The grandparent post said what he said poorly, but the original intent was for the state governments to be the group running the show - the federal government was put into existence by consent of the states to begin with, don't forget.
While the interstate commerce clause has been stretched too much, the federal government was basically put into place in order for a handful of tasks. One of which was defense; leaving this to the states would make a bit of a mess - Rhode Island probably can't afford to make a moderately sized aircraft carrier on their budget, but they'd definitely benefit from one. They might be able to make a deal with Vermont, but being as it's a landlocked state, donating a few doorknobs and toilet seats would have been seen as 'wasteful spending'. Would New Mexico charge rent for Area 51? Though it stretches the "defense" definition a bit, as a branch of the military on paper, would Florida have been responsible for NASA by itself, or would the Saturn V come with a "some assembly required" sticker as each state donated a random assortment of parts? Doing defense on a federal level just makes sense, because no one is going to declare war on any one particular state within the union and leave the rest alone. Now we can argue about this negating the need for private gun owners or the corruptness of privatized military contractors, but in the abstract it makes more sense to ensure that Kansas is contributing to the fund instead of banking on Virginia having to use all their tax money to buy fighter jets and submarines while Kansas gets to bank on the fact that if the coastline states lose that they're already screwed instead of buying an aircraft carrier and letting it sit in a Californian harbor at $1,000 a day to dock it and let it rust away until it's needed only to find that their ship is on the wrong side of the country and by time the non-existent post office ships it across the country, the war is already over and it was delivered to Vermont by accident anyway, giving the dude holding the clipboard a very awkward phone call to make when the bloke who was supposed to sign for it ticked off the "return to sender" box...
Interstate commerce, in its pure, unstretched form, is also a "good idea" for a federal government to deal with - do we need fifty different currencies, or fifty definitions of a mile or a pound, or half the states adopting the metric system with half using imperial measurements? It's a mess, which is why the federal government was tasked with saying, "thus sayeth us, this is the definition of an imperial ton, you will trade using imperial tons, and if you want to avoid an imperial ton of napalm vaporizing your establishment, you'll pay your taxes in an official dollar which is worth what we say it is."
There were a couple of other things also involved with the formation of the federal government that were expressly granted federal powers, and the principle of "small government" effectively says "stick to exactly what the constitution says", generally with some concession as there was no need for the FCC or FAA in 1789, though both are needed today and the nature of broadcast and air travel clearly make them the kind of thing that only a federal establishment should regulate. Instead, we get situations like congress saying "the ACA is a tax because the federal government can make new taxes, except it isn't because no one wants to hear another reason to increase taxes, except it is because the Supreme Court won't let us implement it if we don't call it a tax...". These kinds of things were intended to be state powers. If Massachusetts wants to implement a statewide healthcare system and say "if you're living in this state you must get medical insurance, and if you're a doctor in this state you must accept the public option", fine. Let 'em. It will either work wonderfully for them and blaze the trail for the other states to do the same, or it will fail in a spectacular fireball. Other states could pass sl
I just don't see anything helpful coming out of that-
For a site dedicated to nerds, there's an utter dearth of imagination...and memory.
See kids, back in the day, HTC made this little phone called the HD2. It shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5 and was intended to ship with Windows 7, but Microsoft told them "no can do" for the sole reason that it has an inconsistent hardware button configuration with the rest of the Windows Phone 7 handsets. However, because of the intended dual-OS compatibility, HTC released a phone that was impressively consistent and relatively easy to flash. This lead to the development of MAGLDR and CLK, which were alternative bootloaders that enabled users to flash Windows Phone 7 (unofficially, though completely functionally if you can get MS to give you a product key), Android (more versions of Android than any other handset; everything from Froyo to Jellybean and I think some of the earlier versions were available, too), Meego, Ubuntu, FirefoxOS, and proof-of-concept compatibility with WP8 and WinRT. To this day, it has one of the most active communities on XDA, certainly moreso than any other phone that was sold during the same time period.
When HTC builds a phone to boot a pair of OSes, especially ones as different as Windows Phone and Android, odds are better than ever that HTC will end up shipping a phone that's more mod-friendly than most of the phones that ship with just one OS, even a Nexus. Don't you think that there's something "helpful" about a phone that is sufficiently hackable that it can have its software kept current long past its EOL date according to the carrier? I do.
While we're at it, I know that hating Microsoft is cool around here and all, and yes, I do walk around with an Android phone because a phone without a user-exposed file system is a dealbreaker for me, but are we seriously going to sit here and say that it's better for Google/Samsung and Apple to each have ~50% of the market rather than having Google/Samsung/HTC, Microsoft/Nokia/HTC, and Apple all having ~33% of the market a piece? I always thought competition was a positive situation, and even if HTC gets screwed over by Microsoft somehow (like they did by not being able to officially software upgrade the HD2), it still means more mod-friendly phones for everyone - something I thought that a group of people who like installing Linux on everything with a processor would appreciate.
If the government mandated that everybody carry a tracking device, keep it on at all times, and that they'd be storing the tracking data in perpetuity, there'd be a goddamn revolution.
Yes, because the primary, explicitly stated purpose of the device is to take away your privacy. Cell phones are primarily intended to facilitate communication independent of physical location. Cell phones do need to have an idea of your location, but that data doesn't NEED to be stored. Storing the data is done for corporate/government convenience, and it is indeed done in poor taste and generally against the wishes of the user...but no one owns a cell phone for the intent of getting tracked by the government.
But when they do so voluntarily, and the NSA steals all that data - leading to the exact same end point - people are all like, "oh, look, Walter White is twerking again."
The fact that the NSA is using the data is a point of contention for just about everyone, regardless of political affiliation. You'll find a relatively small minority of people that view it as a good thing. Again, cell phones are not purchased for the intent of being tracked by corporations or governments. The alternative to being tracked via cell phone is giving up one's cell phone. While you're right in that plenty of people are all "I don't care, for I have nothing to hide, for only terrorists have anything to hide, and I am not a terrorist", many of those people are also dependent on their cell phones for legitimate reasons. I perform on-site tech support for a living. If I don't have my cell phone, I don't know who is having a problem until I start my laptop, which must be online. To provide this level of service to customers requires a cell phone; if they have to wait for hours to even make me aware that there are problems with their systems, they won't be my clients for very long, which means that bills don't get paid, which means that not having a cell phone is the least of my worries.
Again, for many it's "zomg then I can't instagram my lunch!!!111", but for others, our society has built itself in such a way that we are dependent on constant communication...which almost seems to lend credence to the thought that someone, somewhere, planned that all along....
Using Ctrl-Alt-Del to trigger login gives you two kinds of security:
1. Software cannot simulate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to play games with the login screen.
2. By first pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, the user logging on can be quite sure that they are giving their login credentials to a genuine Windows (or whatever OS) login screen, and not some malware that merely resembles the login screen.
Perhaps I'm simply misinformed and the software does something different somewhere...but I've 'simulated' Ctrl+Alt+Del from Remote Desktop, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and VNC...I still don't follow how this still holds true.
Getting the information from your old system to an out of the box solution is going to be a huge hassle, and you will probably end up losing a lot of data in the process. You should look into having a developer improve or streamline the current system instead of trying to push a one size fits all solution down everyone's throat.
I agree with this, except for a blaring situation: the existing solution is a hodgepodge of VB and Access code. I'm dealing with something very similar at work...
One of our clients recently acquired someone else. Among them was a custom Access "application". It *must* be launched from a standalone executable, which *must* be run as administrator, and as best we can tell, requires a metric ton of DNS redirects because it pulls data from all over the network using server names instead of FQDNs or IP addresses, has a wheelbarrow full of security warnings due to extensive use of macros, fails in any version of Access except 2003...and cost the company over a quarter million dollars ten years ago. The amount of duct tape and string that this thing is being held together by is ridiculous, and it NEEDS to be moved into some sort of legit server/browser situation, since it literally will not run without reordering one's entire system around it. Now yes, we could (and are) tracing out those servers so we can add DNS entries to allow for domain traversal, but it still won't run on anything except Access 2003 without extensive rewriting, and the consulting firm that made it is no longer in business so we can't just "call the vendor".
Between the two options of "add more duct tape" and "deal with all kinds of pain and agony to make it somewhat standards compliant and run in a browser using some MS-SQL and HTML/PHP/ASP.NET*", it makes more sense to invest our time in a manner that will make it continue to run long after Access 2003 fails to install anymore.
*Yes, I know, the Microsoft database/web platform situation isn't exactly "standards compliant", but remember that we're coming from a Microsoft Access database, so getting data into tables is significantly easier than MariaDB or Postgres...and even if we end up in a similar situation where we can't upgrade the database beyond, for example, Server 2008/SQL Server 2008/IIS 7.0, at least that's server-side, can live in a virtual machine (and thus the hardware can be upgraded in time), and it's an internally facing setup anyway so security doesn't need to be as crucial a focus as if it were being pounded from the outside. If we're still there in 2018, that's fine - end user desktops can be changed whenever and it won't be nearly as big of a problem.
One of the benefits of traditional consoles is the (relative) lack of the kind of hardware fragmentation that can cause errors, glitches, and performance drops....Will it be up to standards adherence and vigilant devs to make sure hardware fragmentation doesn't get out of hand? Or is there some magic bullet that Valve has discovered?
Or are we looking at the worst of both worlds, with broken games that you can't fix?
My guess...as in GUESS, as in Gabe hasn't discussed with me over a game of Xcom...is that it will likely be closer to an AutoCAD kind of situation. AutoCAD gives a short list of Quadro and FirePro cards that are 'Certified'. They are stupidly more expensive than other cards...but if you have a support contract with AutoCAD and you say that there's a video bug, they will (in theory) work with you to get to the bottom of it, because those cards are thoroughly tested with the software.
What seems to make sense in this case is to have a Steam Machine that can have different modules like a PC, but in a much more simplified manner, like a console. You may not have a GeForce 790GTX contingent on a 1KW power supply and a compatible motherboard...you'll have all the Steam Machines shipping with baseline hardware and modularized core components. You'd be able to get a "level 2 GPU", "level 2 RAM", "level 2 SSD", and a "level 2 processor", and next year they'll have "level 3" versions, and so on. Driver updates can be a non-issue because they can be baked into the SteamOS patches; since they know what the modules will be, they can easily have the drivers ready without a problem.
It *can* be the best of both worlds if it ends up being "limited choice". Being able to throw any old GPU from Newegg into the Steam Machine will be a mess, but being able to have different combinations of hardware levels in the same box can still provide some degree of choice while keeping a level of consistency that will be in line with the advantages of traditional consoles.
Apple Earpods don't work as hands-free cell phone headsets on my Galaxy S3 or Note 2, or my dad's LG something-or-other...so unfortunately I think that base is already covered.
I'd say including an active digitiser in the original Surface Pro was pretty innovative. It's the first tablet to do so.
Given that I had to google to figure out WTF that is, and given that you can already buy a stylus for about $15 which allows you to do the same thing on a 'normal' touchscreen... what fraction of the market actually knows or cares about that?
It sounds like niche functionality which is just increasing the cost of these tablets for little benefit to most people.
But, hey, if that's a feature you need for what you're doing, run wild with it. That neither my iPad nor my Nexus 7 have it and I've never missed it (or known what it is) means that for me it's not differentiating technology for most people.
I'd say both you and the grandparent missed the mark. the HTC Flyer had one, as does the Galaxy Note (both phone and tablet flavors), and both companies have had them on the market for over a year. The $15 stylus is a night-and-day difference from an active digitizer; it's clear you've never used one. They're significantly more precise, and have the ability to detect differences in pressure. I've also found that the $15 stylus offerings for capacitive screens tend to be inconsistent - straight lines frequently have gaps in them (making the use of Swype or Swiftkey Flow a nightmare), and even the premium ones feel so light and flimsy.
As for it being a niche feature, Samsung sold 5 million Note 2 phones within the first three months of release...and that was still in 2012. If we assume that that's five million handsets and that Samsung never sold another one since, and that 80% of the people who bought one don't care about the S-Pen...that still means that a million people bought their Note 2 for its active digitizer.
And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
...And yet, companies seem unable to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a very rational reason why people like me resist Teh Cloud(tm).
If MS did integrate a gaming marketplace into Windows that took noticable marketshare from Steam, Origin, etc. they would get sued, just like for IE, WMP, Messenger...
I'm not completely convinced of that, depending on how they actually went about it. If they did some sort of exclusivity situation where Xbox Marketplace games couldn't be released on Steam as well, THEN that would be an issue. If Microsoft prohibited Steam from being installed, or using DirectX APIs, THEN there would be solid ground for a lawsuit.
Microsoft simply having a competing product isn't grounds for a lawsuit, even if it's integrated - so far, no lawsuits for Windows Defender or Zip Folders, despite them competing with Symantec and WinRAR, respectively.
See, The Xbox PC marketplace, the once or twice I used it, was never really a desirable means of doing anything. Every time I tried something, it would only be available on Xbox...because apparently hiding things that can't be used on a PC was an insurmountable task. It didn't seem to do cool things like let you play PC versions of Xbox games you own or save my game of Batman Arkham Asylum that was a GFWL title such that I could pick up where I left off after a format...
It surprises me that Microsoft has traditionally done such a piss poor job of integrating ANYTHING involving gaming or software purchasing into the OS. Maybe now with Win8 they'll take it a bit more seriously, but I'm still shocked they didn't partner with EA years ago and make a windows-integrated service that precluded the necessity of Origin in the first place.
Ballmer doesn't understand that the Windows brand represents one of two things: 1.) That super locked down computer at work which forces me to use Excel and blocks Facebook and Youtube. 2.) That super virus infested computer in the living room that the kids use to type up their reports.
Neither of these are the kinds of experiences people want associated with their tablet experience; it's among the reasons why so many people have opted for them for casual use. If Microsoft is trying to make inroads into a market other than the desktop, then they need to use branding to their advantage by distancing itself from the desktop experience. As much as Ballmer believes that people want Windows everywhere, the spec sheet of Windows RT, almost by definition, ensures that its ONLY resemblance to the familiar desktop experience (even if we assume the positive aspects thereof) is the Windows name. No use of their iTunes library, and tricky-at-best use of Gmail and Dropbox.
If Microsoft wants to compete in the tablet space, then it's not a matter of their lack of an entry-level device like the Nexus 7 - it's the lack of an entry POINT. Apple's entry point was the iPod, whose entry point was the fact that it played MP3s from both Napster and MusicMatch. Apple then established iTunes, which was the entry point for the iPhone, and then the iPad built upon that. Microsoft requires an Outlook.com account, Skydrive, Zune Music (or Xbox Music?), and rebuying the apps you already bought on your iPhone or Galaxy S2. Even if they gave away the entry level Surface, that's still far too much change for far too many people.
Microsoft, here's my business plan for your next tablet...
1.) Do what they say - make a 7", $199 entry level unit and a $499 extended unit. Call it the xTab, and the Pocket xTab. Have no Microsoft branding on it at all, and never once use the term "Windows". 2.) Sell it (at the very least the Pocket xTab) wherever you can - Best Buy, Microcenter, Amazon, even Walgreens or Rite Aid. Make it as easy as possible to acquire one. 3.) Do some sort of cross licensing deal - Office for Android in exchange for official Gmail for the xTab. Offer some free Azure space to Dropbox in exchange for an official client. Do the same for Facebook in exchange for an Instagram client. 4.) Offer crossgrade app reimbursement - if a paid app from your iTunes account or Google Play account exists in the Microsoft Store, give it to the customer for free...then pay the developer what they would have gotten as a result of the sale. This will encourage developers on other platforms to develop the same app for the Windows Store. Similarly, provide copies of movies, TV episodes, and eBooks to people making the jump. 5.) Get the Chevron team back in the game - your system hackers are your platform evangelists, and you need all the help you can get. 6.) 16GB versions include 16GB of space available to the user. 7.) Add the Start Menu back to Windows 8 as an option. It won't do squat on the tablet OS, but it will help get some good will from the people who are avoiding Windows 8 because it comes across as trying to force a tablet UI where it doesn't belong. 8.) Free phone upgrades (to an xPhone, btw) to anyone still stuck on Windows Phone 7. Again, it's expensive, but Apple gets good will from giving older handsets software updates. Want to one-up them? You'll need a stack of Lumias to do it.
Think it's too drastic or too expensive? I can't possibly see it costing more than the hit that Steve Ballmer's way of doing things cost the company.
1.) you say you're missing leadership, yet you're worried that there's a game plan to give away? 2.) someone takes a picture in the meeting, and you assume it's to upload the game plan to Instagram? 3.) was there a stated rule against taking pictures? If not, you're firing someone for breaking a rule that wasn't stated? If so, is firing the man really the example you want to set for a first offense, instead of requiring that the image be deleted? 4.) you're running a subsidiary of a company whose only asset is its name's association with the 1990's...and your subsidiary is losing money...and you're firing people during a meeting, as if that's going to help matters in the slightest?
Who wants to bet that the next board meeting will involve some chair throwing antics?
Sometimes it's more important who you know and not what you know.
Not only this, but there's also, in theory, a greater threat between the combination of the two. Suppose I have three friends, Alice, Bob, and Carol. I send cleartext e-mails to Alice and Bob, but Carol gets encrypted messages, then those who are sniffing the traffic can discern the following information:
1.) I know Alice, Bob, and Carol. 2.) Since Alice and Bob get standard e-mails, I'm selectively encrypting my messages. 3.) I'm selectively encrypting messages to Carol, and Carol is selectively encrypting messages to me. 4.) Both Carol and I have the tools, understanding, and sense of requirement to encrypt what we are sending.
Even if I'm sending Alice and Bob different Amazon links on pressure cookers and Carol is getting e-mails containing images of adorable kittens and sending photos of Victoria's Secret models, there's going to be more suspicion placed upon my communications with Carol.
Ultimately, what I would really like to see is something like Retroshare replace e-mail...
Steve and company are looking to get the "iPad halo". They priced at $499 for that very reason: pricing themselves above the iPad would lead everyone to say "why not just get an iPad?". Pricing below the iPad would be a de facto admission that the iPad is "worth more". Microsoft is trying to establish themselves as having a premium product.
This is why you will never see a Surface fire sale: It is an admission that the only reason to buy a Surface in the first place is because it's significantly cheaper than any other first party tablet (and most third party tablets that don't come in boxes with Chinese bullet points).
HP did the fire sale because they were looking to shuffle their inventory, and it was cheaper for them to sell them at a price well below manufacturing cost than it was to landfill them, and they did so because they were looking to get out of the tablet market anyway - they didn't care what it did to the Touchpad brand because the brand itself was headed for the dumpster out back.
Microsoft still wants to sell tablets. Microsoft wants to sell tablets to people who have $500 saved up for an iPad. The logic goes that if they have $500 for an iPad, they have $500 for a Surface. If they sell at $300, well then it's easier to upsell them the keyboard case and still get close to the $500. At $99, even with a keyboard, a copy of Office RT, and a service plan, they're still leaving about half the money on the table, and in doing so, reinforcing the mindset that "A Surface is only worth 1/5 of what an iPad is worth". Sure, it will get Surface units in the home, that will be used for Internet Explorer and Netflix and...basically nothing else. This is great for the customer because it doesn't tap too much into the money they had saved up for the iPad...but they'll never get a Surface2 at $499, "because Surface tablets just aren't worth that much money, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have sold first gen units for $99", the logic goes.
Microsoft could probably make $901 million by selling those tablets for ($901 million / quantity in inventory) and do better fiscally with the first gen units than by just taking the writeoff. The problem is that the marketing division knows that premium brands never dilute their influence by committing acts of desperation. Microsoft doesn't want to simply gets units in hands, they want units in hands that have already parted with enough money to mirror the margins that Apple makes on their hardware. So long as this is the case, you'll never see a fire sale.
1. No Instagram client. True, this means nothing to the Slashdot crowd, but even a 41 megapixel camera is worthless if you can't share them. I don't think that this alone would cause WinRT/WP8 to remain on the shelf, but if $499 tablet X has instagram, $499 tablet Y has instagram, and $499 Surface doesn't have instagram, it's going to help narrow down the purchasing decisions pretty quick to anyone who uses the service regularly.
2. Too many migrations at once. Amongst the things that helped jump-start the iPhone back in 2007 was the fact that it integrated nicely with the iTunes library that people already had. Android integrated nicely with the gmail and picasa accounts people already had, and Google went to great lengths to simplify extending those services. Microsoft had hackneyed support for gmail (outlook.com is natively required), no official dropbox support (skydrive is natively supported), no support for iTunes (Xbox Music is natively supported), no drag-and-drop file system support; there's a fancy desktop client for it..but it doesn't work under Windows RT. Going the Microsoft route requires LOTS of changes for many people.
3. The devices that require less migration of stuff frequently cost the same or less.
4. Friends and family had iPads or Android tablets already. Easy ways to learn about new apps and figure out how to do some things are explained socially. If you're getting a WinRT device, you're standing alone. At some level, tablets are fashion accessories for many. This doesn't work when you're the only one with a tablet branded with a name reminiscent of your ridiculously locked down work PC or your slow, spyware infested home PC.
5. Little incentive for devs to help change any of this.
I had no idea the NSA was trolling the whole internet or had cooperation from major IT giants. I didn't know they were spying on their own allies and friends.
Well, for me at least, the push to get people's data onto the internet and off of their own hard drives was a red flag to me. Even if it wasn't the NSA/CIA/FBI/DHS specifically, there seemed an oddly timed shift, cohesive shift to "the cloud", in order to solve problems that, in many cases, had been solved for some time. Personally, I suspected corporate profits and data mining for marketing data with the side bonus of Uncle Sam making the occasional offer Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook couldn't refuse.
We might not have KNOWN that the government specifically had their own spy network that would make the KGB jealous, but trusting that the United States Government would both pass the Patriot Act and let multibillion dollar companies amass huge amounts of data on their citizens and say "We'll have to acquire a search warrant and follow due process every time we want data" is a level of optimism that doesn't add up to reality.
...I seriously doubt the home market for 3-D beyond cheap plastic birthday party trinkets is going to take off any time soon.
You then underestimate the potential market for cheap plastic birthday party trinkets. There's already a company making a fortune off a paper cutter, because they've learned how to correctly market it to the craft maker segment. The cutter is $200 or so, then you have the rest of the ecosystem: the mats, the different cutting blades, and the patterns. How much does all this crap go for? Usually the pattern cartridges cost some $30 a pop,give or take. Go to your local craft store, they will have a huge section full of them. My aunt loves all this stamp and calligraphy stuff, but any slashdotter who believes they have the patience of Gandhi can swing by any day and teach my aunt how to do 'conventional' vector illustration and how to generate an EPS and then send it to a professional-grade paper cutter. It's at best impractical, and certainly wouldn't achieve a critical mass.
However, if there's a company out there that can make a mint off an ecosystem designed to make patterns on paper, you can't possibly convince me that there's no market to do the same out of plastic, if not a bigger one - ever been to a hobby store and seen all the plastic models that can be built? Now you've got the bored housewives' craft market and the nerds' model building market, and yes - a DIY-spare-parts market for certain things where such pieces could be made out of the correct plastic effectively.
As a blank slate that requires the 3D version of PostScript written in LaTeX? yeah, not much of a market. As a machine that allows birthday trinkets with a point-and-click iPad interface? someone's gonna get rich off that.
There are a few alternatives that come to mind if you're like me and adhere to the philosophy that "data that doesn't exist on hard drives I can clone or shoot, either doesn't exist, or exists in the hands of my enemies"...
Where seamless sync isn't an issue, FTP/SFTP can work well. FreeNAS and NAS4Free do this with a great back end file system, but UnRAID, while not free, does do a pretty good job of performing a similar tasks if you have a hodgepodge of hard disks lying around. In all three cases, you're looking at a dedicated OS install.
OwnCloud is a good sync app and browser based file portal. The Android app for it is still very much in beta though and doesn't always sync everything you want it to.
Ajaxplorer is a great browser-based file manager, and they have a desktop sync client in beta. It's gotten a LOT prettier in this last release and has great user management tools, as well as a public folder system for collaborative efforts.
Both OwnCloud and Ajaxplorer run on a LAMP stack; the Turnkey Linux project and Bitnami both offer builds for both applications to make things relatively simple if you've got the hardware or a VM at your disposal.
Tonido will do desktop sync a la Dropbox with a point-and-grunt Windows installer; 2GB of sync is free, 100GB of sync is $29/year.
Looking for an inexpensive server to put it on? I had a great purchase experience from the guys over at ServerWorlds; it's possible to get a properly spec'd IBM x3550 from them for less than $500 using backplanes that will use off-the-shelf SATA drives in a RAID-1, and it'll fully support ESXi if you want. eBay is also a fountain of such things.
If home internet is too slow and/or untrustworthy to the point where you trust a colo provider instead, GoRack (the only colo center I could Google that gives actual pricing information) seems to be willing to power and shuffle data to your server for some $50/month or less. Clearly Dropbox has the edge here as far as availability and uptime as opposed to a single x3550 (along with the convenience of not having to manage your server), but if you load up the server with a pair of 2TB drives, the only offering Dropbox has that can compete with that is the business package that costs some $800/year.
Depending on your level of expertise, what you've got at your disposal, who you trust, and what you can spend, there are more than a few options besides dropbox.
Slashdot Mirror
When I read
ultrasonic transducer grid
, my first thought was that it was a doomsday weapon created by Doctor Drakken.
What is it you really want?
The grandparent post said what he said poorly, but the original intent was for the state governments to be the group running the show - the federal government was put into existence by consent of the states to begin with, don't forget.
While the interstate commerce clause has been stretched too much, the federal government was basically put into place in order for a handful of tasks. One of which was defense; leaving this to the states would make a bit of a mess - Rhode Island probably can't afford to make a moderately sized aircraft carrier on their budget, but they'd definitely benefit from one. They might be able to make a deal with Vermont, but being as it's a landlocked state, donating a few doorknobs and toilet seats would have been seen as 'wasteful spending'. Would New Mexico charge rent for Area 51? Though it stretches the "defense" definition a bit, as a branch of the military on paper, would Florida have been responsible for NASA by itself, or would the Saturn V come with a "some assembly required" sticker as each state donated a random assortment of parts? Doing defense on a federal level just makes sense, because no one is going to declare war on any one particular state within the union and leave the rest alone. Now we can argue about this negating the need for private gun owners or the corruptness of privatized military contractors, but in the abstract it makes more sense to ensure that Kansas is contributing to the fund instead of banking on Virginia having to use all their tax money to buy fighter jets and submarines while Kansas gets to bank on the fact that if the coastline states lose that they're already screwed instead of buying an aircraft carrier and letting it sit in a Californian harbor at $1,000 a day to dock it and let it rust away until it's needed only to find that their ship is on the wrong side of the country and by time the non-existent post office ships it across the country, the war is already over and it was delivered to Vermont by accident anyway, giving the dude holding the clipboard a very awkward phone call to make when the bloke who was supposed to sign for it ticked off the "return to sender" box...
Interstate commerce, in its pure, unstretched form, is also a "good idea" for a federal government to deal with - do we need fifty different currencies, or fifty definitions of a mile or a pound, or half the states adopting the metric system with half using imperial measurements? It's a mess, which is why the federal government was tasked with saying, "thus sayeth us, this is the definition of an imperial ton, you will trade using imperial tons, and if you want to avoid an imperial ton of napalm vaporizing your establishment, you'll pay your taxes in an official dollar which is worth what we say it is."
There were a couple of other things also involved with the formation of the federal government that were expressly granted federal powers, and the principle of "small government" effectively says "stick to exactly what the constitution says", generally with some concession as there was no need for the FCC or FAA in 1789, though both are needed today and the nature of broadcast and air travel clearly make them the kind of thing that only a federal establishment should regulate. Instead, we get situations like congress saying "the ACA is a tax because the federal government can make new taxes, except it isn't because no one wants to hear another reason to increase taxes, except it is because the Supreme Court won't let us implement it if we don't call it a tax...". These kinds of things were intended to be state powers. If Massachusetts wants to implement a statewide healthcare system and say "if you're living in this state you must get medical insurance, and if you're a doctor in this state you must accept the public option", fine. Let 'em. It will either work wonderfully for them and blaze the trail for the other states to do the same, or it will fail in a spectacular fireball. Other states could pass sl
I just don't see anything helpful coming out of that-
For a site dedicated to nerds, there's an utter dearth of imagination...and memory.
See kids, back in the day, HTC made this little phone called the HD2. It shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5 and was intended to ship with Windows 7, but Microsoft told them "no can do" for the sole reason that it has an inconsistent hardware button configuration with the rest of the Windows Phone 7 handsets. However, because of the intended dual-OS compatibility, HTC released a phone that was impressively consistent and relatively easy to flash. This lead to the development of MAGLDR and CLK, which were alternative bootloaders that enabled users to flash Windows Phone 7 (unofficially, though completely functionally if you can get MS to give you a product key), Android (more versions of Android than any other handset; everything from Froyo to Jellybean and I think some of the earlier versions were available, too), Meego, Ubuntu, FirefoxOS, and proof-of-concept compatibility with WP8 and WinRT. To this day, it has one of the most active communities on XDA, certainly moreso than any other phone that was sold during the same time period.
When HTC builds a phone to boot a pair of OSes, especially ones as different as Windows Phone and Android, odds are better than ever that HTC will end up shipping a phone that's more mod-friendly than most of the phones that ship with just one OS, even a Nexus. Don't you think that there's something "helpful" about a phone that is sufficiently hackable that it can have its software kept current long past its EOL date according to the carrier? I do.
While we're at it, I know that hating Microsoft is cool around here and all, and yes, I do walk around with an Android phone because a phone without a user-exposed file system is a dealbreaker for me, but are we seriously going to sit here and say that it's better for Google/Samsung and Apple to each have ~50% of the market rather than having Google/Samsung/HTC, Microsoft/Nokia/HTC, and Apple all having ~33% of the market a piece? I always thought competition was a positive situation, and even if HTC gets screwed over by Microsoft somehow (like they did by not being able to officially software upgrade the HD2), it still means more mod-friendly phones for everyone - something I thought that a group of people who like installing Linux on everything with a processor would appreciate.
Adobe must be the one company in the world to have a worse track record at security than Microsoft, Oracle or Mozilla.
...Sony?
If the government mandated that everybody carry a tracking device, keep it on at all times, and that they'd be storing the tracking data in perpetuity, there'd be a goddamn revolution.
Yes, because the primary, explicitly stated purpose of the device is to take away your privacy. Cell phones are primarily intended to facilitate communication independent of physical location. Cell phones do need to have an idea of your location, but that data doesn't NEED to be stored. Storing the data is done for corporate/government convenience, and it is indeed done in poor taste and generally against the wishes of the user...but no one owns a cell phone for the intent of getting tracked by the government.
But when they do so voluntarily, and the NSA steals all that data - leading to the exact same end point - people are all like, "oh, look, Walter White is twerking again."
The fact that the NSA is using the data is a point of contention for just about everyone, regardless of political affiliation. You'll find a relatively small minority of people that view it as a good thing. Again, cell phones are not purchased for the intent of being tracked by corporations or governments. The alternative to being tracked via cell phone is giving up one's cell phone. While you're right in that plenty of people are all "I don't care, for I have nothing to hide, for only terrorists have anything to hide, and I am not a terrorist", many of those people are also dependent on their cell phones for legitimate reasons. I perform on-site tech support for a living. If I don't have my cell phone, I don't know who is having a problem until I start my laptop, which must be online. To provide this level of service to customers requires a cell phone; if they have to wait for hours to even make me aware that there are problems with their systems, they won't be my clients for very long, which means that bills don't get paid, which means that not having a cell phone is the least of my worries.
Again, for many it's "zomg then I can't instagram my lunch!!!111", but for others, our society has built itself in such a way that we are dependent on constant communication...which almost seems to lend credence to the thought that someone, somewhere, planned that all along....
Using Ctrl-Alt-Del to trigger login gives you two kinds of security:
1. Software cannot simulate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to play games with the login screen.
2. By first pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, the user logging on can be quite sure that they are giving their login credentials to a genuine Windows (or whatever OS) login screen, and not some malware that merely resembles the login screen.
Perhaps I'm simply misinformed and the software does something different somewhere...but I've 'simulated' Ctrl+Alt+Del from Remote Desktop, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and VNC...I still don't follow how this still holds true.
Getting the information from your old system to an out of the box solution is going to be a huge hassle, and you will probably end up losing a lot of data in the process. You should look into having a developer improve or streamline the current system instead of trying to push a one size fits all solution down everyone's throat.
I agree with this, except for a blaring situation: the existing solution is a hodgepodge of VB and Access code. I'm dealing with something very similar at work...
One of our clients recently acquired someone else. Among them was a custom Access "application". It *must* be launched from a standalone executable, which *must* be run as administrator, and as best we can tell, requires a metric ton of DNS redirects because it pulls data from all over the network using server names instead of FQDNs or IP addresses, has a wheelbarrow full of security warnings due to extensive use of macros, fails in any version of Access except 2003...and cost the company over a quarter million dollars ten years ago. The amount of duct tape and string that this thing is being held together by is ridiculous, and it NEEDS to be moved into some sort of legit server/browser situation, since it literally will not run without reordering one's entire system around it. Now yes, we could (and are) tracing out those servers so we can add DNS entries to allow for domain traversal, but it still won't run on anything except Access 2003 without extensive rewriting, and the consulting firm that made it is no longer in business so we can't just "call the vendor".
Between the two options of "add more duct tape" and "deal with all kinds of pain and agony to make it somewhat standards compliant and run in a browser using some MS-SQL and HTML/PHP/ASP.NET*", it makes more sense to invest our time in a manner that will make it continue to run long after Access 2003 fails to install anymore.
*Yes, I know, the Microsoft database/web platform situation isn't exactly "standards compliant", but remember that we're coming from a Microsoft Access database, so getting data into tables is significantly easier than MariaDB or Postgres...and even if we end up in a similar situation where we can't upgrade the database beyond, for example, Server 2008/SQL Server 2008/IIS 7.0, at least that's server-side, can live in a virtual machine (and thus the hardware can be upgraded in time), and it's an internally facing setup anyway so security doesn't need to be as crucial a focus as if it were being pounded from the outside. If we're still there in 2018, that's fine - end user desktops can be changed whenever and it won't be nearly as big of a problem.
One of the benefits of traditional consoles is the (relative) lack of the kind of hardware fragmentation that can cause errors, glitches, and performance drops....Will it be up to standards adherence and vigilant devs to make sure hardware fragmentation doesn't get out of hand? Or is there some magic bullet that Valve has discovered?
Or are we looking at the worst of both worlds, with broken games that you can't fix?
My guess...as in GUESS, as in Gabe hasn't discussed with me over a game of Xcom...is that it will likely be closer to an AutoCAD kind of situation. AutoCAD gives a short list of Quadro and FirePro cards that are 'Certified'. They are stupidly more expensive than other cards...but if you have a support contract with AutoCAD and you say that there's a video bug, they will (in theory) work with you to get to the bottom of it, because those cards are thoroughly tested with the software.
What seems to make sense in this case is to have a Steam Machine that can have different modules like a PC, but in a much more simplified manner, like a console. You may not have a GeForce 790GTX contingent on a 1KW power supply and a compatible motherboard...you'll have all the Steam Machines shipping with baseline hardware and modularized core components. You'd be able to get a "level 2 GPU", "level 2 RAM", "level 2 SSD", and a "level 2 processor", and next year they'll have "level 3" versions, and so on. Driver updates can be a non-issue because they can be baked into the SteamOS patches; since they know what the modules will be, they can easily have the drivers ready without a problem.
It *can* be the best of both worlds if it ends up being "limited choice". Being able to throw any old GPU from Newegg into the Steam Machine will be a mess, but being able to have different combinations of hardware levels in the same box can still provide some degree of choice while keeping a level of consistency that will be in line with the advantages of traditional consoles.
What's next? "Unauthorized" headphones?
Apple Earpods don't work as hands-free cell phone headsets on my Galaxy S3 or Note 2, or my dad's LG something-or-other...so unfortunately I think that base is already covered.
This is where Mr. Fusion would really come in handy.
I beg to differ...unless you happen to be aware of a stash of beer cans and banana peels in space.
Given that I had to google to figure out WTF that is, and given that you can already buy a stylus for about $15 which allows you to do the same thing on a 'normal' touchscreen ... what fraction of the market actually knows or cares about that?
It sounds like niche functionality which is just increasing the cost of these tablets for little benefit to most people.
But, hey, if that's a feature you need for what you're doing, run wild with it. That neither my iPad nor my Nexus 7 have it and I've never missed it (or known what it is) means that for me it's not differentiating technology for most people.
I'd say both you and the grandparent missed the mark. the HTC Flyer had one, as does the Galaxy Note (both phone and tablet flavors), and both companies have had them on the market for over a year. The $15 stylus is a night-and-day difference from an active digitizer; it's clear you've never used one. They're significantly more precise, and have the ability to detect differences in pressure. I've also found that the $15 stylus offerings for capacitive screens tend to be inconsistent - straight lines frequently have gaps in them (making the use of Swype or Swiftkey Flow a nightmare), and even the premium ones feel so light and flimsy.
As for it being a niche feature, Samsung sold 5 million Note 2 phones within the first three months of release...and that was still in 2012. If we assume that that's five million handsets and that Samsung never sold another one since, and that 80% of the people who bought one don't care about the S-Pen...that still means that a million people bought their Note 2 for its active digitizer.
And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
...And yet, companies seem unable to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a very rational reason why people like me resist Teh Cloud(tm).
Microsoft partnering with EA would be like Bubba partnering with Ray Ray to chase you down in the woods.
Exactly why I'm surprised it never happened.
Which is essential really.
If MS did integrate a gaming marketplace into Windows that took noticable marketshare from Steam, Origin, etc. they would get sued, just like for IE, WMP, Messenger...
I'm not completely convinced of that, depending on how they actually went about it. If they did some sort of exclusivity situation where Xbox Marketplace games couldn't be released on Steam as well, THEN that would be an issue. If Microsoft prohibited Steam from being installed, or using DirectX APIs, THEN there would be solid ground for a lawsuit.
Microsoft simply having a competing product isn't grounds for a lawsuit, even if it's integrated - so far, no lawsuits for Windows Defender or Zip Folders, despite them competing with Symantec and WinRAR, respectively.
See, The Xbox PC marketplace, the once or twice I used it, was never really a desirable means of doing anything. Every time I tried something, it would only be available on Xbox...because apparently hiding things that can't be used on a PC was an insurmountable task. It didn't seem to do cool things like let you play PC versions of Xbox games you own or save my game of Batman Arkham Asylum that was a GFWL title such that I could pick up where I left off after a format...
It surprises me that Microsoft has traditionally done such a piss poor job of integrating ANYTHING involving gaming or software purchasing into the OS. Maybe now with Win8 they'll take it a bit more seriously, but I'm still shocked they didn't partner with EA years ago and make a windows-integrated service that precluded the necessity of Origin in the first place.
You have a folder named Music, you have subfolders named A, B, C, D, ...
How exactly does that not scale?
Because the way you say it, you can only have 26 folders.
Ballmer doesn't understand that the Windows brand represents one of two things:
1.) That super locked down computer at work which forces me to use Excel and blocks Facebook and Youtube.
2.) That super virus infested computer in the living room that the kids use to type up their reports.
Neither of these are the kinds of experiences people want associated with their tablet experience; it's among the reasons why so many people have opted for them for casual use. If Microsoft is trying to make inroads into a market other than the desktop, then they need to use branding to their advantage by distancing itself from the desktop experience. As much as Ballmer believes that people want Windows everywhere, the spec sheet of Windows RT, almost by definition, ensures that its ONLY resemblance to the familiar desktop experience (even if we assume the positive aspects thereof) is the Windows name. No use of their iTunes library, and tricky-at-best use of Gmail and Dropbox.
If Microsoft wants to compete in the tablet space, then it's not a matter of their lack of an entry-level device like the Nexus 7 - it's the lack of an entry POINT. Apple's entry point was the iPod, whose entry point was the fact that it played MP3s from both Napster and MusicMatch. Apple then established iTunes, which was the entry point for the iPhone, and then the iPad built upon that. Microsoft requires an Outlook.com account, Skydrive, Zune Music (or Xbox Music?), and rebuying the apps you already bought on your iPhone or Galaxy S2. Even if they gave away the entry level Surface, that's still far too much change for far too many people.
Microsoft, here's my business plan for your next tablet...
1.) Do what they say - make a 7", $199 entry level unit and a $499 extended unit. Call it the xTab, and the Pocket xTab. Have no Microsoft branding on it at all, and never once use the term "Windows".
2.) Sell it (at the very least the Pocket xTab) wherever you can - Best Buy, Microcenter, Amazon, even Walgreens or Rite Aid. Make it as easy as possible to acquire one.
3.) Do some sort of cross licensing deal - Office for Android in exchange for official Gmail for the xTab. Offer some free Azure space to Dropbox in exchange for an official client. Do the same for Facebook in exchange for an Instagram client.
4.) Offer crossgrade app reimbursement - if a paid app from your iTunes account or Google Play account exists in the Microsoft Store, give it to the customer for free...then pay the developer what they would have gotten as a result of the sale. This will encourage developers on other platforms to develop the same app for the Windows Store. Similarly, provide copies of movies, TV episodes, and eBooks to people making the jump.
5.) Get the Chevron team back in the game - your system hackers are your platform evangelists, and you need all the help you can get.
6.) 16GB versions include 16GB of space available to the user.
7.) Add the Start Menu back to Windows 8 as an option. It won't do squat on the tablet OS, but it will help get some good will from the people who are avoiding Windows 8 because it comes across as trying to force a tablet UI where it doesn't belong.
8.) Free phone upgrades (to an xPhone, btw) to anyone still stuck on Windows Phone 7. Again, it's expensive, but Apple gets good will from giving older handsets software updates. Want to one-up them? You'll need a stack of Lumias to do it.
Think it's too drastic or too expensive? I can't possibly see it costing more than the hit that Steve Ballmer's way of doing things cost the company.
Microsoft believes any sufficiently nebulous implementation is indistinguishable from something patentworthy.
Microsoft can't patent The Cloud, so are they already planning for "The Nebula"?
1.) you say you're missing leadership, yet you're worried that there's a game plan to give away?
2.) someone takes a picture in the meeting, and you assume it's to upload the game plan to Instagram?
3.) was there a stated rule against taking pictures? If not, you're firing someone for breaking a rule that wasn't stated? If so, is firing the man really the example you want to set for a first offense, instead of requiring that the image be deleted?
4.) you're running a subsidiary of a company whose only asset is its name's association with the 1990's...and your subsidiary is losing money...and you're firing people during a meeting, as if that's going to help matters in the slightest?
Who wants to bet that the next board meeting will involve some chair throwing antics?
Sometimes it's more important who you know and not what you know.
Not only this, but there's also, in theory, a greater threat between the combination of the two. Suppose I have three friends, Alice, Bob, and Carol. I send cleartext e-mails to Alice and Bob, but Carol gets encrypted messages, then those who are sniffing the traffic can discern the following information:
1.) I know Alice, Bob, and Carol.
2.) Since Alice and Bob get standard e-mails, I'm selectively encrypting my messages.
3.) I'm selectively encrypting messages to Carol, and Carol is selectively encrypting messages to me.
4.) Both Carol and I have the tools, understanding, and sense of requirement to encrypt what we are sending.
Even if I'm sending Alice and Bob different Amazon links on pressure cookers and Carol is getting e-mails containing images of adorable kittens and sending photos of Victoria's Secret models, there's going to be more suspicion placed upon my communications with Carol.
Ultimately, what I would really like to see is something like Retroshare replace e-mail...
Steve and company are looking to get the "iPad halo". They priced at $499 for that very reason: pricing themselves above the iPad would lead everyone to say "why not just get an iPad?". Pricing below the iPad would be a de facto admission that the iPad is "worth more". Microsoft is trying to establish themselves as having a premium product.
This is why you will never see a Surface fire sale: It is an admission that the only reason to buy a Surface in the first place is because it's significantly cheaper than any other first party tablet (and most third party tablets that don't come in boxes with Chinese bullet points).
HP did the fire sale because they were looking to shuffle their inventory, and it was cheaper for them to sell them at a price well below manufacturing cost than it was to landfill them, and they did so because they were looking to get out of the tablet market anyway - they didn't care what it did to the Touchpad brand because the brand itself was headed for the dumpster out back.
Microsoft still wants to sell tablets. Microsoft wants to sell tablets to people who have $500 saved up for an iPad. The logic goes that if they have $500 for an iPad, they have $500 for a Surface. If they sell at $300, well then it's easier to upsell them the keyboard case and still get close to the $500. At $99, even with a keyboard, a copy of Office RT, and a service plan, they're still leaving about half the money on the table, and in doing so, reinforcing the mindset that "A Surface is only worth 1/5 of what an iPad is worth". Sure, it will get Surface units in the home, that will be used for Internet Explorer and Netflix and...basically nothing else. This is great for the customer because it doesn't tap too much into the money they had saved up for the iPad...but they'll never get a Surface2 at $499, "because Surface tablets just aren't worth that much money, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have sold first gen units for $99", the logic goes.
Microsoft could probably make $901 million by selling those tablets for ($901 million / quantity in inventory) and do better fiscally with the first gen units than by just taking the writeoff. The problem is that the marketing division knows that premium brands never dilute their influence by committing acts of desperation. Microsoft doesn't want to simply gets units in hands, they want units in hands that have already parted with enough money to mirror the margins that Apple makes on their hardware. So long as this is the case, you'll never see a fire sale.
1. No Instagram client. True, this means nothing to the Slashdot crowd, but even a 41 megapixel camera is worthless if you can't share them. I don't think that this alone would cause WinRT/WP8 to remain on the shelf, but if $499 tablet X has instagram, $499 tablet Y has instagram, and $499 Surface doesn't have instagram, it's going to help narrow down the purchasing decisions pretty quick to anyone who uses the service regularly.
2. Too many migrations at once. Amongst the things that helped jump-start the iPhone back in 2007 was the fact that it integrated nicely with the iTunes library that people already had. Android integrated nicely with the gmail and picasa accounts people already had, and Google went to great lengths to simplify extending those services. Microsoft had hackneyed support for gmail (outlook.com is natively required), no official dropbox support (skydrive is natively supported), no support for iTunes (Xbox Music is natively supported), no drag-and-drop file system support; there's a fancy desktop client for it..but it doesn't work under Windows RT. Going the Microsoft route requires LOTS of changes for many people.
3. The devices that require less migration of stuff frequently cost the same or less.
4. Friends and family had iPads or Android tablets already. Easy ways to learn about new apps and figure out how to do some things are explained socially. If you're getting a WinRT device, you're standing alone. At some level, tablets are fashion accessories for many. This doesn't work when you're the only one with a tablet branded with a name reminiscent of your ridiculously locked down work PC or your slow, spyware infested home PC.
5. Little incentive for devs to help change any of this.
I had no idea the NSA was trolling the whole internet or had cooperation from major IT giants. I didn't know they were spying on their own allies and friends.
Well, for me at least, the push to get people's data onto the internet and off of their own hard drives was a red flag to me. Even if it wasn't the NSA/CIA/FBI/DHS specifically, there seemed an oddly timed shift, cohesive shift to "the cloud", in order to solve problems that, in many cases, had been solved for some time. Personally, I suspected corporate profits and data mining for marketing data with the side bonus of Uncle Sam making the occasional offer Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook couldn't refuse.
We might not have KNOWN that the government specifically had their own spy network that would make the KGB jealous, but trusting that the United States Government would both pass the Patriot Act and let multibillion dollar companies amass huge amounts of data on their citizens and say "We'll have to acquire a search warrant and follow due process every time we want data" is a level of optimism that doesn't add up to reality.
...I seriously doubt the home market for 3-D beyond cheap plastic birthday party trinkets is going to take off any time soon.
You then underestimate the potential market for cheap plastic birthday party trinkets.
There's already a company making a fortune off a paper cutter, because they've learned how to correctly market it to the craft maker segment. The cutter is $200 or so, then you have the rest of the ecosystem: the mats, the different cutting blades, and the patterns. How much does all this crap go for? Usually the pattern cartridges cost some $30 a pop,give or take. Go to your local craft store, they will have a huge section full of them. My aunt loves all this stamp and calligraphy stuff, but any slashdotter who believes they have the patience of Gandhi can swing by any day and teach my aunt how to do 'conventional' vector illustration and how to generate an EPS and then send it to a professional-grade paper cutter. It's at best impractical, and certainly wouldn't achieve a critical mass.
However, if there's a company out there that can make a mint off an ecosystem designed to make patterns on paper, you can't possibly convince me that there's no market to do the same out of plastic, if not a bigger one - ever been to a hobby store and seen all the plastic models that can be built? Now you've got the bored housewives' craft market and the nerds' model building market, and yes - a DIY-spare-parts market for certain things where such pieces could be made out of the correct plastic effectively.
As a blank slate that requires the 3D version of PostScript written in LaTeX? yeah, not much of a market. As a machine that allows birthday trinkets with a point-and-click iPad interface? someone's gonna get rich off that.
There are a few alternatives that come to mind if you're like me and adhere to the philosophy that "data that doesn't exist on hard drives I can clone or shoot, either doesn't exist, or exists in the hands of my enemies"...
Where seamless sync isn't an issue, FTP/SFTP can work well. FreeNAS and NAS4Free do this with a great back end file system, but UnRAID, while not free, does do a pretty good job of performing a similar tasks if you have a hodgepodge of hard disks lying around. In all three cases, you're looking at a dedicated OS install.
OwnCloud is a good sync app and browser based file portal. The Android app for it is still very much in beta though and doesn't always sync everything you want it to.
Ajaxplorer is a great browser-based file manager, and they have a desktop sync client in beta. It's gotten a LOT prettier in this last release and has great user management tools, as well as a public folder system for collaborative efforts.
Both OwnCloud and Ajaxplorer run on a LAMP stack; the Turnkey Linux project and Bitnami both offer builds for both applications to make things relatively simple if you've got the hardware or a VM at your disposal.
Tonido will do desktop sync a la Dropbox with a point-and-grunt Windows installer; 2GB of sync is free, 100GB of sync is $29/year.
Looking for an inexpensive server to put it on? I had a great purchase experience from the guys over at ServerWorlds; it's possible to get a properly spec'd IBM x3550 from them for less than $500 using backplanes that will use off-the-shelf SATA drives in a RAID-1, and it'll fully support ESXi if you want. eBay is also a fountain of such things.
If home internet is too slow and/or untrustworthy to the point where you trust a colo provider instead, GoRack (the only colo center I could Google that gives actual pricing information) seems to be willing to power and shuffle data to your server for some $50/month or less. Clearly Dropbox has the edge here as far as availability and uptime as opposed to a single x3550 (along with the convenience of not having to manage your server), but if you load up the server with a pair of 2TB drives, the only offering Dropbox has that can compete with that is the business package that costs some $800/year.
Depending on your level of expertise, what you've got at your disposal, who you trust, and what you can spend, there are more than a few options besides dropbox.