Sorry, didn't notice it was open box. No problem. I did notice the $1450 version, which was why I continued in the discussion.
The ASUS has both VGA and DVI built in. I generally don't consider "features" where you have to carry around an external adapter. I guess a lot of the issues around this depend upon where you're going and what you're plugging into. For me, everywhere I go where I want to plug my notebook into an external monitor has LCDs with DVI, some with DVI+VGA, so having the capability of VGA-out is irrelevant to me, anyway. Regardless, the MBP does do VGA out. Once we start getting into preferences, you can no longer claim to be objectively comparing features. I like the Mac keyboard over the ASUS, for example, even though they are functionally equivalent (I hate the extra column of keys on the right--always screws up my typing).
I mean if you wanted to argue it, you could say that any laptop has all features by virtue of an adapter that fits into its expansion slot. That's fine, as long as this hypothetical laptop comes with the adapters. Remember, the whole point is comparing PC costs to Mac costs. I don't think it's reasonable to find a dirt cheap laptop and then say, "Well, you can add memory, hard drive, external-video card, etc. to make it just like this other notebook!" What comes with it is what matters.
A nice bonus I found about the nVidia 7700 is that it has separate LUTs for each output. That means I can display simultaneously with two color profiles, meaning both my displays can be color calibrated simultaneously. That's pretty excellent.
It should go without saying that if you're going to compare an open-box item from one manufacturer, you should compare an open-box item from the other. Apple.com often has refurbished MBPs for around $1500. It's rather unfortunate that they don't right now, but it's probably got something to do with the new ones having come out so recently (all of their current refurb models are the ones which are normally priced at $2499.)
The MAC also has 802.11n. It/does/ have VGA out (via the included adapter). I don't know if you can use VGA, LCD, and DVI on the Asus (though it would be pretty cool if you could) but if you can't, that makes it irrelevant.
The Asus looks like an incredible value, no doubt about it. That has to be the most feature-packed laptop I've seen for that price, and it's sorely tempting. But it's not the norm. I don't think it's reasonable to say that "PC notebooks are significantly cheaper than Mac notebooks" based on this outlier. Spec for spec, Macs tend to be a little bit more expensive, but not much. And the value you get in return is very high quality hardware and software, before discounts. Dell gets quite the edge because they're willing to discount their hardware.
I've known almost as many people with Mac notebooks as with off-brand notebooks. The off-brand notebooks tend to be pretty crappy, physically (poorly made, terrible ventilation, cracking cases, etc.) The Mac notebooks tend to wear very well, though I've noticed that the larger ones LCD becomes pretty wobbly over time. My Dell does the same thing, though, so I assume that it's fairly common in the notebook industry.
I've been looking for something to serve as a low-end fileserver, but which can do RAID. Ideally, the hardware would be fully supported by either OpenSolaris or FreeBSD so that I can use ZFS.
Remembering that Apple will be getting ZFS in a few months, I started looking in that direction. The options are sorely limited. Minis and iMacs don't have the expandability, which would be fine if they had eSATA. Of course, they don't. A Mac Pro would be quite capable of housing my hard drives, and would be expandable, but for $2200, I could buy a pretty decent Sun workstation. I could actually expand to up to 7 drives in my RAID (the Sun has 8 drive bays, compared to Apple's 4) obviating the need for external housing should I choose the Apple.
I'd be pretty happy if Apple produced a mid-range workstation that was expandable. I don't need 4 cores. I don't need up to 16GB of RAM. What I need is a workstation with exchangeable parts for around $1,000. Cheaper would be better, of course, but then Apple wouldn't be able to move the Minis.
Comparing a Turion to a Core2Duo is absurd. The performance difference is going to be noticeable.
For features that really are pretty hard to compare, the Mac has a 802.11n and 1000mbps ethernet, Bluetooth, a webcam, and a remote control (despite never expecting to, we've actually used the Mac remote before). Battery life wasn't mentioned on the HP computer, but if we're being honest here, the Turion is probably not going to be as efficient as the Core2Duo. You were also wrong about the price--it's $1100, not $1000.
The HP unit has a multimedia card reader, and an extra pound of weight.
It's really hard to compare the two, but I don't think your post gave the whole story.
The Macs aren't 800mhz, they're 667mhz, just like the Inspiron E1505. I was looking at the Dell D820, not the D830. The Mac comes with a remote control. I think that mostly covers it.
The PC notebook makers seemed to conclude that hiding some of the facts is the best marketing tool... Brag about CPU speed, but bury it in fine print that it's a Celeron class CPU. Most of your model line hasn't been updated yet to use the new wireless N standards? Don't mention it at all then. Just announce they have "built-in wi-fi!". Even more savvy users won't always remember to check ALL of these items until after the sale...
By contrast, when I order a new Apple notebook on their web site, each specific detail is listed, and can be customized in many cases. If the competition was sold identically, I think people would have a clearer sense of what they're getting for their dollar. You're comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended). That is, you're comparing brick-and-mortar stores to an online retailer.
Go to Dell's site. You'll find even more information than Apple provides.
I recently did a Dell price comparison, myself, since I was interested in Macbooks. It's almost impossible to directly compare the two, but I did a pretty decent job. I'll roughly list the differences between the low-end Macbook Pro and a similarly configured Inspiron E1505: Dell: -200mhz (Can't configure this machine with 2.2Ghz) Dell: ATI 256M graphics Mac: NVIDIA 128M graphics Dell: -7 WHr battery compared to Mac Dell: Windows Vista Home Premium Mac: OS X Mac: 800mhz bus Dell: 667mhz bus Dell: Touchpad with two physical buttons Mac: Touchpad with one physical button Mac: +webcam
Dell: $1,368 Mac: $1,999
So it's obviously hard to compare. Is the extra bus speed worth the money? Is it worth it to get nVidia graphics instead of ATI (though older MBPs use ATI graphics, which would have made this less of an issue). Is it worth it when the nVidia graphics card memory is limited to 128? It's hard to compare, but you can't really deny that these are very similar notebooks, and that the price difference is over $600, favoring Dell in terms of price. Now the Dell in this scenario is with a Dell-provided discount of $250. But you don't generally get Apple provided discounts. When you do, it's on refurb items and/or old stock that they're trying to move.
Someone tipped me off to the Latitude line of Dells, which is easier to configure closely to the MBP. The D830 looked like a good place to start: Dell: -0.04 Ghz Dell: 256MB NVIDIA Mac: 128MB NVIDIA Dell: Wireless is 802.11b/802.11g Mac: Wireless is 802.11n Dell: Choice of XP or Vista Mac: OS X Dell: -7 WHr battery compared to Mac Dell: Touchpad with two physical buttons Mac: Touchpad with one physical button Mac: +Webcam
Dell: $1,537 Mac: $1,999
Again, the differences make it hard to compare. The Dell, in this case, has a $300 discount applied instantly, making the 'msrp' margin even finer. Again, though, Macs almost never get discounted, whereas Dells are almost constantly under one discount or another.
This is all distinctly middle-of-the road in terms of computing power, but I still have to give the advantage to Dell, in terms of the iron you're getting. I don't even think it's fair to compare OS X with Windows in these scenarios, because by all accounts, OS X runs just fine on PC hardware--it's DRM which locks it to Macs only. If we allow the OS comparison, we must surely also allow the comparison of other options which Dell offers and Mac does not, such as a WUXGA (1920x1200 pixel) screen on their 15.4" notebooks (Apple offers this resolution only on their 17" notebooks, which modifies portability in a way which is difficult to quantify, and costs around $700 more, in total).
I have no interest in 'high-end' notebooks with absurdly large monitors, so I haven't priced these. It's always been clear that Apple doesn't compete in the low-end market. I don't think they compete well in the mid-range market. When you buy a Mac, you're buying a lifestyle, and an extremely well-designed OS, but don't don't for one minute think that you're getting a good deal on the hardware. Macs are more expensive. Part of it is bound to be production runs (Dell probably sells 600% more laptops than Apple), but a lot of it is probably 'because they can.'
For one thing, IPv6 is on and enabled by default in Vista. This means that, as more and more people downgrade to Vista, more and more people will be IPv6-ready by default. This is a partial solution to the chicken-egg problem of migrating to a new Internet standard. In a couple of years, ISPs need not be afraid of migrating to IPv6 since Vista will be fairly prevalent. Their support centers won't have to deal with thousands of calls from people trying to get XP to play nice with IPv6.
I suspect that this just means that worms will have to be smarter, gathering information on IP addresses to attack based upon connections, logs, etc. People using BitTorrent will provide a huge number of targets. Compromise a webserver, and you've got the addresses of anyone who visits the site. Read through e-mail headers, and you'll get some more.
Bots have no trouble finding e-mail addresses to spam. I imagine that in the face of near infinite IP addresses, they'll find some way to continue their attacks.
Also, the IPv6 address space corresponding to the current IPv4 address space will probably always be scanned.
He's obviously suggesting that there is a value to patents, so long as there are consequences for issuing bad patents. Perhaps his use of the term "free market" is unfortunate, however his point stands.
If there were penalties for issuing patents which are later invalidated, we'd see the USPTO put more effort into researching the patents they receive, rejection of overly broad patents, and probably eventually start seeing fewer patents requested in general. Then truly innovative inventions would receive patent protection, and every Microsoft, Broadcom, and Qualcomm wouldn't issue patents on every tiny thing they do in an effort to protect their research.
It seems to me like you're acting more like the troll, pedantically focusing on one single term that the poster got wrong rather than reading his post and understanding his point. You're like the guy who points out the fact that someone misuses the word 'infer' and uses that to try to tear down the entire argument.
It seems like the 'copies' parameter would only protect against disk corruption (sector dying, for example), rather than disk failure. I'll have to read up on what that actually does, because I thought ZFS was already supposed to protect data integrity pretty well.
So you end up with one filesystem consisting of two raidz pools. I don't think you actually gain redundancy in this scenario (as 0xABADC0DA implied). At best, you don't lose any, but I think you sacrifice a tiny bit.
Statistically, before you add the second raidz, your filesystem has to have 66% of its drives fail before you lose your data. After adding the pool, if as little as 33% of your drives fail (2 out of the 6, if they're in the same raidz) you lose your data. In fact, if 50% of your drives fail, you've lost your data.
With pools of 4 drives each, of course, the numbers get worse, but at least you get divisible percentages that you can realistically compare. 1 raidz: 25% fail = ok 1 raidz: 50% fail = data loss 2 raidz: 25% fail = ok, if the two drives that fail are in different raidz 2 raidz: 37.5% fail = data loss
So if you stripe two raidz pools, you get some weird failure states.. One drive from each pool can fail, but two drives from one pool failing is fatal to the whole pool? Not quite raidz2.
Presumably, also, the pools don't have to be of the same size, or contain similar numbers of hard drives. I'll have to break down the numbers on failure scenarios in this setup, but my gut tells me that it's not a great situation.
I'd rather a standardized filesystem be used. Otherwise, you're asking for compatibility problems (see the current issues with case-sensitivity if you choose to make your filesystem case-sensitive). In this case, I'd rather there be less choice for the main partition.
You mean, the CDDL's restrictive nature. Semantics. Each license restricts you from using the other. The GPL is generally more restrictive, but since you have to relicense under the GPL, further restrictions to modified software cannot be added. The CDDL has a restriction (regarding attribution) which must accompany any CDDL derivative work. Therefore, the licenses are incompatible. If the CDDL did not require attribution, or if the GPL allowed further restrictions to be placed upon derivative works, the licenses would be compatible (as I understand the issue, at least).
Sun's patents prevent a compatible reimplementation of ZFS from being imported into the Linux kernel, so you won't see that, either. The most we'll get is a CDDL-licensed FUSE module. And that sucks.
It's only partially elitism. You can still get viruses and other malware as a standard user, if you trust websites without a good reason.
Part of the way intelligence is measured is being able to take old knowledge and apply it to new situations. I was raised to not trust people that I don't know. So when I see a popup saying "install me for ", I tend to be very suspicious. For some reason, with computers, lots of people can't make the logical leap from being suspicious of strangers to being suspicious of things that strangers want to do on their computer. Is it stupidity? Is it elitist of me to point all of this out? I don't know, but I think you're probably more defensive about it because you know people (whom you probably consider to be smart) who have been hit with various Windows malware.
That doesn't mean that there will be a new hardware release. The Wii hardware is more than capable of decoding DVDs, and the drive itself is a DVD-rom. Nintendo should be able to offer DVD playback via a software
upgrade.
But this is a problem without encryption, too. This is a with data retention, specifically. Unencrypted e-mails (which seemed to be your alternative suggestion, in a post higher up in the tree) which are retained will be subject to the same problems. If you send me an unencrypted e-mail, I can retain it for as long as I like, and may be forced to give it up if the authorities compel me to. Similarly, if you send me a GPG encrypted e-mail, and I retain that encrypted e-mail, I can be compelled to give up my private key. The only difference is that encrypted e-mail is protected for some period of time, assuming the key hasn't already been divulged.
I suppose that some people might consider encryption to be a magic bullet, and thus might keep encrypted data around, even if they wouldn't want evidence of that data to exist. This isn't a problem with encryption, however.
Whereas if your ciphertext becomes useless shortly after it is sent, you only have to trust the recipient in the present. You have to trust that they won't archive a cleartext version of the message, too.
I'm not sure they have a choice. DirectTiVos have to respect DRM. If they don't, DirectTV won't let them steam the content. I think its similar for TiVos which accept CableCards. And TiVo isn't big enough to put pressure on the people holding them to these restrictions.
It boils down to exactly what they say. GPLv3 won't let them use DRM, and the content providers won't give them access to the streams without it. They don't have enough clout to pressure either group to relax their policies, so they're kinda screwed.
You mean you could see the cat through a transparent material? The shock! The horror!
Did you look at the picture? You can barely tell that there's a cat there, and it looks like it's just on the other side of the glass. You can't see anything in the background at all.
If it was me in that window? I'd feel like an idiot for standing in front of the window, naked, where anyone could see me. I might ask to have it blurred out, I'm not really sure. I'd definitely learn from my own mistake and use curtains whenever I specifically don't want people looking in on me.
The general laws appear to be that if it can be seen on public land, then there is no expectation of privacy. That sounds harsh, until you consider that what can be viewed from the street is pretty limited. And if you take a look at the picture she's so upset over, you can verify that. To me, you can barely tell that there's a cat there. You can't make out what it's sitting on (or behind), or anything about the interior of the house. Not that it matters, because if she was standing in front of the window completely naked, she's still got no expectation of privacy if that window faces the street, but in this specific case, I think it's a complete non-issue.
All fair points, though I tend to think that a few of the cases are a little contrived or, as you point out, sophisticated enough to only target a few users. Certainly interesting to consider. Thanks for the discussion!
They can't guarantee anything, but they can get ahead of the latest rootkits until such time as the rootkits learn their tricks and hide from the new version of the detector. Yes, it's cat-and-mouse, unfortunately, but so is all security.
Slashdot Mirror
It should go without saying that if you're going to compare an open-box item from one manufacturer, you should compare an open-box item from the other. Apple.com often has refurbished MBPs for around $1500. It's rather unfortunate that they don't right now, but it's probably got something to do with the new ones having come out so recently (all of their current refurb models are the ones which are normally priced at $2499.)
/does/ have VGA out (via the included adapter). I don't know if you can use VGA, LCD, and DVI on the Asus (though it would be pretty cool if you could) but if you can't, that makes it irrelevant.
/stream-of-conciousness
The MAC also has 802.11n. It
The Asus looks like an incredible value, no doubt about it. That has to be the most feature-packed laptop I've seen for that price, and it's sorely tempting. But it's not the norm. I don't think it's reasonable to say that "PC notebooks are significantly cheaper than Mac notebooks" based on this outlier. Spec for spec, Macs tend to be a little bit more expensive, but not much. And the value you get in return is very high quality hardware and software, before discounts. Dell gets quite the edge because they're willing to discount their hardware.
I've known almost as many people with Mac notebooks as with off-brand notebooks. The off-brand notebooks tend to be pretty crappy, physically (poorly made, terrible ventilation, cracking cases, etc.) The Mac notebooks tend to wear very well, though I've noticed that the larger ones LCD becomes pretty wobbly over time. My Dell does the same thing, though, so I assume that it's fairly common in the notebook industry.
Oh well.
Agreed.
I've been looking for something to serve as a low-end fileserver, but which can do RAID. Ideally, the hardware would be fully supported by either OpenSolaris or FreeBSD so that I can use ZFS.
Remembering that Apple will be getting ZFS in a few months, I started looking in that direction. The options are sorely limited. Minis and iMacs don't have the expandability, which would be fine if they had eSATA. Of course, they don't. A Mac Pro would be quite capable of housing my hard drives, and would be expandable, but for $2200, I could buy a pretty decent Sun workstation. I could actually expand to up to 7 drives in my RAID (the Sun has 8 drive bays, compared to Apple's 4) obviating the need for external housing should I choose the Apple.
I'd be pretty happy if Apple produced a mid-range workstation that was expandable. I don't need 4 cores. I don't need up to 16GB of RAM. What I need is a workstation with exchangeable parts for around $1,000. Cheaper would be better, of course, but then Apple wouldn't be able to move the Minis.
Comparing a Turion to a Core2Duo is absurd. The performance difference is going to be noticeable.
For features that really are pretty hard to compare, the Mac has a 802.11n and 1000mbps ethernet, Bluetooth, a webcam, and a remote control (despite never expecting to, we've actually used the Mac remote before). Battery life wasn't mentioned on the HP computer, but if we're being honest here, the Turion is probably not going to be as efficient as the Core2Duo. You were also wrong about the price--it's $1100, not $1000.
The HP unit has a multimedia card reader, and an extra pound of weight.
It's really hard to compare the two, but I don't think your post gave the whole story.
Looks like I made a few goofs:
The Macs aren't 800mhz, they're 667mhz, just like the Inspiron E1505.
I was looking at the Dell D820, not the D830.
The Mac comes with a remote control.
I think that mostly covers it.
By contrast, when I order a new Apple notebook on their web site, each specific detail is listed, and can be customized in many cases. If the competition was sold identically, I think people would have a clearer sense of what they're getting for their dollar. You're comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended). That is, you're comparing brick-and-mortar stores to an online retailer.
Go to Dell's site. You'll find even more information than Apple provides.
I recently did a Dell price comparison, myself, since I was interested in Macbooks. It's almost impossible to directly compare the two, but I did a pretty decent job. I'll roughly list the differences between the low-end Macbook Pro and a similarly configured Inspiron E1505:
Dell: -200mhz (Can't configure this machine with 2.2Ghz)
Dell: ATI 256M graphics
Mac: NVIDIA 128M graphics
Dell: -7 WHr battery compared to Mac
Dell: Windows Vista Home Premium
Mac: OS X
Mac: 800mhz bus
Dell: 667mhz bus
Dell: Touchpad with two physical buttons
Mac: Touchpad with one physical button
Mac: +webcam
Dell: $1,368
Mac: $1,999
So it's obviously hard to compare. Is the extra bus speed worth the money? Is it worth it to get nVidia graphics instead of ATI (though older MBPs use ATI graphics, which would have made this less of an issue). Is it worth it when the nVidia graphics card memory is limited to 128? It's hard to compare, but you can't really deny that these are very similar notebooks, and that the price difference is over $600, favoring Dell in terms of price.
Now the Dell in this scenario is with a Dell-provided discount of $250. But you don't generally get Apple provided discounts. When you do, it's on refurb items and/or old stock that they're trying to move.
Someone tipped me off to the Latitude line of Dells, which is easier to configure closely to the MBP. The D830 looked like a good place to start:
Dell: -0.04 Ghz
Dell: 256MB NVIDIA
Mac: 128MB NVIDIA
Dell: Wireless is 802.11b/802.11g
Mac: Wireless is 802.11n
Dell: Choice of XP or Vista
Mac: OS X
Dell: -7 WHr battery compared to Mac
Dell: Touchpad with two physical buttons
Mac: Touchpad with one physical button
Mac: +Webcam
Dell: $1,537
Mac: $1,999
Again, the differences make it hard to compare. The Dell, in this case, has a $300 discount applied instantly, making the 'msrp' margin even finer. Again, though, Macs almost never get discounted, whereas Dells are almost constantly under one discount or another.
This is all distinctly middle-of-the road in terms of computing power, but I still have to give the advantage to Dell, in terms of the iron you're getting. I don't even think it's fair to compare OS X with Windows in these scenarios, because by all accounts, OS X runs just fine on PC hardware--it's DRM which locks it to Macs only. If we allow the OS comparison, we must surely also allow the comparison of other options which Dell offers and Mac does not, such as a WUXGA (1920x1200 pixel) screen on their 15.4" notebooks (Apple offers this resolution only on their 17" notebooks, which modifies portability in a way which is difficult to quantify, and costs around $700 more, in total).
I have no interest in 'high-end' notebooks with absurdly large monitors, so I haven't priced these. It's always been clear that Apple doesn't compete in the low-end market. I don't think they compete well in the mid-range market. When you buy a Mac, you're buying a lifestyle, and an extremely well-designed OS, but don't don't for one minute think that you're getting a good deal on the hardware. Macs are more expensive. Part of it is bound to be production runs (Dell probably sells 600% more laptops than Apple), but a lot of it is probably 'because they can.'
For one thing, IPv6 is on and enabled by default in Vista. This means that, as more and more people downgrade to Vista, more and more people will be IPv6-ready by default. This is a partial solution to the chicken-egg problem of migrating to a new Internet standard. In a couple of years, ISPs need not be afraid of migrating to IPv6 since Vista will be fairly prevalent. Their support centers won't have to deal with thousands of calls from people trying to get XP to play nice with IPv6.
I suspect that this just means that worms will have to be smarter, gathering information on IP addresses to attack based upon connections, logs, etc. People using BitTorrent will provide a huge number of targets. Compromise a webserver, and you've got the addresses of anyone who visits the site. Read through e-mail headers, and you'll get some more.
Bots have no trouble finding e-mail addresses to spam. I imagine that in the face of near infinite IP addresses, they'll find some way to continue their attacks.
Also, the IPv6 address space corresponding to the current IPv4 address space will probably always be scanned.
Ever tried to install OS X on a non-Apple computer?
No, you don't have to do activation, but they use DRM to restrict installs of OS X to their own iron.
He's obviously suggesting that there is a value to patents, so long as there are consequences for issuing bad patents. Perhaps his use of the term "free market" is unfortunate, however his point stands.
If there were penalties for issuing patents which are later invalidated, we'd see the USPTO put more effort into researching the patents they receive, rejection of overly broad patents, and probably eventually start seeing fewer patents requested in general. Then truly innovative inventions would receive patent protection, and every Microsoft, Broadcom, and Qualcomm wouldn't issue patents on every tiny thing they do in an effort to protect their research.
It seems to me like you're acting more like the troll, pedantically focusing on one single term that the poster got wrong rather than reading his post and understanding his point. You're like the guy who points out the fact that someone misuses the word 'infer' and uses that to try to tear down the entire argument.
It seems like the 'copies' parameter would only protect against disk corruption (sector dying, for example), rather than disk failure. I'll have to read up on what that actually does, because I thought ZFS was already supposed to protect data integrity pretty well.
So you end up with one filesystem consisting of two raidz pools. I don't think you actually gain redundancy in this scenario (as 0xABADC0DA implied). At best, you don't lose any, but I think you sacrifice a tiny bit.
Statistically, before you add the second raidz, your filesystem has to have 66% of its drives fail before you lose your data. After adding the pool, if as little as 33% of your drives fail (2 out of the 6, if they're in the same raidz) you lose your data. In fact, if 50% of your drives fail, you've lost your data.
With pools of 4 drives each, of course, the numbers get worse, but at least you get divisible percentages that you can realistically compare.
1 raidz: 25% fail = ok
1 raidz: 50% fail = data loss
2 raidz: 25% fail = ok, if the two drives that fail are in different raidz
2 raidz: 37.5% fail = data loss
Interesting stuff, though.
That makes a lot of sense.
So if you stripe two raidz pools, you get some weird failure states.. One drive from each pool can fail, but two drives from one pool failing is fatal to the whole pool? Not quite raidz2.
Presumably, also, the pools don't have to be of the same size, or contain similar numbers of hard drives. I'll have to break down the numbers on failure scenarios in this setup, but my gut tells me that it's not a great situation.
I was definitely under the impression that you couldn't add to a raidz. Have you tried this, yourself?
I'd rather a standardized filesystem be used. Otherwise, you're asking for compatibility problems (see the current issues with case-sensitivity if you choose to make your filesystem case-sensitive). In this case, I'd rather there be less choice for the main partition.
Sun's patents prevent a compatible reimplementation of ZFS from being imported into the Linux kernel, so you won't see that, either. The most we'll get is a CDDL-licensed FUSE module. And that sucks.
It's only partially elitism. You can still get viruses and other malware as a standard user, if you trust websites without a good reason.
Part of the way intelligence is measured is being able to take old knowledge and apply it to new situations. I was raised to not trust people that I don't know. So when I see a popup saying "install me for ", I tend to be very suspicious. For some reason, with computers, lots of people can't make the logical leap from being suspicious of strangers to being suspicious of things that strangers want to do on their computer. Is it stupidity? Is it elitist of me to point all of this out? I don't know, but I think you're probably more defensive about it because you know people (whom you probably consider to be smart) who have been hit with various Windows malware.
That doesn't mean that there will be a new hardware release. The Wii hardware is more than capable of decoding DVDs, and the drive itself is a DVD-rom. Nintendo should be able to offer DVD playback via a software
upgrade.
I suppose that some people might consider encryption to be a magic bullet, and thus might keep encrypted data around, even if they wouldn't want evidence of that data to exist. This isn't a problem with encryption, however. Whereas if your ciphertext becomes useless shortly after it is sent, you only have to trust the recipient in the present. You have to trust that they won't archive a cleartext version of the message, too.
I'm not sure they have a choice. DirectTiVos have to respect DRM. If they don't, DirectTV won't let them steam the content. I think its similar for TiVos which accept CableCards. And TiVo isn't big enough to put pressure on the people holding them to these restrictions.
It boils down to exactly what they say. GPLv3 won't let them use DRM, and the content providers won't give them access to the streams without it. They don't have enough clout to pressure either group to relax their policies, so they're kinda screwed.
You mean you could see the cat through a transparent material? The shock! The horror!
Did you look at the picture? You can barely tell that there's a cat there, and it looks like it's just on the other side of the glass. You can't see anything in the background at all.
If it was me in that window? I'd feel like an idiot for standing in front of the window, naked, where anyone could see me. I might ask to have it blurred out, I'm not really sure. I'd definitely learn from my own mistake and use curtains whenever I specifically don't want people looking in on me.
And where does the privacy insanity stop?
The general laws appear to be that if it can be seen on public land, then there is no expectation of privacy. That sounds harsh, until you consider that what can be viewed from the street is pretty limited. And if you take a look at the picture she's so upset over, you can verify that. To me, you can barely tell that there's a cat there. You can't make out what it's sitting on (or behind), or anything about the interior of the house. Not that it matters, because if she was standing in front of the window completely naked, she's still got no expectation of privacy if that window faces the street, but in this specific case, I think it's a complete non-issue.
All fair points, though I tend to think that a few of the cases are a little contrived or, as you point out, sophisticated enough to only target a few users. Certainly interesting to consider. Thanks for the discussion!
They can't guarantee anything, but they can get ahead of the latest rootkits until such time as the rootkits learn their tricks and hide from the new version of the detector. Yes, it's cat-and-mouse, unfortunately, but so is all security.