And likely giving you access to an even larger catalog of music. No idea how expansive Lala's catalog was, but quite likely anything in it that was not in iTunes now is, and the new "iTunes Lala" will have all it plus anything iTunes had that Lala didn't (almost certainly some stuff, maybe a lot of stuff, I don't know).
a) Get your money back. In their extremises of evil Apple is apparently offering full refunds for the next month. b) Just buy some crap off of iTunes (borrow a friends computer or something) and move it to your Linux box through any of numerous modern file transfer utilities available. Why I understand that not only can Windows an Linux machines can use the same files systems on literally dozens of types of removable media, they have numerous network file transfer utilities that work on both. Most even work over the Internet. Astounding. It seems that the iTunes store has offered all of their music in an unencrypted and open format for quite some time now.
If I am not mistaken (and I may be), aac is MORE open than mp3. aac is an open standard (IIRC), whereas *technically* you're supposed to pay for an MP3 encoder/decoder. Not withstanding the fact that there are free mp3 encoder/decoders (which are technically illegal though not in any way likely to get you in trouble). At worst aac is no more encumbered than mp3, but I think it's actually more open.
This. If anyone is "evil" here it's the owners of Lala. You have this service. Lots of people like your service. You sell your service to a larger competitor, knowing full well they either a) plan to close it down and absorb everything useful, b) will give it half a chance, but in the end will probably shut it down and absorb it. Now the larger competitor is evil when they shut it down and absorb it? Since there was no hostile take over here, there are just a few possible scenarios:
1) Lala was doing well, but the owners wanted more. Apple offered them a large pile of money and they accepted. They knew Apple was planning to shut them down in the near future, and didn't care.
2) Lala was doing well, but the owners wanted more. Apple offered them a large pile of money and they accepted. Apple told them they had six months and X more piles of money to make the business profitable, or they would shut it down and absorb the useful bits. They failed. They probably cared some, but they would have shown it better if they'd just not sold out in the first place.
3) Lala was failing. Apple bought it and propped it up for an extra 6 months while they prepared to absorb it. The owners knew this, but either thought it was worth it to keep the service around as long as they could, or just wanted their parts of the pile of money.
4) Lala was failing. Apple bought it and propped it up for an extra 6 months to give the former owners (now managers) a chance to make it profitable. They failed and now Apple is going to absorb the useful bits.
That's really about it. The various scenarios present different levels of "evil" on the parts of the owners, but in the end they basically boils down to: either the owners sold out, knowing full well they might be signing the services death warrant, or the owners sold out to keep a sinking ship afloat a little longer and hope for a miracle. In either case I seriously doubt Apple bought the service promising on their crossed hearts to keep it running forever regardless of profitability.
Apple hasn't sold DRMed music in years. Years. Stop saying this. I remember when it was posted to/. that they had taken DRM off everything. There were thousands of "about time" comments, and I was one of them. They now sell the same unencrypted.aac music that you have. So it's both technically superior to what GP listens to *and* unencumbered.
Neither is Apple, on the Mac. I'd be curious to see what position Microsoft will take for IE on the latest version of WinMo. Jobs made some valid points. It's still arguable that he and Apple should step back and let people hang themselves with mobile Flash if they want to, but he made good points.
If GP is right in general (and I think there is definitely something in what he's saying), your specific point is immaterial. If you have a chance to make a bit more per handset, but are dropping yourself into a ecosystem where you're not likely to sell very many handsets, have you really helped yourself? Especially as Palm? These guys were already falling, they *needed* the Pre to be big, they needed it to make a splash like iPhone did. Tying themselves to a second tier carrier with a limited network was not a good way to do it, even if they could make an extra 2% on each handset.
Which a) still sucks. I often don't carry my driver's license. I am not legally required to carry my drivers license. Apparently though if I'm a Mexican-American citizen in AZ there's a back-handed requirement that I do, just in case.
And b) makes the law pretty toothless. Fake driver's licenses (especially out of state ones, which would be harder to verify), or even licenses issued while a person was a legal resident, when they are not now, mean that many will get away with it.
But you don't HAVE to carry your driver's license. I often don't when I ride my bike somewhere or go jogging. Point in fact, I probably should, if only so they can identify my body if I get run over or something, but I often don't and there is no legal requirement that I do. Nor is there a legal require you that you or any other citizen do. Unless you happen to be a Mexican-American in AZ apparently. And if the requirement is merely that I tell you my name so you can look me up in database, then the whole law is laughable anyway. "I'm Julio Sanchez, course I'm a citizen". What do you suppose the chance are that there *isn't* a Julio Sanchez (or 50) in the AZ DMV database?
We're talking about US Citizens who might be arrested for not happening to have proof on them, not visitors or aliens failing to carry them (which is, or course, illegal). Do you carry your passport to the grocery store (in your home country)?
In addition to the other points above, there are nearly always at least two, and in larger planes often more people, in the cockpit certified to fly the plane. On a 6 hour transcontinental flight, I'd like to think that they're switching off on the "watching blinky lights and widgets" duty. I know how well I can pay attention to blinky lights and widgets for 6 straight hours, and lemme tell ya... it's not all that well. I've been known to zone out watching a three minute install progress bar.
#1 You are required to produce your license as proof of your right to operate a motor vehicle, NOT as proof of identification. The fact that a driver's license provides both is ancillary, not a requirement of law. This may seem likea fine distiction, but it is crucial. You cannot be arrested for failing to provide identification, but you CAN be arrested for operating a vehicle while not carrying a license to do so.
Regardless, a drivers license is not proof of citizenship or legal status. Many states do not even check legal status before issuing licenses, yet they remain valid forms of identification and right to drive in states that do. Even in states that do check legal status, the existence of a license only indicates that the person in question was legal at the time the license was issued. See the IRS I-9 form for documents that establish citizenship or right to work status. Only documents in columns "A" and "C" establish citizenship or right to work, columns "B" merely establishes identity. Obviously a Foreign Passport with current visa would be just as good in this case, since they only need to establish a right be here, not work here.
2) If you are a passenger you must "identify yourself" not "provide identification". Again, a critical distinction. If I say, "Yeah, I'm Bob Smith, but I don't have my wallet on me." I can't be arrested fro failing to carry my wallet while riding in the passenger seat. Later if they could prove I lied (and wanted to bother) they could conceivably charge me with something,but simply not having an ID on me is not a crime. I identified myself. I have complied with the law.
3) See above. Demands that I "identify myself" are not the same as demands that I "provide identification". If I lie, I can be in trouble, but I don't have to prove my identity on the spot. There was in fact a story right here on/. a week or so ago about someone suing the police for arresting him merely because he refused to show ID. The police are fighting to cover their asses because they know they can't do that.
Tl;dr: I am never "required" to carry identification as a US citizen. I am required to provide proof of my right to drive if I am driving, I am required to prove my right to be on military property if I am found on it (Military ID), I might be required to prove my age to buy certain products, but I am never, per se, required by law to carry ID.
You carry your birth certificate with you at all times? Or your passport? Those are the only two documents you list that prove citizenship or legal status. Neither a military ID nor a driver's license is considered a proof of status. I carried my military ID around for years, but still had to provide a birth certificate, Social Security Card, or Passport as proof of legal right to work when I got a new job. I was a National Guardsman, so I changed employers several times while still carrying a military ID, and it was never once accepted as proof of citizenship (not surprising, non-citizens can be in the military. We had a Brit in our unit. He eventually got US citizenship, but was a legal resident for the first two or three years of his service. He couldn't get a clearance until his citizenship went through, but not all jobs require them).
That's the problem here. Actually, there's two problems. Requiring someone to show any form of identification without a their being a suspect in a crime or otherwise falling somehow under the jurisdiction if the police is wrong, and generally one of the things we see in over the top satires of authoritarian states ("Youa paapas, plaeze!"). That a US state should make it a matter of course for law enforcement to ask citizens for proof of citizenship lest they face arrest would be comical if it wasn't depressing. The *secondary* problem is that proof of citizenship is actually a pain to carry.
Your Social Security Card says right on it that it should be kept in a safe place, not carried. Your birth certificate is probably a fairly large and cumbersome document to lug around (not to mention that it should also be kept in a safe place), and Americans are not required to possess Passports unless they plan to travel abroad. What do you suggest US citizens of Mexican decent carry to prove their citizenship? Driver's license isn't proof. SSC and birth certificate shouldn't be carried. Passport they may or may not have and are not legally required to have.
Who the law is aimed at is completely immaterial to who it may affect. One could reasonably argue that legal residents have to carry a green card. It's a pain, but one could make a reasonable argument, that it's a burden they bear for living in a country not their own. The fact that there is absolutely no way to externally tell the difference between an illegal Mexican immigrant, a legal Mexican immigrant, and a US citizen of Mexican decent creates a dilemma though. The citizen should not be required to carry proof of citizenship, but without such proof how do you know he's a citizen? If this was a rare and unusual use case, it might not be that bad, but there are hundred's of thousands if not millions of US citizens of Mexican decent in Arizona.
I'll give Boeing a little credit though (used to be a sub in one of their facilities). They know they have a problem and are working to fix it. They also make it trivially easy to install Firefox if you prefer to use it for non-intranet stuff.. They have a fairly nifty little app that appears to work a little like sudo. Regular users can install all kind of software that Corp IT has stuck in vault after testing. You go into this program and it's organized like a network drive full of installers. You click the software you want and it gets admin privileges somehow and does the install. I had a bunch of useful free software (some beer free, some beer and speech free) installed on my Boeing laptop, all completely Kosher and no need to get IT involved directly.
You misunderstand him. When he says, "My company still use VB6 and no program language can replace it because these VB6 programs need to control hardware and automate Office applications like Excel." He doesn't mean "No other language can do what VB6 does and control this stuff" he means "We don't want to rewrite all this stuff. It's a pain and might cost a few bucks." Clearly that makes it impossible to replace.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice I think you have a very optimistic view of how well people listen to other experts. I have a... well.. friend, I guess, though I haven't seen her in quite a while and she seems to have gone off the deep end in that time frame. At any rate we're friends on Facebook, so I get to read all about her attempts (which would be humorous if they weren't so sad) to out guess her doctors. She's nearly 40, overweight (not that I have room to talk ATM, but where I could "stand to lose a few pounds", she's "obese"), and pregnant for the second time in 3 years. Surprisingly, she has health problems. The doctors routinely tell her that these problems are related to being nearly 40, overweight, and pregnant for the second time in 3 years. She is convinced that she has any of a number of rare diseases.
She's like her own personal version of House, but without the years of medical knowledge, the spiffy beard, or the television proclivity for simple answers being inevitably wrong. She's even made up her own vaguely realistic "medical chart" that she uses to attempt diagnoses (which she very happily scanned in for the rest of us to see. "Yay?"). Meanwhile, she refuses to get her daughter vaccinated (Autism, you know. Never mind that even if that Mercury based preservative ever did contribute to Autism it's been long since removed from all US vaccines), and expressed shock, shock! that they wanted to keep the girl in the hospital for a few days after she got infected dog bites on her face.
While most people aren't as bad as my "friend", the fact is that most of us routinely ignore our doctor's advice to one degree or another. My friend may be the equivalent of the user with IE4 on Win98 expressing how they can't possibly have a virus; but most of us are capable of normal user's level of ignorance when it comes to our own habits and such. Case in point, I really need to get on the diet horse and lose those 30 pounds... But... Mmmmmm... Chinese for lunch...
A minimal amount of searching shows that the "Propel" Accelerator does work with non-IE browsers, and therefore it's pretty likely that you can find a dial-up ISP with a compressing proxy that won't need IE. From a technical standpoint I can't even see a good reason why you'd want to make the proxy IE only. Seems like you'd have to go out of your way to make it not work properly with other browsers. Regardless, while Net-zero mentions only working with IE (why?), Earthlink does not. It's possible the information is hidden somehow, but I doubt it.
I'd be willing to bet a bit of money that you could even get non-IE browsers to work on systems that claim they won't by manually setting up the proxy servers. Could be fun to try at any rate:-)
Maybe, but I don't think so. You can get away with more on servers than you can on clients. You still hear about apps that run on mainframes from the 70s and 80s, but it's OK, because you gateway those systems behind secure, modern hardware and software. Increasing more likely you're actually running them in emulation ON secure, modern hardware and software. If you keep IE6 on every desktop past it getting security updates and patches, you're risking massive infection every time one of your users opens it up. Servers for internal apps primarily run inside walled gardens, user workstations generally do not, or at least the walls usually have bigger holes and aren't nearly as high.
I realize this probably wasn't your fault in the first place, but it *is* your company's own fault. Eventually, Microsoft *will* stop supporting IE6 (XP is supposed to go out of support in a few years, and there's no IE6 for Vista or 7). Those millions of dollars *will* have to be spent. Why not start working on it now and spread the pain out. All of this "but it will cost us million of dollars to make our stuff work like it should have in the first place!" whinging by various corporate managers kind of ridiculous. You (not you personally, but generically "you IT managers") know they won't support this stuff forever, you could fix this over time and spend very little quarter by quarter, but you'd rather cry about the million of dollars it will cost all at once when you eventually HAVE to deal with it.
Apparently nothing awful. I clicked a link on the TFA page to one by Steve Wozniak. He seems convinced by inside information that the engineer wasn't fired (though another was for showing him an iPad prototype a short while ago). As one of the Gizmodo editors put it, it seems that Steve Jobs has a Michael Corleone honor code. Mistakes are forgivable, but deliberately breaking secrecy (even in a very harmless way) is not.
See this is where the whole argument breaks down for me. I'm a "geek". I manage supercomputers for a living. I use Linux as the primary OS on my lap top. I can program to one degree or another in half a dozen languages, though these day I do mostly Perl scripting. I can talk intelligently about computer hardware, software, and networks at a professional level with other professionals, whether we're using Macs, Windows or Linux PCs, or HP Superdomes and SGI Origins. I also use and like an iPhone. It does what I need it to do, effectively and efficiently, most of the time. I jailbroke it at one point, but then realized I never used any apps that actually required jailbreaking, so I reinstalled the base OS. I paid for a developer license for a year, but again realized that I'd never developed anything or run unapproved code so I let it lapse.
The device works for me. I don't have anything against Android, and am even considering switching for next phone depending on what the new iPhone gets spec-wise. The point is, I'm not a fan boy or a shill. I'm not a moron "consumer" with no idea what I'm looking at. I'm a person who made an informed decision to purchase an iPhone and is happy with the results.
It seems like every time there's an iPhone article the argument is broken down between iPhone defenders, who's basic argument is "iPhone is a nice device and I like it" and iPhone haters who's basic argument is "iPhone is a crummy consumer device that only idiots use and buy. It doesn't do everything I want it to to do, so everyone that owns one is a shill, a fanboi, an idiot, or all three."
It's not universal, some of the defenders clearly are fanbois and some of the "haters" are just reasonable people that want something else in a phone, but what I described seems to be the majority of the posts. So to the people like the parent, let me just say, "The phone you have chosen is in no way tied to the size of your penis. Get over yourselves"
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And likely giving you access to an even larger catalog of music. No idea how expansive Lala's catalog was, but quite likely anything in it that was not in iTunes now is, and the new "iTunes Lala" will have all it plus anything iTunes had that Lala didn't (almost certainly some stuff, maybe a lot of stuff, I don't know).
Why not:
a) Get your money back. In their extremises of evil Apple is apparently offering full refunds for the next month.
b) Just buy some crap off of iTunes (borrow a friends computer or something) and move it to your Linux box through any of numerous modern file transfer utilities available. Why I understand that not only can Windows an Linux machines can use the same files systems on literally dozens of types of removable media, they have numerous network file transfer utilities that work on both. Most even work over the Internet. Astounding. It seems that the iTunes store has offered all of their music in an unencrypted and open format for quite some time now.
God Apple is evil.
If I am not mistaken (and I may be), aac is MORE open than mp3. aac is an open standard (IIRC), whereas *technically* you're supposed to pay for an MP3 encoder/decoder. Not withstanding the fact that there are free mp3 encoder/decoders (which are technically illegal though not in any way likely to get you in trouble). At worst aac is no more encumbered than mp3, but I think it's actually more open.
This. If anyone is "evil" here it's the owners of Lala. You have this service. Lots of people like your service. You sell your service to a larger competitor, knowing full well they either a) plan to close it down and absorb everything useful, b) will give it half a chance, but in the end will probably shut it down and absorb it. Now the larger competitor is evil when they shut it down and absorb it? Since there was no hostile take over here, there are just a few possible scenarios:
1) Lala was doing well, but the owners wanted more. Apple offered them a large pile of money and they accepted. They knew Apple was planning to shut them down in the near future, and didn't care.
2) Lala was doing well, but the owners wanted more. Apple offered them a large pile of money and they accepted. Apple told them they had six months and X more piles of money to make the business profitable, or they would shut it down and absorb the useful bits. They failed. They probably cared some, but they would have shown it better if they'd just not sold out in the first place.
3) Lala was failing. Apple bought it and propped it up for an extra 6 months while they prepared to absorb it. The owners knew this, but either thought it was worth it to keep the service around as long as they could, or just wanted their parts of the pile of money.
4) Lala was failing. Apple bought it and propped it up for an extra 6 months to give the former owners (now managers) a chance to make it profitable. They failed and now Apple is going to absorb the useful bits.
That's really about it. The various scenarios present different levels of "evil" on the parts of the owners, but in the end they basically boils down to: either the owners sold out, knowing full well they might be signing the services death warrant, or the owners sold out to keep a sinking ship afloat a little longer and hope for a miracle. In either case I seriously doubt Apple bought the service promising on their crossed hearts to keep it running forever regardless of profitability.
Apple hasn't sold DRMed music in years. Years. Stop saying this. I remember when it was posted to /. that they had taken DRM off everything. There were thousands of "about time" comments, and I was one of them. They now sell the same unencrypted .aac music that you have. So it's both technically superior to what GP listens to *and* unencumbered.
Neither is Apple, on the Mac. I'd be curious to see what position Microsoft will take for IE on the latest version of WinMo. Jobs made some valid points. It's still arguable that he and Apple should step back and let people hang themselves with mobile Flash if they want to, but he made good points.
I though it was Nokia? Regardless, Gp should have said "consumer smartphone". iPhone is definitely the biggest piece of that pie.
If GP is right in general (and I think there is definitely something in what he's saying), your specific point is immaterial. If you have a chance to make a bit more per handset, but are dropping yourself into a ecosystem where you're not likely to sell very many handsets, have you really helped yourself? Especially as Palm? These guys were already falling, they *needed* the Pre to be big, they needed it to make a splash like iPhone did. Tying themselves to a second tier carrier with a limited network was not a good way to do it, even if they could make an extra 2% on each handset.
Which a) still sucks. I often don't carry my driver's license. I am not legally required to carry my drivers license. Apparently though if I'm a Mexican-American citizen in AZ there's a back-handed requirement that I do, just in case.
And b) makes the law pretty toothless. Fake driver's licenses (especially out of state ones, which would be harder to verify), or even licenses issued while a person was a legal resident, when they are not now, mean that many will get away with it.
But you don't HAVE to carry your driver's license. I often don't when I ride my bike somewhere or go jogging. Point in fact, I probably should, if only so they can identify my body if I get run over or something, but I often don't and there is no legal requirement that I do. Nor is there a legal require you that you or any other citizen do. Unless you happen to be a Mexican-American in AZ apparently. And if the requirement is merely that I tell you my name so you can look me up in database, then the whole law is laughable anyway. "I'm Julio Sanchez, course I'm a citizen". What do you suppose the chance are that there *isn't* a Julio Sanchez (or 50) in the AZ DMV database?
We're talking about US Citizens who might be arrested for not happening to have proof on them, not visitors or aliens failing to carry them (which is, or course, illegal). Do you carry your passport to the grocery store (in your home country)?
In addition to the other points above, there are nearly always at least two, and in larger planes often more people, in the cockpit certified to fly the plane. On a 6 hour transcontinental flight, I'd like to think that they're switching off on the "watching blinky lights and widgets" duty. I know how well I can pay attention to blinky lights and widgets for 6 straight hours, and lemme tell ya... it's not all that well. I've been known to zone out watching a three minute install progress bar.
And if my Driver's License happens to be from Louisiana? and I'm visiting relatives in AZ?
#1 You are required to produce your license as proof of your right to operate a motor vehicle, NOT as proof of identification. The fact that a driver's license provides both is ancillary, not a requirement of law. This may seem likea fine distiction, but it is crucial. You cannot be arrested for failing to provide identification, but you CAN be arrested for operating a vehicle while not carrying a license to do so.
Regardless, a drivers license is not proof of citizenship or legal status. Many states do not even check legal status before issuing licenses, yet they remain valid forms of identification and right to drive in states that do. Even in states that do check legal status, the existence of a license only indicates that the person in question was legal at the time the license was issued. See the IRS I-9 form for documents that establish citizenship or right to work status. Only documents in columns "A" and "C" establish citizenship or right to work, columns "B" merely establishes identity. Obviously a Foreign Passport with current visa would be just as good in this case, since they only need to establish a right be here, not work here.
2) If you are a passenger you must "identify yourself" not "provide identification". Again, a critical distinction. If I say, "Yeah, I'm Bob Smith, but I don't have my wallet on me." I can't be arrested fro failing to carry my wallet while riding in the passenger seat. Later if they could prove I lied (and wanted to bother) they could conceivably charge me with something,but simply not having an ID on me is not a crime. I identified myself. I have complied with the law.
3) See above. Demands that I "identify myself" are not the same as demands that I "provide identification". If I lie, I can be in trouble, but I don't have to prove my identity on the spot. There was in fact a story right here on /. a week or so ago about someone suing the police for arresting him merely because he refused to show ID. The police are fighting to cover their asses because they know they can't do that.
Tl;dr: I am never "required" to carry identification as a US citizen. I am required to provide proof of my right to drive if I am driving, I am required to prove my right to be on military property if I am found on it (Military ID), I might be required to prove my age to buy certain products, but I am never, per se, required by law to carry ID.
You carry your birth certificate with you at all times? Or your passport? Those are the only two documents you list that prove citizenship or legal status. Neither a military ID nor a driver's license is considered a proof of status. I carried my military ID around for years, but still had to provide a birth certificate, Social Security Card, or Passport as proof of legal right to work when I got a new job. I was a National Guardsman, so I changed employers several times while still carrying a military ID, and it was never once accepted as proof of citizenship (not surprising, non-citizens can be in the military. We had a Brit in our unit. He eventually got US citizenship, but was a legal resident for the first two or three years of his service. He couldn't get a clearance until his citizenship went through, but not all jobs require them).
That's the problem here. Actually, there's two problems. Requiring someone to show any form of identification without a their being a suspect in a crime or otherwise falling somehow under the jurisdiction if the police is wrong, and generally one of the things we see in over the top satires of authoritarian states ("Youa paapas, plaeze!"). That a US state should make it a matter of course for law enforcement to ask citizens for proof of citizenship lest they face arrest would be comical if it wasn't depressing. The *secondary* problem is that proof of citizenship is actually a pain to carry.
Your Social Security Card says right on it that it should be kept in a safe place, not carried. Your birth certificate is probably a fairly large and cumbersome document to lug around (not to mention that it should also be kept in a safe place), and Americans are not required to possess Passports unless they plan to travel abroad. What do you suggest US citizens of Mexican decent carry to prove their citizenship? Driver's license isn't proof. SSC and birth certificate shouldn't be carried. Passport they may or may not have and are not legally required to have.
Who the law is aimed at is completely immaterial to who it may affect. One could reasonably argue that legal residents have to carry a green card. It's a pain, but one could make a reasonable argument, that it's a burden they bear for living in a country not their own. The fact that there is absolutely no way to externally tell the difference between an illegal Mexican immigrant, a legal Mexican immigrant, and a US citizen of Mexican decent creates a dilemma though. The citizen should not be required to carry proof of citizenship, but without such proof how do you know he's a citizen? If this was a rare and unusual use case, it might not be that bad, but there are hundred's of thousands if not millions of US citizens of Mexican decent in Arizona.
I'll give Boeing a little credit though (used to be a sub in one of their facilities). They know they have a problem and are working to fix it. They also make it trivially easy to install Firefox if you prefer to use it for non-intranet stuff.. They have a fairly nifty little app that appears to work a little like sudo. Regular users can install all kind of software that Corp IT has stuck in vault after testing. You go into this program and it's organized like a network drive full of installers. You click the software you want and it gets admin privileges somehow and does the install. I had a bunch of useful free software (some beer free, some beer and speech free) installed on my Boeing laptop, all completely Kosher and no need to get IT involved directly.
Believe it or not there are companies out there *right now* still selling web apps that only work on IE6. Worse, someone is *buying* them.
You misunderstand him. When he says, "My company still use VB6 and no program language can replace it because these VB6 programs need to control hardware and automate Office applications like Excel." He doesn't mean "No other language can do what VB6 does and control this stuff" he means "We don't want to rewrite all this stuff. It's a pain and might cost a few bucks." Clearly that makes it impossible to replace.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice I think you have a very optimistic view of how well people listen to other experts. I have a... well.. friend, I guess, though I haven't seen her in quite a while and she seems to have gone off the deep end in that time frame. At any rate we're friends on Facebook, so I get to read all about her attempts (which would be humorous if they weren't so sad) to out guess her doctors. She's nearly 40, overweight (not that I have room to talk ATM, but where I could "stand to lose a few pounds", she's "obese"), and pregnant for the second time in 3 years. Surprisingly, she has health problems. The doctors routinely tell her that these problems are related to being nearly 40, overweight, and pregnant for the second time in 3 years. She is convinced that she has any of a number of rare diseases.
She's like her own personal version of House, but without the years of medical knowledge, the spiffy beard, or the television proclivity for simple answers being inevitably wrong. She's even made up her own vaguely realistic "medical chart" that she uses to attempt diagnoses (which she very happily scanned in for the rest of us to see. "Yay?"). Meanwhile, she refuses to get her daughter vaccinated (Autism, you know. Never mind that even if that Mercury based preservative ever did contribute to Autism it's been long since removed from all US vaccines), and expressed shock, shock! that they wanted to keep the girl in the hospital for a few days after she got infected dog bites on her face.
While most people aren't as bad as my "friend", the fact is that most of us routinely ignore our doctor's advice to one degree or another. My friend may be the equivalent of the user with IE4 on Win98 expressing how they can't possibly have a virus; but most of us are capable of normal user's level of ignorance when it comes to our own habits and such. Case in point, I really need to get on the diet horse and lose those 30 pounds... But... Mmmmmm... Chinese for lunch...
A minimal amount of searching shows that the "Propel" Accelerator does work with non-IE browsers, and therefore it's pretty likely that you can find a dial-up ISP with a compressing proxy that won't need IE. From a technical standpoint I can't even see a good reason why you'd want to make the proxy IE only. Seems like you'd have to go out of your way to make it not work properly with other browsers. Regardless, while Net-zero mentions only working with IE (why?), Earthlink does not. It's possible the information is hidden somehow, but I doubt it.
I'd be willing to bet a bit of money that you could even get non-IE browsers to work on systems that claim they won't by manually setting up the proxy servers. Could be fun to try at any rate :-)
Maybe, but I don't think so. You can get away with more on servers than you can on clients. You still hear about apps that run on mainframes from the 70s and 80s, but it's OK, because you gateway those systems behind secure, modern hardware and software. Increasing more likely you're actually running them in emulation ON secure, modern hardware and software. If you keep IE6 on every desktop past it getting security updates and patches, you're risking massive infection every time one of your users opens it up. Servers for internal apps primarily run inside walled gardens, user workstations generally do not, or at least the walls usually have bigger holes and aren't nearly as high.
Eh... What? Are you connecting through a proxy or some weird thing like that? Get a new ISP. Seriously.
I realize this probably wasn't your fault in the first place, but it *is* your company's own fault. Eventually, Microsoft *will* stop supporting IE6 (XP is supposed to go out of support in a few years, and there's no IE6 for Vista or 7). Those millions of dollars *will* have to be spent. Why not start working on it now and spread the pain out. All of this "but it will cost us million of dollars to make our stuff work like it should have in the first place!" whinging by various corporate managers kind of ridiculous. You (not you personally, but generically "you IT managers") know they won't support this stuff forever, you could fix this over time and spend very little quarter by quarter, but you'd rather cry about the million of dollars it will cost all at once when you eventually HAVE to deal with it.
Apparently nothing awful. I clicked a link on the TFA page to one by Steve Wozniak. He seems convinced by inside information that the engineer wasn't fired (though another was for showing him an iPad prototype a short while ago). As one of the Gizmodo editors put it, it seems that Steve Jobs has a Michael Corleone honor code. Mistakes are forgivable, but deliberately breaking secrecy (even in a very harmless way) is not.
See this is where the whole argument breaks down for me. I'm a "geek". I manage supercomputers for a living. I use Linux as the primary OS on my lap top. I can program to one degree or another in half a dozen languages, though these day I do mostly Perl scripting. I can talk intelligently about computer hardware, software, and networks at a professional level with other professionals, whether we're using Macs, Windows or Linux PCs, or HP Superdomes and SGI Origins. I also use and like an iPhone. It does what I need it to do, effectively and efficiently, most of the time. I jailbroke it at one point, but then realized I never used any apps that actually required jailbreaking, so I reinstalled the base OS. I paid for a developer license for a year, but again realized that I'd never developed anything or run unapproved code so I let it lapse.
The device works for me. I don't have anything against Android, and am even considering switching for next phone depending on what the new iPhone gets spec-wise. The point is, I'm not a fan boy or a shill. I'm not a moron "consumer" with no idea what I'm looking at. I'm a person who made an informed decision to purchase an iPhone and is happy with the results.
It seems like every time there's an iPhone article the argument is broken down between iPhone defenders, who's basic argument is "iPhone is a nice device and I like it" and iPhone haters who's basic argument is "iPhone is a crummy consumer device that only idiots use and buy. It doesn't do everything I want it to to do, so everyone that owns one is a shill, a fanboi, an idiot, or all three."
It's not universal, some of the defenders clearly are fanbois and some of the "haters" are just reasonable people that want something else in a phone, but what I described seems to be the majority of the posts. So to the people like the parent, let me just say, "The phone you have chosen is in no way tied to the size of your penis. Get over yourselves"