Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
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Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 1
You'd be hard pressed to find a 15-year-old motherboard that could handle 768MB of RAM either. Also in Win95's defense, there were a lot fewer compatibility issues between Win3.1 software running on Win95 than between Win98 and XP. I've got a shelf full of games that won't run on XP without some flavor of emulation, but will run on both 3.1 and 95.
Let me ask you a question. It's a one word one too...
Dinosaurs.
Let me answer your question. It's a one word one too...
Dragons.
To expound on it, the word 'dinosaur' is relatively new, but references to dragons can be found throughout literature of antiquity, including references within the Bible (the Behemoth and the Leviathan being the most famous). The belief in the existence of dinosaurs and the belief in a young earth are not mutually exclusive.
As several people have pointed out, the headline and the patent reading are just slightly different.
That said, I can think of a few incredibly trivial ways that Apple/AT&T could have done this a long time ago:
-Compare the cell number with a list of cell numbers that AT&T has registered. When I had an iPhone, iTunes would display my cell number, even though it was dished out by T-Mobile. If they wanted to prevent the use of SIM unlocked units, that seems to be the simplest method of doing so. Substitute cell number with SIM card ID or similar.
-Block access to known Cydia repos and/or the jailbreak sites.
-Scan for programs and folders associated with jailbroken phones (SwirlyMMS, Winterboard, Icy, etc.)
All of these would have worked just fine for the past four years, but as yet none have been implemented. If Apple truly wanted to prevent users from jailbreaking and/or SIM unlocking, it's been simple to do for some time using methods that don't require a patent. I'm not saying that Apple is necessarily happy with the jailbreak scene, but I don't consider it beyond the realm of possibility that there's been some degree of unwilling aversion to an all-out war against the jailbreakers, though the hardware-level anti-jailbreak widget they added into the 3GS does put that theory on shaky ground as well.
I'm sure a significant percentage of slashdotters either have second hard disks in their machines or some type of NAS system. The issue is that while we can easily say "40GB should be a good enough C: drive for anybody", that's only because we have a few terabytes within an ethernet cable's reach to store other stuff on. Consider the average Joe/Jane who has a 12-megapixel camera and a sizeable iTunes library. Even if we assume that they don't have a single XviD or MKV file on their drive, that just music and photos would start to make that C drive VERY cramped given the absence of another device to put it on. I've got friends whose Windows/Program Files directories can fit inside 15GB, and even their "My Documents" folder can keep that number inside 20, but their music/photo/video folders are easily north of 100GB. I agree with another poster that says that if you're going to pay a premium for the speed an SSD affords, you're not above paying an extra $75 for a WD Passport drive to carry your media on. The issue is convincing Joe and Jane Public of this, rather than having them say "ZoMg ThIs DrIvE iS tInY i CaNt FiT nEtHiNg On It!!!!1111"
I'm 99% in agreement with you. I agree that not everyone is going to gravitate towards tech, I agree that we need experts in every field, as well as "non-experts" like cashiers and fast food workers (I've done both personally; this isn't a slur).
The one point of contention I do have is more implicit. You don't have to be Cisco/MSCE/Linux/A+ certified to use some critical thinking skills. For example, I wouldn't necessarily expect end users to do port translation on a router without a tutorial (and even then, asking someone more knowledgable for some assistance). However, I've had people say to me things like, "My computer was working just fine, but it got really slow over the past week. Also, this virus thing keeps popping up. Could it be the huge amount of music or photos on my computer?" A little critical thinking would say, "Well, I've been adding photos and music to my computer for the past two years, but this slowdown only happened recently. This virus warning thing just started coming up right around the time that my computer got slower, and I don't remember intentionally installing a virus scanner..." It doesn't take all kinds of computer skills to apply just a little bit of thinking through a problem. My mechanic never studied computers, but he's actually pretty savvy and has changed out his own hard drives, backs up his stuff, and configured his own routers with little to no help from me. The general process of troubleshooting cars and computers isn't all that far off. I'm sure there are plenty of doctors who, while they can't compile their own LFS installers, are a bit more savvy in diagnosing computer issues than their receptionist who's had her taskbar on the right of the screen for months 'cuz she can't figure out how to drag it back down.
The issue isn't that experts in one field aren't experts in another. The issue is that the art if thinking critically has been downplayed. I'm pretty solidly convinced that teaching three terms of critical thinking and one term of MS Office in a single year of high school would yield a similar amount of skill as a full year of Office.
The implication of the GGGP was that things were purchased from the iTunes Media Store, or however you want to collectively term the content purchased through Apple using iTunes software. My point was that the iTMS isn't limited to audio files, and while you correctly stated that music files sold through them are regular AAC files, other content available is still DRM laden. The post wasn't specific as to what type of content was causing the problem.
I believe there was a comment on an article some time ago about this. The way I remember it is that MS and Apple have foundationally different methods of thought when it comes to how to render fonts. Apple's logic is "accuracy is supreme". If, for example, one were to generate a character whose dimensions were smaller than the DPI of the monitor, Apple machines would display an illegible - but accurately scaled - blob representing that character. This is among the reasons why graphic designers prefer the platform; for them getting the spacing and alignment is more important than being able to read it on their monitor. MS's logic goes something like "legibility is key". In the same example above, the character will not be rendered completely accurately, but the user will be able to recognize the character on the screen. For users predominantly dealing with data on their monitors, it makes more sense to do it this way.
DRM? App store? Open formats? You're talking about an iPod syncing with linux, so you must be talking about music? The Apple store hasn't sold DRMed music in years.
That may be true, but movies, TV episodes, and eBooks are still lovingly shackled in DRM that prevents it from being played back using non-Apple software or hardware. Technically this is true for Apps as well (which also include various flavors of DRM), but I'll give them a pass on that since it's software for their own platform.
I, and presumably most of the rest of the crowd here at Slashdot, are in agreement with you on both accounts. The issue is everyone else...
-OS/Driver/App discs were the standard, and should still be so in an ideal world. The problem is that everyone wants a cheap computer. That Norton demo probably shaved $2 off the cost of your laptop. The Lite version of Nero another $2. That eBay icon cut another dollar off. Lather, rinse, repeat, and all that bundleware probably shaved $20-$50 off the cost of your machine. The problem was that users were only being subjected to it the first time they unboxed it, never when they recovered. If you're going to give HP/Dell/Acer/Sony between six and eight figures to load your crap, you want to make sure that the investment pays off as practically as possible. Whether OEMs were able to get more money by slipstreaming the bloat into the recovery media or the third parties were threatening to kill off the revenue stream, I don't know, but it simply makes business sense to do it this way.
-Recovery media gives a known starting point. Windows/OS/App discs allow end users to make decisions during the restoration process. While the Slashdot crowd can make competent decisions, I'd wager that at least 7 out of 10 Dell/HP customers couldn't successfully bring their machine back to the official factory spec using windows/driver/app discs. As such, the support burden increases instead of decreases. Recovery media gives a few prompts, and then doesn't prompt the user to do anything but swap discs thereafter.
-Recovery partitions helped solve the "I put my discs in a safe place" and the "I threw them out...they weren't just packaging?" problems. My solution to this would have been to put the discs in a sleeve inside the case and then have the user access them when told to by support, but the partition thing does solve the problem as well.
-I had a friend once who made the mistake of letting her son on her laptop - the only more problematic mistake was letting the son attempt to fix it. He triggered the system recovery option and restored it to its out-of-the-box glory. Well, among the things HP did right was to back up the profile folder before performing the restore. A little digging on the hard drive showed that all of her documents were still intact, so the child lived. Is she a dolt for not having her stuff backed up? yes. Did this give her the scare she needed to back up more regularly? you bet. Nonetheless, OS/driver/app discs don't perform that task automatically; they're not designed to do that.
-While recovery partitions and applications take an age and a half to burn the media, it does provide two advantages over ISOs. First, it accomodates different media. End users can burn their recovery discs on CD-R, DVD-R, or DVD-R DL media. Redundant ISO files for each flavor of media starts to take up ridiculous amounts of hard disk space, especially if it's in addition to a recovery partition. Second, the utilities I've used have run a read verification pass before asking for the next disc. It does take hours to burn the discs, but you know they'll work when you need them.
In summary, I agree with your premise that I'd prefer plain discs over specialized recovery media. I also realize that between trusting end users with Windows/Driver install discs and recovery media that does all the thinking for them, I can't possibly blame OEMs for going the recovery route. The only other thing I could think of that might work better would be to license some Acronis code and, after the user has run through all the first-run dialogs, have Acronis image the drive to optical media.
I think the best compromise would be to provide plain discs for order or ISO download at a nominal fee; my time is worth the $14.95 I'd save doing a vanilla Windows install.
I think you're on to something. It's only been recently that VZW phones have started to get integrated Wi-Fi. For example, the Blackberry Curve 8330 didn't have Wi-Fi capability at all, so there was no means of offloading traffic. Verizon traditionally prevented handsets from having Wi-Fi capabilities up until fairly recently. Personally, I probably *would* have been using Wi-Fi more often when I had a Curve if it was available. I think the answer is going to change whether the statistics are taken at the handset level, not at the network level. Handset level stats will display what users are actually doing, while network level stats could show that VZW customers may simply spit more data out of their baseband than AT&T customers.
And full-on developer tools for free. Not an incentive for 99% of the Mac userbase, but I find it really nice.
While granted that it's not quite their kitchen-sink professional bundles, Microsoft does offer Visual Studio Express, Web Developer Express, and SQL Server Express for free to any Windows user.
I work for my employer. They give me money, so they get to determine what I'm allowed to do on the internet while they're paying me. If they blacklist/whitelist sites on their machines, that's fine. They paid for those machines, they pay for the bandwidth, and they pay for my time. They get to pick what I do with their time and equipment.
I give money to my ISP. It is a world of difference when I pay someone for their services, then they decide how those services can be used.
In other words, the golden rule (i.e. he who has the gold makes the rules) applies unequally between the two. Herein lies the problem.
Requiring real names, as opposed to the long established Internet practice of using handles, is a risk for people's privacy, and also means that some people may restrict what they can talk about on Facebook, out of fear of family/potential-employers etc reading.
I'ma kinda say "duh" on this one. Facebook (and Myspace before it), by the very nature of its existence, is designed to be almost "anti-anonymous". I have a Facebook so people *can* contact me that way as a digital extension of previously established relationships. If you don't want your family finding out that you were trashed in Vegas last weekend, either don't have them as Facebook friends, or don't post the photos on Facebook. If you want to share photos, add them to Flikr/Photobucket/Imageshack and give out the URL to whoever you want to view them. If I wanted to blog things concerning topics at variance with the pastors in my church (many of whom are my Facebook friends), I'd hit up Blogspot and make an anonymous blog where the anonymity you're speaking of is still alive and well.
While I agree with the general sentiment, I disagree with the implementation in this case. Yes, I'm no fan of 5MB Excel spreadsheets, either. However, look at it from the user's perspective. They don't pick up software as naturally as you and I do. While some people are just stupid, most of the users at my office aren't technical enough to just look at a piece of software and immediately understand it, or think beyond their daily grind. They may be great at other things (one woman here is an amazing Italian cook, another guy here helped me start out my business records in Peachtree Accounting, etc.), but it's a bit unfair to expect them to have a way of thinking that falls in line with the computer systems.
Think about it: It wasn't elegant, and it was a bit large, but ultimately you got the screenshot you needed, and the message was conveyed, right? Consider the user's perspective: they had to send a screenshot, they knew how to paste it into Excel and send it, and it probably took them all of about two minutes to do. Even if you say "well can't they send it in MS Paint?", you'd be accurate, but that still requires an alternate workflow that users don't normally use, in addition to extra steps (e-mailing an Excel spreadsheet is an explicit menu option, e-mailing from paint involves save and attach). For some users, this can take several times longer than the excel workaround.
It also depends on the frequency of a given task. An occasional excel file with a screengrab is an inelegant, yet effective means to an end. Daily screenshots warrant a copy of Gadwin Printscreen or SnagIt. Using Excel for a list is one thing and its inelegance with larger lists is understandable if there are calculations involved, but there is a point at which the amount of time to teach the users to use Access is less than they'd spend squeezing Excel into a database role.
The issue is that in the good ol' days, there was much less lock-in. To a certain extent, that's true as well. If a waitress is rude to me at Applebees, I won't eat there anymore. If a can of soup is not to my liking, I'll purchase a different brand. If my web hosting company treats me poorly, I'll switch to another provider. In these cases, one pays directly for a service with no intertia to overcome.
By contrast, Facebook is where all of my friends are. Its private messaging function has largely replaced personal e-mail. My cell phone integrates seamlessly with Facebook and automatically updates their status, their photo, and their birthday in my calendar (as well as any events that I RSVP as attending). There are people with whom the only method of communication I have with them is through Facebook.
In Facebook's defense, they solved a LOT of problems that Myspace had in its heydey. From simple things like requiring real names instead of handles to display to people ('cuz x0x0LaTiNaLoVeRx0x with a picture of a palm tree makes perfect sense to me), to issues with spam (I constantly got friend requests and messages from "18 and have a webcam" chiqs, rare if ever on FB), to not allowing custom HTML (have you seen some of the God-awful crap that people cut-and-pasted together? half the pages there took forever to load and looked like someone swalllowed all of Geocities and Xanga and vomited it onto a web server) to just a general community shift from being who you want people to think you are and begging for comments to just putting out there who you are and not having arguments over whether you're in someone's top 8 or not. It was really only a matter of time before the holes in Facebook's systems were exploited.
Privacy issues are just inherent with giving a company - be it Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or whoever - the amount of personal data a typical Facebook page contains. I wonder how many people complaining about the security being slowly relaxed over time have actually made specifications as to what they want, or whether they have their own profiles on the defaults.
The thing that irks me the most about Facebook with regards to privacy was how they defaulted to making your info available to basically everyone. Targeted ads within Facebook are one thing - bandwidth isn't free, and neither is hard disk space. I, for one, don't mind targeted ads. I'd much rather see an ad for the new Above and Beyond album than for Kotex. I do have an issue when I post a status update regarding owning an HTC phone, and suddenly half the banner ads on the websites I visit thereafter involve the latest HTC gear. That's just plain creepy, and yes, I turned it off once I realized that it was there.
In summary, having users come back when they're happy is still accurate, except in cases when there is lock-in (cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Facebook accounts, heck even MS Windows [for those of us with substantial hardware/software investments]). By its nature, Facebook will remain the de facto standard for social networking until they both royally screw up AND have a viable competitor ready to catch their fall.
The Republican party depends on a group of deeply delusional voters known as Evangelicals. That's why, in the 21st Century, there are elected officials pretending to be concerned about gay couples, pretending that evolution is a lie that shouldn't be taught as fact, and pretending that a woman's body is the property of the Federal Government.
The Democratic party has it's fair share of hypocrites, but only one party demands delusion as part of their party platform. They are still demanding God be put back in Government, and pretending the founding fathers wanted the same thing. Their next sentence could be about the dangers of muslim theocracies, but their delusion is thought-proof. They know God chose America to fight Evil, just like their old hero President said himself: he answers to a higher father, even if the father he has in reality fought the same war against the same army only a decade earlier.
As someone who would probably fit the bill for an "Evangelical Voter", here are my views on the above. I'm not trying to flamebait. I'm simply expressing myself and my opinions and beliefs; I won't reply unless specifically asked a question by a responding post...
-I don't think Evolution is a lie. I believe that there are inconsistencies with it. I have no problem with the general concept of natural selection and the refining of a species as a whole as such. I have heard some admittedly thought-provoking responses as to how some of the inconsistencies could be addressed (i.e. the human eyes may have only been able to disinguish light and dark at first, but later became the refined visual receptors they are today. This works well for eyes and ears and similar, but for example the reproductive system cannot be explained by this particular logic). I have no problem with evolution being taught as a theory in science class; I learned it myself in high school (I went to a religious high school, BTW). I'll fully admit that Creation is only a theory and wasn't observed or measured, nor is it repeatable (by any known entity, anyway). However, my issue is that many who profess evolution as infallible truth that fully explains how life began is wrong. Both lines of thinking require some degree of faith in things that are as yet unexplained (i.e. how the laws of physics came into existence, abiogenesis [admittedly hypothesized, but never proven], inconsistencies in the fossil record, etc.), yet while I'm fully aware that I cannot explain how God came into existence and will readily admit that my faith fills those gaps, few evolutionists will admit the same, especially in a classroom. All I'm looking for is a textbook where everything is considered.
-My opinion on gay marriage tends to go counter to my general party line. I've got a few stipulations, but here's my take on it. My belief system states that God established the concept of marriage and that the union of souls is a sacred construct done, as is commonly stated, "in the sight of God". There is also the sociopolitical aspect of marriage - state licenses, certificates, tax brackets - all that good stuff. The two of them are different aspects of the same action, and are ordained by different entities (again, most pastors/rabbis will say "By the power vested in me by God, and the State of ($YOUR_STATE)...)". Finally, I believe that the Bible declares homosexuality a sin, and by extension I don't believe that God will ordain a marriage between two like-gendered individuals. If a state wants to give a marriage license to a gay couple, as long as religious organizations are not required to perform them, I have no problem with a homosexual couple heading over to town hall and getting married.
-You'll be VERY hard pressed to find a single person who believes that a female body is the property o
I half agree with you. I agree that unfortunately too many schools teach keyboarding and MS Office as the beginning, middle, and end of their curricula, and that's def a problem. In their defense, many of the people resonsible for bringing computers into education aren't versed in much more than the above skills, and everyone in my office uses a productivity suite. Even if you're going to be an architect, knowing how to properly use Word isn't necessarily a bad thing - have you the slightest idea how many people make a new page by hitting 'enter' repeatedly instead of using a page break? I think that Office as a part of a larger curriculum is good, but like you I disagree that it should be the foundation of it. I think you also have the order flip-flopped a bit.
Teaching the fundamental electrical functions and multi-level programming to elementary school students is going to make very little sense, because it's just theoretical and bears no resemblance to anything they'd be dealing with ordinarily. To take the same logic, they should learn nothing but math, then move on to physics, and so on, when in reality counting their crayons would be a real-world reinforcement of basic arithmetic.
In my opinion, the better version of your foundational premise (moving away from typing and office into a more diverse curriculum) would be to start a lesson using manual methods, then advancing to using computers. Teach graphic design principles, color matching, and basic drawing paradigms, THEN say "here is Photoshop and Illustrator". Powerpoint could be taught alongside the other graphic design applications, and students could critique each other as to how effectively they use design principles, thus learning how to make quality presentations and not stop at making text fly all over the place. When teaching Word, make a part of the test "checking the spellchecker". See if students can determine whether the spellchecker is accurate in its suggestions or not. What about a basic programming course that is founded upon demonstrating different logic models? An Intro to Computers course could include sample phishing scams and require students to correctly identify why a given example is a phishing scam. Once the basics are in, THEN go deeper and explain HOW DNS hijacking works, HOW monitors display pixels, WHY bad RAM can crash a machine, because now it relates to things they already know.
Teaching computers only works in the context of teaching how the computer is streamlining a task that was once done manually. Networking and low level hardware functions are great (I'm a network admin myself), but teaching them to everyone is like teaching physics in second grade - relevant to what they're doing, but to foundational to serve a purpose to most.
The only example for which I'll say [citation needed] is Bioware. I loved Mass Effect, Bioware got bought out, and Mass Effect 2 I liked even better. Granted much of the code had likely been written before the acquisition, and I know that ME2 charged for most of the DLC, but the flip side to that was that there were only two DLC packs for ME1, one paid, one free. ME2 has had several DLC packs.
Granted I haven't played DragonAge or, well, pretty much any other Bioware title, but I'm wondering if the effect you're describing hasn't influenced Bioware, or it simply hasn't influenced Bioware YET. I guess the true test will happen in a year or two when ME3 comes out =)
What may work for you in this case is to either partition the drive or connect a separate external, then grab a copy of Microsoft SteadyState. Once you've got the thing clean (i.e. thorough scans with multiple apps, all patches installed, etc.), direct her My Documents directory to the separate drive/partion, and install SteadyState. She can install 1,001 trojans if she wants, but the cleanup process will always be the same: reboot. The computer will revert itself to its previous state, and any new data on the drive will be erased. Windows updates and most virus scanner definitions will be installed automatically, and SS has a few other options that can be used to prevent software installs and similar. I had a friend who was similarly skilled at infecting her machine, always pleading ignorance as to why she kept getting her machine infected...then I installed SteadyState and she hasn't gotten one since.
Admittedly, the only doozy is keeping non-virus scanner apps updated. Flash and similar programs need to be kept up-to-date, and the "unlock/patch/relock" process can take a bit more time and planning.
...are the guys to pay attention to with regards to software upgrades. Depending on the carriers to provide WinMo upgrades is as reliable as Dell providing laptop video driver upgrades quicker than the guys over at Laptopvideo2go.
The difference between an ATM and a photo kiosk is that the only forms of input into the system are the debit card (which is programmed by the bank) and the keypad or touch screen input. Users don't bring in their own infected media to use with it.
Also, the odds are extremely good that at some point, your financial data will involve a Windows terminal. If it makes you feel any better, there are some pretty tight regulations as to how heavily locked down bank systems have to be. Even if you see a bank teller using Windows XP, I guarantee you he/she isn't running as admin, and probably has default-deny permissions for just about everything. Just because Windows doesn't come out of the box very secure doesn't mean that there aren't a few dozen computer techs on the other side responsible for locking it down to the point where it is actually secure enough to do what it does.
You're probably correct in that a determined virus writer won't be stopped by something like file permissions. However, the nature of publicly accessible computers dealing with everyone's removable storage means that the likelihood of someone with infected media using it is a near certainty. Will things like changing permissions and disabling autorun stop every virus out there? of course not. Will it stop half of them? Quite likely. Can other kiosk-side measures be implemented to reduce infection even further? I'd wager they could. It's not about stopping everyone, it's about adding layers to make it progressively more difficult so that only the most determined of attacks gets through.
...and now the customers aren't getting critical security patches because Apple only wants to deal with their most current hardware configs?
Well if YOU want to develop an exploit that turns iPhone 2G units into a botnet, but doesn't involve multitasking and won't kill the user's battery to an appreciable extent (5% they don't notice, 50% they do), then go right ahead. If that weren't enough, remember that they basically only run on EDGE, so you'll be pumping out packets at a blazing 4-10 KBytes/sec. I'd applaud you even at that point, but you will have my eternal adoration if you can pull off a successful DDoS on AT&T's cellular network.
When I've researched the electronic recycling services, many seem to charge to take your gear. Even the one or two I recall that would take your stuff would make you pay for shipping. For the PCMCIA cards that may be a trivial amount, but depending on how much gear you've got and how much it weighs, it can add up fast.
Like was said in the summary, the routers would be to (optionally) add alternative firmware on them and repurpose them as a firewall or network switch. the PCMCIA cards either pay for recycling, sell on eBay, donate to charity, or throw away. IME that pretty much sums up the options.
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You'd be hard pressed to find a 15-year-old motherboard that could handle 768MB of RAM either. Also in Win95's defense, there were a lot fewer compatibility issues between Win3.1 software running on Win95 than between Win98 and XP. I've got a shelf full of games that won't run on XP without some flavor of emulation, but will run on both 3.1 and 95.
Let me ask you a question. It's a one word one too...
Dinosaurs.
Let me answer your question. It's a one word one too...
Dragons.
To expound on it, the word 'dinosaur' is relatively new, but references to dragons can be found throughout literature of antiquity, including references within the Bible (the Behemoth and the Leviathan being the most famous). The belief in the existence of dinosaurs and the belief in a young earth are not mutually exclusive.
As several people have pointed out, the headline and the patent reading are just slightly different.
That said, I can think of a few incredibly trivial ways that Apple/AT&T could have done this a long time ago:
-Compare the cell number with a list of cell numbers that AT&T has registered. When I had an iPhone, iTunes would display my cell number, even though it was dished out by T-Mobile. If they wanted to prevent the use of SIM unlocked units, that seems to be the simplest method of doing so. Substitute cell number with SIM card ID or similar.
-Block access to known Cydia repos and/or the jailbreak sites.
-Scan for programs and folders associated with jailbroken phones (SwirlyMMS, Winterboard, Icy, etc.)
All of these would have worked just fine for the past four years, but as yet none have been implemented. If Apple truly wanted to prevent users from jailbreaking and/or SIM unlocking, it's been simple to do for some time using methods that don't require a patent. I'm not saying that Apple is necessarily happy with the jailbreak scene, but I don't consider it beyond the realm of possibility that there's been some degree of unwilling aversion to an all-out war against the jailbreakers, though the hardware-level anti-jailbreak widget they added into the 3GS does put that theory on shaky ground as well.
I'm sure a significant percentage of slashdotters either have second hard disks in their machines or some type of NAS system. The issue is that while we can easily say "40GB should be a good enough C: drive for anybody", that's only because we have a few terabytes within an ethernet cable's reach to store other stuff on. Consider the average Joe/Jane who has a 12-megapixel camera and a sizeable iTunes library. Even if we assume that they don't have a single XviD or MKV file on their drive, that just music and photos would start to make that C drive VERY cramped given the absence of another device to put it on. I've got friends whose Windows/Program Files directories can fit inside 15GB, and even their "My Documents" folder can keep that number inside 20, but their music/photo/video folders are easily north of 100GB. I agree with another poster that says that if you're going to pay a premium for the speed an SSD affords, you're not above paying an extra $75 for a WD Passport drive to carry your media on. The issue is convincing Joe and Jane Public of this, rather than having them say "ZoMg ThIs DrIvE iS tInY i CaNt FiT nEtHiNg On It!!!!1111"
I'm 99% in agreement with you. I agree that not everyone is going to gravitate towards tech, I agree that we need experts in every field, as well as "non-experts" like cashiers and fast food workers (I've done both personally; this isn't a slur).
The one point of contention I do have is more implicit. You don't have to be Cisco/MSCE/Linux/A+ certified to use some critical thinking skills. For example, I wouldn't necessarily expect end users to do port translation on a router without a tutorial (and even then, asking someone more knowledgable for some assistance). However, I've had people say to me things like, "My computer was working just fine, but it got really slow over the past week. Also, this virus thing keeps popping up. Could it be the huge amount of music or photos on my computer?" A little critical thinking would say, "Well, I've been adding photos and music to my computer for the past two years, but this slowdown only happened recently. This virus warning thing just started coming up right around the time that my computer got slower, and I don't remember intentionally installing a virus scanner..." It doesn't take all kinds of computer skills to apply just a little bit of thinking through a problem. My mechanic never studied computers, but he's actually pretty savvy and has changed out his own hard drives, backs up his stuff, and configured his own routers with little to no help from me. The general process of troubleshooting cars and computers isn't all that far off. I'm sure there are plenty of doctors who, while they can't compile their own LFS installers, are a bit more savvy in diagnosing computer issues than their receptionist who's had her taskbar on the right of the screen for months 'cuz she can't figure out how to drag it back down.
The issue isn't that experts in one field aren't experts in another. The issue is that the art if thinking critically has been downplayed. I'm pretty solidly convinced that teaching three terms of critical thinking and one term of MS Office in a single year of high school would yield a similar amount of skill as a full year of Office.
The implication of the GGGP was that things were purchased from the iTunes Media Store, or however you want to collectively term the content purchased through Apple using iTunes software. My point was that the iTMS isn't limited to audio files, and while you correctly stated that music files sold through them are regular AAC files, other content available is still DRM laden. The post wasn't specific as to what type of content was causing the problem.
I believe there was a comment on an article some time ago about this. The way I remember it is that MS and Apple have foundationally different methods of thought when it comes to how to render fonts. Apple's logic is "accuracy is supreme". If, for example, one were to generate a character whose dimensions were smaller than the DPI of the monitor, Apple machines would display an illegible - but accurately scaled - blob representing that character. This is among the reasons why graphic designers prefer the platform; for them getting the spacing and alignment is more important than being able to read it on their monitor. MS's logic goes something like "legibility is key". In the same example above, the character will not be rendered completely accurately, but the user will be able to recognize the character on the screen. For users predominantly dealing with data on their monitors, it makes more sense to do it this way.
I apologize for the lack of citations.
DRM? App store? Open formats? You're talking about an iPod syncing with linux, so you must be talking about music? The Apple store hasn't sold DRMed music in years.
That may be true, but movies, TV episodes, and eBooks are still lovingly shackled in DRM that prevents it from being played back using non-Apple software or hardware. Technically this is true for Apps as well (which also include various flavors of DRM), but I'll give them a pass on that since it's software for their own platform.
I, and presumably most of the rest of the crowd here at Slashdot, are in agreement with you on both accounts. The issue is everyone else...
-OS/Driver/App discs were the standard, and should still be so in an ideal world. The problem is that everyone wants a cheap computer. That Norton demo probably shaved $2 off the cost of your laptop. The Lite version of Nero another $2. That eBay icon cut another dollar off. Lather, rinse, repeat, and all that bundleware probably shaved $20-$50 off the cost of your machine. The problem was that users were only being subjected to it the first time they unboxed it, never when they recovered. If you're going to give HP/Dell/Acer/Sony between six and eight figures to load your crap, you want to make sure that the investment pays off as practically as possible. Whether OEMs were able to get more money by slipstreaming the bloat into the recovery media or the third parties were threatening to kill off the revenue stream, I don't know, but it simply makes business sense to do it this way.
-Recovery media gives a known starting point. Windows/OS/App discs allow end users to make decisions during the restoration process. While the Slashdot crowd can make competent decisions, I'd wager that at least 7 out of 10 Dell/HP customers couldn't successfully bring their machine back to the official factory spec using windows/driver/app discs. As such, the support burden increases instead of decreases. Recovery media gives a few prompts, and then doesn't prompt the user to do anything but swap discs thereafter.
-Recovery partitions helped solve the "I put my discs in a safe place" and the "I threw them out...they weren't just packaging?" problems. My solution to this would have been to put the discs in a sleeve inside the case and then have the user access them when told to by support, but the partition thing does solve the problem as well.
-I had a friend once who made the mistake of letting her son on her laptop - the only more problematic mistake was letting the son attempt to fix it. He triggered the system recovery option and restored it to its out-of-the-box glory. Well, among the things HP did right was to back up the profile folder before performing the restore. A little digging on the hard drive showed that all of her documents were still intact, so the child lived. Is she a dolt for not having her stuff backed up? yes. Did this give her the scare she needed to back up more regularly? you bet. Nonetheless, OS/driver/app discs don't perform that task automatically; they're not designed to do that.
-While recovery partitions and applications take an age and a half to burn the media, it does provide two advantages over ISOs. First, it accomodates different media. End users can burn their recovery discs on CD-R, DVD-R, or DVD-R DL media. Redundant ISO files for each flavor of media starts to take up ridiculous amounts of hard disk space, especially if it's in addition to a recovery partition. Second, the utilities I've used have run a read verification pass before asking for the next disc. It does take hours to burn the discs, but you know they'll work when you need them.
In summary, I agree with your premise that I'd prefer plain discs over specialized recovery media. I also realize that between trusting end users with Windows/Driver install discs and recovery media that does all the thinking for them, I can't possibly blame OEMs for going the recovery route. The only other thing I could think of that might work better would be to license some Acronis code and, after the user has run through all the first-run dialogs, have Acronis image the drive to optical media.
I think the best compromise would be to provide plain discs for order or ISO download at a nominal fee; my time is worth the $14.95 I'd save doing a vanilla Windows install.
I think you're on to something. It's only been recently that VZW phones have started to get integrated Wi-Fi. For example, the Blackberry Curve 8330 didn't have Wi-Fi capability at all, so there was no means of offloading traffic. Verizon traditionally prevented handsets from having Wi-Fi capabilities up until fairly recently. Personally, I probably *would* have been using Wi-Fi more often when I had a Curve if it was available. I think the answer is going to change whether the statistics are taken at the handset level, not at the network level. Handset level stats will display what users are actually doing, while network level stats could show that VZW customers may simply spit more data out of their baseband than AT&T customers.
And full-on developer tools for free. Not an incentive for 99% of the Mac userbase, but I find it really nice.
While granted that it's not quite their kitchen-sink professional bundles, Microsoft does offer Visual Studio Express, Web Developer Express, and SQL Server Express for free to any Windows user.
http://www.microsoft.com/express/
Just saying that first party dev tools aren't Mac exclusive.
Here is how it's unfair:
I work for my employer. They give me money, so they get to determine what I'm allowed to do on the internet while they're paying me. If they blacklist/whitelist sites on their machines, that's fine. They paid for those machines, they pay for the bandwidth, and they pay for my time. They get to pick what I do with their time and equipment.
I give money to my ISP. It is a world of difference when I pay someone for their services, then they decide how those services can be used.
In other words, the golden rule (i.e. he who has the gold makes the rules) applies unequally between the two. Herein lies the problem.
Requiring real names, as opposed to the long established Internet practice of using handles, is a risk for people's privacy, and also means that some people may restrict what they can talk about on Facebook, out of fear of family/potential-employers etc reading.
I'ma kinda say "duh" on this one. Facebook (and Myspace before it), by the very nature of its existence, is designed to be almost "anti-anonymous". I have a Facebook so people *can* contact me that way as a digital extension of previously established relationships. If you don't want your family finding out that you were trashed in Vegas last weekend, either don't have them as Facebook friends, or don't post the photos on Facebook. If you want to share photos, add them to Flikr/Photobucket/Imageshack and give out the URL to whoever you want to view them. If I wanted to blog things concerning topics at variance with the pastors in my church (many of whom are my Facebook friends), I'd hit up Blogspot and make an anonymous blog where the anonymity you're speaking of is still alive and well.
Joey
While I agree with the general sentiment, I disagree with the implementation in this case. Yes, I'm no fan of 5MB Excel spreadsheets, either. However, look at it from the user's perspective. They don't pick up software as naturally as you and I do. While some people are just stupid, most of the users at my office aren't technical enough to just look at a piece of software and immediately understand it, or think beyond their daily grind. They may be great at other things (one woman here is an amazing Italian cook, another guy here helped me start out my business records in Peachtree Accounting, etc.), but it's a bit unfair to expect them to have a way of thinking that falls in line with the computer systems.
Think about it: It wasn't elegant, and it was a bit large, but ultimately you got the screenshot you needed, and the message was conveyed, right? Consider the user's perspective: they had to send a screenshot, they knew how to paste it into Excel and send it, and it probably took them all of about two minutes to do. Even if you say "well can't they send it in MS Paint?", you'd be accurate, but that still requires an alternate workflow that users don't normally use, in addition to extra steps (e-mailing an Excel spreadsheet is an explicit menu option, e-mailing from paint involves save and attach). For some users, this can take several times longer than the excel workaround.
It also depends on the frequency of a given task. An occasional excel file with a screengrab is an inelegant, yet effective means to an end. Daily screenshots warrant a copy of Gadwin Printscreen or SnagIt. Using Excel for a list is one thing and its inelegance with larger lists is understandable if there are calculations involved, but there is a point at which the amount of time to teach the users to use Access is less than they'd spend squeezing Excel into a database role.
The issue is that in the good ol' days, there was much less lock-in. To a certain extent, that's true as well. If a waitress is rude to me at Applebees, I won't eat there anymore. If a can of soup is not to my liking, I'll purchase a different brand. If my web hosting company treats me poorly, I'll switch to another provider. In these cases, one pays directly for a service with no intertia to overcome.
By contrast, Facebook is where all of my friends are. Its private messaging function has largely replaced personal e-mail. My cell phone integrates seamlessly with Facebook and automatically updates their status, their photo, and their birthday in my calendar (as well as any events that I RSVP as attending). There are people with whom the only method of communication I have with them is through Facebook.
In Facebook's defense, they solved a LOT of problems that Myspace had in its heydey. From simple things like requiring real names instead of handles to display to people ('cuz x0x0LaTiNaLoVeRx0x with a picture of a palm tree makes perfect sense to me), to issues with spam (I constantly got friend requests and messages from "18 and have a webcam" chiqs, rare if ever on FB), to not allowing custom HTML (have you seen some of the God-awful crap that people cut-and-pasted together? half the pages there took forever to load and looked like someone swalllowed all of Geocities and Xanga and vomited it onto a web server) to just a general community shift from being who you want people to think you are and begging for comments to just putting out there who you are and not having arguments over whether you're in someone's top 8 or not. It was really only a matter of time before the holes in Facebook's systems were exploited.
Privacy issues are just inherent with giving a company - be it Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or whoever - the amount of personal data a typical Facebook page contains. I wonder how many people complaining about the security being slowly relaxed over time have actually made specifications as to what they want, or whether they have their own profiles on the defaults.
The thing that irks me the most about Facebook with regards to privacy was how they defaulted to making your info available to basically everyone. Targeted ads within Facebook are one thing - bandwidth isn't free, and neither is hard disk space. I, for one, don't mind targeted ads. I'd much rather see an ad for the new Above and Beyond album than for Kotex. I do have an issue when I post a status update regarding owning an HTC phone, and suddenly half the banner ads on the websites I visit thereafter involve the latest HTC gear. That's just plain creepy, and yes, I turned it off once I realized that it was there.
In summary, having users come back when they're happy is still accurate, except in cases when there is lock-in (cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Facebook accounts, heck even MS Windows [for those of us with substantial hardware/software investments]). By its nature, Facebook will remain the de facto standard for social networking until they both royally screw up AND have a viable competitor ready to catch their fall.
The Republican party depends on a group of deeply delusional voters known as Evangelicals. That's why, in the 21st Century, there are elected officials pretending to be concerned about gay couples, pretending that evolution is a lie that shouldn't be taught as fact, and pretending that a woman's body is the property of the Federal Government.
And if you don't believe me, just look at how pathetic McCain was when he had to prostrate himself in front of these idiots: http://thinkprogress.org/mccain-flip-flops/
The Democratic party has it's fair share of hypocrites, but only one party demands delusion as part of their party platform. They are still demanding God be put back in Government, and pretending the founding fathers wanted the same thing. Their next sentence could be about the dangers of muslim theocracies, but their delusion is thought-proof. They know God chose America to fight Evil, just like their old hero President said himself: he answers to a higher father, even if the father he has in reality fought the same war against the same army only a decade earlier.
As someone who would probably fit the bill for an "Evangelical Voter", here are my views on the above. I'm not trying to flamebait. I'm simply expressing myself and my opinions and beliefs; I won't reply unless specifically asked a question by a responding post...
-I don't think Evolution is a lie. I believe that there are inconsistencies with it. I have no problem with the general concept of natural selection and the refining of a species as a whole as such. I have heard some admittedly thought-provoking responses as to how some of the inconsistencies could be addressed (i.e. the human eyes may have only been able to disinguish light and dark at first, but later became the refined visual receptors they are today. This works well for eyes and ears and similar, but for example the reproductive system cannot be explained by this particular logic). I have no problem with evolution being taught as a theory in science class; I learned it myself in high school (I went to a religious high school, BTW). I'll fully admit that Creation is only a theory and wasn't observed or measured, nor is it repeatable (by any known entity, anyway). However, my issue is that many who profess evolution as infallible truth that fully explains how life began is wrong. Both lines of thinking require some degree of faith in things that are as yet unexplained (i.e. how the laws of physics came into existence, abiogenesis [admittedly hypothesized, but never proven], inconsistencies in the fossil record, etc.), yet while I'm fully aware that I cannot explain how God came into existence and will readily admit that my faith fills those gaps, few evolutionists will admit the same, especially in a classroom. All I'm looking for is a textbook where everything is considered.
-My opinion on gay marriage tends to go counter to my general party line. I've got a few stipulations, but here's my take on it. My belief system states that God established the concept of marriage and that the union of souls is a sacred construct done, as is commonly stated, "in the sight of God". There is also the sociopolitical aspect of marriage - state licenses, certificates, tax brackets - all that good stuff. The two of them are different aspects of the same action, and are ordained by different entities (again, most pastors/rabbis will say "By the power vested in me by God, and the State of ($YOUR_STATE)...)". Finally, I believe that the Bible declares homosexuality a sin, and by extension I don't believe that God will ordain a marriage between two like-gendered individuals. If a state wants to give a marriage license to a gay couple, as long as religious organizations are not required to perform them, I have no problem with a homosexual couple heading over to town hall and getting married.
-You'll be VERY hard pressed to find a single person who believes that a female body is the property o
I half agree with you. I agree that unfortunately too many schools teach keyboarding and MS Office as the beginning, middle, and end of their curricula, and that's def a problem. In their defense, many of the people resonsible for bringing computers into education aren't versed in much more than the above skills, and everyone in my office uses a productivity suite. Even if you're going to be an architect, knowing how to properly use Word isn't necessarily a bad thing - have you the slightest idea how many people make a new page by hitting 'enter' repeatedly instead of using a page break? I think that Office as a part of a larger curriculum is good, but like you I disagree that it should be the foundation of it. I think you also have the order flip-flopped a bit.
Teaching the fundamental electrical functions and multi-level programming to elementary school students is going to make very little sense, because it's just theoretical and bears no resemblance to anything they'd be dealing with ordinarily. To take the same logic, they should learn nothing but math, then move on to physics, and so on, when in reality counting their crayons would be a real-world reinforcement of basic arithmetic.
In my opinion, the better version of your foundational premise (moving away from typing and office into a more diverse curriculum) would be to start a lesson using manual methods, then advancing to using computers. Teach graphic design principles, color matching, and basic drawing paradigms, THEN say "here is Photoshop and Illustrator". Powerpoint could be taught alongside the other graphic design applications, and students could critique each other as to how effectively they use design principles, thus learning how to make quality presentations and not stop at making text fly all over the place. When teaching Word, make a part of the test "checking the spellchecker". See if students can determine whether the spellchecker is accurate in its suggestions or not. What about a basic programming course that is founded upon demonstrating different logic models? An Intro to Computers course could include sample phishing scams and require students to correctly identify why a given example is a phishing scam. Once the basics are in, THEN go deeper and explain HOW DNS hijacking works, HOW monitors display pixels, WHY bad RAM can crash a machine, because now it relates to things they already know.
Teaching computers only works in the context of teaching how the computer is streamlining a task that was once done manually. Networking and low level hardware functions are great (I'm a network admin myself), but teaching them to everyone is like teaching physics in second grade - relevant to what they're doing, but to foundational to serve a purpose to most.
The only example for which I'll say [citation needed] is Bioware. I loved Mass Effect, Bioware got bought out, and Mass Effect 2 I liked even better. Granted much of the code had likely been written before the acquisition, and I know that ME2 charged for most of the DLC, but the flip side to that was that there were only two DLC packs for ME1, one paid, one free. ME2 has had several DLC packs.
Granted I haven't played DragonAge or, well, pretty much any other Bioware title, but I'm wondering if the effect you're describing hasn't influenced Bioware, or it simply hasn't influenced Bioware YET. I guess the true test will happen in a year or two when ME3 comes out =)
What may work for you in this case is to either partition the drive or connect a separate external, then grab a copy of Microsoft SteadyState. Once you've got the thing clean (i.e. thorough scans with multiple apps, all patches installed, etc.), direct her My Documents directory to the separate drive/partion, and install SteadyState. She can install 1,001 trojans if she wants, but the cleanup process will always be the same: reboot. The computer will revert itself to its previous state, and any new data on the drive will be erased. Windows updates and most virus scanner definitions will be installed automatically, and SS has a few other options that can be used to prevent software installs and similar. I had a friend who was similarly skilled at infecting her machine, always pleading ignorance as to why she kept getting her machine infected...then I installed SteadyState and she hasn't gotten one since.
Admittedly, the only doozy is keeping non-virus scanner apps updated. Flash and similar programs need to be kept up-to-date, and the "unlock/patch/relock" process can take a bit more time and planning.
the guys at xda-devs
...are the guys to pay attention to with regards to software upgrades. Depending on the carriers to provide WinMo upgrades is as reliable as Dell providing laptop video driver upgrades quicker than the guys over at Laptopvideo2go.
The difference between an ATM and a photo kiosk is that the only forms of input into the system are the debit card (which is programmed by the bank) and the keypad or touch screen input. Users don't bring in their own infected media to use with it.
Also, the odds are extremely good that at some point, your financial data will involve a Windows terminal. If it makes you feel any better, there are some pretty tight regulations as to how heavily locked down bank systems have to be. Even if you see a bank teller using Windows XP, I guarantee you he/she isn't running as admin, and probably has default-deny permissions for just about everything. Just because Windows doesn't come out of the box very secure doesn't mean that there aren't a few dozen computer techs on the other side responsible for locking it down to the point where it is actually secure enough to do what it does.
You're probably correct in that a determined virus writer won't be stopped by something like file permissions. However, the nature of publicly accessible computers dealing with everyone's removable storage means that the likelihood of someone with infected media using it is a near certainty. Will things like changing permissions and disabling autorun stop every virus out there? of course not. Will it stop half of them? Quite likely. Can other kiosk-side measures be implemented to reduce infection even further? I'd wager they could. It's not about stopping everyone, it's about adding layers to make it progressively more difficult so that only the most determined of attacks gets through.
Dude, my monochrome screen Nokia 6800 from 2004 had seven bars. You def got screwed, Rob :-P
...and now the customers aren't getting critical security patches because Apple only wants to deal with their most current hardware configs?
Well if YOU want to develop an exploit that turns iPhone 2G units into a botnet, but doesn't involve multitasking and won't kill the user's battery to an appreciable extent (5% they don't notice, 50% they do), then go right ahead. If that weren't enough, remember that they basically only run on EDGE, so you'll be pumping out packets at a blazing 4-10 KBytes/sec. I'd applaud you even at that point, but you will have my eternal adoration if you can pull off a successful DDoS on AT&T's cellular network.
When I've researched the electronic recycling services, many seem to charge to take your gear. Even the one or two I recall that would take your stuff would make you pay for shipping. For the PCMCIA cards that may be a trivial amount, but depending on how much gear you've got and how much it weighs, it can add up fast.
Like was said in the summary, the routers would be to (optionally) add alternative firmware on them and repurpose them as a firewall or network switch. the PCMCIA cards either pay for recycling, sell on eBay, donate to charity, or throw away. IME that pretty much sums up the options.