Your analogy falls flat in that the data you're threatening to modify doesn't exist on your computer. By contrast, Mr. Hotz was modifying the software on the PS3 he *did* own. He *did* pay for the rights to use the Playstation OS as a part of the cost of the console. To my knowledge he wasn't distributing copies of the source code, and everything he built was reverse engineered. The reason why this is malicious is because the device was never sold as "the box that can either run linux or play games", it was advertised as both, and made to be either/or on an ex-post-facto basis. There is NO other industry that can get away with this, and until the current generation of internet connected consoles, it wasn't practical to do on the consoles either.
If he was hacking the PSN to get free games or steal credit card data or to explicitly facilitate cheating, then fine, you'd have a case. But what REALLY irks me is the fact that the PSN is still required for activation of single player games and split-screen multiplayer. I mean really, these are cases where cheating is irrelevant, impractical, and even if performed, doesn't alter the experience of ANY player but the one doing the cheating (and the buddies he's got over his house). Why does console hacking make it impossible to play these types of games?
It was said either here or on ZDNet...
"Sony removed the ability to install Linux on the PS3, thinking nobody would notice. Let this be an example to all tech producing companies: you do NOT want to piss off the type of geeks who install Linux on a Playstation"
I'm a bit of a pragmatist. Richard Stallman-like loyalty to FOSS be damned if my users can't do what they need to do for the company to be productive. Your NFS analogy falls flat because users can still store files and have share-level and file-level permissions added via NTFS. It doesn't support ZFS either, but if I wanted to, I could easily build a FreeNAS and have Windows talk to it with the users being none the wiser.
*YOUR* bubble involves the notion that users are going to notice what file system is on the computers they run. Given that half the staff has an iPhone or Android phone and the other half wants one of the above, neither of which come with file system management utilities out of the box, it's a safe bet that they won't care in the slightest. They *will*, however, care if I took away their ability to deal with large mailboxes and exchange meeting requests, or radically altered the process. While our internet service here is firewalled with a Linux appliance and our fax system soon will be, replacing our entire server infrastructure with Linux machines will do nothing but cost us money. How? our financial management software, for one, is Windows only. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean squat to a finance department that can NO LONGER DO THEIR JOBS because their financial management software no longer functions. Even if you were able to find me collaborative bookkeeping software that was able to handle tens of thousands of financial entries per fiscal quarter with the kind of support I get from that vendor (when I call, it's one of four people who all know me by my first name, know the internal politics, know the systems, and know my limits of abilities, etc.), there's still the hours of migrating the data from one system to the other. A full blown linux stack is useless for us because there's a dozen other windows-only applications that run our business that don't have Linux counterparts designed to scale to the magnitude that we need it to.
Even if you said, "okay, just switch your mail server then", I again ask the question - why? for a warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not giving my money to Microsoft - the Microsoft that's already got my money for the present Exchange server? So that the mail store can run on ZFS and be somewhat more fault tolerant? Would whatever the product I'd switch to be able to seamlessly import the hundreds of gigabytes of mail that already exists and would cost me my job if it wasn't able to be migrated? So I get better support than having every question I've ever had exactly one Google search away?
Exchange isn't the only option, but - stay with me now - I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch AWAY from it. Sure, it makes sense if you're starting from scratch. Heck, I'm working with another client to replace their present Squirrelmail abomination with a Zimbra stack, so I'm not opposed to it in a broad sense. But I'm still waiting to hear the list of specific (and neither "more secure" nor "free [in any sense of the word]" fit that criteria) functionality that would make a switch away from Exchange worth the migration.
As for 'instant search', as I said to another reply, it does require the freely downloadable Windows Desktop Search plugin. The semantics of what exactly is being searched is irrelevant to exactly all of my end users as long as the e-mail they're thinking of is found at the end of the day.
Okay so if you want to get technical it's not part of the RTM installer for Outlook, but adding Windows Desktop Search allows for indexing of the inbox. Search on an inbox without this is, as you point out, a glacial affair, but once indexed, WDS makes searching in Outlook a MUCH more useful tool.
Zimbra, as has been mentioned before, is among the closest I've seen, but the list you wrote are NOT outlook substitutes.
I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature. If you're going to list Thunderbird as a viable alternative, you'll then by definition have to also list Windows Live Mail, since techncially it does do e-mail. ignoring user familiarity and data lock-in, here's what you're missing:
-Exchange support - yes, Exchange does POP3 and imap, but device sync, user policy and dozens of other backend features make it a staple in many server rooms. Again, there are FOSS alternatives, but "just because" isn't a good enough reason to ditch a perfectly working exchange server for a product many sysadmins don't know how to use (and "well they should" is a load of crap if their organization isn't using a non-exchange product already, and most of us have better things to do in our day like work on the actual Exchange server). There's also Blackberry server, OWA, and a swath of other things in the exchange ecosystem that the alternatives simply can't compete with yet.
-Calendar features - Sunbird is great, and has decent Thunderbird collaboration, but it's nowhere near as fluid. Meeting requests, room scheduling, and 'presence' features are just a few things off the top of my head that my office would crucify me for if I switched them to something else.
-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large.
Outlook has its issues (the fact that PST repair utilities exist is telling of one of them), but at the end of the day, I've yet to see an e-mail program of the FOSS variety that can compare to Outlook. Zimbra is pretty close, but it still comes up short - ask anyone in my office.
There's no way to upgrade phone running Windows Mobile 6.0 to 6.5, or upgrade Windows Mobile 6.5 to phone to Windows Phone 7.
This is complete crap...well, it's mostly crap. My HTC Rhodium got a 6.1->6.5 upgrade FROM THE CARRIER. My HTC Excalibur got a WinMo 5.0->6.0 upgrade FROM THE CARRIER. quite a few other devices got upgraded software on old-school WinMo. xda-developers took care of a few other upgrade paths; e.g. if I wanted to run 6.5 on my Excalibur there were quite a handful of ports for it. The HTC Leo happens to have a WP7 compatible processor architecture, so again the xda devs have manged to port a mostly-working build of WP7 to the handset. Neither HTC nor T-Mobile are providing officially blessed versions of WP7 for the handset, but that's different than saying it's impossible.
(PING) works well, and it's free. Can't beat that with a stick.
Personally, I beg to differ. PING is great if you're on a threadbare-shoestring budget and don't mind the 'minimalist' (and there I'm being generous) UI. It does do disk imaging well, but I find Acronis True Image to be worth the $40 they ask for it. In addition to Acronis being able to pull double duty and both do disk imaging and data backups, it's really nice in that images can be mounted and browsed like regular disk drives. This is a functionality that PING presently does not support, but has been invaluable in my travels, and you can't compare its MUCH friendlier GUI to PING.
No, I don't work for Acronis, but Acronis products do work very well for me.
That depends. You're right if you're asking him to limit his assessment to the foundation, however, if he sees that the water heater is set to burst in such a manner that when it does break that it will damage the foundation, then yes, I'd say you're still on the hook. At the end of the day, a risk to the foundation was found. If you're limiting the risk to only those which have already manifested, then yes the case could be argued, but you'd be a fool to not consider it an assessment within the scope of the question. There's a difference between that (finding a secondary answer to the question being asked) and simply saying that the heater is broken so your water won't be hot. I'd say that the former should still count, while the latter should not.
\...and also unwilling (a bit contrary to what AC above said?...) to do weird "custom carrier phones" (what actually seemed quite typical in the - if anything, Nokia was dumb to not let it happen?)
Because not really "North America" of AC above. Say, in Mexico they are quite popular...
The way I remember this, only Verizon was big into the custom carrier UI. For a time, virtually every phone they sold had an identical UI. This was great if you were a phone user whose entire day consisted of calling, texting, and using the phone book. The problem was that they were locked down to the Nth degree, and it got to the point where the UI would do things like intentionally inhibit functionality the phone was otherwise capable of. LG essentially became Verizon's bitch and did whatever they wanted; VZ's lineup was like 2/3 LG, 30% Samsung, and 3% everyone else...or something like that. If nothing else, for a good 2-3 years, any Verizon commercial I saw involved an LG phone (the Chocolate, the Envy, the Voyager, etc.). It was nearly a symbiotic relationship.
The rest of the carriers, AFAIK, didn't have that kind of system. AT&T might have listed a few requirements, I think Sprint just added their navigation/TV/Hotspot apps, and T-Mobile has always been the pioneer of do-whatever-the-hell-you-want, only adding T-Zones and MyFaves to the gear they sell.
Nokia might not have been able to hold Verizon once they wanted all their phones to work the same, but they could have been half the shelf of the other three carriers and had a smaller-but-respectable marketshare. At the very least, they could have been the LG alternative for Verizon exclusive phones, but I think we're all in agreement here that they basically pulled out of the American market.
Its also(I've spoken to grunt-level insiders) a token belief at Nokia that they will do badly in North America.
This is something i simply don't get. My first three phones were from Nokia. My dad and sister both had Nokia phones early on. Wanna know why I made the plunge to HTC (and by extension my dad, since he gets my hand-me-down expensive phones)? Simple: THERE WEREN'T ANY AVAILABLE. If Nokia made a comparable handset to the HTC Excalibur (aka T-Mobile Dash) back in 2006, I'd have taken Nokia over HTC in a heartbeat and left some time on the clock. Then I discovered HTC doesn't entirely suck, and the next three phones I had were all HTC (I'd also taken to the WinMo platform - yes, I do in fact LIKE Windows Mobile 6.x).
It seemed to me that Nokia just pulled out of North America entirely, or once consumers moved from dumbphones to feature phones, Nokia stayed a bit stagnant here, and they seemingly missed the smartphone wave here entirely. I know the N900 exists, but I've only seen one at a Nokia mall kiosk, only available SIM unlocked (aka $500), and the only Nokia handsets I've seen from carriers were the same free-with-2-year-contract deal they've had. You're not going to take a market where sea level is constantly rising by targeting the new-to-cellular crowd.
All Nokia had to do was stick around in stores and have 2-3 models available for the midrange and high end markets for the past decade. I swear, Nokia just gave their cake away to HTC, Samsung, and LG.
...is that consumers will be purchasing a billion internet-connecting devices in the next five years (sarcasm)...because all the cell phones, laptops, ipads, netbooks, APs, and routers will be instantly headed for a landfill due to the fact that none of the devices we have today are fast enough for our present uses. (/sarcasm) The majority of my friends, family, and clients still have 802.11g routers, and none of them have complained about the speed.
The flip side to your logic is that it's also caused shifts in the thinking of the companies. Yes, if an NES game had a bug in it, you were busted, but overall games which couldn't be patched would be more thoroughly tested - too many game-killing bugs and sales would suffer, so there was incentive to get it right the first time.
Keeping people from cheating online is a perk with which I am unfamiliar; I'm either playing single player or having friends over my house for a LAN party, complete with a Cisco Catalyst switch, dedicated LAN server, chips, soda, and in some cases, ladies (yes, the last one I held actually had a 50/50 gender split, and everyone played). If Valve Anti-Cheat is keeping script kiddies from using aimbots in Counterstrike, congratulations. I for one am too busy playing Unreal Tournament 2004 with my friends at my house on my LAN isolated from the rest of the internet. Even so, that doesn't excuse the excessive DRM on Bioshock, Mass Effect, and other single player only games for which cheating has no effect on other players.
DLC is a cool idea in theory, but there's an inherent incentive to release a half-baked game at full price, while DLC becomes more and more plentiful to the point where it's a substantial portion of the game itself. I'd be cooler with it if game devs would make Collector's Editions comprehensive; i.e. $20 more than the standard edition, but containing all DLC released for the game thereafter. The company still has incentive to produce the DLC due to the added sales from late-buyers or standard-edition purchases, but there isn't that nickel-and-diming feeling to getting the complete game...or simply bake it all into the RTM release. I expect the bean counters will continue to push for making more and more of the game DLC.
I can't imagine how I could be using the internet less.
A quick idea that may provide assistance would be to take a look at the Opera web browser, specifically its "Opera Turbo" function. Turbo does server-side compression of web pages, so the pages themselves take up less bandwidth. Worth a shot if you find yourself in that position.
First, are tablet PCs *REALLY* the future of computing? I mean, PADDs were cool on Star Trek and all, but are they really more desirable than either smaller form factor laptops and/or the iPod Touch and its ilk on a grand scale? I realize that not everyone is like me and needs to carry around an 11-pound laptop everywhere, but despite the current iPad/Galaxy Tab craze, is it really likely that tablets will be the de facto laptop replacement in five years?
Second, and more relevant to the topic, what's the major difference at an OS level in Honeycomb that makes it ideal for a tablet that's either 1.) unsuitable for mobile phones, or 2.) optimized for a tablet? I can see things at the application level that could be different (a bleeding obvious example being the Office 2007/2010 Ribbon), and making apps optimized for a tablet sized display would yield different capabilities, the least of which being a little UI scaling so there aren't unnecessary empty areas where additional controls could replace cascading menus,but at the OS level, what kind of tablet optimizations would make the code so radically different from smartphones and iPod Touch clones that it deserves its own fork?
Timecode exists for both CDs and vinyl. All the titles I'm aware of (Traktor, Serato, Torq, PCDJ, Virtual DJ, Deckadance, Mixvibes) support timecode either way. The irony is that nearly all of the features of a CDJ are useless when spinning timecode. The looping and hot cues still work, but you won't get any of the stutter, reverb, or EQ effects working, nor is pitch lock handled on the deck level (the software handles that).
The argument between CDJ and turntables is the DJ version of vi vs emacs. CDJs have the advantage of never skipping or finding the needle in a weird place you didn't want it, though most timecode-supporting titles match this by providing 'relative mode' that tracks motion instead of needle location. CDJs afford hot cues and more instant stopping and starting, but again most of this is handled in software, and MIDI controllers allow the jock to assign virtually any function to a single key press, again limiting the exclusivity of the feature to CD. Turntables' advantages are less technical. I find that audiences simply respond better to vinyl spinning - I'll have a dozen people come up to me and make a comment when I'm spinning vinyl, but nobody asks me anything when I'm using a CD deck or MIDI controller. Second, while Denon 3700's have uniquely catered to this one, the overwhelming majority of CDJ platters are static and provide no tactile feedback to a jock used to the feel of a 'slip cue'.
The lack of vinyl pressing is mostly what you're talking about - Serato plays tracks from beatport and it costs a LOT less to double check that an MP3 is Serato compliant than it is to press and distribute a couple thousand vinyl copies. Some of the more major releases get pressed to vinyl, especially those that end up being sold to the general public in stores like Hot Topic or audiophile releases that get pressed to 180-gram unrecycled vinyl, but they are admittedly in the distinct minority.
honestly I think online dating is the most efficient way to find someone you're compatible with.
After a six month stint with eHarmony (and enough wasted money to have built the NAS I'm building this week a year ago), I disagree.
Granted, there is a chasm of difference between our respective goals. According to your post, you're "looking for titties", and that's your prerogative. Personally, I'm looking for a lifelong commitment, so therein may explain the difference between our experiences.
I found two major issues that are foundational with online dating, regardless of service or region. The first is that someone who is writing to you online can determine what to tell you. Obvious as that may seem, it's still an important thing to consider - you don't hear their real reaction. You hear their revised, calculated, desired response. It is simply human nature to avoid conflict in the beginning stages of a relationship, and the fact that it's the written word instead of the spoken word which includes vocal intonations and, if in person, body language and eye contact. It's a LOT of information that's being lost when discussing online that can skew one's perception of the other person. The second issue is that, especially with free services, you still don't ultimately know who you're talking to. There are the people who are the creeps you hear about on the news (i.e. those which the ladies especially tend to be wary of), and then there are simply people who are like me and just plain bad at striking up a discussion from nowhere, with someone who doesn't know you whatsoever. That can be a good thing if your general circles have a general negative opinion of you as it can be a place to start anew, but that's not really a guaranteed ideal situation.
If anyone particularly cares about some of the more specific issues I found with online dating, feel free to ask, but I figured that it'd warrant a tl;dr response. I don't hold anything against online dating sites, but I have noticed that there are issues that it seems no one manages to quantify.
Upping gasoline prices to stimulate the purchase of new vehicles sounds like something that the marketing droids at Ford or GM would come up with. Here is where that logic falls flat: it incorrectly assumes that motivation to purchase a new car is the ONLY thing stopping people from buying them. For the vast majority of Americans, this is not the case. I personally - and virtually all of my friends and relatives - are not in a position to purchase a new car. In addition to not having enough credit to justify a $80,000 car loan for a Tesla Roadster, as a mobile DJ, I need a car like my Volvo station wagon to haul my gear around. I don't need a box truck or a trailer yet, but my five cylinder wagon accurately fits my needs. How many parents would be capable of squeezing their three kids into a Chevy Volt to the point where they could ditch their Honda Odyssey?
All that plan would do would slip us right back into a recession as my spending money at Applebees/AMC Theaters/Steam that recently started getting spent are baked back into my already high gas bill, as is the plan for everyone else. The thing is, even if the government were to cut the cost of a Tesla in half via gas subsidies, it still wouldn't fit my DJ gear. While I wouldn't have to pay $150 a week in gasoline anymore (I pay between $65 and $90 now), I'd be paying at least that in the high-interest auto loan, so all I see is my expenses going up with my ability to actually buy one of these cars going down. Bonus points: my local power plant burns oil, so the amount of pollution happening will largely shift.
I would, however, be all for the government giving me whatever money is in my Social Security fund at present as a down payment for one of these vehicles, allowing me to opt out of Social Security, and be perfectly fine with never receiving any social security benefits, because I already know I'm too young to ever see it anyway. This way I get to at least use the few grand that's in there in a way that will benefit everyone now.
I would be really surprised if we don't already have one.
While I too don't entirely doubt that there's a means of cutting off all outbound communications from the USA (even sending orbiting satellites into 'sleep' mode would hamper communications pretty effectively), the flip side is that the government hasn't yet stated that there is, and by pulling it, they acknowledge they have it. It's a bomb they can only ever drop once, lest the entire structure of the internet change to work around it, and 'pirate isps' start popping up that are beyond their control.
I'll ignore the multiple spelling/grammar/punctuation flaws in your post for the sake of making my point.
You are Cwix, slashdot member #1671282. That is all I know about you, aside from what you write. Much of the internet is this way, though admittedly Facebook and texting imply some previous, and likely real-life relationship as well. Since the only further information others know about you is based on the content of your posts, the lack of proofreading and spellcheck running implies that accurately expressing yourself isn't valued. For the ladies, it's akin to wearing mismatched clothes or a wrinkled dress when going to a bar.
How you say what you say is just as important as the message you're trying to convey. This is why grammar nazis like myself make it a point to express ourselves accurately. Sometimes it's expressed condescendingly, and I think that THAT is a problem (since it obviously doesn't help much), but summarily knocking the desire to express one's self accurately is shortsighted.
More likely is that people will end up with an experience closely resembling my own. Before DRM, the process was generally:
-buy game. -install game. -play game.
It was simple, and since I had purchased the game, I was fine. Now, the process more closely resembles:
-buy game. -install game. -patch game. -scour the internet for NOCD crack. -run game.
It's become a mandatory step for virtually every non-Steam/Impulse game I've bought. What's worse is that I've now become aware of sites that host pirated games, and the steps involved in using them. Don't get me wrong, I knew they existed before in a more broad sense, but now buying a game almost invariably involves a visit to such a site. While I still purchase my music/movies/software/games as a matter of principle, plenty of people will see green pastures of free games and opt to go that route instead.
Within the protestant church (yes, I regularly attend one), this has been dubbed the 'health and wealth gospel', and even with the ranks it's controversial at best and similarly detested at worst, for the reasons you describe. After all, if Jesus is the Son of God and the metric of how well one does God's will is directly related to one's earthly wealth, than Jesus sucked at it royally.
I wonder how many homework assignments/theses etc have been lost to BSODs, and how much money people have lost to malware and zombie-assisted spam scams, etc.
The counterargument to this is whether Gates has benefited from these incidents. OSX/Linux/BSD don't magically save term papers in multiple places automatically, either. People that actually fall for those Prince of Nigeria scams wouldn't be safe if they used a computer completely free of any Microsoft code. How does it benefit Gates to release a product that BSODs during a demo (the infamous video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84)?
I'm not saying that Microsoft has no responsibility whatsoever (they've really only tightened up ship within the past couple years after 20 years of 'whatevs'), but if someone ignores all warnings presented when promised to see the dancing bunnies, is it Windows' fault that they've been tricked into running a trojan? Should it be an unconditional deny so that users are made completely incapable of such things? If so, then why is the general slashdot groupthink angry at Apple for doing these things on iOS? You can't have it both ways.
Call me paranoid, but what I fear about having what amounts to a support contract become a required cost are the following two scenarios:
1.) $OS_COMPANY, be it Apple, MS, Red Hat, whoever, takes your money and DOESN'T provide support or patches.
2.) The cost steadily goes up, and as the applications that run on top of the OS are purchased, the question every month becomes whether to call it quits and cut your losses with the apps and data you have, or pay what can easily amount to charging more because they know you'll pay it.
The REAL issue with point #2 is that providing that kind of support can get VERY expensive. There are still a handful of NT 4.0 servers floating around out there. How much do you think it will cost to write an IPv6 stack for them? Do you charge separate for that?
It's a can of worms. Call me a dinosaur, but I *LIKE* having my copy of Office 97 sitting on a disc for my reference at any point without having to ask Microsoft pretty please to let me do it. Will I ever actually do that? probably not. Will I be pissed if at some point I can't? you bet.
That may be true, but despite the networks being faster, are they faster proportionally to what they were transferring? I don't know how fast 10-base-2 ethernet went back then, but as a soft science comparison, DOS 6.22 fit on three floppies. Ubuntu 10.10 fills a CD-R. Yes, I know the latter can (and likely would be) trimmed down, but the general point I'm making is that while networks have gotten faster, there's more data that will make use of those speeds.
The flip side to this argument is that it's impractical to expect the people who run a business to also be tech experts to the point where they can see stuff like this coming every time. There comes a point at which one MUST trust another person. You said it yourself that they must consult someone who is both impartial and knowledgeable. How many totally impartial people do you know that work in IT who also consult? My company is a Dell reseller, how often do you think we recommend HP? If $Firm is a Linux shop, how often do you think they bundle Windows Server into their quotes?
How often are the alternatives as night-and-day a difference as you claim? sometimes they are, but as another poster in the thread pointed out, how many Quickbooks alternatives can do as comprehensive a job as Quickbooks AND not require over a month to retrain staff AND has their data in a secure-yet-open format? Peachtree? The now-defunct Microsoft Accounting? How many of those interact with Annual Statement preparation software, or can open up and seamlessly integrate these 'open formats'? If the decision is one closed, proprietary format versus another (or an open format that no other company can effectively import), then is there REALLY a choice in that regard?
To respond to the 'accept the bugs' argument, yes it's true that sometimes things like that happen. However, there's sometimes wisdom in sticking to 'the devil you know'. If $PRODUCT_A has a bug that requires starting from a batch file instead of a program shortcut, is it worth several thousand dollars, a month of training, and two months of re-importing the data to get $PRODUCT_B and start it from a legit shortcut instead? there's a tradeoff point that must be considered. If it crashes once a week, you facepalm, take a coffee break, and come back to it. If that crash takes a week's worth of data with it each time, you either put the screws the vendor and/or start shopping.
One doesn't have to be ignorant to realize that a computer system of any kind won't be perfect, but it's quite a broad brush to paint with when saying that it's a symbol of incompetence and/or ignorance to chose a slightly-broken system over a very-broken system.
There's a mountain of difference between the render farms and the end user desktops. Machines in a render farm tend to simply crunch numbers all day, so it makes perfect sense for them to run Linux - strip down the Linux install to be as bare as possible and set it to be a node on the LAN. This is a case where Linux always HAS performed extremely well, and I too would question the logic of running a render farm of any size on anything *but* Linux.
The desktop is a different story entirely. Before animations get to the render farm, they need to be designed by the animators. The studio you reference can apparently do well using only Maya (and possibly Blender for certain tasks), but it doesn't account for a whole lot of software for rotoscoping, audio mastering, chroma-keying, and nonlinear editing that is used in post production of a whole swath of feature films. Sure, the next Wall-E can probably be done on Linux, but the next Minority Report will still involve OSX and Windows to a large degree.
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Your analogy falls flat in that the data you're threatening to modify doesn't exist on your computer. By contrast, Mr. Hotz was modifying the software on the PS3 he *did* own. He *did* pay for the rights to use the Playstation OS as a part of the cost of the console. To my knowledge he wasn't distributing copies of the source code, and everything he built was reverse engineered. The reason why this is malicious is because the device was never sold as "the box that can either run linux or play games", it was advertised as both, and made to be either/or on an ex-post-facto basis. There is NO other industry that can get away with this, and until the current generation of internet connected consoles, it wasn't practical to do on the consoles either.
If he was hacking the PSN to get free games or steal credit card data or to explicitly facilitate cheating, then fine, you'd have a case. But what REALLY irks me is the fact that the PSN is still required for activation of single player games and split-screen multiplayer. I mean really, these are cases where cheating is irrelevant, impractical, and even if performed, doesn't alter the experience of ANY player but the one doing the cheating (and the buddies he's got over his house). Why does console hacking make it impossible to play these types of games?
It was said either here or on ZDNet...
"Sony removed the ability to install Linux on the PS3, thinking nobody would notice. Let this be an example to all tech producing companies: you do NOT want to piss off the type of geeks who install Linux on a Playstation"
I'm a bit of a pragmatist. Richard Stallman-like loyalty to FOSS be damned if my users can't do what they need to do for the company to be productive. Your NFS analogy falls flat because users can still store files and have share-level and file-level permissions added via NTFS. It doesn't support ZFS either, but if I wanted to, I could easily build a FreeNAS and have Windows talk to it with the users being none the wiser.
*YOUR* bubble involves the notion that users are going to notice what file system is on the computers they run. Given that half the staff has an iPhone or Android phone and the other half wants one of the above, neither of which come with file system management utilities out of the box, it's a safe bet that they won't care in the slightest. They *will*, however, care if I took away their ability to deal with large mailboxes and exchange meeting requests, or radically altered the process. While our internet service here is firewalled with a Linux appliance and our fax system soon will be, replacing our entire server infrastructure with Linux machines will do nothing but cost us money. How? our financial management software, for one, is Windows only. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean squat to a finance department that can NO LONGER DO THEIR JOBS because their financial management software no longer functions. Even if you were able to find me collaborative bookkeeping software that was able to handle tens of thousands of financial entries per fiscal quarter with the kind of support I get from that vendor (when I call, it's one of four people who all know me by my first name, know the internal politics, know the systems, and know my limits of abilities, etc.), there's still the hours of migrating the data from one system to the other. A full blown linux stack is useless for us because there's a dozen other windows-only applications that run our business that don't have Linux counterparts designed to scale to the magnitude that we need it to.
Even if you said, "okay, just switch your mail server then", I again ask the question - why? for a warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not giving my money to Microsoft - the Microsoft that's already got my money for the present Exchange server? So that the mail store can run on ZFS and be somewhat more fault tolerant? Would whatever the product I'd switch to be able to seamlessly import the hundreds of gigabytes of mail that already exists and would cost me my job if it wasn't able to be migrated? So I get better support than having every question I've ever had exactly one Google search away?
Exchange isn't the only option, but - stay with me now - I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch AWAY from it. Sure, it makes sense if you're starting from scratch. Heck, I'm working with another client to replace their present Squirrelmail abomination with a Zimbra stack, so I'm not opposed to it in a broad sense. But I'm still waiting to hear the list of specific (and neither "more secure" nor "free [in any sense of the word]" fit that criteria) functionality that would make a switch away from Exchange worth the migration.
As for 'instant search', as I said to another reply, it does require the freely downloadable Windows Desktop Search plugin. The semantics of what exactly is being searched is irrelevant to exactly all of my end users as long as the e-mail they're thinking of is found at the end of the day.
Okay so if you want to get technical it's not part of the RTM installer for Outlook, but adding Windows Desktop Search allows for indexing of the inbox. Search on an inbox without this is, as you point out, a glacial affair, but once indexed, WDS makes searching in Outlook a MUCH more useful tool.
*facepalm*
Zimbra, as has been mentioned before, is among the closest I've seen, but the list you wrote are NOT outlook substitutes.
I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature. If you're going to list Thunderbird as a viable alternative, you'll then by definition have to also list Windows Live Mail, since techncially it does do e-mail. ignoring user familiarity and data lock-in, here's what you're missing:
-Exchange support - yes, Exchange does POP3 and imap, but device sync, user policy and dozens of other backend features make it a staple in many server rooms. Again, there are FOSS alternatives, but "just because" isn't a good enough reason to ditch a perfectly working exchange server for a product many sysadmins don't know how to use (and "well they should" is a load of crap if their organization isn't using a non-exchange product already, and most of us have better things to do in our day like work on the actual Exchange server). There's also Blackberry server, OWA, and a swath of other things in the exchange ecosystem that the alternatives simply can't compete with yet.
-Calendar features - Sunbird is great, and has decent Thunderbird collaboration, but it's nowhere near as fluid. Meeting requests, room scheduling, and 'presence' features are just a few things off the top of my head that my office would crucify me for if I switched them to something else.
-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large.
Outlook has its issues (the fact that PST repair utilities exist is telling of one of them), but at the end of the day, I've yet to see an e-mail program of the FOSS variety that can compare to Outlook. Zimbra is pretty close, but it still comes up short - ask anyone in my office.
There's no way to upgrade phone running Windows Mobile 6.0 to 6.5, or upgrade Windows Mobile 6.5 to phone to Windows Phone 7.
This is complete crap...well, it's mostly crap. My HTC Rhodium got a 6.1->6.5 upgrade FROM THE CARRIER. My HTC Excalibur got a WinMo 5.0->6.0 upgrade FROM THE CARRIER. quite a few other devices got upgraded software on old-school WinMo. xda-developers took care of a few other upgrade paths; e.g. if I wanted to run 6.5 on my Excalibur there were quite a handful of ports for it. The HTC Leo happens to have a WP7 compatible processor architecture, so again the xda devs have manged to port a mostly-working build of WP7 to the handset. Neither HTC nor T-Mobile are providing officially blessed versions of WP7 for the handset, but that's different than saying it's impossible.
(PING) works well, and it's free. Can't beat that with a stick.
Personally, I beg to differ. PING is great if you're on a threadbare-shoestring budget and don't mind the 'minimalist' (and there I'm being generous) UI. It does do disk imaging well, but I find Acronis True Image to be worth the $40 they ask for it. In addition to Acronis being able to pull double duty and both do disk imaging and data backups, it's really nice in that images can be mounted and browsed like regular disk drives. This is a functionality that PING presently does not support, but has been invaluable in my travels, and you can't compare its MUCH friendlier GUI to PING.
No, I don't work for Acronis, but Acronis products do work very well for me.
That depends. You're right if you're asking him to limit his assessment to the foundation, however, if he sees that the water heater is set to burst in such a manner that when it does break that it will damage the foundation, then yes, I'd say you're still on the hook. At the end of the day, a risk to the foundation was found. If you're limiting the risk to only those which have already manifested, then yes the case could be argued, but you'd be a fool to not consider it an assessment within the scope of the question. There's a difference between that (finding a secondary answer to the question being asked) and simply saying that the heater is broken so your water won't be hot. I'd say that the former should still count, while the latter should not.
\ ...and also unwilling (a bit contrary to what AC above said?...) to do weird "custom carrier phones" (what actually seemed quite typical in the - if anything, Nokia was dumb to not let it happen?)
Because not really "North America" of AC above. Say, in Mexico they are quite popular...
The way I remember this, only Verizon was big into the custom carrier UI. For a time, virtually every phone they sold had an identical UI. This was great if you were a phone user whose entire day consisted of calling, texting, and using the phone book. The problem was that they were locked down to the Nth degree, and it got to the point where the UI would do things like intentionally inhibit functionality the phone was otherwise capable of. LG essentially became Verizon's bitch and did whatever they wanted; VZ's lineup was like 2/3 LG, 30% Samsung, and 3% everyone else...or something like that. If nothing else, for a good 2-3 years, any Verizon commercial I saw involved an LG phone (the Chocolate, the Envy, the Voyager, etc.). It was nearly a symbiotic relationship.
The rest of the carriers, AFAIK, didn't have that kind of system. AT&T might have listed a few requirements, I think Sprint just added their navigation/TV/Hotspot apps, and T-Mobile has always been the pioneer of do-whatever-the-hell-you-want, only adding T-Zones and MyFaves to the gear they sell.
Nokia might not have been able to hold Verizon once they wanted all their phones to work the same, but they could have been half the shelf of the other three carriers and had a smaller-but-respectable marketshare. At the very least, they could have been the LG alternative for Verizon exclusive phones, but I think we're all in agreement here that they basically pulled out of the American market.
Its also(I've spoken to grunt-level insiders) a token belief at Nokia that they will do badly in North America.
This is something i simply don't get. My first three phones were from Nokia. My dad and sister both had Nokia phones early on. Wanna know why I made the plunge to HTC (and by extension my dad, since he gets my hand-me-down expensive phones)? Simple: THERE WEREN'T ANY AVAILABLE. If Nokia made a comparable handset to the HTC Excalibur (aka T-Mobile Dash) back in 2006, I'd have taken Nokia over HTC in a heartbeat and left some time on the clock. Then I discovered HTC doesn't entirely suck, and the next three phones I had were all HTC (I'd also taken to the WinMo platform - yes, I do in fact LIKE Windows Mobile 6.x).
It seemed to me that Nokia just pulled out of North America entirely, or once consumers moved from dumbphones to feature phones, Nokia stayed a bit stagnant here, and they seemingly missed the smartphone wave here entirely. I know the N900 exists, but I've only seen one at a Nokia mall kiosk, only available SIM unlocked (aka $500), and the only Nokia handsets I've seen from carriers were the same free-with-2-year-contract deal they've had. You're not going to take a market where sea level is constantly rising by targeting the new-to-cellular crowd.
All Nokia had to do was stick around in stores and have 2-3 models available for the midrange and high end markets for the past decade. I swear, Nokia just gave their cake away to HTC, Samsung, and LG.
...is that consumers will be purchasing a billion internet-connecting devices in the next five years (sarcasm)...because all the cell phones, laptops, ipads, netbooks, APs, and routers will be instantly headed for a landfill due to the fact that none of the devices we have today are fast enough for our present uses. (/sarcasm) The majority of my friends, family, and clients still have 802.11g routers, and none of them have complained about the speed.
*kisses moderations goodbye*
The flip side to your logic is that it's also caused shifts in the thinking of the companies. Yes, if an NES game had a bug in it, you were busted, but overall games which couldn't be patched would be more thoroughly tested - too many game-killing bugs and sales would suffer, so there was incentive to get it right the first time.
Keeping people from cheating online is a perk with which I am unfamiliar; I'm either playing single player or having friends over my house for a LAN party, complete with a Cisco Catalyst switch, dedicated LAN server, chips, soda, and in some cases, ladies (yes, the last one I held actually had a 50/50 gender split, and everyone played). If Valve Anti-Cheat is keeping script kiddies from using aimbots in Counterstrike, congratulations. I for one am too busy playing Unreal Tournament 2004 with my friends at my house on my LAN isolated from the rest of the internet. Even so, that doesn't excuse the excessive DRM on Bioshock, Mass Effect, and other single player only games for which cheating has no effect on other players.
DLC is a cool idea in theory, but there's an inherent incentive to release a half-baked game at full price, while DLC becomes more and more plentiful to the point where it's a substantial portion of the game itself. I'd be cooler with it if game devs would make Collector's Editions comprehensive; i.e. $20 more than the standard edition, but containing all DLC released for the game thereafter. The company still has incentive to produce the DLC due to the added sales from late-buyers or standard-edition purchases, but there isn't that nickel-and-diming feeling to getting the complete game...or simply bake it all into the RTM release. I expect the bean counters will continue to push for making more and more of the game DLC.
I can't imagine how I could be using the internet less.
A quick idea that may provide assistance would be to take a look at the Opera web browser, specifically its "Opera Turbo" function. Turbo does server-side compression of web pages, so the pages themselves take up less bandwidth. Worth a shot if you find yourself in that position.
The following is a legit set of questions...
First, are tablet PCs *REALLY* the future of computing? I mean, PADDs were cool on Star Trek and all, but are they really more desirable than either smaller form factor laptops and/or the iPod Touch and its ilk on a grand scale? I realize that not everyone is like me and needs to carry around an 11-pound laptop everywhere, but despite the current iPad/Galaxy Tab craze, is it really likely that tablets will be the de facto laptop replacement in five years?
Second, and more relevant to the topic, what's the major difference at an OS level in Honeycomb that makes it ideal for a tablet that's either 1.) unsuitable for mobile phones, or 2.) optimized for a tablet? I can see things at the application level that could be different (a bleeding obvious example being the Office 2007/2010 Ribbon), and making apps optimized for a tablet sized display would yield different capabilities, the least of which being a little UI scaling so there aren't unnecessary empty areas where additional controls could replace cascading menus,but at the OS level, what kind of tablet optimizations would make the code so radically different from smartphones and iPod Touch clones that it deserves its own fork?
Timecode exists for both CDs and vinyl. All the titles I'm aware of (Traktor, Serato, Torq, PCDJ, Virtual DJ, Deckadance, Mixvibes) support timecode either way. The irony is that nearly all of the features of a CDJ are useless when spinning timecode. The looping and hot cues still work, but you won't get any of the stutter, reverb, or EQ effects working, nor is pitch lock handled on the deck level (the software handles that).
The argument between CDJ and turntables is the DJ version of vi vs emacs. CDJs have the advantage of never skipping or finding the needle in a weird place you didn't want it, though most timecode-supporting titles match this by providing 'relative mode' that tracks motion instead of needle location. CDJs afford hot cues and more instant stopping and starting, but again most of this is handled in software, and MIDI controllers allow the jock to assign virtually any function to a single key press, again limiting the exclusivity of the feature to CD. Turntables' advantages are less technical. I find that audiences simply respond better to vinyl spinning - I'll have a dozen people come up to me and make a comment when I'm spinning vinyl, but nobody asks me anything when I'm using a CD deck or MIDI controller. Second, while Denon 3700's have uniquely catered to this one, the overwhelming majority of CDJ platters are static and provide no tactile feedback to a jock used to the feel of a 'slip cue'.
The lack of vinyl pressing is mostly what you're talking about - Serato plays tracks from beatport and it costs a LOT less to double check that an MP3 is Serato compliant than it is to press and distribute a couple thousand vinyl copies. Some of the more major releases get pressed to vinyl, especially those that end up being sold to the general public in stores like Hot Topic or audiophile releases that get pressed to 180-gram unrecycled vinyl, but they are admittedly in the distinct minority.
honestly I think online dating is the most efficient way to find someone you're compatible with.
After a six month stint with eHarmony (and enough wasted money to have built the NAS I'm building this week a year ago), I disagree.
Granted, there is a chasm of difference between our respective goals. According to your post, you're "looking for titties", and that's your prerogative. Personally, I'm looking for a lifelong commitment, so therein may explain the difference between our experiences.
I found two major issues that are foundational with online dating, regardless of service or region. The first is that someone who is writing to you online can determine what to tell you. Obvious as that may seem, it's still an important thing to consider - you don't hear their real reaction. You hear their revised, calculated, desired response. It is simply human nature to avoid conflict in the beginning stages of a relationship, and the fact that it's the written word instead of the spoken word which includes vocal intonations and, if in person, body language and eye contact. It's a LOT of information that's being lost when discussing online that can skew one's perception of the other person. The second issue is that, especially with free services, you still don't ultimately know who you're talking to. There are the people who are the creeps you hear about on the news (i.e. those which the ladies especially tend to be wary of), and then there are simply people who are like me and just plain bad at striking up a discussion from nowhere, with someone who doesn't know you whatsoever. That can be a good thing if your general circles have a general negative opinion of you as it can be a place to start anew, but that's not really a guaranteed ideal situation.
If anyone particularly cares about some of the more specific issues I found with online dating, feel free to ask, but I figured that it'd warrant a tl;dr response. I don't hold anything against online dating sites, but I have noticed that there are issues that it seems no one manages to quantify.
Upping gasoline prices to stimulate the purchase of new vehicles sounds like something that the marketing droids at Ford or GM would come up with. Here is where that logic falls flat: it incorrectly assumes that motivation to purchase a new car is the ONLY thing stopping people from buying them. For the vast majority of Americans, this is not the case. I personally - and virtually all of my friends and relatives - are not in a position to purchase a new car. In addition to not having enough credit to justify a $80,000 car loan for a Tesla Roadster, as a mobile DJ, I need a car like my Volvo station wagon to haul my gear around. I don't need a box truck or a trailer yet, but my five cylinder wagon accurately fits my needs. How many parents would be capable of squeezing their three kids into a Chevy Volt to the point where they could ditch their Honda Odyssey?
All that plan would do would slip us right back into a recession as my spending money at Applebees/AMC Theaters/Steam that recently started getting spent are baked back into my already high gas bill, as is the plan for everyone else. The thing is, even if the government were to cut the cost of a Tesla in half via gas subsidies, it still wouldn't fit my DJ gear. While I wouldn't have to pay $150 a week in gasoline anymore (I pay between $65 and $90 now), I'd be paying at least that in the high-interest auto loan, so all I see is my expenses going up with my ability to actually buy one of these cars going down. Bonus points: my local power plant burns oil, so the amount of pollution happening will largely shift.
I would, however, be all for the government giving me whatever money is in my Social Security fund at present as a down payment for one of these vehicles, allowing me to opt out of Social Security, and be perfectly fine with never receiving any social security benefits, because I already know I'm too young to ever see it anyway. This way I get to at least use the few grand that's in there in a way that will benefit everyone now.
I would be really surprised if we don't already have one.
While I too don't entirely doubt that there's a means of cutting off all outbound communications from the USA (even sending orbiting satellites into 'sleep' mode would hamper communications pretty effectively), the flip side is that the government hasn't yet stated that there is, and by pulling it, they acknowledge they have it. It's a bomb they can only ever drop once, lest the entire structure of the internet change to work around it, and 'pirate isps' start popping up that are beyond their control.
I'll ignore the multiple spelling/grammar/punctuation flaws in your post for the sake of making my point.
You are Cwix, slashdot member #1671282. That is all I know about you, aside from what you write. Much of the internet is this way, though admittedly Facebook and texting imply some previous, and likely real-life relationship as well. Since the only further information others know about you is based on the content of your posts, the lack of proofreading and spellcheck running implies that accurately expressing yourself isn't valued. For the ladies, it's akin to wearing mismatched clothes or a wrinkled dress when going to a bar.
How you say what you say is just as important as the message you're trying to convey. This is why grammar nazis like myself make it a point to express ourselves accurately. Sometimes it's expressed condescendingly, and I think that THAT is a problem (since it obviously doesn't help much), but summarily knocking the desire to express one's self accurately is shortsighted.
More likely is that people will end up with an experience closely resembling my own. Before DRM, the process was generally:
-buy game.
-install game.
-play game.
It was simple, and since I had purchased the game, I was fine. Now, the process more closely resembles:
-buy game.
-install game.
-patch game.
-scour the internet for NOCD crack.
-run game.
It's become a mandatory step for virtually every non-Steam/Impulse game I've bought. What's worse is that I've now become aware of sites that host pirated games, and the steps involved in using them. Don't get me wrong, I knew they existed before in a more broad sense, but now buying a game almost invariably involves a visit to such a site. While I still purchase my music/movies/software/games as a matter of principle, plenty of people will see green pastures of free games and opt to go that route instead.
Within the protestant church (yes, I regularly attend one), this has been dubbed the 'health and wealth gospel', and even with the ranks it's controversial at best and similarly detested at worst, for the reasons you describe. After all, if Jesus is the Son of God and the metric of how well one does God's will is directly related to one's earthly wealth, than Jesus sucked at it royally.
I wonder how many homework assignments/theses etc have been lost to BSODs, and how much money people have lost to malware and zombie-assisted spam scams, etc.
The counterargument to this is whether Gates has benefited from these incidents. OSX/Linux/BSD don't magically save term papers in multiple places automatically, either. People that actually fall for those Prince of Nigeria scams wouldn't be safe if they used a computer completely free of any Microsoft code. How does it benefit Gates to release a product that BSODs during a demo (the infamous video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84)?
I'm not saying that Microsoft has no responsibility whatsoever (they've really only tightened up ship within the past couple years after 20 years of 'whatevs'), but if someone ignores all warnings presented when promised to see the dancing bunnies, is it Windows' fault that they've been tricked into running a trojan? Should it be an unconditional deny so that users are made completely incapable of such things? If so, then why is the general slashdot groupthink angry at Apple for doing these things on iOS? You can't have it both ways.
Call me paranoid, but what I fear about having what amounts to a support contract become a required cost are the following two scenarios:
1.) $OS_COMPANY, be it Apple, MS, Red Hat, whoever, takes your money and DOESN'T provide support or patches.
2.) The cost steadily goes up, and as the applications that run on top of the OS are purchased, the question every month becomes whether to call it quits and cut your losses with the apps and data you have, or pay what can easily amount to charging more because they know you'll pay it.
The REAL issue with point #2 is that providing that kind of support can get VERY expensive. There are still a handful of NT 4.0 servers floating around out there. How much do you think it will cost to write an IPv6 stack for them? Do you charge separate for that?
It's a can of worms. Call me a dinosaur, but I *LIKE* having my copy of Office 97 sitting on a disc for my reference at any point without having to ask Microsoft pretty please to let me do it. Will I ever actually do that? probably not. Will I be pissed if at some point I can't? you bet.
That may be true, but despite the networks being faster, are they faster proportionally to what they were transferring? I don't know how fast 10-base-2 ethernet went back then, but as a soft science comparison, DOS 6.22 fit on three floppies. Ubuntu 10.10 fills a CD-R. Yes, I know the latter can (and likely would be) trimmed down, but the general point I'm making is that while networks have gotten faster, there's more data that will make use of those speeds.
The flip side to this argument is that it's impractical to expect the people who run a business to also be tech experts to the point where they can see stuff like this coming every time. There comes a point at which one MUST trust another person. You said it yourself that they must consult someone who is both impartial and knowledgeable. How many totally impartial people do you know that work in IT who also consult? My company is a Dell reseller, how often do you think we recommend HP? If $Firm is a Linux shop, how often do you think they bundle Windows Server into their quotes?
How often are the alternatives as night-and-day a difference as you claim? sometimes they are, but as another poster in the thread pointed out, how many Quickbooks alternatives can do as comprehensive a job as Quickbooks AND not require over a month to retrain staff AND has their data in a secure-yet-open format? Peachtree? The now-defunct Microsoft Accounting? How many of those interact with Annual Statement preparation software, or can open up and seamlessly integrate these 'open formats'? If the decision is one closed, proprietary format versus another (or an open format that no other company can effectively import), then is there REALLY a choice in that regard?
To respond to the 'accept the bugs' argument, yes it's true that sometimes things like that happen. However, there's sometimes wisdom in sticking to 'the devil you know'. If $PRODUCT_A has a bug that requires starting from a batch file instead of a program shortcut, is it worth several thousand dollars, a month of training, and two months of re-importing the data to get $PRODUCT_B and start it from a legit shortcut instead? there's a tradeoff point that must be considered. If it crashes once a week, you facepalm, take a coffee break, and come back to it. If that crash takes a week's worth of data with it each time, you either put the screws the vendor and/or start shopping.
One doesn't have to be ignorant to realize that a computer system of any kind won't be perfect, but it's quite a broad brush to paint with when saying that it's a symbol of incompetence and/or ignorance to chose a slightly-broken system over a very-broken system.
There's a mountain of difference between the render farms and the end user desktops. Machines in a render farm tend to simply crunch numbers all day, so it makes perfect sense for them to run Linux - strip down the Linux install to be as bare as possible and set it to be a node on the LAN. This is a case where Linux always HAS performed extremely well, and I too would question the logic of running a render farm of any size on anything *but* Linux.
The desktop is a different story entirely. Before animations get to the render farm, they need to be designed by the animators. The studio you reference can apparently do well using only Maya (and possibly Blender for certain tasks), but it doesn't account for a whole lot of software for rotoscoping, audio mastering, chroma-keying, and nonlinear editing that is used in post production of a whole swath of feature films. Sure, the next Wall-E can probably be done on Linux, but the next Minority Report will still involve OSX and Windows to a large degree.