warranty length. I bought my Origin laptop with a three year, soup-to-nuts warranty in early 2011. That ran out last year, long after Windows 8's release. No Windows 8 disc in sight, and while admittedly I didn't ask, I sincerely doubt Origin would have sent it to me, despite the laptop being within the "supported lifetime of the device" by most practical definitions. The machine does, however, get regular security patches for the version of Windows that it /does/ run. Mobile devices' concept of "updates" involve both "security patches" and "OS version upgrades", whereas desktops do not.
So how does all this tie into Windows being a subscription or not? Well, both "OS updates" and "supported lifetime" are more clearly defined terms in mobile devices, and bringing that paradigm to the desktop yields yet another issue: the "broom problem". If you're a Doctor Who fan, there was an episode this season where The Doctor was saying that if you take a broom and replace the head when it wears out, and then you replace the handle because it breaks, and then replace the head again because it wears out, it's not the same broom anymore. With desktops, we have the same issue - the hard disk dies, we replace the disk. We upgrade a 4GB RAM module with an 8GB module, we add a video card to play games, and the PSU to power it, then we want to SLI, so we replace the motherboard, which mandates a different processor, and change the DVD burner to a Blu-Ray burner...If all these upgrades and replacements happen over three years, we end up with a completely different computer than the one we started with - at what point does the Windows license no longer apply? Microsoft has arbitrarily pointed to "the motherboard", which in fairness is about the closest thing one can get to a reasonable component definition (it's got the most hardware-as-detected-by-Windows of any single physical component), but even those die or have some sort of issue or whatever. What if the CPU is supported, but the motherboard is not? I sincerely doubt Gigabyt
Not trying to start a flame war, but what would companies use instead?
This is exactly the problem, and I'll underscore it with an inquiry to anyone who echoes the grandparent post...
Amongst the reasons Exchange is as readily used as it is, isn't because Exchange itself is some awesome piece of software. Exchange is part of a bigger ecosystem that incorporates a few major pieces:
--ActiveSync - and more to the point, ActiveSync support from billions of phones and tablets.
--Active Directory - single sign-on through Outlook from a domain user, and the reverse: creating a mailbox also creates a user in AD.
--Outlook - a mail/contact/calendar/task client that has a handful of competitors that excel in one area or another (IMO Zimbra coming pretty close), but still a program whose replacement will require a barricade on the door to keep out the execs who wish to use their torches and pitchforks.
--Self-Hosted - Gmail and company don't count.
I've seen plenty of great answers to one or more of these solutions. I'm a fan of the super-easy-to-use-and-manage IceWarp, but the Icewarp mail client is lacking pretty notably. Google is great if you're okay with them having your mail (many are), but unless there's an on-site version of Gmail, it's not a fair comparison fight. Univention makes a pretty good PDC replacement, but using for its mail server isn't the greatest and mobile device support is lacking. Zentyal and ClearOS are also great for small environments, but scaling becomes a problem.
So, to those who say "Exchange Sucks", I say "fine. Show me a better system that satisfies all of the above criteria, and I will be MORE than happy to take a long, hard look at it." I don't like Exchange, or its CAL structure, either...but "worst except all the rest" seems to apply here.
Different apps. I haven't been in Cydia recently, but I'd wager that the variety of apps that leverage the "rootedness" of an Android phone outnumber what's on an iPhone. Similarly, there are a number of apps (Rocketdial, GoSMS, etc.) that require a jailbreak on iOS
I'm not sure that's the case... besides there are more app options for things that do not require jailbreaking (like custom keyboards for example).
The examples I provided were a replacement for the dialer and the SMS client; I'm unaware of there being unofficial replacements for them in Cydia, but I'm all but certain that there aren't any in the App Store proper.
As for the example of apps that require jailbreaking... since the basic assumption is rooted/jailbroken system, why is that an issue? You get to use them if you like either way then.
Because very few users of rooted phones use rooted apps in exclusivity. I like having Xprivacy, but it doesn't mean that I don't also play Angry Birds - I can't have booth without root, but they're not mutually exclusive. There are also apps for Android that don't exist on iOS (again, perhaps in Cydia, but certainly not in the App Store) - there are several torrent clients on Android - they don't require root there, but if they're available at all on iOS (I remember cTorrent being a thing on iOS; don't know if there's anything better that's been released there since like 2010), you most certainly need a jailbreak.
Well, at initial setup, there's not much that Google can ascertain - your Gmail address, your cell number, your phone carrier, and your location...
Whereas with an Apple tablet all it's going to get is your IP during activation (it asks on first run if you are OK with it collecting location info).
For the purposes of this post, I'll roll with the assumption that Apple doesn't collect that data anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you need an Apple account to use an iPhone, right? If there's no opt-out, then they get an e-mail address as well. iTunes always got my cell number when I would sync the phone (as well as being necessary for iMessage to work, I'd gather), and carrier is a fairly trivial thing to ascertain based on any number of things - a log file that indicates which .PNG file is accessed for the carrier logo, the aforementioned IP address, or even the serial number of the phone - I'd be shocked if they don't have some sort of record of which batch is sold for which carrier. This leaves us with location. Google also gives an opt-out on the location data, but I tend to not-trust them. The difference between iOS and Android in this respect is that Xprivacy gives a method by which to force an opt-out, completely irrespective of what any given application wants - including all of the system apps.
Because if you're rooting, and more specifically installing a custom ROM, carrier updates become irrelevant.
I'm not talking about carrier updates, I'm talking about installing new Google releases, which may have some new collection mechanisms you have not yet blocked or otherwise break your privacy software.
Xprivacy blocks access at a pretty low level and blocks them pretty effectively despite updates. I could see something interesting happening maybe at the driver level, but every time they update the Play Services, the "good luck with that" response from Xprivacy appears to hold thus far.
tl;dr: Android sucks, except for all the alternatives.
For out of the box privacy (esp. for the non-technical user) iOS is 1000x better than Android.
For jailbroken privacy for a very technical user, iOS is a tad better. But again it's a matter than the OS is not going to care that it's not collecting your data to transmit back.
I can't really dispute that, to be honest. Android, when properly beaten into submission, CAN have more privacy than iOS, but I'd completely agree that this is a very deliberate state that is not the easiest to obtain.