Even so, I've found Windows local search to be more trouble than it's worth anyway. the "perpetual green bar" kept getting in my way, so I just disabled Windows Search entirely. On the sad side, I can't use instant search in Outlook anymore. On the bright side, I replaced it with Everything. It legitimately searches everything, and does so instantly. I'd prefer doing that in Windows 8.1. If for no other reason, I haven't the foggiest idea why someone would want to simultaneously search the internet and a local drive for the same search string. They're foundationally different - internet search is for "stuff you don't have", and local search is for "stuff you have, but don't know where". I can't ever once think of a time I've wanted to search both at a time.
Serato really, REALLY needs to port itself to Linux.
A cursory look at the Wikipedia article indicates that Egypt has spent time under the rule of a few empires here and there over history, but it and Greece have both been their own societies for several thousand years in spite of this. I figure that both countries are closer to the age of China than they're listed...but that's just me.
My LOGIC goes like this: the DMCA prohibits the act of running DeCSS. If you run a decryption program that spits out a standard ISO/MP4/XviD file, and you're legally entitled to enjoy the content that you purchased, I can't see there being an issue with it.
Facebook was the result of some epic timing, but I can't necessarily call them innovative. Before Facebook, there were some pretty well populated social networks, Myspace being the one whose problems they solved, but Geocities, AIM, and IRC before it also helped break ground. Facebook brought very few foundational ideas to the table.
Apple is a victim of its own success. No matter what they release, it will be compared to the iPhone (which brought smartphones and data plans to the masses), or the iPad (which all but started the tablet PC market). Very few companies have ever had products that successful, and the fact of the matter is that it's nearly impossible to maintain that momentum consistently.
Google might have a handful of good ideas left in it, but they have a different problem. When they started, it was basically a haven for geeks where they could throw Jell-O at the wall and see what stuck. I'm certain that there were projects that spent a week being added to the drawing board and were never pursued, to say nothing of the projects that have ultimately been scrapped over time. The problem is that Google has financial expectations on it now, which means that the geeks who could come up with some innovative ideas need to allocate their time pursuant to whether they can meet their deadlines. This kind of thinking leaves a lot of the gambling on the table.
Amazon doesn't need much innovation. They're the Wal-Mart of the internet, and this isn't a bad thing. They all but 'personify' the term "economies of scale"..If it's a good idea, Amazon can throw resources at it, whether it be servers, distribution, money, or audience. They have all of these things in great abundance, and generally keep their customers happy with cheap prices and (unlike wal-mart) generally very good customer service, and do so extremely efficiently. As long as they keep doing this, and do it as well as they have been for nearly 20 years, then they will continue to be profitable.
The problem with innovation in this context is that it doesn't seem to count, except when it does. The Newton was innovative. The PocketPC was, at some level, innovative. "Innovation" isn't what's being looked for. What is being looked for is "Innovation that immediately captures the public's attention and makes a substantial amount of money, market share, and mindshare in a very short period of time".
I wonder if there's any visible impact on torrent traffic from this.
If memory serves, kat.ph doesn't have a tracker, or if they do, they're one of several trackers per torrent. Also, because they're a public tracker, even if the tracker went down, most swarms would be able to continue for a while using DHT and other trackerless technologies. If kat.ph went down and remained down, by time the people who had files all had them seeded, the masses would move on to the next major public tracker, as was done with suprnova, mininova, demonoid, and depending on where you live, the pirate bay.
While not a fan of the new Mac Pro, HDD speeds are the major bottleneck in PC systems, any attempt to thwart this should be praised.
Clearly you're not the target demographic for the Mac Pro. Having an SSD for a SYSTEM drive, I wholeheartedly agree with. Omitting the SATA bus and the physical capability to add in spinning rust drives is NOT a generally desirable feature. See, the majority of people who still use Mac Pro hardware are video editors. the ~70MBytes/sec of sustained linear writes for HD video on a RAID-5 of SATA drives is just fine; what's much more important is the storage space. A terabyte goes REAL quick when editing HD video of any length. You also need stock footage, scratch disks for render files, and in some cases multiple audio channels. Yes, adding in several terabytes of storage can be done using external drives or a Thunderbolt storage array or similar, but the original Mac Pro case made it possible to do all of that with bog standard hard drives and SATA cables. It is a solution not solved by present availability of PCIe flash storage, and the requirement of a Thunderbolt storage tower to prevent the Mac Pro from having to retain its physical appearance as a tower seems a bit counterproductive in this regard.
But they'll just take it all away in a year or two with a mandatory software update, citing fears of piracy.
Again.
My guess is that it will largely hinge on how well Microsoft does with it. If Sony and MS are somewhere in the 40/60 split area, I could see Sony keeping things as-is. Too far in either direction could be reasons to start adding these restrictions in later on, perhaps less stringently so (e.g. "internet connectivity required, but only once a week!"). Similarly, I think it also depends on how many PS4 disc images find their way onto the Pirate Bay.
When Bill Gates first discovered the Internet in the mid-1990s, he spent three hours on line, and wrote in a memo "I didn't see a single Microsoft file format". Microsoft's dominance has relied heavily on proprietary file formats. But now, if it won't work on a tablet or phone, it's useless. This reduces Microsoft's control.
But that's sort of disingenuous. Sure Microsoft doesn't own JPEG, GIF, or HTML...but Microsoft has had desktop dominance for decades, and has had a respectable existence in the server market ever since the demise of Novell, even as a web server (behind Apache and nginx right now). LibreOffice is excellent, but their Office division still makes a mint despite file formats being mostly-compliant. Really, the only company who has had any real success with a proprietary format on the web was Macromedia (and by extension Adobe), but even that's rapidly eroding.
Microsoft started with having a mostly-better product, then format lock-in, and now inertia...but more inertia than anyone else has really had.
People said the same thing when File Manager was removed.
Except that File Manager was still available in Windows 95 if you wanted it.
People said
the same thing when the "gummy" themed buttons in Windows XP showed up (oh, its not professional!).
Except that classic mode was available in XP if you wanted it.
They said the same thing when Vista added UAC.
Except that UAC could be disabled if you wanted to.
And they're saying the same thing now.
Except that now we're stuck using third party utilities to undo Microsoft's changes.
Turns out, for Microsoft, people "saying the same thing" works out very well financially.
And it is this line of thinking that may get Microsoft into trouble in the none-too-distant future. In the Windows 3.x/95/XP days you speak of, "computing" and "desktop computing" were synonymous for home users. If you wanted to get online, you used a desktop/laptop. Now though, many people's needs can be adequately met by iPads, Transformer-like tablets, and Chromebooks. Even Linux Mint has all but gotten the Linux Desktop situation sorted out (though I personally was a fan of Xandros in its day). Microsoft's response has been the polar opposite of what it's been in the past: instead of including classic modes, Microsoft has actively worked to remove such functionality. The first public beta had a start menu that could be enabled by group policy, presumably more people were enabling it than Microsoft was happy about and as a result it was forcibly removed. How this will impact Microsoft over the next five years is anyone's guess.
The point I was making is that mobile computing does not have the same level of openness that desktop computing has traditionally enjoyed, and this has been the case by design in both scenarios. Sure I can't run Windows on my Linksys router (as an example of a closed Linux device), but that's a similarly disingenuous argument to make. My router supports the stock firmware, DD-WRT, and TomatoUSB; I'm not complaining about it not running Windows because I'm not looking to go beyond its class of existence, namely, to route network traffic.
I didn't buy the Toshiba tablet, I won it in a contest. I didn't get a choice in the matter. The point I was making is related to the GGGP post who said that it should be of questionable celebration that the demise of Windows be the case; Microsoft never actively prevented users from installing Linux on their machines, and even for all the hoopla Secure Boot has generated, the spec mandates that the user be able to disable it. Nexus tablets don't allow me to install WinRT, to directly address it not being Google's fault. Surface tablets don't let me install Android. I can't install either one on an iPad. This has never been the case in the realm of desktop computing, where basically everything runs on basically everything (Hackint0sh situations notwithstanding).
My point is that no matter which mobile OS you point to, it's tied to a vertical ecosystem in which the hardware and software are much more intimately connected than has been the case in desktop computing. Resultantly, just because AOSP doesn't come with bloatware and unremovable applications doesn't mean that these problems don't plague the ecosystem.
Android is pretty open. They let you run just about anything that can't screw up the drivers without even batting an eye (at least on Sprint they do). And rooting your phone is a simple 10-minute process. I'm not really seeing the problem.
That's not ENTIRELY accurate. The grandparent's point transcends "Microsoft" and speaks a lot to "ecosystem" as well.
Amongst the thing that gave Compaq and the IBM clones their rise was their level of openness. You could buy any commodity x86 box (or pieces and DIY assemble said box), and run DOS or Windows or OS/2 or Linux on them, upgrade when Microsoft released stuff, and be in charge of exactly what software did and didn't end up on our machines. Now this level of openness came with a cost, namely all of the problems that naturally came with giving users complete control: viruses/malware/toolbars, the necessary routine maintenance not being performed, incompatibilities, teaching users to "click next until the installation is finished" and ending up with a dozen pieces of software that weren't wanted, and people actually believing the FBI holds their computer for ransom unless they use Greenpak to send money to "pay the fine".
You can SOMETIMES root in ten minutes. My Toshiba AT200 has a locked bootloader and since Toshiba hasn't released a means of unlocking it (and hacking said bootloader doesn't have the same sex appeal as being the one to crack the Galaxy S5), so I'm stuck in an unrooted state. Even if I had an unlocked bootloader or Nexus 10 or Transformer Prime, I can't install Windows RT on it if I wanted to. In its present state, I can't remove the unwanted applications that came with the machine. Sure I can 'disable' them, but they're still taking up storage space I would rather use for other things. I'm at Toshiba's mercy as to whether I'll ever get Jelly Bean, Key Lime Pie, or Taramasu, and none of them look promising. Sure, I can install most applications on said tablet even if they don't come from the Play Store, but for quite some time this ability was disabled on AT&T phones running Android. I doubt I need to say more than "Kindle Fire" and "Nook Color" to make my point in those cases.
Android, the operating system, as uploaded to source.android.com, is indeed a "pretty open" system. This doesn't make Android-as-98%-of-the-population-run-it a system as open as Windows-as-98%-of-the-population-run-it, the hardware it shipped on, and the ISPs that shuffled data to it. It might not be Google's fault that Android is twisted in the form that it is by some of the OEMs and carriers, but it is a product they put their name on.
While I can't possibly see it as being legitimately profitable to Microsoft to provide 3x processing power in Azure for every X1 sold, I will at least say that Microsoft at least owns the datacenters and the software stacks for Azure as opposed to EA or Ubisoft. It's possible that MS will be better able to handle the processing and bandwidth for this reason.
LAN parties make sense even if everyone has Google Fiber. See, you're focusing on the LAN part of the description, and ignoring the "PARTY" half. Some people like dancing at parties, others like getting wasted, still others paint fingernails, and others still dress nicely and have a fancy dinner. There are people who prefer playing video games to those activities. When a group of people who enjoy video games wish to congregate and share in the activity of playing video games in a competitive or cooperative context, we have a "Lan Party".
While you might not have had the best group of friends with whom to play a multiplayer video game, my friends and I still enjoy a nice round of Unreal Tournament, Starcraft, or Counterstrike every now and again. In our cases, not everyone brings a computer to the table. Sometimes we'll rotate people in, and those who are 'out' this round will socialize, face to face. When we play over a LAN, we know that everyone has the same games and the same maps. We can take turns teaming up on the person sitting across from us, strategize in real time without headsets or VoIP, and all have a shared experience in the process.
It annoys me how few games released as of late don't include offline LAN play anymore, but some of the UT3 mods are amazing, and there's always GamerLinux - Alien Swarm is quite fun, actually.
I never understood why they bother to lock the phones in the first place.
Oh, I can think of some reasons: 1. So they can sell the right to install an app on a phone that a consumer can't get rid of. 2. So they can set up "app stores" that collect a significant cut of whatever the user wants to buy. 3. So they can prevent third parties from creating and selling alternative services to their own products that are cheaper and/or better. 4. To reduce the number of ways a user can mess it up.
I am a horrible slashdotter. I did not simply read the article, I read the fine legislation being proposed - as in the literal bill looking to get passed, as is linked in the article.
As best I can tell, the bill refers to SIM unlocking only, for the purposes of moving a cell phone between carriers. It does not appear to have any accommodations for rooting/jailbreaking/HardSPLing, except to say that you're not infringing if the purpose of rooting your phone is the means to the end of performing a baseband unlock.
My understanding of this bill is that it doesn't completely legitimize rooting/jailbreaking/HardSPLing in its own right. Resultantly, it doesn't address any of the reasons above, since none of the reasons you state have to do with an unlocked baseband.
I have no issue whatsoever with paying $10-$15 for a music album. I've got hundreds, and as a mobile DJ I even subscribe to more than one record pool. The catch here is that I get my music in bog standard, DRM-free, universally playable MP3 format, every time.
Where the Adobe software becomes an issue is that proprietary formats abound in their suite. PSD, AI, and PDF are somewhat-cross-compatible, but After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Audition, and Dreamweaver all have a more proprietary project file format that doesn't easily slip into an alternative. With plastic disc versions of software, I can be certain that I can always use the software, and I can always be guaranteed that my project files will open correctly and that the UI will remain the same until I decide to upgrade. By contrast, to use Facebook as an example, many people have been averse to the changes that have been made, particularly since Timeline.
Creative Cloud brings few benefits to users that couldn't have been made otherwise. Why not have feature-based DLC with separately downloadable installers. Image-Line does this with FL Studio, and it's worked out very well for them. Creative Cloud doesn't run in the browser, it makes it a requirement to store project files in "The Cloud". There's also no impetus for them to continue adding new features in due time; "continued access to your own data" is the killer feature for them.
I don't trust Creative Cloud. I don't trust Adobe independent of plastic discs.
They are also alienating their core high margin markets eg Music and Media have been worried for a long time now that Apple will throw them under the bus in the pursuit of the lower margin consumer market.
Even these guys are getting somewhat skittish. The Mac Pro hasn't had a decent hardware upgrade in some time; PCs 1/3 the cost are outspeccing it now. Firewire still has a respectable niche in video and audio production, yet these all require Thunderbolt adapters now. Final Cut Pro X got the nickname "iMovie Pro" because, in a colossal oversight, it opened iMovie project files but *not* FCP projects (though admittedly they fixed this in a service pack).
Now Apple will continue to have a respectable share in this market if for no other reason that people simply don't take you as a "real" musician if you run Ableton or Protools or After Effects on a PC, despite all of these applications (and countless more) being cross platform. Depending on how Apple proceeds with OSX, this could go either way...unless production tasks become the domain of the iPad and the Lightning Hard Disk.
Best Buy and HP are on my I'll-take-my-chances list. When I've bought warranties from either, they've failed to honor them in more cases than not. HP spare parts are also sufficiently plentiful on eBay and I've gotten to the point where it's worth my time to just swap the parts out myself when something goes wrong. Admittedly this is atypical for the average consumer (especially when it comes to iPads and similar), but it's true at least for me.
Cell Phones? Asurion. Always. I've never once had an issue with them; I pay my deductible and I've got a phone on my desk at work the next day, every time. THEY are worth it. Yes I know that this is insurance, not a warranty per say, but ultimately it boils down to semantics insofaras Asurion gets paid monthly through my cell carrier while an extended warranty is a one-time payout.
Origin PC is another company whose warranties are worth it. Perfect support, perfect track record with replacement parts, and they've worked with me every time, without exception. I'll by warranties from them any day.
Tablets? Well, mine is a Toshiba, a company who's also been historically atrocious with warranty related matters in my experience, plus the tablet itself is sluggish and moderate-at-best quality so the device itself doesn't justify it for me personally.
This does raise a tangentially interesting business question though: we all know that businesses make a mint off the warranties and thus push them in order to bump the profit margin on the sale. I get that, and I'm okay with it. The problem then becomes the fact that it gives incentive for device prices to remain artificially high. If the device is higher priced, companies make more money. It justifies warranty purchases (also at higher prices) in many minds due to how expensive the device is. Now in the case of Apple specifically I'll give them a certain level of a pass on this because they are well known for honoring their warranties very consistently. Everyone else...not so much.
Thus, My original premise stands: certain companies make it worth it because there's actual peace-of-mind involved. I don't worry about my laptop breaking; I know Origin has my back without question. I don't worry about my screen cracking, Asurion will see to it that I can make calls tomorrow by noon. My Toshiba tablet? I have peace of mind knowing I'm screwed if the tablet breaks, as opposed to knowing I'm screwed if the tablet breaks AND I have a hundred bucks in Toshiba's hands whose only redeeming factor is having some underpaid foreign support representative informing me I'm screwed and my warranty doesn't cover whatever-happened-to-my-tablet.
You can bet that the MAFIAA is hard at work writing legislation for their wholly owned subsidiary, the US Congress...
This is a ridiculous notion, to say that the US Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of the RIAA and MPAA....they begrudgingly share ownership with Monsanto, BP, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Comcast, and General Motors.
Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan.
They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it,
...Yet
It aint gonna happen. The Mac App Store is fine for small and/or "not well known" vendors. However for the "big guys" who have the resource to have their own stores and digital download infrastructure the Mac App Store has little advantage, certainly nothing worth losing a 30% cut. These big well known vendors don't need to be discovered via the Mac App Store's listings and search capabilities, their potential customers know off the vendor and their products. Not letting these vendors sell direct will just cause them to drop the Mac OS X platform. Good bye Blizzard games, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. It aint gonna happen.
I disagree: I believe that, given time, it will end up being a Mac App Store Only model. I do agree, however, that it will be the last possible straw at a point when it won't matter anyway.
Adobe wants to sell everyone on a subscription model. You have to go so far out of your way to get Photoshop on a plastic disc anymore that you have to either buy it on Amazon or spend enough time digging on their site to find it that most who aren't bent on having their plastic disc will cave long before and just get The Cloud. Adobe can probably strong-arm Apple into allowing them to have a "stub installer" in the App Store that allows the subscription model to work despite the store. Alternatively, Adobe may do a dongle situation where all their software is free on the App Store, but use a USB license key to determine what you do and don't have. This is how Serato works - everyone here at Slashdot can download Scratch Live for free...but if you want to be able to use multiple decks or use timecode media, you're forking over $500-$3,000 for an official audio interface for the purpose. Apple may continue allowing "sideloading" of software, but soon enough it'll limit the ability of the Geniuses in the Apple store to troubleshoot software installations based on something akin to Samsung's "Modified" status on their Android phones. Once that happens, users will be weary of enabling sideloading. This will enable competitors to seep in. "Logic Pro is available in the Mac App Store and ProTools isn't? I'm not risking my shiny new hardware. Besides, Apple knows best..." Avid will be forced to either play ball and eat the 30% Apple Tax, or lose 35% of sales. Lather, rinse, repeat for everyone else. Those married to the software rather than the platforms *may* begrudgingly migrate to Windows or Linux, assuming Microsoft doesn't keep trying to shove their own App Market down everyone's throat and Linux manages to get a bit more commercial software developed for the platform. As an aside, I think Microsoft is less likely to disable sideloading as it's a 100% guaranteed way to lose their corporate market entirely AND give all the antitrust lawyers bulging dollar-sign eyes AND make things really messy in the EU. Apple has a minimal corporate market, no antitrust issues to deal with, and the EU seems to be fairly lenient on Apple thus far. Thus, Windows is less likely to prevent desktop software from being installed no matter how much they want to steer everyone toward Metro.
By time Apple removes the ability to sideload entirely, all the software developers will have figured out the least objectionable way to play ball with the App Store model, or replaced by developers who have done so. It will be like the removal of Rosetta - something mourned by a minority of hardcore users and given hoopla by tech journalists, but unable to gain sufficient traction with the mass market of users that even if every single person who complained about the removal of sideloading were to go to Windows, Apple would be able to easily consider it "acceptable losses" to watch 5% of users defect to Windows or Linux in light of the fact that they now are getting 30% of every $500 Ableton sale when they used to get nothing.
The flaw in your BitTorrent logic is this: The way BitTorrent works, if I'm sharing a Kubuntu Whacky Wombat ISO, then yes, I will be expected to upload as I download...but solely for THAT ISO. I assure you that there would be significantly fewer BT users if the protocol required sharing your My Documents directory despite the ISO living on a different hard disk entirely. The latter is what Google and Facebook both do.
Napster did exactly that. Took the courts to bring it down, the users loved it.
Yes, it did, but not by default. By default, Napster (and Kazaa and Limewire) shared the files you downloaded by default, and you had the option to share your 'my documents' if you wanted. Napster was a bit more secure, actually, because the only files it supported sharing were MP3, WAV, and WMA. Its successors allowed everything to be shared, and yes, I know people who have gotten themselves in hot water because they were sharing their documents folder and didn't exactly realize what that meant.
I have a hosted Exchange account that I link to my phone. Why then, does Google automatically sync my calendar and contacts from Gmail when I sign into the phone? Literally the only three services of Google I want to use on my phone are Maps (on demand only), Search (only through Firefox), and the Play Store.
Because you used your gmail address as your exchange login? Syncing to gservices is what android is meant to do. If you don't want it to, then don't sign into your phone with your gmail account.
Wrong. I have an exchange account that is configured as a corporate e-mail, and a gmail account that's configured as a gmail account. Yes, it's meant to sync with Google Services, but why does it assume I want EVERYTHING by default? I'd be perfectly happy with not signing in to Google Services, but I can't do that if I want to be able to access my apps in the Play Store.
Google seems to believe I want more than that; not the least of examples is the inclusion of Google+ as a "system" app or the automatic login to Google Sites and Youtube.
, and it's why people like myself feel the need to use tools like LBE, Permission Denied, Pdroid, and Droidwall.
FYI everything not user installed is a system app, including all the crapware your phone came with. It's why people like you should take the time to learn something about the device you trust your private data with. Instead of knee-jerking to everything you see on/.
I am, in fact, aware that everything I don't install is considered a system app. I think that the inability to uninstall any preloaded apps is a bad thing, which is among the reasons I root the phone and get rid of the things the system says I can't get rid of, courtesy of ROM Toolbox. I do this as a first step with my phone, and like I said, I use multiple permissions-wrangling applications to take care of the rest. I don't have the foggiest idea what you're referring to when you're talking about "knee-jerking to everything [I] see on/." I guess that's what I get for responding to an AC though:/
Slashdot Mirror
Best Practices:
1. Take off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
The whole facility? As in...decreasing the size of the government?? I like the idea...but how do the politicians then justify a tax increase?
Oh wait...making another nuke that's twice as expensive as the one that just got blown up! And attaching a $400 hammer and a $3,000 toilet seat!
Even so, I've found Windows local search to be more trouble than it's worth anyway. the "perpetual green bar" kept getting in my way, so I just disabled Windows Search entirely. On the sad side, I can't use instant search in Outlook anymore. On the bright side, I replaced it with Everything. It legitimately searches everything, and does so instantly. I'd prefer doing that in Windows 8.1. If for no other reason, I haven't the foggiest idea why someone would want to simultaneously search the internet and a local drive for the same search string. They're foundationally different - internet search is for "stuff you don't have", and local search is for "stuff you have, but don't know where". I can't ever once think of a time I've wanted to search both at a time.
Serato really, REALLY needs to port itself to Linux.
A cursory look at the Wikipedia article indicates that Egypt has spent time under the rule of a few empires here and there over history, but it and Greece have both been their own societies for several thousand years in spite of this. I figure that both countries are closer to the age of China than they're listed...but that's just me.
Standard "IANAL, TINLA" disclaimer...
My LOGIC goes like this: the DMCA prohibits the act of running DeCSS. If you run a decryption program that spits out a standard ISO/MP4/XviD file, and you're legally entitled to enjoy the content that you purchased, I can't see there being an issue with it.
I don't know if this was the site you were referring to, but it was a really interesting read and has lots of graphs and measurements and such:
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html
It's shocking how different everything is!
Facebook was the result of some epic timing, but I can't necessarily call them innovative. Before Facebook, there were some pretty well populated social networks, Myspace being the one whose problems they solved, but Geocities, AIM, and IRC before it also helped break ground. Facebook brought very few foundational ideas to the table.
Apple is a victim of its own success. No matter what they release, it will be compared to the iPhone (which brought smartphones and data plans to the masses), or the iPad (which all but started the tablet PC market). Very few companies have ever had products that successful, and the fact of the matter is that it's nearly impossible to maintain that momentum consistently.
Google might have a handful of good ideas left in it, but they have a different problem. When they started, it was basically a haven for geeks where they could throw Jell-O at the wall and see what stuck. I'm certain that there were projects that spent a week being added to the drawing board and were never pursued, to say nothing of the projects that have ultimately been scrapped over time. The problem is that Google has financial expectations on it now, which means that the geeks who could come up with some innovative ideas need to allocate their time pursuant to whether they can meet their deadlines. This kind of thinking leaves a lot of the gambling on the table.
Amazon doesn't need much innovation. They're the Wal-Mart of the internet, and this isn't a bad thing. They all but 'personify' the term "economies of scale". .If it's a good idea, Amazon can throw resources at it, whether it be servers, distribution, money, or audience. They have all of these things in great abundance, and generally keep their customers happy with cheap prices and (unlike wal-mart) generally very good customer service, and do so extremely efficiently. As long as they keep doing this, and do it as well as they have been for nearly 20 years, then they will continue to be profitable.
The problem with innovation in this context is that it doesn't seem to count, except when it does. The Newton was innovative. The PocketPC was, at some level, innovative. "Innovation" isn't what's being looked for. What is being looked for is "Innovation that immediately captures the public's attention and makes a substantial amount of money, market share, and mindshare in a very short period of time".
I wonder if there's any visible impact on torrent traffic from this.
If memory serves, kat.ph doesn't have a tracker, or if they do, they're one of several trackers per torrent. Also, because they're a public tracker, even if the tracker went down, most swarms would be able to continue for a while using DHT and other trackerless technologies. If kat.ph went down and remained down, by time the people who had files all had them seeded, the masses would move on to the next major public tracker, as was done with suprnova, mininova, demonoid, and depending on where you live, the pirate bay.
While not a fan of the new Mac Pro, HDD speeds are the major bottleneck in PC systems, any attempt to thwart this should be praised.
Clearly you're not the target demographic for the Mac Pro. Having an SSD for a SYSTEM drive, I wholeheartedly agree with. Omitting the SATA bus and the physical capability to add in spinning rust drives is NOT a generally desirable feature. See, the majority of people who still use Mac Pro hardware are video editors. the ~70MBytes/sec of sustained linear writes for HD video on a RAID-5 of SATA drives is just fine; what's much more important is the storage space. A terabyte goes REAL quick when editing HD video of any length. You also need stock footage, scratch disks for render files, and in some cases multiple audio channels. Yes, adding in several terabytes of storage can be done using external drives or a Thunderbolt storage array or similar, but the original Mac Pro case made it possible to do all of that with bog standard hard drives and SATA cables. It is a solution not solved by present availability of PCIe flash storage, and the requirement of a Thunderbolt storage tower to prevent the Mac Pro from having to retain its physical appearance as a tower seems a bit counterproductive in this regard.
But they'll just take it all away in a year or two with a mandatory software update, citing fears of piracy.
Again.
My guess is that it will largely hinge on how well Microsoft does with it. If Sony and MS are somewhere in the 40/60 split area, I could see Sony keeping things as-is. Too far in either direction could be reasons to start adding these restrictions in later on, perhaps less stringently so (e.g. "internet connectivity required, but only once a week!"). Similarly, I think it also depends on how many PS4 disc images find their way onto the Pirate Bay.
When Bill Gates first discovered the Internet in the mid-1990s, he spent three hours on line, and wrote in a memo "I didn't see a single Microsoft file format". Microsoft's dominance has relied heavily on proprietary file formats. But now, if it won't work on a tablet or phone, it's useless. This reduces Microsoft's control.
But that's sort of disingenuous. Sure Microsoft doesn't own JPEG, GIF, or HTML...but Microsoft has had desktop dominance for decades, and has had a respectable existence in the server market ever since the demise of Novell, even as a web server (behind Apache and nginx right now). LibreOffice is excellent, but their Office division still makes a mint despite file formats being mostly-compliant. Really, the only company who has had any real success with a proprietary format on the web was Macromedia (and by extension Adobe), but even that's rapidly eroding.
Microsoft started with having a mostly-better product, then format lock-in, and now inertia...but more inertia than anyone else has really had.
People said the same thing when File Manager was removed.
Except that File Manager was still available in Windows 95 if you wanted it.
People said
the same thing when the "gummy" themed buttons in Windows XP showed up (oh, its not professional!).
Except that classic mode was available in XP if you wanted it.
They said the same thing when Vista added UAC.
Except that UAC could be disabled if you wanted to.
And they're saying the same thing now.
Except that now we're stuck using third party utilities to undo Microsoft's changes.
Turns out, for Microsoft, people "saying the same thing" works out very well financially.
And it is this line of thinking that may get Microsoft into trouble in the none-too-distant future. In the Windows 3.x/95/XP days you speak of, "computing" and "desktop computing" were synonymous for home users. If you wanted to get online, you used a desktop/laptop. Now though, many people's needs can be adequately met by iPads, Transformer-like tablets, and Chromebooks. Even Linux Mint has all but gotten the Linux Desktop situation sorted out (though I personally was a fan of Xandros in its day). Microsoft's response has been the polar opposite of what it's been in the past: instead of including classic modes, Microsoft has actively worked to remove such functionality. The first public beta had a start menu that could be enabled by group policy, presumably more people were enabling it than Microsoft was happy about and as a result it was forcibly removed. How this will impact Microsoft over the next five years is anyone's guess.
The point I was making is that mobile computing does not have the same level of openness that desktop computing has traditionally enjoyed, and this has been the case by design in both scenarios. Sure I can't run Windows on my Linksys router (as an example of a closed Linux device), but that's a similarly disingenuous argument to make. My router supports the stock firmware, DD-WRT, and TomatoUSB; I'm not complaining about it not running Windows because I'm not looking to go beyond its class of existence, namely, to route network traffic.
I didn't buy the Toshiba tablet, I won it in a contest. I didn't get a choice in the matter. The point I was making is related to the GGGP post who said that it should be of questionable celebration that the demise of Windows be the case; Microsoft never actively prevented users from installing Linux on their machines, and even for all the hoopla Secure Boot has generated, the spec mandates that the user be able to disable it. Nexus tablets don't allow me to install WinRT, to directly address it not being Google's fault. Surface tablets don't let me install Android. I can't install either one on an iPad. This has never been the case in the realm of desktop computing, where basically everything runs on basically everything (Hackint0sh situations notwithstanding).
My point is that no matter which mobile OS you point to, it's tied to a vertical ecosystem in which the hardware and software are much more intimately connected than has been the case in desktop computing. Resultantly, just because AOSP doesn't come with bloatware and unremovable applications doesn't mean that these problems don't plague the ecosystem.
Android is pretty open. They let you run just about anything that can't screw up the drivers without even batting an eye (at least on Sprint they do). And rooting your phone is a simple 10-minute process. I'm not really seeing the problem.
That's not ENTIRELY accurate. The grandparent's point transcends "Microsoft" and speaks a lot to "ecosystem" as well.
Amongst the thing that gave Compaq and the IBM clones their rise was their level of openness. You could buy any commodity x86 box (or pieces and DIY assemble said box), and run DOS or Windows or OS/2 or Linux on them, upgrade when Microsoft released stuff, and be in charge of exactly what software did and didn't end up on our machines. Now this level of openness came with a cost, namely all of the problems that naturally came with giving users complete control: viruses/malware/toolbars, the necessary routine maintenance not being performed, incompatibilities, teaching users to "click next until the installation is finished" and ending up with a dozen pieces of software that weren't wanted, and people actually believing the FBI holds their computer for ransom unless they use Greenpak to send money to "pay the fine".
You can SOMETIMES root in ten minutes. My Toshiba AT200 has a locked bootloader and since Toshiba hasn't released a means of unlocking it (and hacking said bootloader doesn't have the same sex appeal as being the one to crack the Galaxy S5), so I'm stuck in an unrooted state. Even if I had an unlocked bootloader or Nexus 10 or Transformer Prime, I can't install Windows RT on it if I wanted to. In its present state, I can't remove the unwanted applications that came with the machine. Sure I can 'disable' them, but they're still taking up storage space I would rather use for other things. I'm at Toshiba's mercy as to whether I'll ever get Jelly Bean, Key Lime Pie, or Taramasu, and none of them look promising. Sure, I can install most applications on said tablet even if they don't come from the Play Store, but for quite some time this ability was disabled on AT&T phones running Android. I doubt I need to say more than "Kindle Fire" and "Nook Color" to make my point in those cases.
Android, the operating system, as uploaded to source.android.com, is indeed a "pretty open" system. This doesn't make Android-as-98%-of-the-population-run-it a system as open as Windows-as-98%-of-the-population-run-it, the hardware it shipped on, and the ISPs that shuffled data to it. It might not be Google's fault that Android is twisted in the form that it is by some of the OEMs and carriers, but it is a product they put their name on.
Slashdot has a new Linux distro release notice before Distrowatch.
While I can't possibly see it as being legitimately profitable to Microsoft to provide 3x processing power in Azure for every X1 sold, I will at least say that Microsoft at least owns the datacenters and the software stacks for Azure as opposed to EA or Ubisoft. It's possible that MS will be better able to handle the processing and bandwidth for this reason.
LAN parties never made much sense to me.
Well then let me break it down for you.
LAN parties make sense even if everyone has Google Fiber. See, you're focusing on the LAN part of the description, and ignoring the "PARTY" half. Some people like dancing at parties, others like getting wasted, still others paint fingernails, and others still dress nicely and have a fancy dinner. There are people who prefer playing video games to those activities. When a group of people who enjoy video games wish to congregate and share in the activity of playing video games in a competitive or cooperative context, we have a "Lan Party".
While you might not have had the best group of friends with whom to play a multiplayer video game, my friends and I still enjoy a nice round of Unreal Tournament, Starcraft, or Counterstrike every now and again. In our cases, not everyone brings a computer to the table. Sometimes we'll rotate people in, and those who are 'out' this round will socialize, face to face. When we play over a LAN, we know that everyone has the same games and the same maps. We can take turns teaming up on the person sitting across from us, strategize in real time without headsets or VoIP, and all have a shared experience in the process.
It annoys me how few games released as of late don't include offline LAN play anymore, but some of the UT3 mods are amazing, and there's always GamerLinux - Alien Swarm is quite fun, actually.
Just like MusicMatch?
Just like Konfabulator?
Just like Geocities?
Just like Dialpad?
I'm not holding out much hope for Yahoo's ability to successfully leverage an acquisition.
I never understood why they bother to lock the phones in the first place.
Oh, I can think of some reasons:
1. So they can sell the right to install an app on a phone that a consumer can't get rid of.
2. So they can set up "app stores" that collect a significant cut of whatever the user wants to buy.
3. So they can prevent third parties from creating and selling alternative services to their own products that are cheaper and/or better.
4. To reduce the number of ways a user can mess it up.
I am a horrible slashdotter. I did not simply read the article, I read the fine legislation being proposed - as in the literal bill looking to get passed, as is linked in the article.
As best I can tell, the bill refers to SIM unlocking only, for the purposes of moving a cell phone between carriers. It does not appear to have any accommodations for rooting/jailbreaking/HardSPLing, except to say that you're not infringing if the purpose of rooting your phone is the means to the end of performing a baseband unlock.
My understanding of this bill is that it doesn't completely legitimize rooting/jailbreaking/HardSPLing in its own right. Resultantly, it doesn't address any of the reasons above, since none of the reasons you state have to do with an unlocked baseband.
Because not everyone felt this way.
I have no issue whatsoever with paying $10-$15 for a music album. I've got hundreds, and as a mobile DJ I even subscribe to more than one record pool. The catch here is that I get my music in bog standard, DRM-free, universally playable MP3 format, every time.
Where the Adobe software becomes an issue is that proprietary formats abound in their suite. PSD, AI, and PDF are somewhat-cross-compatible, but After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Audition, and Dreamweaver all have a more proprietary project file format that doesn't easily slip into an alternative. With plastic disc versions of software, I can be certain that I can always use the software, and I can always be guaranteed that my project files will open correctly and that the UI will remain the same until I decide to upgrade. By contrast, to use Facebook as an example, many people have been averse to the changes that have been made, particularly since Timeline.
Creative Cloud brings few benefits to users that couldn't have been made otherwise. Why not have feature-based DLC with separately downloadable installers. Image-Line does this with FL Studio, and it's worked out very well for them. Creative Cloud doesn't run in the browser, it makes it a requirement to store project files in "The Cloud". There's also no impetus for them to continue adding new features in due time; "continued access to your own data" is the killer feature for them.
I don't trust Creative Cloud. I don't trust Adobe independent of plastic discs.
They are also alienating their core high margin markets eg Music and Media have been worried for a long time now that Apple will throw them under the bus in the pursuit of the lower margin consumer market.
Even these guys are getting somewhat skittish. The Mac Pro hasn't had a decent hardware upgrade in some time; PCs 1/3 the cost are outspeccing it now. Firewire still has a respectable niche in video and audio production, yet these all require Thunderbolt adapters now. Final Cut Pro X got the nickname "iMovie Pro" because, in a colossal oversight, it opened iMovie project files but *not* FCP projects (though admittedly they fixed this in a service pack).
Now Apple will continue to have a respectable share in this market if for no other reason that people simply don't take you as a "real" musician if you run Ableton or Protools or After Effects on a PC, despite all of these applications (and countless more) being cross platform. Depending on how Apple proceeds with OSX, this could go either way...unless production tasks become the domain of the iPad and the Lightning Hard Disk.
Best Buy and HP are on my I'll-take-my-chances list. When I've bought warranties from either, they've failed to honor them in more cases than not. HP spare parts are also sufficiently plentiful on eBay and I've gotten to the point where it's worth my time to just swap the parts out myself when something goes wrong. Admittedly this is atypical for the average consumer (especially when it comes to iPads and similar), but it's true at least for me.
Cell Phones? Asurion. Always. I've never once had an issue with them; I pay my deductible and I've got a phone on my desk at work the next day, every time. THEY are worth it. Yes I know that this is insurance, not a warranty per say, but ultimately it boils down to semantics insofaras Asurion gets paid monthly through my cell carrier while an extended warranty is a one-time payout.
Origin PC is another company whose warranties are worth it. Perfect support, perfect track record with replacement parts, and they've worked with me every time, without exception. I'll by warranties from them any day.
Tablets? Well, mine is a Toshiba, a company who's also been historically atrocious with warranty related matters in my experience, plus the tablet itself is sluggish and moderate-at-best quality so the device itself doesn't justify it for me personally.
This does raise a tangentially interesting business question though: we all know that businesses make a mint off the warranties and thus push them in order to bump the profit margin on the sale. I get that, and I'm okay with it. The problem then becomes the fact that it gives incentive for device prices to remain artificially high. If the device is higher priced, companies make more money. It justifies warranty purchases (also at higher prices) in many minds due to how expensive the device is. Now in the case of Apple specifically I'll give them a certain level of a pass on this because they are well known for honoring their warranties very consistently. Everyone else...not so much.
Thus, My original premise stands: certain companies make it worth it because there's actual peace-of-mind involved. I don't worry about my laptop breaking; I know Origin has my back without question. I don't worry about my screen cracking, Asurion will see to it that I can make calls tomorrow by noon. My Toshiba tablet? I have peace of mind knowing I'm screwed if the tablet breaks, as opposed to knowing I'm screwed if the tablet breaks AND I have a hundred bucks in Toshiba's hands whose only redeeming factor is having some underpaid foreign support representative informing me I'm screwed and my warranty doesn't cover whatever-happened-to-my-tablet.
Best. Response. Ever.
You can bet that the MAFIAA is hard at work writing legislation for their wholly owned subsidiary, the US Congress...
This is a ridiculous notion, to say that the US Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of the RIAA and MPAA. ...they begrudgingly share ownership with Monsanto, BP, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Comcast, and General Motors.
Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan.
They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it,
...Yet
It aint gonna happen. The Mac App Store is fine for small and/or "not well known" vendors. However for the "big guys" who have the resource to have their own stores and digital download infrastructure the Mac App Store has little advantage, certainly nothing worth losing a 30% cut. These big well known vendors don't need to be discovered via the Mac App Store's listings and search capabilities, their potential customers know off the vendor and their products. Not letting these vendors sell direct will just cause them to drop the Mac OS X platform. Good bye Blizzard games, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. It aint gonna happen.
I disagree: I believe that, given time, it will end up being a Mac App Store Only model. I do agree, however, that it will be the last possible straw at a point when it won't matter anyway.
Adobe wants to sell everyone on a subscription model. You have to go so far out of your way to get Photoshop on a plastic disc anymore that you have to either buy it on Amazon or spend enough time digging on their site to find it that most who aren't bent on having their plastic disc will cave long before and just get The Cloud. Adobe can probably strong-arm Apple into allowing them to have a "stub installer" in the App Store that allows the subscription model to work despite the store. Alternatively, Adobe may do a dongle situation where all their software is free on the App Store, but use a USB license key to determine what you do and don't have. This is how Serato works - everyone here at Slashdot can download Scratch Live for free...but if you want to be able to use multiple decks or use timecode media, you're forking over $500-$3,000 for an official audio interface for the purpose. Apple may continue allowing "sideloading" of software, but soon enough it'll limit the ability of the Geniuses in the Apple store to troubleshoot software installations based on something akin to Samsung's "Modified" status on their Android phones. Once that happens, users will be weary of enabling sideloading. This will enable competitors to seep in. "Logic Pro is available in the Mac App Store and ProTools isn't? I'm not risking my shiny new hardware. Besides, Apple knows best..." Avid will be forced to either play ball and eat the 30% Apple Tax, or lose 35% of sales. Lather, rinse, repeat for everyone else. Those married to the software rather than the platforms *may* begrudgingly migrate to Windows or Linux, assuming Microsoft doesn't keep trying to shove their own App Market down everyone's throat and Linux manages to get a bit more commercial software developed for the platform. As an aside, I think Microsoft is less likely to disable sideloading as it's a 100% guaranteed way to lose their corporate market entirely AND give all the antitrust lawyers bulging dollar-sign eyes AND make things really messy in the EU. Apple has a minimal corporate market, no antitrust issues to deal with, and the EU seems to be fairly lenient on Apple thus far. Thus, Windows is less likely to prevent desktop software from being installed no matter how much they want to steer everyone toward Metro.
By time Apple removes the ability to sideload entirely, all the software developers will have figured out the least objectionable way to play ball with the App Store model, or replaced by developers who have done so. It will be like the removal of Rosetta - something mourned by a minority of hardcore users and given hoopla by tech journalists, but unable to gain sufficient traction with the mass market of users that even if every single person who complained about the removal of sideloading were to go to Windows, Apple would be able to easily consider it "acceptable losses" to watch 5% of users defect to Windows or Linux in light of the fact that they now are getting 30% of every $500 Ableton sale when they used to get nothing.
The flaw in your BitTorrent logic is this: The way BitTorrent works, if I'm sharing a Kubuntu Whacky Wombat ISO, then yes, I will be expected to upload as I download...but solely for THAT ISO. I assure you that there would be significantly fewer BT users if the protocol required sharing your My Documents directory despite the ISO living on a different hard disk entirely. The latter is what Google and Facebook both do.
Napster did exactly that. Took the courts to bring it down, the users loved it.
Yes, it did, but not by default. By default, Napster (and Kazaa and Limewire) shared the files you downloaded by default, and you had the option to share your 'my documents' if you wanted. Napster was a bit more secure, actually, because the only files it supported sharing were MP3, WAV, and WMA. Its successors allowed everything to be shared, and yes, I know people who have gotten themselves in hot water because they were sharing their documents folder and didn't exactly realize what that meant.
I have a hosted Exchange account that I link to my phone. Why then, does Google automatically sync my calendar and contacts from Gmail when I sign into the phone? Literally the only three services of Google I want to use on my phone are Maps (on demand only), Search (only through Firefox), and the Play Store.
Because you used your gmail address as your exchange login? Syncing to gservices is what android is meant to do. If you don't want it to, then don't sign into your phone with your gmail account.
Wrong. I have an exchange account that is configured as a corporate e-mail, and a gmail account that's configured as a gmail account. Yes, it's meant to sync with Google Services, but why does it assume I want EVERYTHING by default? I'd be perfectly happy with not signing in to Google Services, but I can't do that if I want to be able to access my apps in the Play Store.
Google seems to believe I want more than that; not the least of examples is the inclusion of Google+ as a "system" app or the automatic login to Google Sites and Youtube.
, and it's why people like myself feel the need to use tools like LBE, Permission Denied, Pdroid, and Droidwall.
FYI everything not user installed is a system app, including all the crapware your phone came with. It's why people like you should take the time to learn something about the device you trust your private data with. Instead of knee-jerking to everything you see on /.
I am, in fact, aware that everything I don't install is considered a system app. I think that the inability to uninstall any preloaded apps is a bad thing, which is among the reasons I root the phone and get rid of the things the system says I can't get rid of, courtesy of ROM Toolbox. I do this as a first step with my phone, and like I said, I use multiple permissions-wrangling applications to take care of the rest. I don't have the foggiest idea what you're referring to when you're talking about "knee-jerking to everything [I] see on /." I guess that's what I get for responding to an AC though :/