While in broad theory I agree, I don't think that more open gun laws would have prevented this *particular* instance.
When people say things about how keeping guns off the streets involves making guns illegal, my answer tends to be, "virtually every moral system from virtually region and origin frowns upon murdering other people. Do you seriously think that anyone willing to commit murder will be thwarted by the inability to legally obtain a gun to do it? Before you say 'but it's easier than having to obtain it illegally', tell me how difficult it would be for you to get marijuana, cocaine, or heroin within the next 48 hours if you wanted it, and append that desire to someone with no regard for legality or morality." Thus, you and I are generally in the same boat.
HOWEVER, consider the setup here: it was a theater for a premiere of a highly anticipated movie. the room was likely extremely dark and densely populated. The perp was dressed in a costume similar to the movie, so everyone's guard was down as they thought it was an easter egg or similar. I believe I read reports of there being a smoke grenade or something similar being set off. Perhaps someone with specialized training or a military background could have made the shot, but the average citizen with a hand gun, even with formal training and a bit of experience on the range, is a lot more likely to hit a fellow moviegoer than they were to be able to stop the perpetrator. 'Spray and Pray' is a fine tactic in Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty, but in real life I'd be just as scared of a well-meaning civilian in a dark, smoke-filled theater attempting to empty a clip into the guy in the front as I would be of the gunman himself. The gunman could spray and pray because the whole room was his target. The well-meaning citizen with a registered firearm has exactly one target to hit. Then again, it's possible that a couple shots fired into the air while the perp was reloading might have triggered an "oh crap" reaction enough for him to stop firing further without actually firing in his direction. It's pure speculation at this point either way.
Single best answer I've heard here, if it's specifically storage space that's needed. If I can be a bit pedantic though, I don't think an Optiplex 755 would be the best unit to use though, simply because those towers invariably only have space for two hard disks, so you'd need a new case. Even if you transplanted the case, you'd all need a new PSU since those things are basically custom wired for that case, so now you're replacing the power supply, so you're basically buying an Optiplex for the mobo/CPU/RAM, and those mobos can get a bit weird when running purpose built *nix distros. Then again, they're so widely available that getting an Optiplex and a custom case and new PSU might be cheaper than buying a CPU and mobo from Newegg anyway.
To add a bit to this, there are several different ways to do samba on a machine like this. Turnkey Linux has a file server distro that is excellent and very simple. OpenFiler, FreeNAS, and Nas4Free are also very good distros for small volume stuff and you don't need an expensive RAID card to make them useful...but you do need a huge quantity of RAM for decent performance, whereas a simple Samba distro is much leaner in that regard.
I also agree with "put a solidly encrypted data blob on an Amazon S3 instance"; Jungledisk is a great tool for it for the reasons you stated.
I do take issue with the term "secure vpn", nothing is totally secure as such a name implies.
Only a noob thinks that anything is totally secure, but there's definitely a difference between "secure" and "not secure." The term is not invalid just because it is not absolute....the term is valid and holds utility because it does define a meaningful state where risk is significantly reduced...the fact that there are no magic bullets that are entirely without risk does not invalidate an entire lexicon of security.
Thank you. Is it not pathetic that this point needs to be made EVERY time the word "secure" comes up, because some pedant is all "zomg nothing is secure!!!111"
I, for one, would like to 100000000000% echo this.
Sure, people used the start menu LESS after tweaking stuff for easier access. That doesn't mean that they didn't use it the first time they launched it.
If your entire businiess model rests on having a closed off IM network in the year 2012, you may want to rethink things...
In 2008, it would've been a perfect. They could have used their then-relevant market share as a springboard to have made BBM into *the* data-based messaging platform, making PingChat/WhatsApp/Kik/LiveProfile/eBuddy/iMessage/GoChat/ChatON all nonstarters...and they could have charged $1 a month for a BBM pin and *everyone* would have been on it.
The question is whether they could still do it, in 2012, for free.
We can engineer a system of government that does not select for the psychopaths we have now.
I'd love to hear your magical government that inherently filters out psychopaths...
If we go for 100% pure democracy where everyone votes for everything directly...well, pair that with George Carlin's pearl of wisdom that says, "consider how dumb the average person is, then realize that half of society is dumber than that". If you need a 51% majority on anything, legislation will require the dumbest 51% to agree - the smarter half would have enough reasonable doubt to say "I'm not sure". Thus, we'll assume we're going to stick with some sort of representative republic.
In that case, let's make a perfect world and say that people running for public office have money taken out of the equation entirely: Everyone writes a 1,000 word Craigslist ad under a pseudonym describing who they are, what they stand for, etc., and cannot talk to anyone about their run for office until they're actually elected. Well first off, you need to ensure that those rules are adhered to, which means you need some sort of group regulating them, which is its own issue entirely, but we'll pixie dust that one away, too. The people who would run for a public office where they will have to make decisions that directly affect the lives of the people they represent. Personally, I have a rough time making decisions that affect my own life, and I'm terrified of being responsible for someone else. The people who run for office do not share my fear, instead they desire that level of power at some level. Even if they desire to do good with that power, they still feel they are better qualified than anyone else to make those decisions. It is the nature of running for office. Finally, at our core, we are all selfish. How many people would vote for Universal Healthcare if they were told that everyone else was guaranteed to get whatever care they needed, but that they themselves were guaranteed to see no difference in their ability (or inability) to go to a hospital and get medical care? Not enough to pass it, I promise you that. Some would, but most would not. To take this to a political office level, a politician will inherently lean in whatever direction yield them personally the best benefit.
So, to engineer this system, you'll need to design it to sidestep intrinsic self-preservation and selfishness, mitigate the desirability of the position to those who believe themselves qualified but are not, maximize the desirability of the position to those who do not believe themselves qualified but are, and that influence upon decisions being made are motivated by selflessness, knowledge, and wisdom instead of misguided emotions, greed, and desire for power.
There are links to all 7 seasons on that link. EVERY episode is reviewed in a manner that would make Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw proud.
Thus, my advice is read through those reviews, get a laugh, and the episodes that it said were good, generally were. Henceforth, cherry pick the GOOD Voyager episodes as a starting point.
If your wife is willing to switch to the PC side and take up Premiere Pro CS6 or Vegas Pro 11, Origin PC makes a few 17" models with four hard disk bays, Blu-Ray burners, and 32GB of RAM. They're not cheap, and the battery is more of a UPS than anything useful for mobile slicing, but they might be worth a look.
The group of people I know who most consistently walk around with 17" MBPs are video editors...i.e. one of Apple's long standing demographics and the ones who purchase products like the $1,000 Final Cut Pro production suite.
17" is on the outer edge of practical for a frequently flying salesman, but it's a whole lot more practical than an editing bay when you need to capture footage in real-time (where FireWire is still a mainstay). Even if you're not capturing in realtime, Adobe OnLocation provides digital equivalents of waveform monitors and vectorscopes for calibrating cameras without having to lug lots of other equipment on site.
Similarly, I wonder how the lack of an optical drive is going to go down. Cue all the people saying "zomg optical media is dead!!!11". To you, I say, "ask a married woman who has gotten married in the past decade whether she had her wedding videoed by an event videographer. Ask her if she got the final product. Ask her how she got it." There will be three possible answers:
1.) VHS (if the woman was married in 2002 and didn't yet have a DVD player). 2.) DVD. 3.) Blu-Ray (if she got married within the past 2-3 years and likely paid extra and/or specifically hired the videographer in large part due to Blu-Ray capability).
You will NOT find a woman who would be alright with a "wedding Youtube upload". The fact of getting a tangible product is just as important as the content being provided. Similarly, I've done videos for a few churches who have wanted either DVD or a DV-AVI formatted video. The latter of which was frequently impractical to send over the internet in any reasonable length of time.
Ultimately, I question how much longer the creative pros I know will stay on the platform, as the amount of extensions requires grows larger to accommodate established workflows.
Um, no, I'm talking about the Tablet PC initiative
No idea what "The Tablet PC Initiative" is -- sounds like prog rock band or something.
I'm going to assume this was an attempt by Microsoft to innovate the future with a product they couldn't figure out how to sell to anybody? Like the Smart House or all the features in Longhorn which never happened?
If all they were trying to do was jam XP onto a touch screen, no wonder nobody bought them.
That sounds all well and good, until you consider a few extra things. The first person I knew with a tablet had one in 2003; it was a Fujitsu Lifebook. As a result, "no wonder no one bought them" sounds right in 2012, but requires a bit of perspective...
In 2003, Wi-Fi was still relatively new at the consumer level. If you wanted cellular data, you would likely end up with a GPRS connection, or EDGE if you were lucky; it complimented Windows Pocket PC Edition, Palm Treos, and early Blackberry units pretty nicely. Capacitive touch wasn't practical at the consumer level; it was either resistive or the Wacom-on-glass system that they ended up using. iOS didn't exist yet (the second-gen iPod was just getting out of the gate; Apple was looking like they could afford to keep the lights on), broadband had only recently hit critical mass. ARM processors lived in devices running embedded operating systems; they were nowhere near powerful enough to run a general purpose OS. Atom didn't exist.
In *that* world, the primary market for tablets were people taking notes with a pen. For all its faults, Windows Tablet PC Edition did a pretty impressive job of recognizing handwriting, which was good because it was the primary reason to be a tablet. Meanwhile, text entry was still king, and 5 hours of battery life was a pretty reasonable amount of time to be using your tablet.
No one is claiming that the first generation of tablet PCs running Windows XP struck a chord with the general populous; they clearly did not. Their target demographic were students, medical professionals, and other people for whom OneNote was the killer app. There was no iOS, there was no Android, and desktop Linux was still getting its pants on regarding getting a decent desktop distribution out the door. Windows XP was just about the only thing that *could* work on the systems at hand, because Apple was just about the only company who was able to write an OS specifically for tablets and have people look at what they *could* do as opposed to what they *couldn't* do, and even that was highly based upon the fact that there were a few years' worth of iPhone OS builds behind it, during which people had built up some level of software library for that platform.
I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.
It's not that people overlooked swivel tablets running XP because iOS was that much better, it's that the target demographic of people who would benefit from handwriting into their laptop was a very small market, and there was no Facebook, Angry Birds, or Netflix streaming to justify a tablet as a consumption device.
Here's my order of preference: 1. Local computer shop, few dollars more, but great service, and great at building customized solutions for me. 2. Microcenter, about 15 miles out of my way, with nearly everything, however, untrained staff and horrible wait in line. 3. Fry's (if you live near one). 4. Costco (or other wholesale club). 5. Office Max/Staples. 6. Wal-Mart/Target. 7. Pawn shop. 8. Thrift store. 9. Guy with shifty eyes on the corner in a trenchcoat. 10. going to a Newegg or Amazon warehouse on a pogo stick. 11. Hiring the guy with the shifty eyes and a trenchcoat to be your rickshaw driver to an Amazon or Newegg warehouse. 12. Ripping apart whatever random tech you've got lying around and soldering your own makeshift alternative to whatever it is you need to buy. 13. Hiring the guy with the shifty eyes and a trenchcoat to do the soldering for you, except having him wear a blindfold. 14. Performing your own colonoscopy. 15. Best Buy
The people who wrote Flame are the same fine ladies and gentlemen who have brought us CleanMyPC.com. Apparently their accountant is on vacation or something, because removing malware is generally a service that they charge for.
I am seeing quite a number of students that want everything and want it NOW and they don't have any concept of what is under the hood of their computers. The percentage of the younger folks that can fix their computers is the exact same percentage of the older folks that can fix their computers.
This.
The problematic difference though is that desktops and laptops are a LOT easier to fix without super specialized tools than cell phones and tablets.
* Applecare means EVERYTHING is fixed for you, hassle free. If it can't be fixed on the spot you'll either get a brand new replacement or the computer will be out a week or so for repairs. They do not haggle with you or give you grief about HOW broken something is, they err on the side of YOU being happy.
I've heard this more often than not, but it took me two weeks and three different Apple stores to convince them that there was an issue with the motherboard...and that's with showing two different guys a MemTest86+ that was scrolling memory write failures, then swapping the memory modules into my laptop and having it test flawlessly. I literally had to have my boss take the laptop to a third Apple store and intentionally cause a scene to get them to replace it on principle, because nobody would listen, because THEIR diagnostics were coming back clean, but files were still going unwritten to disk. Admittedly that's just one anecdote, but Origin PC has sent me every single part I've ever asked for after ten minutes on the phone. If you're alright with doing your own hardware repairs on a laptop, Origin's got the better warranty in my experience.
* All of the trackpads on any model of Mac you choose are fantastic, and work extremely well. You really can easily work without a mouse.
Yes, but the no-button trackpads do take some getting used to. Many love them, I personally hate them. The OP should have his sister use one at an Apple store for a while to see if she acclimates well.
* The unibody design is really solid, and helps prevent damage in backpacks.
Agreed. While most Macbooks I've seen have a scratch here and a dent there, few have damage beyond cosmetic.
* The magsafe connectors work really, really well to prevent a laptop from being yanked off a table or desk.
This is the single most jealousy-inducing feature of the Macbook lines. The flip side is that replacements cost more than the common HP and Dell bricks; official OEM replacement units can be had for $10-$15 on eBay; Apple ones are significantly more expensive.
* Time Machine really works for normal people. Just hook it up to an airport (or get a time capsule) and she'll never have to think about backups, nor will you...
Acronis True Image does an extremely good job backing up PCs to basically anything that can store data; if you've got an external or network storage somewhere (or don't mind paying a nominal fee for 'Cloud Storage' if you're of that persuasion), Acronis can be set to transparently back stuff up without her thinking about it. Just sayin' that there's a viable alternative on the PC side.
* Apple Store support. You can go in and ask the Genius Bar for help with anything, not just hardware issues. The only time anything is not free is when there is hardware that needs replacing out of warranty (and even then Apple is sometimes liberal).
It must be that the statistics are against me, because I find that people who buy Macs and get Applecare still come to me to ask questions, and I seem to come across as a jerk no matter how I phrase, "And what did the people at the Apple store say?". Additionally, there's no guarantee that the OP's sister lives within feasible range of an Apple store, either. However, if she does, and she's willing to take advantage of it, it is nice to have that ability.
I love my family so much I made sure as many of them as possible got Macs - so that when I was with them I could spend time with them, not their computers.
I'm legitimately glad that it solved the "every holiday is tech support day" problem for you.
I know this all sounds horribly like an add but it's just real life experiences about the best aspects of my non-technical family members and myself owning Macs in comparison with help I used to have to give PC
For some people, social skills are instinctive, for others, they are a learned skill. For those who fit into the latter group, there is a dearth of people willing to teach these skills. Video games and porn simulate life experiences that require social skills and have high probabilities of yielding rejection and ridicule, but do so with the safety net of making rejection an easily avoidable outcome. It is these attributes that make video games and porn more desirable than real life.
"It's a social awkwardness like a stranger in a foreign land", he said. "They don't know what to say. They don't know what to do."
At least for me, this is the case, but video games and porn had NOTHING to do with it.
At the age of four I was using DOS commands better than my dad who used them at work all the time. I performed my first paid computer repair at the age of eleven, having read "Windows 95 for Dummies" cover to cover the year before. Computers and computer concepts came naturally to me, though admittedly I can't code to save my life. I did have a similar experience when it came to video editing and DJing, both of which I do on the side and make a decent chunk of change in the process. These things came naturally to me to the point where I never really had to think about what I wanted to do for a living. I knew from an extremely young age my career would involve computers and music; I never had to take one of those "what do you want to be when you grow up" tests in high school. I'd known for years.
Social graces were as foreign to me. When I explain this to people, many of them look at me sideways and can't fathom the concept that for some people, social interactions would be a learned skill, just like computers are to them. What's ironic is that when you ask them, "so what would you recommend I say to this girl, given $SITUATION", they have to stop and think about it, too. To many, it is instinct. To people like myself, it took very explicit 'study' and 'tutoring', the latter coming from several female friends over the years who have spent a lot of time and effort getting me to the point where I can mostly hold a conversation with a stranger, even the good looking ones, and not make things totally awkward.
Without those people in my life, I may or may not have learned how to socially interact effectively. What if I had not? Every social engagement would conjure up all the excitement of a Calculus exam, because it'd be guaranteed that I'd stand in a corner and be incapable of talking to anyone, utterly terrified that I'd end up talking about computers or DJ gear or NLE plug-ins - topics I know about, but are useless to basically anyone else I'd be talking to. It'd be a vicious cycle that I'd be terrified of saying or doing something stupid or awkward, then find myself actually doing so, only to reinforce my belief that it would happen next time, and find out that I was right yet again.
Compare that to video games. The rules are extremely well established; the viewer doesn't have to re-learn them each time they enter the game. They're set up so that if you fail, you can try again. You can lookup walkthroughs on Youtube or IGN. If the player fails, no one knows but themselves (unless they're playing multiplayer). They have conventions that are well understand. They can be played on the player's schedule and terms. The price is explicitly established up front (unless there is DLC, which again, is on the player's terms). The NPCs that aren't explicit enemies generally respect the player. Video games aren't played due to an expectation for life to emulate them. They are chosen because this inexhaustive list of attributes is in explicit contrast to real life.
Compare it to porn. The porn is chosen based on what the viewer desires to do at that time. It doesn't require an initial, elaborate attempt to seduce the individual in the scene. The viewer isn't competing with other people for the porn star's attention or affection, and there is absolutely no fear of rejection. Again, porn isn't watched as an expectation for life to emulate it. It's watched because life *doesn't* emulate it.
So, in summary, we are stating that individuals who frequently fail at particular tasks in real life choose environments where failure doesn't really happen. The study might correctly assume that guys who play video games and habitually watch porn are socially awkward, but the assumption that's inaccurately made is that such individuals preemptively chose it instead of attempting more conventional means of relationships, as opposed to video games and porn being the only outlet of acceptance due to a long history of failure and a dearth of alternative means to rectify social awkwardness.
I'd mod you "Funny", but in all my years on Slashdot, this is the first post to ever make me 100% literally cry laughing, so 'funny' just doesn't cut it. I hope you don't mind me cutting and pasting this and making it my Facebook status.
Streaming != download. Try using Hulu at an airport with free Wi-Fi that the entire terminal is sharing and tell me how well that works out. Try using Netflix on a train where everyone else that train is also streaming Netflix and internet connection is sparse. Let me know how free those ABC.com shows are and you inadvertently go past your monthly data cap and pay $0.10/KByte for the second half of it.
I'm glad that these services get us halfway there,but Hulu and Netflix inherently require a level of connection that DSL or cable can provide, but mobile internet cannot. I'd be perfectly on board with a method to even pick videos and cache them in a container I can't open myself when I'm somewhere with Wi-Fi. Sadly, even this compromise does not yet exist.
Skydrive is free. Hotmail is free (and is ~80% of a Hosted Exchange account). The browser based flavors of Office are free.
The operating systems are a bit of a trickier story, but both online storage services, mail services, and browser-based productivity applications are free. I will admit though, I'm uncertain if Microsoft would be giving them away (or that they would have achieved the level of usability that they presently have), if Google wasn't giving away Google Docs.
As a very-tangentially-on-topic aside, I'm wondering whether Adobe will gain any recognizable market share with their browser based productivity applications. Buzzword is pretty good, but I guess the fact that Tables doesn't scale to squat and Presentations still doesn't have a set of design templates worth a crap (which is odd considering that I'd figure Adobe to have the best designs available) is probably not doing them any favors.
Would this person's prosecution for causing an accident resulting in death deter other people from behaving similarly?
Probably not, but that's not the point.
Do you really think that setting up regulations to ban or approve applications that are allowed to run on a computer would deter someone more than the possibility of causing death, either theirs or others?
Yes, I do. If given the opportunity to play Angry Birds on the dashboard, many will opt to do it, because the barrier to entry is nonexistent. People generally believe that the worst won't happen to them, and that it'd be alright because the foreseen circumstances are just fine. However, it is inherently impossible to account for unforeseen circumstances. These circumstances can, in many cases, be avoided with quick reflexes and complete attention on the road, but trying to line up the perfect shot would inherently prohibit one from realizing the danger before it's too late.
Have you thought through the enforcement regime required to ensure people don't have "unapproved" applications loaded on their car computer?
Yes, and it's called "what's worked for the past century: don't run apps on your dashboard at all". Wanna add a trip computer or GPS stats on there? Fine, I'm down with that. But there's no conceivable reason to add games to a dashboard as it does nothing whatsoever to provide better performance to the vehicle or the driver. Just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea.
Are we talking an annual inspection of their data, or what, you must be a government approved vehicle computer system or application provider?
No, we are talking a dashboard that doesn't run apps.
What's next, regulations about the types of toilet paper, flushing mechanisms or light bulbs "we" approve of? Ridiculous, right?
Redacto ad absurdum much? I'm pretty sure that there are some form of regulations in place to limit the possibility of making toilet paper out of fiberglass or light bulbs out of nuclear waste, because that's the level of absurdity this line requires to make it work.
How about, mind your own damn business until it actually affects you?
My best friend lost her mom in a car accident to a distracted driver. Sue me for the one degree of separation.
Have people really lost sight of liberty so much?
If you want to play angry birds while driving on a closed course or the middle of the desert, go right ahead. It's not a significant infringement of your personal liberties to say that while you're on public highways and operating a motor vehicle that you should act in a manner that doesn't risk the lives of the people next to you for your own entertainment.
Or do they just not think things like this through?
You're defending the notion of adding entertainment in an unnecessary and potentially dangerous manner to cars that will be driving on public roads and putting it under the vise of a liberty issue. I'll take the hit on the "not thinking things through" schtick once you can explain to me how this benefits anyone.
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While in broad theory I agree, I don't think that more open gun laws would have prevented this *particular* instance.
When people say things about how keeping guns off the streets involves making guns illegal, my answer tends to be, "virtually every moral system from virtually region and origin frowns upon murdering other people. Do you seriously think that anyone willing to commit murder will be thwarted by the inability to legally obtain a gun to do it? Before you say 'but it's easier than having to obtain it illegally', tell me how difficult it would be for you to get marijuana, cocaine, or heroin within the next 48 hours if you wanted it, and append that desire to someone with no regard for legality or morality." Thus, you and I are generally in the same boat.
HOWEVER, consider the setup here: it was a theater for a premiere of a highly anticipated movie. the room was likely extremely dark and densely populated. The perp was dressed in a costume similar to the movie, so everyone's guard was down as they thought it was an easter egg or similar. I believe I read reports of there being a smoke grenade or something similar being set off. Perhaps someone with specialized training or a military background could have made the shot, but the average citizen with a hand gun, even with formal training and a bit of experience on the range, is a lot more likely to hit a fellow moviegoer than they were to be able to stop the perpetrator. 'Spray and Pray' is a fine tactic in Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty, but in real life I'd be just as scared of a well-meaning civilian in a dark, smoke-filled theater attempting to empty a clip into the guy in the front as I would be of the gunman himself. The gunman could spray and pray because the whole room was his target. The well-meaning citizen with a registered firearm has exactly one target to hit. Then again, it's possible that a couple shots fired into the air while the perp was reloading might have triggered an "oh crap" reaction enough for him to stop firing further without actually firing in his direction. It's pure speculation at this point either way.
Single best answer I've heard here, if it's specifically storage space that's needed. If I can be a bit pedantic though, I don't think an Optiplex 755 would be the best unit to use though, simply because those towers invariably only have space for two hard disks, so you'd need a new case. Even if you transplanted the case, you'd all need a new PSU since those things are basically custom wired for that case, so now you're replacing the power supply, so you're basically buying an Optiplex for the mobo/CPU/RAM, and those mobos can get a bit weird when running purpose built *nix distros. Then again, they're so widely available that getting an Optiplex and a custom case and new PSU might be cheaper than buying a CPU and mobo from Newegg anyway.
To add a bit to this, there are several different ways to do samba on a machine like this. Turnkey Linux has a file server distro that is excellent and very simple. OpenFiler, FreeNAS, and Nas4Free are also very good distros for small volume stuff and you don't need an expensive RAID card to make them useful...but you do need a huge quantity of RAM for decent performance, whereas a simple Samba distro is much leaner in that regard.
I also agree with "put a solidly encrypted data blob on an Amazon S3 instance"; Jungledisk is a great tool for it for the reasons you stated.
I do take issue with the term "secure vpn", nothing is totally secure as such a name implies.
Only a noob thinks that anything is totally secure, but there's definitely a difference between "secure" and "not secure." The term is not invalid just because it is not absolute....the term is valid and holds utility because it does define a meaningful state where risk is significantly reduced...the fact that there are no magic bullets that are entirely without risk does not invalidate an entire lexicon of security.
Thank you. Is it not pathetic that this point needs to be made EVERY time the word "secure" comes up, because some pedant is all "zomg nothing is secure!!!111"
I, for one, would like to 100000000000% echo this.
Sure, people used the start menu LESS after tweaking stuff for easier access. That doesn't mean that they didn't use it the first time they launched it.
If your entire businiess model rests on having a closed off IM network in the year 2012, you may want to rethink things...
In 2008, it would've been a perfect. They could have used their then-relevant market share as a springboard to have made BBM into *the* data-based messaging platform, making PingChat/WhatsApp/Kik/LiveProfile/eBuddy/iMessage/GoChat/ChatON all nonstarters...and they could have charged $1 a month for a BBM pin and *everyone* would have been on it.
The question is whether they could still do it, in 2012, for free.
We can engineer a system of government that does not select for the psychopaths we have now.
I'd love to hear your magical government that inherently filters out psychopaths...
If we go for 100% pure democracy where everyone votes for everything directly...well, pair that with George Carlin's pearl of wisdom that says, "consider how dumb the average person is, then realize that half of society is dumber than that". If you need a 51% majority on anything, legislation will require the dumbest 51% to agree - the smarter half would have enough reasonable doubt to say "I'm not sure". Thus, we'll assume we're going to stick with some sort of representative republic.
In that case, let's make a perfect world and say that people running for public office have money taken out of the equation entirely: Everyone writes a 1,000 word Craigslist ad under a pseudonym describing who they are, what they stand for, etc., and cannot talk to anyone about their run for office until they're actually elected. Well first off, you need to ensure that those rules are adhered to, which means you need some sort of group regulating them, which is its own issue entirely, but we'll pixie dust that one away, too. The people who would run for a public office where they will have to make decisions that directly affect the lives of the people they represent. Personally, I have a rough time making decisions that affect my own life, and I'm terrified of being responsible for someone else. The people who run for office do not share my fear, instead they desire that level of power at some level. Even if they desire to do good with that power, they still feel they are better qualified than anyone else to make those decisions. It is the nature of running for office. Finally, at our core, we are all selfish. How many people would vote for Universal Healthcare if they were told that everyone else was guaranteed to get whatever care they needed, but that they themselves were guaranteed to see no difference in their ability (or inability) to go to a hospital and get medical care? Not enough to pass it, I promise you that. Some would, but most would not. To take this to a political office level, a politician will inherently lean in whatever direction yield them personally the best benefit.
So, to engineer this system, you'll need to design it to sidestep intrinsic self-preservation and selfishness, mitigate the desirability of the position to those who believe themselves qualified but are not, maximize the desirability of the position to those who do not believe themselves qualified but are, and that influence upon decisions being made are motivated by selflessness, knowledge, and wisdom instead of misguided emotions, greed, and desire for power.
Good luck.
http://www.411mania.com/movies/dvd_reviews/43024/Star-Trek-Voyager---Season-Seven-DVD-Review.htm
There are links to all 7 seasons on that link. EVERY episode is reviewed in a manner that would make Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw proud.
Thus, my advice is read through those reviews, get a laugh, and the episodes that it said were good, generally were. Henceforth, cherry pick the GOOD Voyager episodes as a starting point.
If your wife is willing to switch to the PC side and take up Premiere Pro CS6 or Vegas Pro 11, Origin PC makes a few 17" models with four hard disk bays, Blu-Ray burners, and 32GB of RAM. They're not cheap, and the battery is more of a UPS than anything useful for mobile slicing, but they might be worth a look.
You ever played a video game on a Roman aqueduct? The frame rate is atrocious.
It plays "Pipe Dream" pretty well.
This.
The group of people I know who most consistently walk around with 17" MBPs are video editors...i.e. one of Apple's long standing demographics and the ones who purchase products like the $1,000 Final Cut Pro production suite.
17" is on the outer edge of practical for a frequently flying salesman, but it's a whole lot more practical than an editing bay when you need to capture footage in real-time (where FireWire is still a mainstay). Even if you're not capturing in realtime, Adobe OnLocation provides digital equivalents of waveform monitors and vectorscopes for calibrating cameras without having to lug lots of other equipment on site.
Similarly, I wonder how the lack of an optical drive is going to go down. Cue all the people saying "zomg optical media is dead!!!11". To you, I say, "ask a married woman who has gotten married in the past decade whether she had her wedding videoed by an event videographer. Ask her if she got the final product. Ask her how she got it." There will be three possible answers:
1.) VHS (if the woman was married in 2002 and didn't yet have a DVD player).
2.) DVD.
3.) Blu-Ray (if she got married within the past 2-3 years and likely paid extra and/or specifically hired the videographer in large part due to Blu-Ray capability).
You will NOT find a woman who would be alright with a "wedding Youtube upload". The fact of getting a tangible product is just as important as the content being provided. Similarly, I've done videos for a few churches who have wanted either DVD or a DV-AVI formatted video. The latter of which was frequently impractical to send over the internet in any reasonable length of time.
Ultimately, I question how much longer the creative pros I know will stay on the platform, as the amount of extensions requires grows larger to accommodate established workflows.
No idea what "The Tablet PC Initiative" is -- sounds like prog rock band or something.
I'm going to assume this was an attempt by Microsoft to innovate the future with a product they couldn't figure out how to sell to anybody? Like the Smart House or all the features in Longhorn which never happened?
If all they were trying to do was jam XP onto a touch screen, no wonder nobody bought them.
That sounds all well and good, until you consider a few extra things. The first person I knew with a tablet had one in 2003; it was a Fujitsu Lifebook. As a result, "no wonder no one bought them" sounds right in 2012, but requires a bit of perspective...
In 2003, Wi-Fi was still relatively new at the consumer level. If you wanted cellular data, you would likely end up with a GPRS connection, or EDGE if you were lucky; it complimented Windows Pocket PC Edition, Palm Treos, and early Blackberry units pretty nicely. Capacitive touch wasn't practical at the consumer level; it was either resistive or the Wacom-on-glass system that they ended up using. iOS didn't exist yet (the second-gen iPod was just getting out of the gate; Apple was looking like they could afford to keep the lights on), broadband had only recently hit critical mass. ARM processors lived in devices running embedded operating systems; they were nowhere near powerful enough to run a general purpose OS. Atom didn't exist.
In *that* world, the primary market for tablets were people taking notes with a pen. For all its faults, Windows Tablet PC Edition did a pretty impressive job of recognizing handwriting, which was good because it was the primary reason to be a tablet. Meanwhile, text entry was still king, and 5 hours of battery life was a pretty reasonable amount of time to be using your tablet.
No one is claiming that the first generation of tablet PCs running Windows XP struck a chord with the general populous; they clearly did not. Their target demographic were students, medical professionals, and other people for whom OneNote was the killer app. There was no iOS, there was no Android, and desktop Linux was still getting its pants on regarding getting a decent desktop distribution out the door. Windows XP was just about the only thing that *could* work on the systems at hand, because Apple was just about the only company who was able to write an OS specifically for tablets and have people look at what they *could* do as opposed to what they *couldn't* do, and even that was highly based upon the fact that there were a few years' worth of iPhone OS builds behind it, during which people had built up some level of software library for that platform.
I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.
It's not that people overlooked swivel tablets running XP because iOS was that much better, it's that the target demographic of people who would benefit from handwriting into their laptop was a very small market, and there was no Facebook, Angry Birds, or Netflix streaming to justify a tablet as a consumption device.
Here's my order of preference:
1. Local computer shop, few dollars more, but great service, and great at building customized solutions for me.
2. Microcenter, about 15 miles out of my way, with nearly everything, however, untrained staff and horrible wait in line.
3. Fry's (if you live near one).
4. Costco (or other wholesale club).
5. Office Max/Staples.
6. Wal-Mart/Target.
7. Pawn shop.
8. Thrift store.
9. Guy with shifty eyes on the corner in a trenchcoat.
10. going to a Newegg or Amazon warehouse on a pogo stick.
11. Hiring the guy with the shifty eyes and a trenchcoat to be your rickshaw driver to an Amazon or Newegg warehouse.
12. Ripping apart whatever random tech you've got lying around and soldering your own makeshift alternative to whatever it is you need to buy.
13. Hiring the guy with the shifty eyes and a trenchcoat to do the soldering for you, except having him wear a blindfold.
14. Performing your own colonoscopy.
15. Best Buy
Fixed that for you.
The people who wrote Flame are the same fine ladies and gentlemen who have brought us CleanMyPC.com. Apparently their accountant is on vacation or something, because removing malware is generally a service that they charge for.
I am seeing quite a number of students that want everything and want it NOW and they don't have any concept of what is under the hood of their computers. The percentage of the younger folks that can fix their computers is the exact same percentage of the older folks that can fix their computers.
This.
The problematic difference though is that desktops and laptops are a LOT easier to fix without super specialized tools than cell phones and tablets.
It is somewhat fascinating to see how people get through traffic everyday alive just to switch their brains of at work.
You seem to be of the persuasion that their brains are on while they're getting through traffic.
Anyone want to start taking bets as to when a copy of uTorrent or Transmission will deem you as a part of the botnet?
* Applecare means EVERYTHING is fixed for you, hassle free. If it can't be fixed on the spot you'll either get a brand new replacement or the computer will be out a week or so for repairs. They do not haggle with you or give you grief about HOW broken something is, they err on the side of YOU being happy.
I've heard this more often than not, but it took me two weeks and three different Apple stores to convince them that there was an issue with the motherboard...and that's with showing two different guys a MemTest86+ that was scrolling memory write failures, then swapping the memory modules into my laptop and having it test flawlessly. I literally had to have my boss take the laptop to a third Apple store and intentionally cause a scene to get them to replace it on principle, because nobody would listen, because THEIR diagnostics were coming back clean, but files were still going unwritten to disk. Admittedly that's just one anecdote, but Origin PC has sent me every single part I've ever asked for after ten minutes on the phone. If you're alright with doing your own hardware repairs on a laptop, Origin's got the better warranty in my experience.
* All of the trackpads on any model of Mac you choose are fantastic, and work extremely well. You really can easily work without a mouse.
Yes, but the no-button trackpads do take some getting used to. Many love them, I personally hate them. The OP should have his sister use one at an Apple store for a while to see if she acclimates well.
* The unibody design is really solid, and helps prevent damage in backpacks.
Agreed. While most Macbooks I've seen have a scratch here and a dent there, few have damage beyond cosmetic.
* The magsafe connectors work really, really well to prevent a laptop from being yanked off a table or desk.
This is the single most jealousy-inducing feature of the Macbook lines. The flip side is that replacements cost more than the common HP and Dell bricks; official OEM replacement units can be had for $10-$15 on eBay; Apple ones are significantly more expensive.
* Time Machine really works for normal people. Just hook it up to an airport (or get a time capsule) and she'll never have to think about backups, nor will you...
Acronis True Image does an extremely good job backing up PCs to basically anything that can store data; if you've got an external or network storage somewhere (or don't mind paying a nominal fee for 'Cloud Storage' if you're of that persuasion), Acronis can be set to transparently back stuff up without her thinking about it. Just sayin' that there's a viable alternative on the PC side.
* Apple Store support. You can go in and ask the Genius Bar for help with anything, not just hardware issues. The only time anything is not free is when there is hardware that needs replacing out of warranty (and even then Apple is sometimes liberal).
It must be that the statistics are against me, because I find that people who buy Macs and get Applecare still come to me to ask questions, and I seem to come across as a jerk no matter how I phrase, "And what did the people at the Apple store say?". Additionally, there's no guarantee that the OP's sister lives within feasible range of an Apple store, either. However, if she does, and she's willing to take advantage of it, it is nice to have that ability.
I love my family so much I made sure as many of them as possible got Macs - so that when I was with them I could spend time with them, not their computers.
I'm legitimately glad that it solved the "every holiday is tech support day" problem for you.
I know this all sounds horribly like an add but it's just real life experiences about the best aspects of my non-technical family members and myself owning Macs in comparison with help I used to have to give PC
For some people, social skills are instinctive, for others, they are a learned skill. For those who fit into the latter group, there is a dearth of people willing to teach these skills. Video games and porn simulate life experiences that require social skills and have high probabilities of yielding rejection and ridicule, but do so with the safety net of making rejection an easily avoidable outcome. It is these attributes that make video games and porn more desirable than real life.
"It's a social awkwardness like a stranger in a foreign land", he said. "They don't know what to say. They don't know what to do."
At least for me, this is the case, but video games and porn had NOTHING to do with it.
At the age of four I was using DOS commands better than my dad who used them at work all the time. I performed my first paid computer repair at the age of eleven, having read "Windows 95 for Dummies" cover to cover the year before. Computers and computer concepts came naturally to me, though admittedly I can't code to save my life. I did have a similar experience when it came to video editing and DJing, both of which I do on the side and make a decent chunk of change in the process. These things came naturally to me to the point where I never really had to think about what I wanted to do for a living. I knew from an extremely young age my career would involve computers and music; I never had to take one of those "what do you want to be when you grow up" tests in high school. I'd known for years.
Social graces were as foreign to me. When I explain this to people, many of them look at me sideways and can't fathom the concept that for some people, social interactions would be a learned skill, just like computers are to them. What's ironic is that when you ask them, "so what would you recommend I say to this girl, given $SITUATION", they have to stop and think about it, too. To many, it is instinct. To people like myself, it took very explicit 'study' and 'tutoring', the latter coming from several female friends over the years who have spent a lot of time and effort getting me to the point where I can mostly hold a conversation with a stranger, even the good looking ones, and not make things totally awkward.
Without those people in my life, I may or may not have learned how to socially interact effectively. What if I had not? Every social engagement would conjure up all the excitement of a Calculus exam, because it'd be guaranteed that I'd stand in a corner and be incapable of talking to anyone, utterly terrified that I'd end up talking about computers or DJ gear or NLE plug-ins - topics I know about, but are useless to basically anyone else I'd be talking to. It'd be a vicious cycle that I'd be terrified of saying or doing something stupid or awkward, then find myself actually doing so, only to reinforce my belief that it would happen next time, and find out that I was right yet again.
Compare that to video games. The rules are extremely well established; the viewer doesn't have to re-learn them each time they enter the game. They're set up so that if you fail, you can try again. You can lookup walkthroughs on Youtube or IGN. If the player fails, no one knows but themselves (unless they're playing multiplayer). They have conventions that are well understand. They can be played on the player's schedule and terms. The price is explicitly established up front (unless there is DLC, which again, is on the player's terms). The NPCs that aren't explicit enemies generally respect the player. Video games aren't played due to an expectation for life to emulate them. They are chosen because this inexhaustive list of attributes is in explicit contrast to real life.
Compare it to porn. The porn is chosen based on what the viewer desires to do at that time. It doesn't require an initial, elaborate attempt to seduce the individual in the scene. The viewer isn't competing with other people for the porn star's attention or affection, and there is absolutely no fear of rejection. Again, porn isn't watched as an expectation for life to emulate it. It's watched because life *doesn't* emulate it.
So, in summary, we are stating that individuals who frequently fail at particular tasks in real life choose environments where failure doesn't really happen. The study might correctly assume that guys who play video games and habitually watch porn are socially awkward, but the assumption that's inaccurately made is that such individuals preemptively chose it instead of attempting more conventional means of relationships, as opposed to video games and porn being the only outlet of acceptance due to a long history of failure and a dearth of alternative means to rectify social awkwardness.
I'd mod you "Funny", but in all my years on Slashdot, this is the first post to ever make me 100% literally cry laughing, so 'funny' just doesn't cut it. I hope you don't mind me cutting and pasting this and making it my Facebook status.
WWII bomber? There's an entire NAZI base on the far side.
And a metric ton of stuff from Cybertron.
Streaming != download. Try using Hulu at an airport with free Wi-Fi that the entire terminal is sharing and tell me how well that works out. Try using Netflix on a train where everyone else that train is also streaming Netflix and internet connection is sparse. Let me know how free those ABC.com shows are and you inadvertently go past your monthly data cap and pay $0.10/KByte for the second half of it.
I'm glad that these services get us halfway there,but Hulu and Netflix inherently require a level of connection that DSL or cable can provide, but mobile internet cannot. I'd be perfectly on board with a method to even pick videos and cache them in a container I can't open myself when I'm somewhere with Wi-Fi. Sadly, even this compromise does not yet exist.
Skydrive is free.
Hotmail is free (and is ~80% of a Hosted Exchange account).
The browser based flavors of Office are free.
The operating systems are a bit of a trickier story, but both online storage services, mail services, and browser-based productivity applications are free. I will admit though, I'm uncertain if Microsoft would be giving them away (or that they would have achieved the level of usability that they presently have), if Google wasn't giving away Google Docs.
As a very-tangentially-on-topic aside, I'm wondering whether Adobe will gain any recognizable market share with their browser based productivity applications. Buzzword is pretty good, but I guess the fact that Tables doesn't scale to squat and Presentations still doesn't have a set of design templates worth a crap (which is odd considering that I'd figure Adobe to have the best designs available) is probably not doing them any favors.
Google is the new Apple.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Microsoft is the new IBM.
IBM is the new Xerox.
Would this person's prosecution for causing an accident resulting in death deter other people from behaving similarly?
Probably not, but that's not the point.
Do you really think that setting up regulations to ban or approve applications that are allowed to run on a computer would deter someone more than the possibility of causing death, either theirs or others?
Yes, I do. If given the opportunity to play Angry Birds on the dashboard, many will opt to do it, because the barrier to entry is nonexistent. People generally believe that the worst won't happen to them, and that it'd be alright because the foreseen circumstances are just fine. However, it is inherently impossible to account for unforeseen circumstances. These circumstances can, in many cases, be avoided with quick reflexes and complete attention on the road, but trying to line up the perfect shot would inherently prohibit one from realizing the danger before it's too late.
Have you thought through the enforcement regime required to ensure people don't have "unapproved" applications loaded on their car computer?
Yes, and it's called "what's worked for the past century: don't run apps on your dashboard at all". Wanna add a trip computer or GPS stats on there? Fine, I'm down with that. But there's no conceivable reason to add games to a dashboard as it does nothing whatsoever to provide better performance to the vehicle or the driver. Just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea.
Are we talking an annual inspection of their data, or what, you must be a government approved vehicle computer system or application provider?
No, we are talking a dashboard that doesn't run apps.
What's next, regulations about the types of toilet paper, flushing mechanisms or light bulbs "we" approve of? Ridiculous, right?
Redacto ad absurdum much? I'm pretty sure that there are some form of regulations in place to limit the possibility of making toilet paper out of fiberglass or light bulbs out of nuclear waste, because that's the level of absurdity this line requires to make it work.
How about, mind your own damn business until it actually affects you?
My best friend lost her mom in a car accident to a distracted driver. Sue me for the one degree of separation.
Have people really lost sight of liberty so much?
If you want to play angry birds while driving on a closed course or the middle of the desert, go right ahead. It's not a significant infringement of your personal liberties to say that while you're on public highways and operating a motor vehicle that you should act in a manner that doesn't risk the lives of the people next to you for your own entertainment.
Or do they just not think things like this through?
You're defending the notion of adding entertainment in an unnecessary and potentially dangerous manner to cars that will be driving on public roads and putting it under the vise of a liberty issue. I'll take the hit on the "not thinking things through" schtick once you can explain to me how this benefits anyone.