if you use Intuit/Turbotax/quicken/whatever, once you start filling in your information they can connect to your financial institution and download 1099, capital gains information W-2s etc..
Talk to your local CPA, and they want you to fill in a electronic version of a excel spreadsheet. When I ask the CPAs why they don't use a solution whereby I don't have to worry as much about typos, and I don't have to pay a junior accountant to verify that I entered in my capital gains correctly in some excel spreadsheet type online form, they always tell me, "Accountants don't like change."
This isn't just Intuit, it's all the accounting firms out there that want the system to be complex.
There's an old expression, "Don't complain about not having shoes, when there are people who don't have feet."
I'm unemployed and would love a job. So would those included in this January 8, 2010 report by the US Dept of Labor.
Unemployment rates for the major worker groups--adult men (10.2 percent), adult women (8.2 percent), teenagers (27.1 percent), whites (9.0 percent), blacks (16.2 percent), and Hispanics (12.9 percent)--showed little change in December. The unemployment rate for Asians was 8.4 percent, not seasonally adjusted.
Among the unemployed, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) continued to trend up, reaching 6.1 million. In December, 4 in 10 unemployed workers were jobless for 27 weeks or longer.
If you don't like the job for whatever reason, quit. This isn't indentured servitude.
There's a large, but slow, movement in the storage area and that is encrypting data at rest. Either in the disk array or on the tape. Both require dedicated hardware either in the array or on the tape drive to be practical and not impact performance. While you can buy current generation tape drives that encrypt data on the fly the pain becomes managing the keys. Now there's plenty of solutions to do Key Management, however many customers I've worked with on this are always afraid of losing the key. We tell them to create a hard copy of the encryption key (or put it on a USB thumb drive) and put it in a safe. You have to be a lot smarter when it comes to dealing with encrypted tapes as it's nolonger in the event of a disaster, "ship the tape from NY to LA" and restore the data. It's also about making sure the correct key is present in the LA datacenter when that tape arrives.
Dealing with encrypted disk based data can be even tougher, especially when you're dealing with replication (SRDF/timefinder/PPRC/Snapshots etc..) Because now you're encrypting a volume/lun and replicating that between datacenters. So either the lun is de-encrypted when it leaves the array or you've got the problem of making sure that the lun/volume stays with it's associated encryption key.
What's wrong with data at rest from a security standpoint? It's not walking away with a tape/HD full of encrypted data, it's a compromised hosts that mounts the filesystem or restores the tape. Hosts always have access to unencrypted data. I don't see encryption being used within the application itself until everyone is willing to purchase encryption offload engines for all their servers as it's too taxing on the primary CPU to encrypt everything.
If China invaded Hawaii, California or Alaska, but did not kill any US citizens we would treat this very differently as the Fed would take this very seriously rather than saying, Yeah, cyber attacks, they happen every day, nobody got hurt etc etc.. Maybe if the Fed realized that when China steals intellectual property, it might not hurt the US today, but it enables China to get a free pass on research for which we had to invest our own time and money into.
During WWII there were many Germans immigrants that didn't support the Third Reich and many Japanese immigrants that didn't support what Japan was doing in the Pacific. I wish the US Gov't would grow a pair instead of saying, "Stop or I'll say stop again!" mentality. When did the gov't become a bunch of pussies when it came down to this? The US employs millions of people associated with the protection of property, both physical and intellectual. Yet this is like the equivalent of some guy ignoring it when his boss gropes his wife because his boss signs his paychecks.
If the public is already afraid of living near power lines (100yds away), what makes these manufacturers think that having a bunch of 'wireless power pads' is going to be any different? Or is this a case of a rabid chihuahua is no threat due to its size?
Back when overhead projectors were the dominant method of displaying information before a large audience (y'know the ones you put clear sheets of plastic on and wrote with a marker), before powerpoint and before projectors that connected to your VGA port. IBM came out with the Thinkpad 755CV in which you could remove the backcover of the screen and then place the screen over the light on your overhead projector.
A snap-off screen panel gives the new ThinkPad 755CV the ability to "piggyback" atop many types of standard overhead projectors. Remove the rear panel and the images on the computer's screen become a see-through "slide show" projected on a wall or screen by the overhead's lamp. The contents of any software program or presentation can easily be shared with a group of people.
Often when I'm at home, I watch TV while laying on the couch, so my eyes aren't exactly vertical. While watching Avatar I tried rotating my head a bit and the picture became much worse. I can't imagine what this would have been like if I was lying on a couch watching. I'd probably need to keep a bucket nearby...
Does the estate have to defend their trademark/name against all threats? Or can they just pick and choose what they defend it against? They're suing Google, but why didn't they sue Cisco? Cisco had a Nexus product (actually quite a few of them) for a few years now:
Hell, the government even has Nexus Cards which are are WHTI-compliant documents for land and sea travel, as well as air travel when traveling to and from airports using the NEXUS program, and provide expedited travel via land, air or sea to approved members between the U.S. and Canada border.
IAAKT (I Am A Kindergarten Teacher) and I would not say that I'm going backwards by having my students use crayons, pencils, markers instead of plasma, touch sensitive displays. Nor am I going backwards by using chalk and a blackboard instead of powerpoint and multimedia displays to teach your children how to read and write.
Sometimes I often wonder if people push technology on children for the sake of making themselves look good ("Look, I introduced a bunch of 6yr olds to powerpoint and the web!").
Btw: Chalk/pencils/paper never run out of batteries, never get badly damaged when dropped. Never need an "IT Guy" on staff to fix/train/repair/upgrade. Also, I spend quite a bit of my own money on school supplies for the students. It's much easier to go to walmart and buy a box of pencils than it is to go to the school board and ask them to appropriate more funding so we can have more ebook readers so that every child gets one.
The Unix time(2) system call is "over the hill" at 40 years old today. The time(2) system call has dutifully told us how many seconds have passed since January 1, 1970. I use the day as my "birthday" on public websites in tribute. Please raise a glass of champagne tonight with me in celebration!
Why is there a link in the summary to some guy's blog which says exactly what I've pasted above? I mean really, just put the information in the summary without the link....
Maybe these guys ought to ask someone that was around in the days BEFORE there were SANs. Managing storage back then absolutely sucked. Every server had it's own internal storage with it's own raid controller OR had to be within 9m (the max distance of LVD SCSI) of a storage array.
There was no standardization, every OS has it's own volume managers, firmware updates, patches etc etc etc. Plus compare the number of management points when using a SAN vs internal storage. An enterprise would have thousands of servers connecting through a handful of SAN switches to a handful of arrays. Server admins have more important things to do than replace dead hard drives.
Want to replace a hot spare on a server, what a pain. As you had to understand the volume manager or unique raid controller in that specific server. I personally like how my arrays 'call home' and an HDS/EMC engineer shows up with a new drive, replaces the failed one and walks out the door, without me having to do anything about it.
Two words: Low Utilization. You'd buy an HP server with two 36GB drives and the OS+APP+data would only require 10GB of space. So you'd have this land locked storage all over the place.
Moving the storage to the edge? Even if you replace spinning platters with solid state, putting all the data on the edge is a 'bad thing.'
"But Google does it!"
Maybe so, but then again they don't run their enterprise based upon Oracle, Exchange, SAP, CIFS/NFS based home directories etc like almost all other enterprises do.
It was also expensive as hell. Although, if I recall correctly, someone with a sportster could dial your courier at 56k, while the reverse was not true (sportster didn't support receiving calls at 56k).
It could be pretty much a disaster if you were playing an online game (Moria/Angbang etc) for quite a while (months) and if someone picked up the phone and you were disconnected, the BBS marked your character as dead. You had to message, I mean beg, the sysop to restore your character...
The biggest problem with using modems was that you had to let everyone in the house know you were on the "modem". This meant, sticking post-it notes to every phone in the house, so that someone would tell you they needed to use the phone rather than just picking up the phone and dialing. You also couldn't tie up the phone for hours on end. There was very very few people that had an answering service (not an answering machine), like most do today with VOIP or CableCompany Provided Voice.
You also had to remember, if you were one of those people that had it, disable call waiting, as many modems would drop the connection when a call waiting signal came through. I believe you had to add a *70 after the AT.. so you had something like:
AT OK AT&F OK ATDT*70,,,867-5309
RING.
Today people can spend all day actively or passively (by leaving the computer on) online. Wit
Seems that most products advertised today pull on the "santize everything you touch" FUD that's out there. I work at a large technology company, and they recently installed automated hand sanitizers by every external door. I read an article recently that claimed that EMC was having cleaning crews sanitize every doorknob in their campus once a week.
This isn't just a corporate activity, I've got a friend with a 5yr old son in that the son has been conditioned to ask mom for Purel every 5-10 minutes. I also find it funny that kids are being taught to eat a McDonald's burger by holding the wrapper. The funny part is that the people making the burgers aren't wearing gloves...
Reminds me of the old joke: A Harvard and MIT student, both just finished using the urinal and the MIT student walks towards the door. The Harvard student says, "Hey, at Harvard they teach us to wash our hands after using the urinal!" The MIT student fires back, "At MIT they teach us not to pee on our hands!"
My gf claims she needs a 250hp (at the rear wheel) V6 in her commuter car so she can "get on the highway easier." She compared 0-60 times for Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.
I have friends that bought a huge SUV for when they drive to the ski slopes (they go 2-3x a year). A rented SUV would be much cheaper.
So why wouldn't the telcos use the same tactics when convincing their customers to purchase something that they really don't need? People are buying dual/quad core CPUs with 4GB of RAM just to surf the web and upload pics to flickr and facebook.
Let's say it actually was a "Russian Gang" operating out of say, Russia. What can US Gov't agencies do against this? Can they do anything within the law besides call up Russia and tell them to 'take care of it.' It's not like we can drop commandos into Russia and go after them, nor can we launch electronic attacks on this gang (act of futility).
According to the US Constitution, Section 8, Congress has the power to provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.
I see this type of activity as an attack, just because it's two private entities, this IMHO is no different than if SAP tried to hack into Oracle.
Hey Fed, I'm sick of US companies wasting time, money and effort to deal with these people bent on conducting electronic warfare.
As a side note, I wonder how much $$ is wasted in terms of extra capacity (servers, network, CPU, power) is needed by US companies to deal with all this BS (spam, people hacking in etc..) floating around the internet.
I once heard a presentation by a guy at Yahoo who managed a few of their datacenters. When asked about how they deal with DOS attacks his response was that they had more computing capacity then the internet could deliver to them, so they just absorb whatever attacks are sent their way.
I seem to recall quite a few articles or discussions for app stores for iphone and android that basically said that piracy was brutal for applications.
These apps just seem no different than music was in the napster era. People often ask me why they should pay for these apps when they can just pirate them for free.
Also does anybody audit android apps to make sure there are no backdoors or parts of the app which email all your data to some website?
First off the layout of a McDonalds is actually better than Starbucks. It's pretty hard to find a seat in most starbucks and even if you do you're sitting at some tiny round table and a small chair. Unless you happen to be one of the 4 people that can sit at the 'computer table' or in the big stuffed chairs.
McDonalds has booths and lots of them. Which provide more than enough room for a few people with laptops to sit at and work. Sure if you pick a McD's thats packed you're gonna be in for some noise, but the crowd that's there, unlike at Starbucks isn't looking to sit there for an hour and half and blog about the impact Software Piracy vs Somali Piracy as it pertains to the Nigerian bobsled team.
The new Mcdonalds coffee isn't that bad and the price is outstanding. Sure I can't have the ego boosting espresso a hint of Madagascar cinnamon, but if I want something to drink while working, it's a pretty good deal.
Now we listen to music on highly compressed mp3s. Most people have been listening to mp3s for so long they don't remember (or care) the difference of the higher quality of what a good record or CD used to sound like.
So give the people in the UK a few months and they won't remember what days with higher quality HDTV were like. Especially as we move towards streaming content. Comcast compresses, Netflix transmits audio in stereo. I can't wait for HDTV 1080bw (it's 1080p but in Black and White).
Does the distro work with your printer without any complicated installation procedures? Does the distro work with your audio hardware without any complicated installation procedures? Does the distro switch between all the resolutions supported by your video hardware? Does the distro have a reasonably good package installation mechanism? Does the distro support your applications without special package installation requirements?
It's questions like this that scare Joe Sixpack away from Linux. If all the major distributions were sold at BestBuy and Joe Sixpack walked in and wanted to buy Linux, he'd have no idea which one to get. KDE vs GNOME? If he wants to buy a Logitech Keyboard and mouse, I doubt he'll see SuSE/Ubuntu/Fedora on the back of the box for the Logitech Compact Keyboard Pro, which btw is a pretty generic $29 USB keyboard. It might work, but atleast Joe Sixpack that it'll work with winXP/Vista/7 because it'll say it on the box.
It's a shame that while all the different distros are good for Linux as a whole, the fact that there are so many distros makes it tough for the avg user to get into it. I consider myself pretty linux savy and the above list of questions makes me start to get nervous. Linux and hardware, it should just work.
With browsers having built in security to tell me if some website harbors malware upon accessing it, why do people through this concept out the window and click on any tiny url that could potentially send them to goat.sx. Seems that this defeats the purpose of me being able to see where the link goes before clicking on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope it's cheaper to buy the ad/interview/cover art/lyrics free file since it'll be smaller. I have no interest in downloading a 20MB .mp3.
if you use Intuit/Turbotax/quicken/whatever, once you start filling in your information they can connect to your financial institution and download 1099, capital gains information W-2s etc..
Talk to your local CPA, and they want you to fill in a electronic version of a excel spreadsheet. When I ask the CPAs why they don't use a solution whereby I don't have to worry as much about typos, and I don't have to pay a junior accountant to verify that I entered in my capital gains correctly in some excel spreadsheet type online form, they always tell me, "Accountants don't like change."
This isn't just Intuit, it's all the accounting firms out there that want the system to be complex.
There's an old expression, "Don't complain about not having shoes, when there are people who don't have feet."
I'm unemployed and would love a job. So would those included in this January 8, 2010 report by the US Dept of Labor.
Unemployment rates for the major worker groups--adult men (10.2 percent),
adult women (8.2 percent), teenagers (27.1 percent), whites (9.0 percent),
blacks (16.2 percent), and Hispanics (12.9 percent)--showed little change in
December. The unemployment rate for Asians was 8.4 percent, not seasonally
adjusted.
Among the unemployed, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27
weeks and over) continued to trend up, reaching 6.1 million. In December, 4 in
10 unemployed workers were jobless for 27 weeks or longer.
If you don't like the job for whatever reason, quit. This isn't indentured servitude.
There's a large, but slow, movement in the storage area and that is encrypting data at rest. Either in the disk array or on the tape. Both require dedicated hardware either in the array or on the tape drive to be practical and not impact performance. While you can buy current generation tape drives that encrypt data on the fly the pain becomes managing the keys. Now there's plenty of solutions to do Key Management, however many customers I've worked with on this are always afraid of losing the key. We tell them to create a hard copy of the encryption key (or put it on a USB thumb drive) and put it in a safe. You have to be a lot smarter when it comes to dealing with encrypted tapes as it's nolonger in the event of a disaster, "ship the tape from NY to LA" and restore the data. It's also about making sure the correct key is present in the LA datacenter when that tape arrives.
Dealing with encrypted disk based data can be even tougher, especially when you're dealing with replication (SRDF/timefinder/PPRC/Snapshots etc..) Because now you're encrypting a volume/lun and replicating that between datacenters. So either the lun is de-encrypted when it leaves the array or you've got the problem of making sure that the lun/volume stays with it's associated encryption key.
What's wrong with data at rest from a security standpoint? It's not walking away with a tape/HD full of encrypted data, it's a compromised hosts that mounts the filesystem or restores the tape. Hosts always have access to unencrypted data. I don't see encryption being used within the application itself until everyone is willing to purchase encryption offload engines for all their servers as it's too taxing on the primary CPU to encrypt everything.
If China invaded Hawaii, California or Alaska, but did not kill any US citizens we would treat this very differently as the Fed would take this very seriously rather than saying, Yeah, cyber attacks, they happen every day, nobody got hurt etc etc.. Maybe if the Fed realized that when China steals intellectual property, it might not hurt the US today, but it enables China to get a free pass on research for which we had to invest our own time and money into.
During WWII there were many Germans immigrants that didn't support the Third Reich and many Japanese immigrants that didn't support what Japan was doing in the Pacific. I wish the US Gov't would grow a pair instead of saying, "Stop or I'll say stop again!" mentality. When did the gov't become a bunch of pussies when it came down to this? The US employs millions of people associated with the protection of property, both physical and intellectual. Yet this is like the equivalent of some guy ignoring it when his boss gropes his wife because his boss signs his paychecks.
Cue classic scene from Spies like Us
Though this could never actually happen, because well, MTV doesn't play music videos anymore.
If the public is already afraid of living near power lines (100yds away), what makes these manufacturers think that having a bunch of 'wireless power pads' is going to be any different? Or is this a case of a rabid chihuahua is no threat due to its size?
Back when overhead projectors were the dominant method of displaying information before a large audience (y'know the ones you put clear sheets of plastic on and wrote with a marker), before powerpoint and before projectors that connected to your VGA port. IBM came out with the Thinkpad 755CV in which you could remove the backcover of the screen and then place the screen over the light on your overhead projector.
Back in 1995...
Often when I'm at home, I watch TV while laying on the couch, so my eyes aren't exactly vertical. While watching Avatar I tried rotating my head a bit and the picture became much worse. I can't imagine what this would have been like if I was lying on a couch watching. I'd probably need to keep a bucket nearby...
Does the estate have to defend their trademark/name against all threats? Or can they just pick and choose what they defend it against? They're suing Google, but why didn't they sue Cisco? Cisco had a Nexus product (actually quite a few of them) for a few years now:
Nexus 7000
Nexus 5000
Nexus 2000
Nexus 1000
Hell, the government even has Nexus Cards which are are WHTI-compliant documents for land and sea travel, as well as air travel when traveling to and from airports using the NEXUS program, and provide expedited travel via land, air or sea to approved members between the U.S. and Canada border.
IAAKT (I Am A Kindergarten Teacher) and I would not say that I'm going backwards by having my students use crayons, pencils, markers instead of plasma, touch sensitive displays. Nor am I going backwards by using chalk and a blackboard instead of powerpoint and multimedia displays to teach your children how to read and write.
Sometimes I often wonder if people push technology on children for the sake of making themselves look good ("Look, I introduced a bunch of 6yr olds to powerpoint and the web!").
Btw: Chalk/pencils/paper never run out of batteries, never get badly damaged when dropped. Never need an "IT Guy" on staff to fix/train/repair/upgrade. Also, I spend quite a bit of my own money on school supplies for the students. It's much easier to go to walmart and buy a box of pencils than it is to go to the school board and ask them to appropriate more funding so we can have more ebook readers so that every child gets one.
Why is there a link in the summary to some guy's blog which says exactly what I've pasted above? I mean really, just put the information in the summary without the link....
Maybe these guys ought to ask someone that was around in the days BEFORE there were SANs. Managing storage back then absolutely sucked. Every server had it's own internal storage with it's own raid controller OR had to be within 9m (the max distance of LVD SCSI) of a storage array.
There was no standardization, every OS has it's own volume managers, firmware updates, patches etc etc etc. Plus compare the number of management points when using a SAN vs internal storage. An enterprise would have thousands of servers connecting through a handful of SAN switches to a handful of arrays. Server admins have more important things to do than replace dead hard drives.
Want to replace a hot spare on a server, what a pain. As you had to understand the volume manager or unique raid controller in that specific server. I personally like how my arrays 'call home' and an HDS/EMC engineer shows up with a new drive, replaces the failed one and walks out the door, without me having to do anything about it.
Two words: Low Utilization. You'd buy an HP server with two 36GB drives and the OS+APP+data would only require 10GB of space. So you'd have this land locked storage all over the place.
Moving the storage to the edge? Even if you replace spinning platters with solid state, putting all the data on the edge is a 'bad thing.'
"But Google does it!"
Maybe so, but then again they don't run their enterprise based upon Oracle, Exchange, SAP, CIFS/NFS based home directories etc like almost all other enterprises do.
It was also expensive as hell. Although, if I recall correctly, someone with a sportster could dial your courier at 56k, while the reverse was not true (sportster didn't support receiving calls at 56k).
It could be pretty much a disaster if you were playing an online game (Moria/Angbang etc) for quite a while (months) and if someone picked up the phone and you were disconnected, the BBS marked your character as dead. You had to message, I mean beg, the sysop to restore your character...
The biggest problem with using modems was that you had to let everyone in the house know you were on the "modem". This meant, sticking post-it notes to every phone in the house, so that someone would tell you they needed to use the phone rather than just picking up the phone and dialing. You also couldn't tie up the phone for hours on end. There was very very few people that had an answering service (not an answering machine), like most do today with VOIP or CableCompany Provided Voice.
You also had to remember, if you were one of those people that had it, disable call waiting, as many modems would drop the connection when a call waiting signal came through. I believe you had to add a *70 after the AT.. so you had something like:
Today people can spend all day actively or passively (by leaving the computer on) online. Wit
Seems that most products advertised today pull on the "santize everything you touch" FUD that's out there. I work at a large technology company, and they recently installed automated hand sanitizers by every external door. I read an article recently that claimed that EMC was having cleaning crews sanitize every doorknob in their campus once a week.
This isn't just a corporate activity, I've got a friend with a 5yr old son in that the son has been conditioned to ask mom for Purel every 5-10 minutes. I also find it funny that kids are being taught to eat a McDonald's burger by holding the wrapper. The funny part is that the people making the burgers aren't wearing gloves...
Reminds me of the old joke: A Harvard and MIT student, both just finished using the urinal and the MIT student walks towards the door. The Harvard student says, "Hey, at Harvard they teach us to wash our hands after using the urinal!" The MIT student fires back, "At MIT they teach us not to pee on our hands!"
This is /., so we need some car comparisons...
My gf claims she needs a 250hp (at the rear wheel) V6 in her commuter car so she can "get on the highway easier." She compared 0-60 times for Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.
I have friends that bought a huge SUV for when they drive to the ski slopes (they go 2-3x a year). A rented SUV would be much cheaper.
So why wouldn't the telcos use the same tactics when convincing their customers to purchase something that they really don't need? People are buying dual/quad core CPUs with 4GB of RAM just to surf the web and upload pics to flickr and facebook.
Let's say it actually was a "Russian Gang" operating out of say, Russia. What can US Gov't agencies do against this? Can they do anything within the law besides call up Russia and tell them to 'take care of it.' It's not like we can drop commandos into Russia and go after them, nor can we launch electronic attacks on this gang (act of futility).
According to the US Constitution, Section 8, Congress has the power to provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.
I see this type of activity as an attack, just because it's two private entities, this IMHO is no different than if SAP tried to hack into Oracle.
Hey Fed, I'm sick of US companies wasting time, money and effort to deal with these people bent on conducting electronic warfare.
As a side note, I wonder how much $$ is wasted in terms of extra capacity (servers, network, CPU, power) is needed by US companies to deal with all this BS (spam, people hacking in etc..) floating around the internet.
I once heard a presentation by a guy at Yahoo who managed a few of their datacenters. When asked about how they deal with DOS attacks his response was that they had more computing capacity then the internet could deliver to them, so they just absorb whatever attacks are sent their way.
I headed over to IMDB to see what George Lucas has actually made and it sadly boils down to two franchises and one great movie.
He made Star Wars, and should have stopped at ROTJ.
He made Indiana Jones, and should have stopped with Last Crusade (1989)
Oddly his best work might have been American Graffiti (1973).
He had other crap like Howard the Duck and Captain EO. He should just retire and stop making toys.
I seem to recall quite a few articles or discussions for app stores for iphone and android that basically said that piracy was brutal for applications.
Android:http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/20/1558259/
iPhone: http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/11/21/0011222/
These apps just seem no different than music was in the napster era. People often ask me why they should pay for these apps when they can just pirate them for free.
Also does anybody audit android apps to make sure there are no backdoors or parts of the app which email all your data to some website?
First off the layout of a McDonalds is actually better than Starbucks. It's pretty hard to find a seat in most starbucks and even if you do you're sitting at some tiny round table and a small chair. Unless you happen to be one of the 4 people that can sit at the 'computer table' or in the big stuffed chairs.
McDonalds has booths and lots of them. Which provide more than enough room for a few people with laptops to sit at and work. Sure if you pick a McD's thats packed you're gonna be in for some noise, but the crowd that's there, unlike at Starbucks isn't looking to sit there for an hour and half and blog about the impact Software Piracy vs Somali Piracy as it pertains to the Nigerian bobsled team.
The new Mcdonalds coffee isn't that bad and the price is outstanding. Sure I can't have the ego boosting espresso a hint of Madagascar cinnamon, but if I want something to drink while working, it's a pretty good deal.
We used to buy music on Records and CDs.
Now we listen to music on highly compressed mp3s. Most people have been listening to mp3s for so long they don't remember (or care) the difference of the higher quality of what a good record or CD used to sound like.
So give the people in the UK a few months and they won't remember what days with higher quality HDTV were like. Especially as we move towards streaming content. Comcast compresses, Netflix transmits audio in stereo. I can't wait for HDTV 1080bw (it's 1080p but in Black and White).
Does the distro work with your printer without any complicated installation procedures?
Does the distro work with your audio hardware without any complicated installation procedures?
Does the distro switch between all the resolutions supported by your video hardware?
Does the distro have a reasonably good package installation mechanism?
Does the distro support your applications without special package installation requirements?
It's questions like this that scare Joe Sixpack away from Linux. If all the major distributions were sold at BestBuy and Joe Sixpack walked in and wanted to buy Linux, he'd have no idea which one to get. KDE vs GNOME? If he wants to buy a Logitech Keyboard and mouse, I doubt he'll see SuSE/Ubuntu/Fedora on the back of the box for the Logitech Compact Keyboard Pro, which btw is a pretty generic $29 USB keyboard. It might work, but atleast Joe Sixpack that it'll work with winXP/Vista/7 because it'll say it on the box.
It's a shame that while all the different distros are good for Linux as a whole, the fact that there are so many distros makes it tough for the avg user to get into it. I consider myself pretty linux savy and the above list of questions makes me start to get nervous. Linux and hardware, it should just work.
With browsers having built in security to tell me if some website harbors malware upon accessing it, why do people through this concept out the window and click on any tiny url that could potentially send them to goat.sx. Seems that this defeats the purpose of me being able to see where the link goes before clicking on it.