I too would actually suggest Win7 if the PCs were powerful enough for that, but I understood that they're pretty underpowered and then the choice is between WinXP and Linux.
Though I am Linux user, I would still prefer a novice to use Win XP
I would definitely suggest against XP. There's too many open holes there, the PCs would be malware-infested in no time and would require constant upkeeping. That's definitely not novice-friendly. And I understood the PCs are going to kids so atleast I would be wary of malware that might be offering X-rated links and stuff to them.
I'd install Ubuntu or some other Linux distro mainly because it'll be easy to keep up-to-date. XP is outdated, there's still plenty of open vulnerabilities on it and so on, but any of the more popular Linux distro keeps on pumping out security updates and will likely do so for years to come.
Especially if the PCs are going for kids it's quite important that they work and that there won't be some nasties throwing up links for porn sites or such, and besides, there's plenty of great parenting tools available for Linux that allow one to limit the things the children are allowed to see and/or do.
Just be sure to pick one of the bigger distros like Fedora or Ubuntu and you should be good to go.
5th November.. that means I still have some time to put together my superhero costume. Need to find some really obnoxiously bright and tight spandex: even if I fail in breaking the fabrics of reality atleast I'll make damn sure they won't forget me easily!!
Why should I care that some companies know my buying habits? I am one of billions. There exist some unfathomably vast spreadsheets with a row that indicates I like oatmeal for breakfast and enjoy the works of Terry Pratchett. Why should that bother me? If anything it means that more stores will stock oatmeal and more quality humorous fantasy books will get made.
They certainly don't have my most intimate thoughts, because those rarely leave my lips and never enter a computer. They may have a few angry letters I wrote, but so what? I'm one of billions. No one's likely to see it, and unless it's something really egregious, no one will ever care.
I can't help but agree with you. I don't CARE if people know my shopping habits because, well, why the f*ck would it matter? I mean, everyone knows I like gadgets, anime, manga and movies in general, and that I really like to drink Cola and eat pizza. Everyone knows what kind of stuff I like and what I dislike and I really do not feel I have to somehow hide those things. Googling my nickname brings out most of the websites I frequent and again, I have never made any attempt to appear anonymous there: why would I? I frequent those sites exactly because I'm known there and I enjoy the sites.
My point is: anything out there on the Internet about me is stuff you could find out anyways just by asking me. I simply do not have anything worth hiding.
Maybe someone will find out that people that google Cheerios, fucktards, and pantyhose are statistically proven to be terrorists and need to be rounded up and vilified. They'll look around for a while until that one row in one table in one database outs you. Then you're toast.
Not everyone lives in the US. The rest of the world still knows how to use common sense.
if they JUST STOPPED USING THE DAMN SERVICE ALREADY IF IT BUGS THEM SO FUCKING MUCH.
The problem with that approach is that your privacy can be violated by your friends that put your personal information on FB even if you don't have an account there. I'm trying to solve the problem by not having friends IRL either.
To be honest, that same thing happens IRL, too. Does that mean we should start fighting reality also and prevent people from talking about you or anything related to you when you haven't expressly given them permission?
Outcome 6: Anonymous has already obtained information that, when released, will be a major public relations scandal for facebook, or perhaps will be evidence of criminality. The information will be released on that day.
- Yet Facebook would still live on, even in the very unlikely situation where the management went to jail, and thus Facebook still wouldn't be "destroyed."
with the side-effect of raising awareness of data privacy issues.
- Average Jane and Joe simply DO NOT CARE. Result: none.
Just imagine it: when 30+% of your words are misspelled you hear "You're making me angry..", then at 50+% you hear very loudly "HULK SMASH!!11", and Hulk goes on a rige-induced violent rampage, destroying first your UI elements, then actual installed applications and games, then all of your files.. you'd better be a really fast learner and start fixing those misspellings or your PC wouldn't be useable for long!
may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography.
Wow, that's LAME!:D
I mean... geeeeeeesh, do I find it lame or what that a law-enforcement agency that the citizenry is supposed to trust and honor has to resort to blatant lies to get their will through? Not to mention that I find it utterly terrifying that the people with the power actually do this kind of stuff.. o_o
I too have to recommend HTTPS everywhere, it's a great addon and makes it a lot safer to e.g. Surf the web over an unencrypted WIFI hotspot. And so far I haven't actually had a single glitch because of it.
One other point people seem to be missing is that the majority of Windows viruses are trojans, i.e. they trick the user into installing them. There is no reason why that would be less effective on Mac users.
To be honest, I believe THIS is the whole truth here: more-or-less all current viruses and malware are installed because the user does something to install them. Like e.g. planting a payload inside a pirated game or application is quite popular, works well, and it's totally and completely the user who is at fault. Not the OS. There is NO OS to date that can protect against that. No Linux, no OSX, no Windows.
Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.
That's one of the things I actually complained about at length on OSNews. Even with the recently-opened apps - list you have no indicators whatsoever about which apps are still running and consuming battery, and which ones aren't. It simply is a very, very poorly thought-out implementation, and on a mobile device it absolutely DOES make sense to differentiate clearly when an application is running and when it isn't: these things have a limited amount of resources and thus keeping things running in the background, eating both CPU time and memory, is just bogging them all down, not to mention the extra drain on battery.
But then again, there's so many other things completely wrong and harebrained on Android that this is still among the lesser problems, there's far worse ones there still waiting.
Google actually IS and has been fighting software patents for a good while already and they do indeed have lobbyists. They however cannot do miracles: the whole god damn media industry is pushing for stricter copyright and patents laws and they've got all the politicians in their pockets.
He isn't claiming that EVERY SINGLE PC GAMER is like that. He is saying the majority of PC gamers are like that. And so far it does seem that's in fact true.
I bought Dead Space on Steam when it was on sale, only to be disappointed by similar issues: the controls are all written for consoles, you can't reassign e.g. mouse buttons and so on. It really wouldn't require much work to allow a user to remap the controls, but NO, screw users:S
I never got around to play through the game then, I couldn't get over my irritation over the controls:/
Research some computer history, like for example Xerox PARC and the Star desktop and work from there. What, you thought Apple has invented ALL UI elements and paradigms? Copying of UI elements has been done for tens of years. And we'd still be in the stone ages of computing if it hadn't been allowed in the beginning, ergo it's a good thing.
Plus, what about the smart case thing?
Samsung got caught. they stole the look and feel of iOS2 and 3.
Right. So, how many UI elements has Apple copied from other OSes and projects? Several hundreds? And that is not wrong, but when someone copies from Apple it suddenly becomes wrong?
Personally I feel being able to patent _ideas_ is downright stupid altogether, you should only be able to patent a specific implementation and even then copyright-laws actually do a better job of protecting a specific implementation. Being able to copy good ideas and improve on them is a GOOD thing for all end-users, it's bad only for the company who doesn't want their competitors to be able to enter the same market.
She likely expected Airbnb to do atleast _some_ checks as to who they were accepting as rentees. It's not unreasonable to expect such from them. We don't even know how they advertise themselves to people, did they ever let her know that they don't check the candidates in any way?
If you read a little closer, this woman didn't take any basic precautions like getting ID, photographs, references, phone numbers and so on
That's because Airbnb explicitly denies the possibility of doing such: you do not get any kind of details, not even phone number, on the rentee. Blaming it on EJ is kind of pointless then.
Apparently I have very feminine text messages/tweets, as I use excessive emoticons, exclamation points, and affectionate pet names (though those are directed towards females). And here I thought I had solidified my masculinity when I burnt all my pink shirts.
Surprisingly, the algorithm would classify me as a male: the only thing on that list that I do quite often is use smileys. Quite depressing.
Slashdot Mirror
I too would actually suggest Win7 if the PCs were powerful enough for that, but I understood that they're pretty underpowered and then the choice is between WinXP and Linux.
Though I am Linux user, I would still prefer a novice to use Win XP
I would definitely suggest against XP. There's too many open holes there, the PCs would be malware-infested in no time and would require constant upkeeping. That's definitely not novice-friendly. And I understood the PCs are going to kids so atleast I would be wary of malware that might be offering X-rated links and stuff to them.
I'd install Ubuntu or some other Linux distro mainly because it'll be easy to keep up-to-date. XP is outdated, there's still plenty of open vulnerabilities on it and so on, but any of the more popular Linux distro keeps on pumping out security updates and will likely do so for years to come.
Especially if the PCs are going for kids it's quite important that they work and that there won't be some nasties throwing up links for porn sites or such, and besides, there's plenty of great parenting tools available for Linux that allow one to limit the things the children are allowed to see and/or do.
Just be sure to pick one of the bigger distros like Fedora or Ubuntu and you should be good to go.
5th November.. that means I still have some time to put together my superhero costume. Need to find some really obnoxiously bright and tight spandex: even if I fail in breaking the fabrics of reality atleast I'll make damn sure they won't forget me easily!!
Why should I care that some companies know my buying habits? I am one of billions. There exist some unfathomably vast spreadsheets with a row that indicates I like oatmeal for breakfast and enjoy the works of Terry Pratchett. Why should that bother me? If anything it means that more stores will stock oatmeal and more quality humorous fantasy books will get made.
They certainly don't have my most intimate thoughts, because those rarely leave my lips and never enter a computer. They may have a few angry letters I wrote, but so what? I'm one of billions. No one's likely to see it, and unless it's something really egregious, no one will ever care.
I can't help but agree with you. I don't CARE if people know my shopping habits because, well, why the f*ck would it matter? I mean, everyone knows I like gadgets, anime, manga and movies in general, and that I really like to drink Cola and eat pizza. Everyone knows what kind of stuff I like and what I dislike and I really do not feel I have to somehow hide those things. Googling my nickname brings out most of the websites I frequent and again, I have never made any attempt to appear anonymous there: why would I? I frequent those sites exactly because I'm known there and I enjoy the sites.
My point is: anything out there on the Internet about me is stuff you could find out anyways just by asking me. I simply do not have anything worth hiding.
Maybe someone will find out that people that google Cheerios, fucktards, and pantyhose are statistically proven to be terrorists and need to be rounded up and vilified. They'll look around for a while until that one row in one table in one database outs you. Then you're toast.
Not everyone lives in the US. The rest of the world still knows how to use common sense.
The problem with that approach is that your privacy can be violated by your friends that put your personal information on FB even if you don't have an account there. I'm trying to solve the problem by not having friends IRL either.
To be honest, that same thing happens IRL, too. Does that mean we should start fighting reality also and prevent people from talking about you or anything related to you when you haven't expressly given them permission?
Outcome 6: Anonymous has already obtained information that, when released, will be a major public relations scandal for facebook, or perhaps will be evidence of criminality. The information will be released on that day.
- Yet Facebook would still live on, even in the very unlikely situation where the management went to jail, and thus Facebook still wouldn't be "destroyed."
with the side-effect of raising awareness of data privacy issues.
- Average Jane and Joe simply DO NOT CARE. Result: none.
These patent lawsuits are getting out of hand.
You make it sound like they weren't _already_ out of hand.
That'd be AWESOME!
Just imagine it: when 30+% of your words are misspelled you hear "You're making me angry..", then at 50+% you hear very loudly "HULK SMASH!!11", and Hulk goes on a rige-induced violent rampage, destroying first your UI elements, then actual installed applications and games, then all of your files.. you'd better be a really fast learner and start fixing those misspellings or your PC wouldn't be useable for long!
may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography.
Wow, that's LAME! :D
I mean... geeeeeeesh, do I find it lame or what that a law-enforcement agency that the citizenry is supposed to trust and honor has to resort to blatant lies to get their will through? Not to mention that I find it utterly terrifying that the people with the power actually do this kind of stuff.. o_o
I too have to recommend HTTPS everywhere, it's a great addon and makes it a lot safer to e.g. Surf the web over an unencrypted WIFI hotspot. And so far I haven't actually had a single glitch because of it.
That was exactly my thoughts too: I do NOT want a half-assed console port that is barely playable... :S
One other point people seem to be missing is that the majority of Windows viruses are trojans, i.e. they trick the user into installing them. There is no reason why that would be less effective on Mac users.
To be honest, I believe THIS is the whole truth here: more-or-less all current viruses and malware are installed because the user does something to install them. Like e.g. planting a payload inside a pirated game or application is quite popular, works well, and it's totally and completely the user who is at fault. Not the OS. There is NO OS to date that can protect against that. No Linux, no OSX, no Windows.
Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.
That's one of the things I actually complained about at length on OSNews. Even with the recently-opened apps - list you have no indicators whatsoever about which apps are still running and consuming battery, and which ones aren't. It simply is a very, very poorly thought-out implementation, and on a mobile device it absolutely DOES make sense to differentiate clearly when an application is running and when it isn't: these things have a limited amount of resources and thus keeping things running in the background, eating both CPU time and memory, is just bogging them all down, not to mention the extra drain on battery.
But then again, there's so many other things completely wrong and harebrained on Android that this is still among the lesser problems, there's far worse ones there still waiting.
Google actually IS and has been fighting software patents for a good while already and they do indeed have lobbyists. They however cannot do miracles: the whole god damn media industry is pushing for stricter copyright and patents laws and they've got all the politicians in their pockets.
He isn't claiming that EVERY SINGLE PC GAMER is like that. He is saying the majority of PC gamers are like that. And so far it does seem that's in fact true.
I grade your comment C-.
I bought Dead Space on Steam when it was on sale, only to be disappointed by similar issues: the controls are all written for consoles, you can't reassign e.g. mouse buttons and so on. It really wouldn't require much work to allow a user to remap the controls, but NO, screw users :S
I never got around to play through the game then, I couldn't get over my irritation over the controls :/
name some.
Research some computer history, like for example Xerox PARC and the Star desktop and work from there. What, you thought Apple has invented ALL UI elements and paradigms? Copying of UI elements has been done for tens of years. And we'd still be in the stone ages of computing if it hadn't been allowed in the beginning, ergo it's a good thing.
Plus, what about the smart case thing?
Samsung got caught. they stole the look and feel of iOS2 and 3.
I never commented on that.
Between the wholesale theft of the UI
Right. So, how many UI elements has Apple copied from other OSes and projects? Several hundreds? And that is not wrong, but when someone copies from Apple it suddenly becomes wrong?
Personally I feel being able to patent _ideas_ is downright stupid altogether, you should only be able to patent a specific implementation and even then copyright-laws actually do a better job of protecting a specific implementation. Being able to copy good ideas and improve on them is a GOOD thing for all end-users, it's bad only for the company who doesn't want their competitors to be able to enter the same market.
She likely expected Airbnb to do atleast _some_ checks as to who they were accepting as rentees. It's not unreasonable to expect such from them. We don't even know how they advertise themselves to people, did they ever let her know that they don't check the candidates in any way?
F1ST P0ST!
...but where's the fist?
If you read a little closer, this woman didn't take any basic precautions like getting ID, photographs, references, phone numbers and so on
That's because Airbnb explicitly denies the possibility of doing such: you do not get any kind of details, not even phone number, on the rentee. Blaming it on EJ is kind of pointless then.
Apparently I have very feminine text messages/tweets, as I use excessive emoticons, exclamation points, and affectionate pet names (though those are directed towards females). And here I thought I had solidified my masculinity when I burnt all my pink shirts.
Surprisingly, the algorithm would classify me as a male: the only thing on that list that I do quite often is use smileys. Quite depressing.
Nothing is perfect.
Incorrect: I am perfect.