That's just the point. If you're not technically savvy, it's real easy to get the computer to a point you cannot repair it. If you have to pass it to someone else to have it repaired, it really makes little difference whether the fix was "boot off a floppy and copy file X on top of the file on the hard disk", or "reflash the rom with a dedicated piece of hardware attached to a second computer.
Actually, no. Bricking is a term meaning "cannot be repaired without replacing or tampering with the hardware." Basically, if you have to pull a PROM chip off the board and replace it to make it work, it's bricked. If it can still be reparired by software, through another PROM flash, or something similar, it's not bricked.
I first heard the term 'bricked' in relation to hard drives, back when Apple was still producing the Newton. It makes sense - a drive with severe platter damage that won't spin up resembles a brick because of its shape and weight.
The modern term 'bricking' is usually used in relation to a firmware of OS patch that renders a device unusable. Your use of the term is misleading and overly narrow, since you can't 'flash' a ROM(what people refer to as flash memory is usually a variation of EEPROM). A device can also become 'bricked' because of corrupt user data stored on a drive or battery-backed RAM.
If my mother was to install this patch then for her the PC would be effectively bricked.
No, it wouldn't. All she has to do is pop in her Windows XP CD and let it do it's little auto-recovery magic. Boot.ini will be restored and voila! Her PC is working again.
Perhaps the term is just evolving into a more useful terminology i.e. it's effectively brick for that user. Maybe you need a new term for something that has the ROM screwed so badly that not even a knowledgeable user can fix it.
It's not more useful terminology because it's incorrect. Why should we change the term bricked, which really does mean what it says (your technology is now an expensive brick), because some fucktard users don't know the difference between "not working as intended" and "not working at all"?
WTF is with you people? Ever since the Apple made iPhones "bricks", this erroneous use of the term has seeped into our technical vocabulary. People, it's not a brick if it's still usable. When a piece of electronics is really bricked, that means that the ROM is in such an unrecoverable state, that it can't even be flashed with a new working ROM, and needs to be either thrown away, or sent to a factory for repair.
Now, the term bricking is being applied to any piece of electronics or computer equipment that won't boot an OS.
It's not bricked if you can just reinstall or repair Windows and have it work again. It's bricked if you flash a bad ROM BIOS image and now you can't even turn the thing on.
The fact of the matter is that if the tables were turned and Apple were the most dominant and pervasive OS, there would be similar tactics employed. You bet your life that Apple would hunt you down with their 'iCanDoNoWrong' activation software.
You have no proof that just because one convicted monopolist, with greater than 90% marketshare, throws their weight around in the computer industry and treats their users like thieves, a small computer company, with ~3% marketshare, who has never required activation or authentication to use any of their operating systems, would ever do the same thing.
Your argument is totally illogical. It's like saying "just because Dick Cheney likes to waterboard and torture enemy combatants, if Jesus were vice president, he would do the same thing."
Of course Dick Cheney isn't Steve Ballmer, and Steve Jobs isn't Jesus, but you get the picture.
Apple and Microsoft are like the Yin and Yang of the computer world. They represent the opposite views on almost everything related to computing technology. One company likes to force users through monopolistic practices, bundling, and activation. The other company believes "your computer is yours to use how you like."
One of my XP machines pulled down a WGA update from Windows automatic updates yesterday.
Have they also somehow altered WGA in XP?
Yes, they have. I have my automatic updates on XP set to download only, then ask me before installing. Months ago, I already told it to NOT install WGA, and don't ask me about this update again. They changed something recently, because I got an auto-download of IE7, and it asked me to install that. I said no, of course. Then, right after, I got another auto-download of WGA, and it asked me again to install it.
What they seem to have done is simply published a newer version of WGA. Even if you had chosen to not install it the first time, it still tries to install the newer version, because Windows thinks it's a brand new update. If you had automatic updates set to install without prompting you, BAM! your computer is now infected with the WGA rootkit.
And yes, WGA is a rootkit, as far as I'm concerned. If I can help it, I will never install it on my machine. Why should I give MS the permission to disable my hardware and software? Sneaky tricks aside, I'm sure they'll figure out some way to get it on my system some day.
If I'm not tied to a single source for my books then I may consider it, but I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written... At least for me.
I have a Kindle. It is really dead simple to get non-DRM eBooks onto it. It takes native.TXT and.MOBI files, and other formats can be converted for free with the Mobipocket Creator, which is a free download from http://www.mobipocket.com./ When you connect the Kindle via USB, it just shows up like any other USB removable storage device. Drag and drop files to the "documents" or "Music" or "audiobooks" folders and there you go.
I'd like to be optimistic, but I've (unwillingly) been a Verizon customer for years, and I'd be surprised to see a leopard change its spots...
Yeah, this is such a non-announcement it's not even funny. Verizon can pretend to be open, when in truth their network uses a proprietary version of CDMA which is not even compatible with any of the GSM hardware out there. So basically, nobody will ever become certified, unless they really want them to be, and the only companies with the money and time to apply are the ones that are already providing them with handsets like Motorola, LG, etc.
Verizon gets to pretend "see, we're open, really" when meanwhile the barriers to entry are still so friggin' high that you need a multi-million dollar R&D budget just to play in their proprietary sandbox.
No thanks... Go to hell and take your locked down proprietary handsets with you.
I'm not ramming ideology. It's CNet that explains the ideology wrong by saying "open source = $free". They could just tell people the SW they're pushing is free, without saying something false about the source code. Because, as you say, most people don't care.
I just think CNet is doing a pretty decent job of "marketing" open source products to the average computer user. Because really, that's what advocacy is: marketing.
I don't think the average person reading that article would make the logical leap from free to "I can steal this source code and get away with it," but that's just me.
I believe the Kindle was also going to be the size of a standard paperback book. That means its screen size is going to be a lot more functional for reading than the relatively small size of the iPhone screen.
This is something people are missing out on a lot. I have an iPhone, and it's great for mobile web browsing, but reading anything on that screen for longer than an hour or so your hands get cramped just from trying to hold it. The Kindle was designed to be held like a book. When we hold books, we shift the posture of our hands every time we turn a page, or shift from the left page to the right page. Why? Because hands aren't designed to be held crunched up in one position for hours on end. They need to move. Small screens like the iPhone weren't designed for the needs of book readers.
I feel the need to point out that there's a lot of FUD in the original article as well. I think the Forbes editors might have some AAPL stock perhaps?
From TFA:
There are also big questions about the device's wireless connection. The device will tap into fresh content via an EV-DO (Evolution-Data Only) wireless network. Will there be a monthly subscription fee?
No, they already said there was no monthly fee for wireless access.
How much of the Web will users be able to surf? Newsweek's Levy was able to download a copy of Charles Dickens' Bleak House from Amazon for $1.99, but anyone with full Web access can get the same title from Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) Book Search for free.
Actually, you can download eBooks in text or mobi format for free from the Kindle, so anything on Google book search should be free for the taking. Also, even though you have to subscribe to blogs if you want digital delivery of the content for offline reading, you can still browse to any blog or website and read it right from your Kindle. The only disadvantage: You have to use the next/previous page buttons to scroll up and down the web page. It's a limitation of the e-Ink technology, because you obviously can't smoothly scroll a page with a scroll bar that requires 1 second to update it's screen.
There is a lot of FUD out there about the Kindle, but I think it's going to be pretty amazing. Can you imagine having every O'Reilly book ever made on the thing, and the ability to do full text search/grep capability through your entire library of technical books? That alone is a killer app.
That point is worthless, or some negative value. Because open-source software is free speech , notfree beer. Plenty of open source is $free, but there's plenty of paid products that include the source code. It's harder to prevent people from redistributing open source, to collect the money from something they can copy to others without paying. But that's copyright violation, which CNet is now promoting, even though it makes its own income from that same protection.
I'm all for free speech and free beer. I'm a big OSS advocate, but seriously, you guys need to get off your high horse sometimes and realize that this is how you sell OSS to Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack doesn't care whether the software on his computer is free as in speech or not. He doesn't care about modifying the source code, or freedom to fork. He does care about cost though.
The free speech education can come later, but please, quit arguing semantics because all you do is give the entire OSS movement a bad name. Joe Sixpack will see some idiot blathering on about how free speech does not equal free beer and think we're all just a bunch of whining hippies. Then he'll never use OSS because he thinks there is a religious ideology behind it.
Show him good "free as in beer" software, then later on, if he's interested, educate him on why "free as in speech" is important too. Please do us all a favor and don't try to ram ideology down Joe Sixpack's throat.
And speaking of "trigger-happy", you seem to point the finger right back at the Web sites for not inspecting the ads and the underlaying code. Well, that's what they hire DoubleClick for, thats one of the points for using outside ad servers. DoubleClick (and its Mother Ship Google) where not doing their jobs. It was THEIR responsibility to know that the ads THEY served where ligit or not. That's why THEY make the "big bucks". Google is good, Google is God...
If it was my big dollar website, I would want full editorial control over ALL content that appears on the page, whether it's an article, or the ads that are present in that article.
Print publications have full editorial control of all material, and they exercise it often to remove innapropriate advertising. Why do the online versions of these same print publications not exercise full editorial control?
It's only a matter of time before they get exposed to liability (they probably are already) and a customer sues them for the drive-by installation of malware.
The poster then makes a link himself, because the email was personal, that means the reference to him owning slashdot must be right, therefore slashdot belongs to him.
The leap the author of this article makes is an astounding logic error. He is basically saying "Since the judge thinks this is a personal email (because the spammer signed it with his name), does the judge also think that I really own Slashdot?" I'm all for supporting your cause in suing the spammers, but you're dangerously close to looney land yourself when you start making logic errors like this. As if the judge, agreeing with the spammer, thinks that this is personal email, the judge must then think every aspect of the email is true.
You discredit your cause by making a logical leap like this, and it makes you sound like just some nut-job that likes to bring pointless lawsuits to clog up the court's time.
Completely off-topic, but what the deuce is going on with tags lately? To the adjectives absurdly long, meaningless, and obscure, now we can add obscene.
In case anyone is wondering what Vuze actually is (based on the obscene tag, I guess a few are), this is a company started by the developers of Azureus, the popular Bittorent client on Sourceforge. It's basically a new version of Azureus that hides all of the "technical" bittorent junk behind a media player interface. I think they're trying to make money off of it somehow.
Get the 40 year old guy who was a sociology major and did data entry for 10 years before being asked to take over NT environments. This way you get a 'seasoned' guy because he has a few more wrinkles and that makes him a better 'fit' and definitely must make him more capable.
Half the people I work with are like that. It sucks. Their lack of skills and basic fundamental knowledge really shows and makes me have to dumb everything down so that they can comprehend the most basic concepts. But that's why I make the big bucks. They bring me in to fix the problems caused because they couldn't be bothered to hire someone that actually knows what they're doing. Far better to hire the "reliable" guy that won't ever quit because he would never be lucky enough to get anything other than a minimum wage job in the first place.
Oracle recommends that you disable features such as iptables firewalls and SElinux, or else your database probably won't work. Stupid system administrators take it to the next level and leave it outside a physical firewall so that vendors/partners can access it. Authentication is usually done on an unsecured port 1521, where the username/password is sent in clear text. Very few sites even know how to enable encrypted database traffic on Oracle.
Oracle is mostly to blame with their idiotic processes that need rlogin access as root. Even though your Oracle database is running as user "oracle", it still needs to rlogin to itself as root every 2 seconds to run some unknown commands. The only way to secure an Oracle server is to completely firewall it off from the outside world and only let the application server talk to it.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux sysadmin that builds Oracle database servers all day.
A lot of great ones in there. Personally, I'd rather play almost any of those than most flash games. Most flash games seem to be simple time-wasters, like Solitaire. I prefer games that make me think a little bit.
Right now my absolute favorite free online game is called Mythos. It's a Diablo-like (or should I say Nethack/Roguelike?) hack-n-slash game that is incredibly fun. If there were a Diablo 3, this game would probably be it. The game is still in beta, but it's a lot of fun, and totally free.
Do your taxes on an iPhone this year, and get back to me. PC's will always have a place, though their appearance may change, they may get smaller, not need upgraded as often, whatever, the concept of the PC isn't going anywhere. It'll either be a desktop or a notebook, though.
As funny as it sounds, with Turbotax.com you could do your taxes online using an iPhone.
Remember Safari is a fully javascript enabled, standards compliant browser with PDF support. The only thing missing is flash support.
You hit the nail on the head. The PC market isn't dying. It's miniaturizing. Look at the iPhone and the future is clear. The average Joe Six-Pack (TM) won't even need or have a PC in a few years. They'll have an internet communications device that happens to be a cellphone.
The iPhone is the first portable computing platform that shows the future potential of mobile devices. They have the potential to be your only computing device, once the software is improved enough.
Google realizes this, Apple realizes this, and even MS realizes this (unfortunately for MS, their mobile computing platform sucks). I have a feeling that the mobile computing phenomenon will be the straw that breaks the back of the camel that is the MS desktop monopoly.
Absolutely favorite review ever! I was in the beta and he really is spot on about his arguments. Richard Garriot gave so much hype about this game not having the typical MMO grind, but yet when you play it, you find that one of the first quests is "go kill boards and collect their hides..." WTF? That is like every single MMO ever invented.
I'm sorry but this game fails. If you want a fun hybrid MMO/Shooter, try Hellgate London. Now that game is a lot of fun and hella addictive. Sure, every RPG/MMO/whatever has stupid quests, but Hellgate London is so much fun that you won't really care. It's like Diablo (made by some of the same people) where the quests don't matter so much, it's more the hack-n-slash (or point-and-click) fun of killing hundreds of mobs.
(yes, even in 2007 -- as I type, our tech support guy is spending a lot of time and effort trying to convince Ubuntu Feisty Faun to display 1600x1200 graphics on a rackmount PC with an Intel graphics chipset... you'd think this stuff would have been worked out by now, but apparently not)
Go fire your tech support guy and ask him why he needs or even cares about running X windows on a rack mount server? Most real sysadmins run all of their servers at runlevel 3, and X doesn't load until runlevel 5. He's probably installing Compiz and Beryl right now and crashing your webserver with eye candy...
When Verizon finally rolls-out FIOS here (they've said it's coming "soon" for a couple years), I'll probably sign-up for TWO connections... One for my home, and the other for a family member (within driving distance) or perhaps a friend. In exchange for free ultra-high-speed internet access, all they have to do is leave my back-up server running. rsync will finish pretty damn fast over a 20Mbps connection...
Why don't you just get a hosting account at Dreamhost for like $10 a month? They give you some godawful amount of storage like 500GB, ssh/shell access so you can just rsync to them, and 5TB of transfer. No, I won't give you an affiliate link because I don't want you to think I'm spamming. Just a happy Dreamhost customer that loves their service.
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Now, the term bricking is being applied to any piece of electronics or computer equipment that won't boot an OS.
It's not bricked if you can just reinstall or repair Windows and have it work again. It's bricked if you flash a bad ROM BIOS image and now you can't even turn the thing on.
Your argument is totally illogical. It's like saying "just because Dick Cheney likes to waterboard and torture enemy combatants, if Jesus were vice president, he would do the same thing."
Of course Dick Cheney isn't Steve Ballmer, and Steve Jobs isn't Jesus, but you get the picture.
Apple and Microsoft are like the Yin and Yang of the computer world. They represent the opposite views on almost everything related to computing technology. One company likes to force users through monopolistic practices, bundling, and activation. The other company believes "your computer is yours to use how you like."
What they seem to have done is simply published a newer version of WGA. Even if you had chosen to not install it the first time, it still tries to install the newer version, because Windows thinks it's a brand new update. If you had automatic updates set to install without prompting you, BAM! your computer is now infected with the WGA rootkit.
And yes, WGA is a rootkit, as far as I'm concerned. If I can help it, I will never install it on my machine. Why should I give MS the permission to disable my hardware and software? Sneaky tricks aside, I'm sure they'll figure out some way to get it on my system some day.
Verizon gets to pretend "see, we're open, really" when meanwhile the barriers to entry are still so friggin' high that you need a multi-million dollar R&D budget just to play in their proprietary sandbox.
No thanks... Go to hell and take your locked down proprietary handsets with you.
I don't think the average person reading that article would make the logical leap from free to "I can steal this source code and get away with it," but that's just me.
I feel the need to point out that there's a lot of FUD in the original article as well. I think the Forbes editors might have some AAPL stock perhaps?
From TFA:No, they already said there was no monthly fee for wireless access.Actually, you can download eBooks in text or mobi format for free from the Kindle, so anything on Google book search should be free for the taking. Also, even though you have to subscribe to blogs if you want digital delivery of the content for offline reading, you can still browse to any blog or website and read it right from your Kindle. The only disadvantage: You have to use the next/previous page buttons to scroll up and down the web page. It's a limitation of the e-Ink technology, because you obviously can't smoothly scroll a page with a scroll bar that requires 1 second to update it's screen.
There is a lot of FUD out there about the Kindle, but I think it's going to be pretty amazing. Can you imagine having every O'Reilly book ever made on the thing, and the ability to do full text search/grep capability through your entire library of technical books? That alone is a killer app.
The free speech education can come later, but please, quit arguing semantics because all you do is give the entire OSS movement a bad name. Joe Sixpack will see some idiot blathering on about how free speech does not equal free beer and think we're all just a bunch of whining hippies. Then he'll never use OSS because he thinks there is a religious ideology behind it.
Show him good "free as in beer" software, then later on, if he's interested, educate him on why "free as in speech" is important too. Please do us all a favor and don't try to ram ideology down Joe Sixpack's throat.
Print publications have full editorial control of all material, and they exercise it often to remove innapropriate advertising. Why do the online versions of these same print publications not exercise full editorial control?
It's only a matter of time before they get exposed to liability (they probably are already) and a customer sues them for the drive-by installation of malware.
You discredit your cause by making a logical leap like this, and it makes you sound like just some nut-job that likes to bring pointless lawsuits to clog up the court's time.
Oracle recommends that you disable features such as iptables firewalls and SElinux, or else your database probably won't work. Stupid system administrators take it to the next level and leave it outside a physical firewall so that vendors/partners can access it. Authentication is usually done on an unsecured port 1521, where the username/password is sent in clear text. Very few sites even know how to enable encrypted database traffic on Oracle.
Oracle is mostly to blame with their idiotic processes that need rlogin access as root. Even though your Oracle database is running as user "oracle", it still needs to rlogin to itself as root every 2 seconds to run some unknown commands. The only way to secure an Oracle server is to completely firewall it off from the outside world and only let the application server talk to it.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux sysadmin that builds Oracle database servers all day.
A lot of great ones in there. Personally, I'd rather play almost any of those than most flash games. Most flash games seem to be simple time-wasters, like Solitaire. I prefer games that make me think a little bit.
Right now my absolute favorite free online game is called Mythos. It's a Diablo-like (or should I say Nethack/Roguelike?) hack-n-slash game that is incredibly fun. If there were a Diablo 3, this game would probably be it. The game is still in beta, but it's a lot of fun, and totally free.
Check it out if you get a chance.
Remember Safari is a fully javascript enabled, standards compliant browser with PDF support. The only thing missing is flash support.
You're not the target market for replacing your computer with an iPhone. Somebody that just uses the computer for email and web browsing is.
The iPhone is the first portable computing platform that shows the future potential of mobile devices. They have the potential to be your only computing device, once the software is improved enough.
Google realizes this, Apple realizes this, and even MS realizes this (unfortunately for MS, their mobile computing platform sucks). I have a feeling that the mobile computing phenomenon will be the straw that breaks the back of the camel that is the MS desktop monopoly.
I'm sorry but this game fails. If you want a fun hybrid MMO/Shooter, try Hellgate London. Now that game is a lot of fun and hella addictive. Sure, every RPG/MMO/whatever has stupid quests, but Hellgate London is so much fun that you won't really care. It's like Diablo (made by some of the same people) where the quests don't matter so much, it's more the hack-n-slash (or point-and-click) fun of killing hundreds of mobs.