Also as Ghost Crawler kind of alluded to, one is more less necessary, the other is kinda nice to have. As long as my raid group has one guy willing to parse the combat logs and tell us what went right and what went wrong in that last attempt, we could mostly do without Recount. It's nice to have. It's a friendly face on a lot of ugly numbers. It's great that I can get information in real time on what I personally did right or wrong in that last fight, while the guild is busy analyzing the bigger picture. All in all though, we could clear content without Recount.
The threat meter is arguably much more "necessary". I need to know, in real time, during the fight, if I'm about to pull aggro. Without that information I'm going to be as shocked as everyone else when the baddie turns around and one shots me. In a fight where things are tuned to the point that I must do very close to my maximum possible DPS in order to beat an enrage timer, some kind of threat meter is critical.
Corporations are not, last I checked, people. They contain people, certainly, and those people have rights. The corporation itself has no essential rights. You can't give "natural" rights to an artificial construct. People have rights. Corporations have privileges granted by law. Mostly because they only exist in law. Barring extreme situations like horrible accidents, birth defects or the future creation or discovery of non-human intelligence, I'm quite happy with the theory that if I can't shake it's hand, it's not a person.
You know that's an interesting point. It's a completely logical extension of "Corporations have Free Speech rights", to "Corporations have all first amendment rights". Corporations with "freedom of religious expression" make me a little scared (could be an interesting end run around civil rights legislation), but there's definitely a sufficient conflict between the individual rights of employees and the "rights" of the corporation to make that at least a less likely problem. It's not a big logical step from there to "Corporations have the right to bear arms". That's a scary idea.
Slippery slope arguments are often silly and convoluted, but in this case it's really *not* a huge jump from "Corporations have *this* Constitutional Right" to "Corporations have all Constitutional rights". One really does imply the other. Of course there's lots of interpretation to be done on what it would *mean* that Corporations have these rights (I mean, they're not cognizant sent entities with a single opinion), but the idea that they do *have* them is a short logical jump from this decision. That's more than a bit concerning.
What about using the kinetic energy from like arm swings or something to turn mini turbines on a wrist band or something (along the line of those self winding watches, but converting the energy to electricity and storing it in small batteries). Of course now we're back to having got wear something... Having a turbine, no matter how small, implanted just sound unpleasant.
Thanks! I'll point the IA wogs at it if they haven't already started looking through it. Of course, getting that is only stage 1, but it's nice to know it's out there now.
I think you're underestimating the level of conservatism at many very large companies' IT shops. Relative quality of the OSes aside (I agree that 7 is much better), I guarantee you that there will be shops which consider Vista "more mature" by sheer virtue of age and move onto it instead of 7. There are also doubtless shops that starting a migration to Vista before 7 was even released, and will continue on sheer force of momentum.
It sounds like you work in a shop where technician input is expected and respected. Sadly not all shops are like that (and not all technicians are smart, either). I agree that most shops will probably jump straight to 7, but I'm quite certain that there will be many that go to Vista when the time comes too.
In the early days if you got it on a new system built with Vista in mind it wasn't bad. The problems came with all those that tried to upgrade had issues getting drivers for hardware, software that ran just fine on XP was having problems, and it forced people who were sitting on almost 10 year old computers to have to buy new ones to be able to run it.
It was worse than that. Companies were selling brand spanking new computers with insufficient resources, badly written drivers, etc as "Vista Ready" or even with Vista preinstalled. Got a brand new HP laptop for my wife about four-six months after Vista release (I don't remember exactly), it was terrible. It wouldn't do anything that even looked like 3d graphics. It came with a gig of RAM that I immediately upgrade to two gigs, and it was still a dog. It wouldn't even play World of Warcraft, which was even then a pretty old game graphics wise. It was like watching a slide show on even the lowest settings. I had to downgrade the machine to XP to make it functional.
I've since put Vista (and later Windows 7, now Ubuntu) back on it and it ran fine. There was clearly some kind of graphics card driver issues or something (yes I upgraded to the latest version at the time). None the less, the whole experience soured me on Vista. It's also clear, even now, that while Vista run acceptably on the system, Windows 7 runs better. It's just a better, clearly more mature, OS.
1) Many companies (and governments) have glacially slow approval processes for new OSes. My facility would like to move to Windows 7, but there's still no official DoD hardening and approval process for it. Since we're planning to jump over Vista straight to 7 we're on XP till we get official blessing.
2) A *staggering* number of companies still need IE6 for various internal web apps. A little hunting will turn up companies still selling solutions that require IE6 right now, as XP runs down the clock on even security support. Someone must be buying this crap, though I can't imagine who or why. I don't know which is worse, that Microsoft made IE6 so standards incompatible that this happened in the first place, or that they then immediately reversed course and left all these standard's non-compliant apps hanging. (Though at this point the companies still using them have no one to blame but themselves, XPs retirement schedule has been public for a good long time).
3) A lot of companies just don't feel the need. XP has the distinction of being probably the first Microsoft OS that really worked so well that there's not a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade it (besides its support clock running down). DirectX 10 is mostly unimportant to business, and the rest of Vista and 7's improvements can often be matched by just installing 3rd party software on XP (which many businesses did long before 7 was available). There's some really nice functions in the newest version of AD, but so far MS hasn't allowed XP-AD integration to break.
I suspect the only thing that will actually force companies to upgrade will be XP finally becoming completely unsupported. Even then I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of companies jump to Vista instead of 7 on the theory that it's been around longer and is therefore better supported.
Should Steam, Direct2Drive, etc (and IE or other browsers for that matter!) now be required options in OSX? Because as you said, it's just not good business to let someone compete with you if you don't have to - that's why governments stepped in with the MS situation...
Two points here:
1) I never said Apple shouldn't allow people to compete with them, I said they'd be foolish to do most of the work for the completion. There already is competition. I, for one, don't see people abandoning Steam for games just because the app store exists. Steam has a solid reputation for good games, fair prices, and minimally onerous DRM.
2) The government put the hammer down on Microsoft because they were being anti competitive and had a 95-97% market share. Apple is no where near that in any of the markets they play in, desktop computers least of all. All companies are anti competitive. It's everyone's goal to be like Microsoft was back then, with the huge and incredibly dominate market share of a quickly growing market. Once you get there though, you have to follow different rules.
There's several variations on this reply, so I'll address yours and hope the others read it. Put simply there's no business case for doing what you suggest. Consider: apt-get and yum are designed for developers and users by developers and users. It's in the interest of the developers to make the system work with multiple repositories because it's likely to make their lives easier too. This system is designed by a for profit company. What you're asking them to do is not simply be "open" you're asking them to give their competitors a leg up to compete with them.
You're asking then not merely to allow competition with their app store, but essentially say to potential competitors: "Hey look, we did most of the work for you. All the API's are there and you can hook into them. Just get some cheap bandwidth, hook up a repo and charge a fraction of what we are, kay?" It would be suicidal.
They're already allowing competing repo systems to exist. There's at least two that I'm aware of Fink (which is a more or less standard Free software repo system based on apt-get) and Steam (a direct commercial competitor, albeit narrowly focused). I know there's a couple more Free apt-get style systems to, though I don't know names. There's nothing stopping another company from building yet another system if they want. Just don't expect Apple to hand over the keys.
Please note that I no point have I argued that this system is better than, or even as good as, Linux repo systems. I'm sure it will have better aspects (Apple rarely releases something that's not pretty polished), but it will also be more limited in same ways. That's fine. If I want to use something like apt-get I'll use Fink. If I need a commercial app, I'll check this store. Just because it's not just like apt-get doesn't make it evil.
OK, this is try number three after tries one and two were eaten by/. It's already ported Fink is apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X-11 stuff, to my knowledge there no native Aqua apps. I don't think this is because of any technical limitations of the port... The maintainers are just focused on "traditional" Unix apps.
OK, this is try number three after tries one and two were eaten by/. It's already ported Fink is apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X-11 stuff, to my knowledge there no native Aqua apps. I don't think this is because of any technical limitations of the port... The maintainers are just focused on "traditional" Unix apps.
OK, this is try number three after tries one and two were eaten by/. It's already ported Fink is apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X-11 stuff, to my knowledge there no native Aqua apps. I don't think this is because of any technical limitations of the port... The maintainers are just focused on "traditional" Unix apps.
It's already ported. Fink is essentially apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X windows apps, I'm not aware of any native Aqua apps... But I don't see any technical reason why there couldn't be. I think it's just a choice on the part of the maintainers to focus on "traditional" Unix apps.
It's already ported. You can already use apt-get to install software from a number of free software repositories on MacOS. I haven't had a Mac in a couple of years now so I'm a little out of date. I've heard Fink is pretty much much dead, but there's a new app repository now. Typically you can't get Aqua apps this way, it's mostly console apps and X Windows apps, but that appears to have more to do with who's submitting apps to the repo than any inherent weakness in the software.
But Apple can't be blamed for that. You want your programs to use their repository features you submit it to their repository. Just like if you want you programs to be included in a Linux repository you submit it to the repository maintainer. I'm fairly certain the repo maintainers don't troll the Internet looking for apps to include, then beg the authors for.rpms or.debs. If your app isn't accepted by the maintainer, it doesn't get included (which I'm sure happens with Linux repos too. I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.)
Apple is providing a service. Follow there rules and you can use the service. Choose not to use the service, or chose not to follow their rules, and you have either provide your own service or use a different one. I'm personally quite convinced they aren't going to lock down other methods of installation. If I'm wrong, then I won't purchase the operating system "upgrade" that includes this "feature" and my next computer won't be a Mac.
You're right... I badly misremembered the numbers. Of course it only reinforces my point, but yeah... By estimates I meant population estimates, of course the number of addresses is absolute.
Current estimates are that IPv6 has sufficient address space to assign every living human approximately 4 billion IPs. I could assign an IP to every single item I own down to the spare buttons for my shirts, and the unused sandwich bags in my pantry, and not even get to the first percent of my "allocation". The population of earth could increase by an order of magnitude and we'd all *still* have a few million addresses for our very own... we won't have anywhere to stand, but we'll have plenty of IP addresses. I don't think this will be a problem in the foreseeable future.
My point was more along the lines that Oracle seems to be trying to monetize Java in ways that Sun either couldn't or didn't. Maybe Oracle wanted to jack the license costs, maybe they yanked the license, maybe there was some question of the validity of the license. I don't know, but I tend to guess that Apple didn't pay one price for a perpetual license to produce Java VMs. The terms probably get renegotiated annually or something.
Sun never showed the least interest in what Google was doing with Android, Oracle bought them and, bam, lawsuit. There's a sea change in the way Java is being managed, and Apple may not want to risk the tides. Or they may have been told to go find a new beach.
Of course it's equally possible that Apple doesn't want to see Java apps in their new app store. *Shrug* Who knows.
You're missing the point. Every modern operating system has encryption built in to its lowest levels. He can't use a *computer* as the restriction is written. What's step one to using a system? Logging in, right? And what happens to your password when you log in? It's encrypted with a one way algorithm and compared to a known hash. "Well, you say, simply turn off logins on on the computer he uses." After all, nearly every system allows it to be turned off, and just boots to a single user's desktop. Only problem is that the capability is still there. He's not barred from using encryption, he's barred from using a computer with encryption software installed. Which is pretty much every computer with any operating system written in the last 15 years.
More to the point every modern operating system encrypts and decrypts passwords to provide login authentication. Even if you aren't *using* a password, the capability remains in anything other than a heavily hacked up Linux or *BSD system (You'd have to remove pretty much the entire authentication system, which would in turn break things like gdm, so you'd have to remove that...). You couldn't even hope to remove the capability from a Windows or Mac system. So basically this kid can use a computer which has had a custom operating system hacked together for it, but is otherwise screwed.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. 1) Android isn't really Java, so you'd need additional tools besides the JVM anyway, and 2) Oracle will almost certainly release their own JVM for Mac. It's too big a market to ignore. My guess it starting to lean towards: "They don't want to carry Java apps on their new app store". Which is hardly a big deal, since you can just install them independently of the app store.
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Also as Ghost Crawler kind of alluded to, one is more less necessary, the other is kinda nice to have. As long as my raid group has one guy willing to parse the combat logs and tell us what went right and what went wrong in that last attempt, we could mostly do without Recount. It's nice to have. It's a friendly face on a lot of ugly numbers. It's great that I can get information in real time on what I personally did right or wrong in that last fight, while the guild is busy analyzing the bigger picture. All in all though, we could clear content without Recount.
The threat meter is arguably much more "necessary". I need to know, in real time, during the fight, if I'm about to pull aggro. Without that information I'm going to be as shocked as everyone else when the baddie turns around and one shots me. In a fight where things are tuned to the point that I must do very close to my maximum possible DPS in order to beat an enrage timer, some kind of threat meter is critical.
Corporations are not, last I checked, people. They contain people, certainly, and those people have rights. The corporation itself has no essential rights. You can't give "natural" rights to an artificial construct. People have rights. Corporations have privileges granted by law. Mostly because they only exist in law. Barring extreme situations like horrible accidents, birth defects or the future creation or discovery of non-human intelligence, I'm quite happy with the theory that if I can't shake it's hand, it's not a person.
they do not have a "right" to bear arms
You know that's an interesting point. It's a completely logical extension of "Corporations have Free Speech rights", to "Corporations have all first amendment rights". Corporations with "freedom of religious expression" make me a little scared (could be an interesting end run around civil rights legislation), but there's definitely a sufficient conflict between the individual rights of employees and the "rights" of the corporation to make that at least a less likely problem. It's not a big logical step from there to "Corporations have the right to bear arms". That's a scary idea.
Slippery slope arguments are often silly and convoluted, but in this case it's really *not* a huge jump from "Corporations have *this* Constitutional Right" to "Corporations have all Constitutional rights". One really does imply the other. Of course there's lots of interpretation to be done on what it would *mean* that Corporations have these rights (I mean, they're not cognizant sent entities with a single opinion), but the idea that they do *have* them is a short logical jump from this decision. That's more than a bit concerning.
What about using the kinetic energy from like arm swings or something to turn mini turbines on a wrist band or something (along the line of those self winding watches, but converting the energy to electricity and storing it in small batteries). Of course now we're back to having got wear something... Having a turbine, no matter how small, implanted just sound unpleasant.
Thanks! I'll point the IA wogs at it if they haven't already started looking through it. Of course, getting that is only stage 1, but it's nice to know it's out there now.
I think you're underestimating the level of conservatism at many very large companies' IT shops. Relative quality of the OSes aside (I agree that 7 is much better), I guarantee you that there will be shops which consider Vista "more mature" by sheer virtue of age and move onto it instead of 7. There are also doubtless shops that starting a migration to Vista before 7 was even released, and will continue on sheer force of momentum.
It sounds like you work in a shop where technician input is expected and respected. Sadly not all shops are like that (and not all technicians are smart, either). I agree that most shops will probably jump straight to 7, but I'm quite certain that there will be many that go to Vista when the time comes too.
In the early days if you got it on a new system built with Vista in mind it wasn't bad. The problems came with all those that tried to upgrade had issues getting drivers for hardware, software that ran just fine on XP was having problems, and it forced people who were sitting on almost 10 year old computers to have to buy new ones to be able to run it.
It was worse than that. Companies were selling brand spanking new computers with insufficient resources, badly written drivers, etc as "Vista Ready" or even with Vista preinstalled. Got a brand new HP laptop for my wife about four-six months after Vista release (I don't remember exactly), it was terrible. It wouldn't do anything that even looked like 3d graphics. It came with a gig of RAM that I immediately upgrade to two gigs, and it was still a dog. It wouldn't even play World of Warcraft, which was even then a pretty old game graphics wise. It was like watching a slide show on even the lowest settings. I had to downgrade the machine to XP to make it functional.
I've since put Vista (and later Windows 7, now Ubuntu) back on it and it ran fine. There was clearly some kind of graphics card driver issues or something (yes I upgraded to the latest version at the time). None the less, the whole experience soured me on Vista. It's also clear, even now, that while Vista run acceptably on the system, Windows 7 runs better. It's just a better, clearly more mature, OS.
Mostly because of three things:
1) Many companies (and governments) have glacially slow approval processes for new OSes. My facility would like to move to Windows 7, but there's still no official DoD hardening and approval process for it. Since we're planning to jump over Vista straight to 7 we're on XP till we get official blessing.
2) A *staggering* number of companies still need IE6 for various internal web apps. A little hunting will turn up companies still selling solutions that require IE6 right now, as XP runs down the clock on even security support. Someone must be buying this crap, though I can't imagine who or why. I don't know which is worse, that Microsoft made IE6 so standards incompatible that this happened in the first place, or that they then immediately reversed course and left all these standard's non-compliant apps hanging. (Though at this point the companies still using them have no one to blame but themselves, XPs retirement schedule has been public for a good long time).
3) A lot of companies just don't feel the need. XP has the distinction of being probably the first Microsoft OS that really worked so well that there's not a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade it (besides its support clock running down). DirectX 10 is mostly unimportant to business, and the rest of Vista and 7's improvements can often be matched by just installing 3rd party software on XP (which many businesses did long before 7 was available). There's some really nice functions in the newest version of AD, but so far MS hasn't allowed XP-AD integration to break.
I suspect the only thing that will actually force companies to upgrade will be XP finally becoming completely unsupported. Even then I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of companies jump to Vista instead of 7 on the theory that it's been around longer and is therefore better supported.
Should Steam, Direct2Drive, etc (and IE or other browsers for that matter!) now be required options in OSX? Because as you said, it's just not good business to let someone compete with you if you don't have to - that's why governments stepped in with the MS situation...
Two points here:
1) I never said Apple shouldn't allow people to compete with them, I said they'd be foolish to do most of the work for the completion. There already is competition. I, for one, don't see people abandoning Steam for games just because the app store exists. Steam has a solid reputation for good games, fair prices, and minimally onerous DRM.
2) The government put the hammer down on Microsoft because they were being anti competitive and had a 95-97% market share. Apple is no where near that in any of the markets they play in, desktop computers least of all. All companies are anti competitive. It's everyone's goal to be like Microsoft was back then, with the huge and incredibly dominate market share of a quickly growing market. Once you get there though, you have to follow different rules.
There's several variations on this reply, so I'll address yours and hope the others read it. Put simply there's no business case for doing what you suggest. Consider: apt-get and yum are designed for developers and users by developers and users. It's in the interest of the developers to make the system work with multiple repositories because it's likely to make their lives easier too. This system is designed by a for profit company. What you're asking them to do is not simply be "open" you're asking them to give their competitors a leg up to compete with them.
You're asking then not merely to allow competition with their app store, but essentially say to potential competitors: "Hey look, we did most of the work for you. All the API's are there and you can hook into them. Just get some cheap bandwidth, hook up a repo and charge a fraction of what we are, kay?" It would be suicidal.
They're already allowing competing repo systems to exist. There's at least two that I'm aware of Fink (which is a more or less standard Free software repo system based on apt-get) and Steam (a direct commercial competitor, albeit narrowly focused). I know there's a couple more Free apt-get style systems to, though I don't know names. There's nothing stopping another company from building yet another system if they want. Just don't expect Apple to hand over the keys.
Please note that I no point have I argued that this system is better than, or even as good as, Linux repo systems. I'm sure it will have better aspects (Apple rarely releases something that's not pretty polished), but it will also be more limited in same ways. That's fine. If I want to use something like apt-get I'll use Fink. If I need a commercial app, I'll check this store. Just because it's not just like apt-get doesn't make it evil.
OK, this is try number three after tries one and two were eaten by /. It's already ported Fink is apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X-11 stuff, to my knowledge there no native Aqua apps. I don't think this is because of any technical limitations of the port... The maintainers are just focused on "traditional" Unix apps.
OK, this is try number three after tries one and two were eaten by /. It's already ported Fink is apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X-11 stuff, to my knowledge there no native Aqua apps. I don't think this is because of any technical limitations of the port... The maintainers are just focused on "traditional" Unix apps.
OK, this is try number three after tries one and two were eaten by /. It's already ported Fink is apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X-11 stuff, to my knowledge there no native Aqua apps. I don't think this is because of any technical limitations of the port... The maintainers are just focused on "traditional" Unix apps.
It's already ported. Fink is essentially apt-get for Macs. It's mostly console and X windows apps, I'm not aware of any native Aqua apps... But I don't see any technical reason why there couldn't be. I think it's just a choice on the part of the maintainers to focus on "traditional" Unix apps.
It's already ported. You can already use apt-get to install software from a number of free software repositories on MacOS. I haven't had a Mac in a couple of years now so I'm a little out of date. I've heard Fink is pretty much much dead, but there's a new app repository now. Typically you can't get Aqua apps this way, it's mostly console apps and X Windows apps, but that appears to have more to do with who's submitting apps to the repo than any inherent weakness in the software.
But Apple can't be blamed for that. You want your programs to use their repository features you submit it to their repository. Just like if you want you programs to be included in a Linux repository you submit it to the repository maintainer. I'm fairly certain the repo maintainers don't troll the Internet looking for apps to include, then beg the authors for .rpms or .debs. If your app isn't accepted by the maintainer, it doesn't get included (which I'm sure happens with Linux repos too. I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.)
Apple is providing a service. Follow there rules and you can use the service. Choose not to use the service, or chose not to follow their rules, and you have either provide your own service or use a different one. I'm personally quite convinced they aren't going to lock down other methods of installation. If I'm wrong, then I won't purchase the operating system "upgrade" that includes this "feature" and my next computer won't be a Mac.
This just in, Only by using Apple's central repository can you launch and update your apps through Apple's central repository... Err? Duh?
You're right... I badly misremembered the numbers. Of course it only reinforces my point, but yeah... By estimates I meant population estimates, of course the number of addresses is absolute.
Current estimates are that IPv6 has sufficient address space to assign every living human approximately 4 billion IPs. I could assign an IP to every single item I own down to the spare buttons for my shirts, and the unused sandwich bags in my pantry, and not even get to the first percent of my "allocation". The population of earth could increase by an order of magnitude and we'd all *still* have a few million addresses for our very own... we won't have anywhere to stand, but we'll have plenty of IP addresses. I don't think this will be a problem in the foreseeable future.
One way encryption is still encryption
My point was more along the lines that Oracle seems to be trying to monetize Java in ways that Sun either couldn't or didn't. Maybe Oracle wanted to jack the license costs, maybe they yanked the license, maybe there was some question of the validity of the license. I don't know, but I tend to guess that Apple didn't pay one price for a perpetual license to produce Java VMs. The terms probably get renegotiated annually or something.
Sun never showed the least interest in what Google was doing with Android, Oracle bought them and, bam, lawsuit. There's a sea change in the way Java is being managed, and Apple may not want to risk the tides. Or they may have been told to go find a new beach.
Of course it's equally possible that Apple doesn't want to see Java apps in their new app store. *Shrug* Who knows.
You're missing the point. Every modern operating system has encryption built in to its lowest levels. He can't use a *computer* as the restriction is written. What's step one to using a system? Logging in, right? And what happens to your password when you log in? It's encrypted with a one way algorithm and compared to a known hash. "Well, you say, simply turn off logins on on the computer he uses." After all, nearly every system allows it to be turned off, and just boots to a single user's desktop. Only problem is that the capability is still there. He's not barred from using encryption, he's barred from using a computer with encryption software installed. Which is pretty much every computer with any operating system written in the last 15 years.
Login authentication on modern OSes use encryption. He's pretty much screwed.
More to the point every modern operating system encrypts and decrypts passwords to provide login authentication. Even if you aren't *using* a password, the capability remains in anything other than a heavily hacked up Linux or *BSD system (You'd have to remove pretty much the entire authentication system, which would in turn break things like gdm, so you'd have to remove that...). You couldn't even hope to remove the capability from a Windows or Mac system. So basically this kid can use a computer which has had a custom operating system hacked together for it, but is otherwise screwed.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. 1) Android isn't really Java, so you'd need additional tools besides the JVM anyway, and 2) Oracle will almost certainly release their own JVM for Mac. It's too big a market to ignore. My guess it starting to lean towards: "They don't want to carry Java apps on their new app store". Which is hardly a big deal, since you can just install them independently of the app store.