They could have done that before the '06 elections. They had the votes then. They want the issue but don't want to accept the consequences for what would happen if they actually got their way.
Unlike the Kos Kids most people with enough working brain cells to actually win elected office realize what would happen if they defunded the War. Millions of dead bodies and Democrats unable to compete for the White House for a generation like happened after Vietnam (Carter being the exception because Ford was such a weak and politically damaged candidate) and will do anything to prevent it from happening again. They wouldn't give a rats ass about the dead bodies of course if they thought it would help them win, those are just disposable brown people[1]... but power is everything.
No, they will talk a good surrender and led encouragement to our enemies so as to keep the body count rising and fresh footage of dismembered corpses on the evening news so they can talk about how it is all Bush's fault of course. But notice how all the Democratic candidates who actually have a snowball's chance in hell of winning have already said they won't be doing a fast pullout starting minutes after swearing in, Hillary won't even commit to being out in her first term.
[1] Rememeber that the Democratic Party is the home of instituitional racism. Jim Crow? Democrat. Those guys with the firehoses back in the civil rights movement? Lifelong Democrats all. Only KKK member serving in Washington? Lifelong Democrat and former Kleagle of the KKK: The Honorable Senator Robert C. Byrd. Who was anklebiting Lincoln at every turn and attempting to sabotage that war effort? The Democratic Party. Just because they have some tame colored folks (Jesse Jackson & ilk come to mind) who keep the 'urban' vote solidly showing up on election day in exchange for largesse from the Treasury doesn't mean the average Democrat isn't a condescending bigot.
Not at all. Gitmo isn't exactly a secret. Rendition was a bit more odious but it didn't stop Clinton's first administration from using the practice. It is just a reactiom to our overly lawyered up society not being able to face the reality that the spy vs spy game is nasty business, and totally not comparable to law enforcement and the somewhat graeter limits that can be imposed on their range of action without the liberty/security balance going totally out of whack.
> to avoid US laws and throw out habeas corpus and the Geneva Convention on a new > made-up class of people, "enemy non-combatants"
They aren't US citizens so US law doesn't and shouldn't apply, thus speaking of things like habeas corpus is just proof of your ignorance. Same for your parroting stock Kos/moveon about the Geneva Convention. Sorry Charlie, terrorists must NEVER be given the protections of the GC or it becomes worthless. I'm serious.
Only a few working brain cells should suffice to figure it out on your own, but since half of/. seems to lack them I'll spell it out one more time. The Geneva Convention is a wonderful idea. But it is an agreement between NATION STATES who signed onto the treaty and can only function in that context. To extend the protections promised by that treaty to non-state actors who 1) have not signed the treaty, 2) have shown no signs of believing in the ideas it codifies and more importantly 3) themselves flagrantly violate the provisions of it on a daily basis (see Youtube.com) (which isn't a bad thing in itself... see #1) would totally undermine the rationale for nation states to sign the damned thing and lead to bloodier and more inhumane war in the future. The only reason a country would sign the GC Treaty is because they think the benefits (and probablity) of having THEIR nationals extended the protections promised outweigh the expense of putting enemy combatants in proper facilities and forgoing the potential intelligence that could be gained by torturing them and the propaganda points from exploiting them.
> This is just a motherboard, with a C7 processor...
Ya, that was my problem with the piece too, no reason for it to be on linuxdevices since it is just another Via Mobo+CPU deal, this time blown up to the MicroATX form factor instead of the Mini-ITX VIA normally prefers. $60 for Mobo and CPU is OK I guess but not especially newsworthy.
"Devel" board to me implies something to develop for an embedded 'target'. What is the target system this board aims at? A PC running an x86 Linux isn't embedded computing. It isn't new, interesting or different. Linux on x86 is now mainstream. A decade ago a commercial outfit pushing Linux systems would have been newsworthy.
> Most people aren't going to bother with it until their current TV breaks.
That is part of it, part is availability of content.
If somebody dropped a 1080p TV on my doorstep with a bow on it I'd only be using it to watch SD content. To get HD programming would require more than doubling my cable bill and losing the ability to use my current MythTV setup. With a really over the top outdoor antenna I could pick up ONE signal reliably and perhaps three at night. Or I could go with DirectTV's HD offering or Dish's.... At a substantial premium in monthly cost and loss of MythTV. My movie collection is in DVD format and I have no plans to buy either HD-DVD (Local Walmart just did a promo on a player for $99 so price isn't the issue) or BluRay because of the format war craziness combined with the more effective DRM.
And if want to play games I have a PC with better specs than any of the consoles.
So I see no value in HDTV and won't for years. Eventually the falling prices on LCD panels will bring HD TV sets below the prices of this last generation of tube based SD sets and might even rival them in picture quality by then, but again that is years away and my 32" JVC is still working now.
> If not why would they use it build supercomputers?
Probably the same reason our school system has to pick a school to hand out Macbooks at even though they haven't had an Apple product deployed for a decade and have zero infrastructure to deal with them. Politics.
> Pretty simple really, just make VMware and Parallels check if it is on mac hardware...
Yea, they 'need' Steve's goodwill and blessings. So that leaves Xen, QEMU, etc. Once youy can buy a non-upgrade license 'off the rack' the genie is out of the bottle. Unless they really are stupid enough to pass through the DRM like you suggest, then it will ease the breaking of it and the freeing of OS X Desktop. Which would be hella fun.:)
Nobody cares about the EULA because it isn't enforcable in most states. (Real site licenses often are though since they involve a real contract signed by both parties.)
Of course nobody outside the hardcore Mac Faithful care about OSX Server or the Xserve anyway so it is a dead issue. The Xserve is just a tarted up rackserver the same as a dozen other top tier vendors can sell you with comparable features and support and a better sticker price. And for server duty, except for a few features to support OS X desktops a bit easier, OS X is just another UNIX, but one of the less featured, slower and less scalable ones.....
Yea and I want a pony. I never said I agree with it, just that it is reality. And in this case it isn't even something where you can have both. You either spin up/down to gain battery life at the expense of accelerated component wear or you trade battery runtime for longer life. I'm currently using a four old Thinkpad but it spends most of it's time on a dock so it isn't something I have to worry about as much. But yes,in the general case I'd swap hard drive lifespan for longer battery life. Hell, a three year old hard drive can be replaced for $100US most of the time or pop a little more and get a bigger one that didn't even exist when the machine was originally built.
By five years though everything in a laptop is getting long in the tooth and if it isn't a top quality machine (Thinkpads, etc.) mechanical problems are usually setting in that aren't practical to repair.
We aren't likely to get off the hardware treadmill until we solve the software one. Is there a good goddamned reason why a modern Fedora can't even be installed on a machine with 'only' 256MB? Or why 512MB isn't good enough for RHEL5? Not just picking on RH here, just more familiar with their offerings.
So you are saying that the majority of Apple's current and future customers would bolt for the door if Apple allowed OS X to run (not support, just allow) on non Apple branded hardware. So you, as (very likely at least) an Apple customer, don't believe Apple hardware could compete in an open market on it's own merits.
This is a position I happen to agree with. I have never been excited by Apple hardware's value proposition. It is pretty but the price performance is just totally whacked. If I could get OS X up on generic hardware though I'd at least want to give it a go vs my current Linux desktop. But I wouldn't want to take it in the wallet and trade down to Apple hardware just to find out since I wouldn't ever be happy with Apple kit anyway. On a desktop I like to be able to buy from the wide variety of high quality hardware available. Their laptops are marginal specs, ok build quality with top notch design but sold at such a premium price vs other high quality laptops I'd find it hard to justify paying the price.
I suspect thinking like mine is the #1 reason Apple has been stuck in single digits for decades. They make a good living being the Volvo of computing, but they have had to accept they will never be mainstream. And they wojuld probably get slaughtered if they tried so perhaps it is a good thing they know their limitations. They could never compete with either the quality (Thinkpads, HP's corporate gear, etc) or lowball (Dell) PC vendors on the hardware front and nobody competes with Microsoft.
> I mean, if it was Windows that was destroying laptop hard drives, this would have been a > legendary thread, with viciously bashing comments, insightfully (40%) funny (20%) attacks > against MS, Vista drama etc.
Of course, because all laptops are DESIGNED for Windows so if it doesn't work abuse and ridicule should be heaped on them if it was hitting multiple hardware vendors with the only common factor the OS vendor.
But this case is tricky. I just read through the thread and most people there are paniced sheep just turning off all power management because they don't EVER want the hdd to unload. They don't understand the three year replacement cycle all PC hardware is designed around, it is BUILT to FAIL. Looks like there IS a problem of some sort though because some people are reporting unload followed almost instantly by a load. But power management remains one of the areas of PCs that vary wildly in totally undocumented ways not only from vendor to vendor and model to model but from minor BIOS revisions. It is a non-trivial problem.
> Instead of really helping people, we as a society have just chosen to get rid of them before they become problems.
That was the original point. Don't believe me, go read the writings of Ms. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. She was pretty open about her notions of Eugenics and eliminating the unfit and the 'inferior breeds' from the genepool. Amazing that Jesse Jackson and AL Sharpton never have any problems with supporting politicians who support Planned Parenthood and abortion since such a high percentage of the aborted are 'their'[1] people and that this WAS (even if they won't say it in public anymore) the stated purpose behind the founding of the organization.
[1] According to both the 'Reverends' and the MSM they are the Official spokesmen for all people of African descent in the US, whether the actual people want them as their leaders or not.
> So Microsoft tells something about the next version of Windows not long after the people > have noticed that their current version isn't all that it's made up to be?
Duh. They have been doing this same bait and switch for the life of the company.
Step One. Release wonderous New Version! It is THE must have thing.
Step Two. Everyone realizes it sucks but their money is already in Bill's pocket. And everyone realizes they have no choice but to adopt the new product anyway because of the three year hardware replacement cycle and the illegal (as certified by a US court) bundling agreements with the OEMs that continue to this day. Especially in the case of their OS but to a lesser extent with Office and the other crap they peddle.
Step Three. Microsoft begins hinting about the upcoming new version. It will fix all of the (not quite admitted) problems with current version AND add exciting new must have features. And it is coming Really Soon.
Step Four. Have their minions in the trade press obsess about Upcoming new version. All complaints about Current version are answered with "But Upcoming version will be out soon and will fix that problem." After a year or two make sure to begin writing reviews for competitors products by comparing them to features that Upcoming version will be shipping "Any day now". By this point EVERYONE must be lamenting how crappy the shipping version is to help generate the NEED to upgrade when the new version ships.
Step Five. As the death march to release continues and feaures get cut, spin it as a good thing. (We are focusing on the needs of our customers, blah, blah.) Now that there is beta (anyone else would rate it pre-alpha but.....) code get the drumbeat ramping up in the press with lots of articles and screenshots. Will your hardware be compatible? Can life as you know it continue without the exciting new features? Etc, blah blah.
Step Six. The product finally releases... See Step One.
> The moment a large ISP like AT&T starts blocking theior IP ranges, they'lll move them.
Not so fast with the doom and gloom "we can't win" attitude. Yes we CAN if we decide we WANT to. Almost every scam on the Internet depends on a 'bulletproof' host somewhere. Yes they hijack Windows PCs, yes they now use P2P for C2 but eventually most of these scammers are driving somebody to a website or they have to collect the stolen keystrokes. Bulletproof hosting is real and it is a real problem. If we put an "Internet Death Penalty" on any ISP providing such hosting it would stop. But only if done in a totally evenhanded yet iron fisted way.
Example. How to deal with today's problem child RBN. Declare them outlaws, every responsible network operator ceases traffic to/from their IP and an RFC is posted detailing the best known data on how the outlaw network is currently connected to the world and proposing a total stoppage of traffic with THOSE systems in 30 days. National telecom operations included, even AT&T if they were stupid enough to get caught at it. Make advertising 'bulletproof' into suicide. And keep right on hounding them as they go ever deeper underground until it becomes clear to anyone with enough brains to configure a router that hosting scammers isn't profitable and connecting allowing a cable run to a system hosting known scammers is an equally bad idea. No SEAL teams blowing up server farms in 3rd world cesspools, no big fuss, everything dealt with on a closed mailing list. All it would take is a supermajority of the top 50 connectivity providers coming together to do something obviously in what should be in their own self interest and that of their customers.
But it doesn't happen. Because there are a few people who gain a lot from the current situation while the losses are spread among everyone and it isn't the scammers doing most of the gaining. Think about it. Billions of dollars in the anti-* industries. The large webmail and ISP driven mail domains use the fact they can throw thousands of man hours at the problem to convince more and more smaller mail domains (or their frustrated users) to simply give up. The 1st world governments (and corporations, media, intellectuals, etc) don't want to offend the 3rd world. And on and on.
> I'm hoping that this will be the why and how to votesmart.org's what.
Why? Content posted by joe random user will AT BEST be nothing more than speculation and random opinion, the sort of stuff you can read your fill of at any of a dozen existing sites.... for any political bent you like. Why would the candidates post anything themselves other than a link to their OWN website, one where they can say what they want to say and know it won't be edited into oblivion within an hour.
A Wiki is simply the wrong platform for collecting and delivering this sort of information. If random edits are hidden until moderated/edited it is just votesmart with a wiki interface instead of asking folk to email in changes and updated info. And if you allow live edits the Ronulans and KosKids move in and set up shop like they have everwhere else on the Internet that allows editing or posting comments or online polls without strict controls in place.
No, that proves they aren't entirely hopeless in that they are capable of learning. Remember the Republicans tilted at that windmill only a few short years ago. They knew they would never muster the votes to actually remove President Clinton but they held the Impeachment proceedings anyway, held up more productive legislative work for what seemed like an eternity and got the totally predictable failure to accomplish anything. Newt was soon gone and the Clintons were still secure in their position in the WH and now look set to return in triumph.
Personally I love to seem em go full moonbat and hold impeachment proceedings, attempt to defind the GWOT and the full routine. That sort of arrogance and overreaching is probably the only way to keep the WH in Republican hands in '08 and just might get the House back. (The Senate is a hopeless cause for '08, too much going against us.)
> Are you telling me that voting republican will not ad inches to my penis and make me attractive to women?
You are confusing cause and effect. The truth is that Alpha Males with large penises tend to be Republicans. Along with the sort of real women who marry such real men. Lesser specimens of manhood, women who can't attract a mate (or don't want one), gays, etc. who know themselves to be unfit, vote for Democrats who promise to take care of the poor pathetic creatures.
Note that Democrat leader types are also often Alpha Males (Bill and Hillary Clinton both come to mind) but such personality types are rare in the rank and file. Regardless of party, you pretty much have to be an Alpha with zero self esteem issues to even want high political office.
And THAT folks is how to troll.:) GNAA and the goatse posts ain't got nuthin on what this puppy is going to do. If it doesn't max out negative within an hour I'll be very disappointed.
> I'm still trying to figure out what social ill these things are supposed to cure.
On the one hand I have to agree with ya, the primary problem in Africa is a lack of understanding and respect for basic[1] human rights. But it is a lot harder to keep an educated population in the sort of abject despotism bordering on slavery most of Africa lives under. The first thing is to let those poor blokes understand that a) their life doesn't HAVE to suck and b) what sort of changes would actually improve their lot. So to the extent handing out these machines might be a backdoor way of bringing about an educated population that would throw off the yoke of the totatarians and socialists that have been running things over there since Europe lost the will to maintain their colonial interests, it just might be worth it.
[1] In roughly the order of importance for raising their standard of living:
1. Why the Rule of Law is better than the Rule of Men, and is the basis for all of the others.
2. Property Rights (or why Socialism is the polar opposite of liberty)
3. Free Markets (or why well meaning idiots who think government can run an economy better should be ignored)
4. Individual Liberty (Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness)
I can show you (and so can Google) internet retailers selling 1W panels for $10-12 that are about 1/2sq ft. Buy in bulk and leave out a profit and ya, you can buy 2W (the stated power needed to run an OLPC) for $12.
> Apple have proved that customers DO WANT a closed smartphone.
Oh really? I thought the initial crowd was mostly clueless fashion lemmings and the Apple faithful. And even of those it appears many thought they could thumb their nose at Apple's silly idea of locking the phone to AT&T. Reality check, unless the nunber of phones being unlocked was non-trivial (or Apple is worried it will become so if they didn't act quickly) there is no way Apple would risk A PR backlash. Since everything Apple does these days gets the sort of press coverage normally reserved for rock stars and missing pretty white girls this fiasco is likely to end up getting a lot more mainstream coverage.
Now lets think this through. On one side you have paying customers with a brick (i.e. out $400-$600 USD) for the 'crime' of wanting to use it on their existing network, outside the US, etc. and on the other you have an egomaniacal CEO and AT&T (The freaking resurrected 'Phone Company'; object of hatred and abuse for almost a century). Now lets all put on our thinking caps and make a guess which side the MSM is going to write their stories to cast as villian. This is going to be nasty.
>...it requires a bluetooth compatible phone for 3G/GPRS connectivity, if it had this built in it would be ideal...
No, it would just be repeating the same damned mistake that destroyed Palm. A phone is a phone and a PDA/Tablet is a PDA. No Phone can have enough screen real estate to be useful as a PDA and conversely any useful PDA is too freaking big to hold as a phone. If you are a total convert to the bluetooth earpiece it could work from an exgineering standpoint but still get stuck on practical matters.
The big practical objection is that both phones and computing are on two different replacement cycles and the phone part tends to be closed down, locked down and tied to longterm contracts. So unless the whole industry could come together and adopt one (or perhaps two) standardized modules to allow the whole radio part to be swapped out along with the SIM module it is just asking for trouble.
> I'm not getting the part why signing is required but not getting a certified signature isn't.
If it isn't a certified sig when you install the app you get a warning box that is a 'development' version and that it may be unstable, damage settings, the phone, sell your soul to the devil while you aren't looking, etc.
Nothing everyone isn't long used to ignoring after the signed drivers in XP experience.
> Does it matter why a company actually adopts open software?
And anyway, Nokia HAS been playing in the Open Source/Free Software world for a few years now. Made some mistakes, true enough but they are learning the ropes. Or has everyone forgotten those cool N770 and N800 tablets already?
The change from closed to open smart phones was already underway, Apple may have unwittingly acellerated the trend to a seachange by giving the world (with a product the press just won't STFU about) an object lesson in just WHY a customer doesn't want a closed smartphone.
I guess we have a slashdot user who has not watched Army of Darkness enough times. Sad.:)
But seriously, just watch how His Steveness reacts to a little market dominance. Macs are a footnote in the PC world so being overtly Evil would just be suicide, thus Macs aren't infused with much Evil. But look at the iPod and now iPhone game, where Apple feels itself to be dominant. All of teh new iPods are infested with DRM from the bootloader on, no RockBox or iPod Linux on any of the newer hardware. The iPhone came out of the chute with a locked firmware, just buggy. So in response they are bricking em.
> Wouldn't the phone belong to the person who bought it, not Apple?
If it were any other vendor Slashdot would be in 100% agreement that Apple doesn't 'own' the product once it is bought, in fact they would be venting almost as much fury at/. for posting such drivel since the way it is posted isn't attacking such a notion as stupid. But since it IS Apple we are talking about and so many here live fully inside the Reality Distortion Field you get Slashdot editors leaving otherwise insane sentences like that one in a post. And no, this isn't just a pile on kdawson rant, CmdrTaco is equally within the Field.
Listen up you primitive screwheads, Steve Jobs is AS evil, if not moreso than Steve Balmer. He just doesn't throw chairs or dance around like a drunken monkey.
> A process running as a regular user can break out too.
Only if it can get access to a broken SUID program, etc. I always though the point of a chroot in a security context was that the chroot only had the absolute minimum environment the task being isolated had to have, thus there shouldn't be too much in there to worry about getting exploited. Which is very useful.
Of course there are lots of uses for chroot that have nothing to do with security. Like keeping a whole 32bit environment seperate from the main 64bit install, wonderful tools like mock which allow keeping multiple distros on multiple arches installed and usable for building packages, etc.
> IOW, it's still a POS, just not quite as much a POS as before. And, oh yeah, it costs money the Army doesn't have.
No, it is getting it's first real field test. Theory is meeting reality and as usual reality is winning. Sounds like the right things are happening. The soldiers are ditching the parts that aren't ready for the real world, keeping the parts that work and getting bug fixes and features added to address problems. Give it a rev or two and it will be ready for wider use.
And forget the weight problems, remember that any hardware that has made it to Iraq in such small numbers will have been designed at least a year or so ago and probably have been made as handmade prototypes. If they get the features and software right in this shakedown and get approved for a full scale manufacturing rampup they will be able to get the weight down. Maybe not immediately down to the 5 pounds the troops seem to think would make it a 'must have' but way under 10 and each revision will be smaller, lighter and have more features. It's the nature of tech.
Since it appears that fielding less than 200,000 troops is straining the US Army to the breaking point we are going to need every force multiplier we can get. And that's probably a good thing. A numerically small but well trained and equiped force is probably a better bet anyway since in a straight up brawl with either of the more likely foes (A newly formed Caliphate in the ME or the ChiComs) we might face in the next fifty years the other side is going to outnumber us so we better plan on keeping a high kill ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
> Democrats can stop the war now.
They could have done that before the '06 elections. They had the votes then. They want the issue but don't want to accept the consequences for what would happen if they actually got their way.
Unlike the Kos Kids most people with enough working brain cells to actually win elected office realize what would happen if they defunded the War. Millions of dead bodies and Democrats unable to compete for the White House for a generation like happened after Vietnam (Carter being the exception because Ford was such a weak and politically damaged candidate) and will do anything to prevent it from happening again. They wouldn't give a rats ass about the dead bodies of course if they thought it would help them win, those are just disposable brown people[1]... but power is everything.
No, they will talk a good surrender and led encouragement to our enemies so as to keep the body count rising and fresh footage of dismembered corpses on the evening news so they can talk about how it is all Bush's fault of course. But notice how all the Democratic candidates who actually have a snowball's chance in hell of winning have already said they won't be doing a fast pullout starting minutes after swearing in, Hillary won't even commit to being out in her first term.
[1] Rememeber that the Democratic Party is the home of instituitional racism. Jim Crow? Democrat. Those guys with the firehoses back in the civil rights movement? Lifelong Democrats all. Only KKK member serving in Washington? Lifelong Democrat and former Kleagle of the KKK: The Honorable Senator Robert C. Byrd. Who was anklebiting Lincoln at every turn and attempting to sabotage that war effort? The Democratic Party. Just because they have some tame colored folks (Jesse Jackson & ilk come to mind) who keep the 'urban' vote solidly showing up on election day in exchange for largesse from the Treasury doesn't mean the average Democrat isn't a condescending bigot.
> No, we send them to secret torture prisons
/. seems to lack them I'll spell it out one more time. The Geneva Convention is a wonderful idea. But it is an agreement between NATION STATES who signed onto the treaty and can only function in that context. To extend the protections promised by that treaty to non-state actors who 1) have not signed the treaty, 2) have shown no signs of believing in the ideas it codifies and more importantly 3) themselves flagrantly violate the provisions of it on a daily basis (see Youtube.com) (which isn't a bad thing in itself... see #1) would totally undermine the rationale for nation states to sign the damned thing and lead to bloodier and more inhumane war in the future. The only reason a country would sign the GC Treaty is because they think the benefits (and probablity) of having THEIR nationals extended the protections promised outweigh the expense of putting enemy combatants in proper facilities and forgoing the potential intelligence that could be gained by torturing them and the propaganda points from exploiting them.
Not at all. Gitmo isn't exactly a secret. Rendition was a bit more odious but it didn't stop Clinton's first administration from using the practice. It is just a reactiom to our overly lawyered up society not being able to face the reality that the spy vs spy game is nasty business, and totally not comparable to law enforcement and the somewhat graeter limits that can be imposed on their range of action without the liberty/security balance going totally out of whack.
> to avoid US laws and throw out habeas corpus and the Geneva Convention on a new
> made-up class of people, "enemy non-combatants"
They aren't US citizens so US law doesn't and shouldn't apply, thus speaking of things like habeas corpus is just proof of your ignorance. Same for your parroting stock Kos/moveon about the Geneva Convention. Sorry Charlie, terrorists must NEVER be given the protections of the GC or it becomes worthless. I'm serious.
Only a few working brain cells should suffice to figure it out on your own, but since half of
> This is just a motherboard, with a C7 processor...
Ya, that was my problem with the piece too, no reason for it to be on linuxdevices since it is just another Via Mobo+CPU deal, this time blown up to the MicroATX form factor instead of the Mini-ITX VIA normally prefers. $60 for Mobo and CPU is OK I guess but not especially newsworthy.
"Devel" board to me implies something to develop for an embedded 'target'. What is the target system this board aims at? A PC running an x86 Linux isn't embedded computing. It isn't new, interesting or different. Linux on x86 is now mainstream. A decade ago a commercial outfit pushing Linux systems would have been newsworthy.
> Most people aren't going to bother with it until their current TV breaks.
That is part of it, part is availability of content.
If somebody dropped a 1080p TV on my doorstep with a bow on it I'd only be using it to watch SD content. To get HD programming would require more than doubling my cable bill and losing the ability to use my current MythTV setup. With a really over the top outdoor antenna I could pick up ONE signal reliably and perhaps three at night. Or I could go with DirectTV's HD offering or Dish's.... At a substantial premium in monthly cost and loss of MythTV. My movie collection is in DVD format and I have no plans to buy either HD-DVD (Local Walmart just did a promo on a player for $99 so price isn't the issue) or BluRay because of the format war craziness combined with the more effective DRM.
And if want to play games I have a PC with better specs than any of the consoles.
So I see no value in HDTV and won't for years. Eventually the falling prices on LCD panels will bring HD TV sets below the prices of this last generation of tube based SD sets and might even rival them in picture quality by then, but again that is years away and my 32" JVC is still working now.
> If not why would they use it build supercomputers?
Probably the same reason our school system has to pick a school to hand out Macbooks at even though they haven't had an Apple product deployed for a decade and have zero infrastructure to deal with them. Politics.
> Pretty simple really, just make VMware and Parallels check if it is on mac hardware...
:)
Yea, they 'need' Steve's goodwill and blessings. So that leaves Xen, QEMU, etc. Once youy can buy a non-upgrade license 'off the rack' the genie is out of the bottle. Unless they really are stupid enough to pass through the DRM like you suggest, then it will ease the breaking of it and the freeing of OS X Desktop. Which would be hella fun.
Nobody cares about the EULA because it isn't enforcable in most states. (Real site licenses often are though since they involve a real contract signed by both parties.)
Of course nobody outside the hardcore Mac Faithful care about OSX Server or the Xserve anyway so it is a dead issue. The Xserve is just a tarted up rackserver the same as a dozen other top tier vendors can sell you with comparable features and support and a better sticker price. And for server duty, except for a few features to support OS X desktops a bit easier, OS X is just another UNIX, but one of the less featured, slower and less scalable ones.....
> PCs shouldn't be BUILT to FAIL.
Yea and I want a pony. I never said I agree with it, just that it is reality. And in this case it isn't even something where you can have both. You either spin up/down to gain battery life at the expense of accelerated component wear or you trade battery runtime for longer life. I'm currently using a four old Thinkpad but it spends most of it's time on a dock so it isn't something I have to worry about as much. But yes,in the general case I'd swap hard drive lifespan for longer battery life. Hell, a three year old hard drive can be replaced for $100US most of the time or pop a little more and get a bigger one that didn't even exist when the machine was originally built.
By five years though everything in a laptop is getting long in the tooth and if it isn't a top quality machine (Thinkpads, etc.) mechanical problems are usually setting in that aren't practical to repair.
We aren't likely to get off the hardware treadmill until we solve the software one. Is there a good goddamned reason why a modern Fedora can't even be installed on a machine with 'only' 256MB? Or why 512MB isn't good enough for RHEL5? Not just picking on RH here, just more familiar with their offerings.
> Not to mention it will kill Apple.
So you are saying that the majority of Apple's current and future customers would bolt for the door if Apple allowed OS X to run (not support, just allow) on non Apple branded hardware. So you, as (very likely at least) an Apple customer, don't believe Apple hardware could compete in an open market on it's own merits.
This is a position I happen to agree with. I have never been excited by Apple hardware's value proposition. It is pretty but the price performance is just totally whacked. If I could get OS X up on generic hardware though I'd at least want to give it a go vs my current Linux desktop. But I wouldn't want to take it in the wallet and trade down to Apple hardware just to find out since I wouldn't ever be happy with Apple kit anyway. On a desktop I like to be able to buy from the wide variety of high quality hardware available. Their laptops are marginal specs, ok build quality with top notch design but sold at such a premium price vs other high quality laptops I'd find it hard to justify paying the price.
I suspect thinking like mine is the #1 reason Apple has been stuck in single digits for decades. They make a good living being the Volvo of computing, but they have had to accept they will never be mainstream. And they wojuld probably get slaughtered if they tried so perhaps it is a good thing they know their limitations. They could never compete with either the quality (Thinkpads, HP's corporate gear, etc) or lowball (Dell) PC vendors on the hardware front and nobody competes with Microsoft.
> I mean, if it was Windows that was destroying laptop hard drives, this would have been a
> legendary thread, with viciously bashing comments, insightfully (40%) funny (20%) attacks
> against MS, Vista drama etc.
Of course, because all laptops are DESIGNED for Windows so if it doesn't work abuse and ridicule should be heaped on them if it was hitting multiple hardware vendors with the only common factor the OS vendor.
But this case is tricky. I just read through the thread and most people there are paniced sheep just turning off all power management because they don't EVER want the hdd to unload. They don't understand the three year replacement cycle all PC hardware is designed around, it is BUILT to FAIL. Looks like there IS a problem of some sort though because some people are reporting unload followed almost instantly by a load. But power management remains one of the areas of PCs that vary wildly in totally undocumented ways not only from vendor to vendor and model to model but from minor BIOS revisions. It is a non-trivial problem.
> Instead of really helping people, we as a society have just chosen to get rid of them before they become problems.
That was the original point. Don't believe me, go read the writings of Ms. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. She was pretty open about her notions of Eugenics and eliminating the unfit and the 'inferior breeds' from the genepool. Amazing that Jesse Jackson and AL Sharpton never have any problems with supporting politicians who support Planned Parenthood and abortion since such a high percentage of the aborted are 'their'[1] people and that this WAS (even if they won't say it in public anymore) the stated purpose behind the founding of the organization.
[1] According to both the 'Reverends' and the MSM they are the Official spokesmen for all people of African descent in the US, whether the actual people want them as their leaders or not.
> So Microsoft tells something about the next version of Windows not long after the people
> have noticed that their current version isn't all that it's made up to be?
Duh. They have been doing this same bait and switch for the life of the company.
Step One. Release wonderous New Version! It is THE must have thing.
Step Two. Everyone realizes it sucks but their money is already in Bill's pocket. And everyone realizes they have no choice but to adopt the new product anyway because of the three year hardware replacement cycle and the illegal (as certified by a US court) bundling agreements with the OEMs that continue to this day. Especially in the case of their OS but to a lesser extent with Office and the other crap they peddle.
Step Three. Microsoft begins hinting about the upcoming new version. It will fix all of the (not quite admitted) problems with current version AND add exciting new must have features. And it is coming Really Soon.
Step Four. Have their minions in the trade press obsess about Upcoming new version. All complaints about Current version are answered with "But Upcoming version will be out soon and will fix that problem." After a year or two make sure to begin writing reviews for competitors products by comparing them to features that Upcoming version will be shipping "Any day now". By this point EVERYONE must be lamenting how crappy the shipping version is to help generate the NEED to upgrade when the new version ships.
Step Five. As the death march to release continues and feaures get cut, spin it as a good thing. (We are focusing on the needs of our customers, blah, blah.) Now that there is beta (anyone else would rate it pre-alpha but.....) code get the drumbeat ramping up in the press with lots of articles and screenshots. Will your hardware be compatible? Can life as you know it continue without the exciting new features? Etc, blah blah.
Step Six. The product finally releases... See Step One.
> The moment a large ISP like AT&T starts blocking theior IP ranges, they'lll move them.
Not so fast with the doom and gloom "we can't win" attitude. Yes we CAN if we decide we WANT to. Almost every scam on the Internet depends on a 'bulletproof' host somewhere. Yes they hijack Windows PCs, yes they now use P2P for C2 but eventually most of these scammers are driving somebody to a website or they have to collect the stolen keystrokes. Bulletproof hosting is real and it is a real problem. If we put an "Internet Death Penalty" on any ISP providing such hosting it would stop. But only if done in a totally evenhanded yet iron fisted way.
Example. How to deal with today's problem child RBN. Declare them outlaws, every responsible network operator ceases traffic to/from their IP and an RFC is posted detailing the best known data on how the outlaw network is currently connected to the world and proposing a total stoppage of traffic with THOSE systems in 30 days. National telecom operations included, even AT&T if they were stupid enough to get caught at it. Make advertising 'bulletproof' into suicide. And keep right on hounding them as they go ever deeper underground until it becomes clear to anyone with enough brains to configure a router that hosting scammers isn't profitable and connecting allowing a cable run to a system hosting known scammers is an equally bad idea. No SEAL teams blowing up server farms in 3rd world cesspools, no big fuss, everything dealt with on a closed mailing list. All it would take is a supermajority of the top 50 connectivity providers coming together to do something obviously in what should be in their own self interest and that of their customers.
But it doesn't happen. Because there are a few people who gain a lot from the current situation while the losses are spread among everyone and it isn't the scammers doing most of the gaining. Think about it. Billions of dollars in the anti-* industries. The large webmail and ISP driven mail domains use the fact they can throw thousands of man hours at the problem to convince more and more smaller mail domains (or their frustrated users) to simply give up. The 1st world governments (and corporations, media, intellectuals, etc) don't want to offend the 3rd world. And on and on.
> I'm hoping that this will be the why and how to votesmart.org's what.
Why? Content posted by joe random user will AT BEST be nothing more than speculation and random opinion, the sort of stuff you can read your fill of at any of a dozen existing sites.... for any political bent you like. Why would the candidates post anything themselves other than a link to their OWN website, one where they can say what they want to say and know it won't be edited into oblivion within an hour.
A Wiki is simply the wrong platform for collecting and delivering this sort of information. If random edits are hidden until moderated/edited it is just votesmart with a wiki interface instead of asking folk to email in changes and updated info. And if you allow live edits the Ronulans and KosKids move in and set up shop like they have everwhere else on the Internet that allows editing or posting comments or online polls without strict controls in place.
> So they don't try because it would be hard?
No, that proves they aren't entirely hopeless in that they are capable of learning. Remember the Republicans tilted at that windmill only a few short years ago. They knew they would never muster the votes to actually remove President Clinton but they held the Impeachment proceedings anyway, held up more productive legislative work for what seemed like an eternity and got the totally predictable failure to accomplish anything. Newt was soon gone and the Clintons were still secure in their position in the WH and now look set to return in triumph.
Personally I love to seem em go full moonbat and hold impeachment proceedings, attempt to defind the GWOT and the full routine. That sort of arrogance and overreaching is probably the only way to keep the WH in Republican hands in '08 and just might get the House back. (The Senate is a hopeless cause for '08, too much going against us.)
> Are you telling me that voting republican will not ad inches to my penis and make me attractive to women?
:) GNAA and the goatse posts ain't got nuthin on what this puppy is going to do. If it doesn't max out negative within an hour I'll be very disappointed.
You are confusing cause and effect. The truth is that Alpha Males with large penises tend to be Republicans. Along with the sort of real women who marry such real men. Lesser specimens of manhood, women who can't attract a mate (or don't want one), gays, etc. who know themselves to be unfit, vote for Democrats who promise to take care of the poor pathetic creatures.
Note that Democrat leader types are also often Alpha Males (Bill and Hillary Clinton both come to mind) but such personality types are rare in the rank and file. Regardless of party, you pretty much have to be an Alpha with zero self esteem issues to even want high political office.
And THAT folks is how to troll.
> I'm still trying to figure out what social ill these things are supposed to cure.
On the one hand I have to agree with ya, the primary problem in Africa is a lack of understanding and respect for basic[1] human rights. But it is a lot harder to keep an educated population in the sort of abject despotism bordering on slavery most of Africa lives under. The first thing is to let those poor blokes understand that a) their life doesn't HAVE to suck and b) what sort of changes would actually improve their lot. So to the extent handing out these machines might be a backdoor way of bringing about an educated population that would throw off the yoke of the totatarians and socialists that have been running things over there since Europe lost the will to maintain their colonial interests, it just might be worth it.
[1] In roughly the order of importance for raising their standard of living:
1. Why the Rule of Law is better than the Rule of Men, and is the basis for all of the others.
2. Property Rights (or why Socialism is the polar opposite of liberty)
3. Free Markets (or why well meaning idiots who think government can run an economy better should be ignored)
4. Individual Liberty (Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness)
> Sounds too good to be true. Hope I'm wrong...
I can show you (and so can Google) internet retailers selling 1W panels for $10-12 that are about 1/2sq ft. Buy in bulk and leave out a profit and ya, you can buy 2W (the stated power needed to run an OLPC) for $12.
> Apple have proved that customers DO WANT a closed smartphone.
Oh really? I thought the initial crowd was mostly clueless fashion lemmings and the Apple faithful. And even of those it appears many thought they could thumb their nose at Apple's silly idea of locking the phone to AT&T. Reality check, unless the nunber of phones being unlocked was non-trivial (or Apple is worried it will become so if they didn't act quickly) there is no way Apple would risk A PR backlash. Since everything Apple does these days gets the sort of press coverage normally reserved for rock stars and missing pretty white girls this fiasco is likely to end up getting a lot more mainstream coverage.
Now lets think this through. On one side you have paying customers with a brick (i.e. out $400-$600 USD) for the 'crime' of wanting to use it on their existing network, outside the US, etc. and on the other you have an egomaniacal CEO and AT&T (The freaking resurrected 'Phone Company'; object of hatred and abuse for almost a century). Now lets all put on our thinking caps and make a guess which side the MSM is going to write their stories to cast as villian. This is going to be nasty.
> ...it requires a bluetooth compatible phone for 3G/GPRS connectivity, if it had this built in it would be ideal...
No, it would just be repeating the same damned mistake that destroyed Palm. A phone is a phone and a PDA/Tablet is a PDA. No Phone can have enough screen real estate to be useful as a PDA and conversely any useful PDA is too freaking big to hold as a phone. If you are a total convert to the bluetooth earpiece it could work from an exgineering standpoint but still get stuck on practical matters.
The big practical objection is that both phones and computing are on two different replacement cycles and the phone part tends to be closed down, locked down and tied to longterm contracts. So unless the whole industry could come together and adopt one (or perhaps two) standardized modules to allow the whole radio part to be swapped out along with the SIM module it is just asking for trouble.
> I'm not getting the part why signing is required but not getting a certified signature isn't.
If it isn't a certified sig when you install the app you get a warning box that is a 'development' version and that it may be unstable, damage settings, the phone, sell your soul to the devil while you aren't looking, etc.
Nothing everyone isn't long used to ignoring after the signed drivers in XP experience.
> Does it matter why a company actually adopts open software?
And anyway, Nokia HAS been playing in the Open Source/Free Software world for a few years now. Made some mistakes, true enough but they are learning the ropes. Or has everyone forgotten those cool N770 and N800 tablets already?
The change from closed to open smart phones was already underway, Apple may have unwittingly acellerated the trend to a seachange by giving the world (with a product the press just won't STFU about) an object lesson in just WHY a customer doesn't want a closed smartphone.
I guess we have a slashdot user who has not watched Army of Darkness enough times. Sad. :)
But seriously, just watch how His Steveness reacts to a little market dominance. Macs are a footnote in the PC world so being overtly Evil would just be suicide, thus Macs aren't infused with much Evil. But look at the iPod and now iPhone game, where Apple feels itself to be dominant. All of teh new iPods are infested with DRM from the bootloader on, no RockBox or iPod Linux on any of the newer hardware. The iPhone came out of the chute with a locked firmware, just buggy. So in response they are bricking em.
> Wouldn't the phone belong to the person who bought it, not Apple?
/. for posting such drivel since the way it is posted isn't attacking such a notion as stupid. But since it IS Apple we are talking about and so many here live fully inside the Reality Distortion Field you get Slashdot editors leaving otherwise insane sentences like that one in a post. And no, this isn't just a pile on kdawson rant, CmdrTaco is equally within the Field.
If it were any other vendor Slashdot would be in 100% agreement that Apple doesn't 'own' the product once it is bought, in fact they would be venting almost as much fury at
Listen up you primitive screwheads, Steve Jobs is AS evil, if not moreso than Steve Balmer. He just doesn't throw chairs or dance around like a drunken monkey.
> A process running as a regular user can break out too.
Only if it can get access to a broken SUID program, etc. I always though the point of a chroot in a security context was that the chroot only had the absolute minimum environment the task being isolated had to have, thus there shouldn't be too much in there to worry about getting exploited. Which is very useful.
Of course there are lots of uses for chroot that have nothing to do with security. Like keeping a whole 32bit environment seperate from the main 64bit install, wonderful tools like mock which allow keeping multiple distros on multiple arches installed and usable for building packages, etc.
> IOW, it's still a POS, just not quite as much a POS as before. And, oh yeah, it costs money the Army doesn't have.
No, it is getting it's first real field test. Theory is meeting reality and as usual reality is winning. Sounds like the right things are happening. The soldiers are ditching the parts that aren't ready for the real world, keeping the parts that work and getting bug fixes and features added to address problems. Give it a rev or two and it will be ready for wider use.
And forget the weight problems, remember that any hardware that has made it to Iraq in such small numbers will have been designed at least a year or so ago and probably have been made as handmade prototypes. If they get the features and software right in this shakedown and get approved for a full scale manufacturing rampup they will be able to get the weight down. Maybe not immediately down to the 5 pounds the troops seem to think would make it a 'must have' but way under 10 and each revision will be smaller, lighter and have more features. It's the nature of tech.
Since it appears that fielding less than 200,000 troops is straining the US Army to the breaking point we are going to need every force multiplier we can get. And that's probably a good thing. A numerically small but well trained and equiped force is probably a better bet anyway since in a straight up brawl with either of the more likely foes (A newly formed Caliphate in the ME or the ChiComs) we might face in the next fifty years the other side is going to outnumber us so we better plan on keeping a high kill ratio.