Wait, are you saying the executive is what makes or breaks the company and is modded to +5? I thought the slashdot meme was that they were just the 1%ers raking in the millions for playing golf and being part of the old boys club, while the engineers do all the work. If they're actually important, paying to get a good one makes sense. Oh, you may still get a shyster at the CEO-level too, but if you pay peanuts then you'll definitively only get monkeys because the best people will go where they get paid well. But that super expensive CEO often isn't worth it, just like that super expensive contractor that's charging three times what everyone else does. Same game, just with a few more zeros to the paycheck...
Seeing as this Ubuntu respin has never been officially endorsed by Canonical
If something called Ubuntu TV and presented by Canonical isn't endorsed by Canonical they must be pretty schizophrenic over there;). Anyway, did Canonical need the endorsement of Debian to create Ubuntu? Or did Mint need the endorsement of Canonical? I don't see why Canonical should have to ask permission to make a respin of MythTV. If they could actually get some market traction (which I'm not holding my breath for) then patches and improvements will hopefully make their way back. Or not, since there's no law that require you to work well with upstream. If it turns out to be nothing but MythTV with a skin I'm sure most people will hear about that anyway.
For the most part, neither are worth repairing anymore. I remember my parents' CRT broke, my mom absolutely wanted it fixed even though it was 10 years old. The cost came out to about 1/3rd of what a new TV would cost and with no guarantee that any of the other old components won't fail soon. I bought an LCD that failed spectacularly 5 years later, at that time you got an LCD that had better picture, more inputs and of the same size for 17% of the price. The CRTs are like the IBM PCs that failed spectacularly in the 80s, they were built to last 20 years with expensive repairs. They were run into the ground by cheap clones that people used as long as they worked, then threw away and bought a new one.
And no, this isn't some kind of conspiracy. It's just that repairing something takes a large distributed network of skilled people with the right tools and an inventory of parts, with parts becoming increasingly integrated and the interconnects finer and finer. Meanwhile building highly specialized assembly lines that just churn them out in the thousands or millions and do precision point welding in clean rooms has gotten cheaper and cheaper. Less and less items are actually repaired, even refurbished items are typically returned for other reasons not because they're broken. If you return something on warranty, they're just likely to take another box off the assembly line as a replacement. It's only a matter of who carries the cost of that risk.
Anyways, my point is, as long as people are sitting at a desk using a computer, there will be desktop computers.
People will still be using a computer on their desktop, but I'm not so sure they'll need a desktop computer - at least not in any traditional sense. Already you have machines like the Transformer Prime that blurs the line between tablet and laptop. With smart phones now getting quad core processors, a gigabyte or more of RAM and 32GB+ of storage, full HD decoding in hardware and so on I think the whole line between phone, tablet, laptop and desktop will start to blur. That your "desktop computer" is just your phone with a breakout box for keyboard, mouse, screen and so on - and presumably a bluetooth headset so you don't have to undock to answer the phone. I suppose you can make it more complicated with hybrid graphics, NUMA, additional media libraries etc. when you dock, but I don't really think it's necessary. As long as you're docked and not power constrained, many people will do just fine with the power of their phone.
1) It's total destruction. 2) This is their problem, not mine. 3) No
The first one I only accepted because well it could get lost or stolen, I should have backups anyway and hopefully it'll be as rare as actually losing the phone. It's remote wipe, not remote control. But I might also not run to IT security until I'm sure it's gone for good. As for the last point, that I have everything on one phone means I'll carry it almost always. If I had to have a separate work phone, well then if I'm not on call with pay then tough shit. Maybe the IT department see this as a problem but for the company it should mostly be a win-win so I don't think it's unreasonable that they take the cost of their security system. But then I've never been a huge fan of bring your own gear, except for the phone. It's enough to carry one phone, I'm perfectly happy to let the company supply me with a laptop and whatever else I need to do my job.
The basis of legal contracts is that BOTH sides know, understand, and agree to the contract. If it can be demonstrated that either side could not be expected to reasonably know, understand, or agree to everything in a contract then the contract is invalid.
I think your legal theory that as long as you're oblivious to what you're signing on it won't stick is mostly your own imagination talking. When you are offered a contract the burden is generally on you to understand what you are signing, including getting any necessary help to do that. It's not my burden to prove that you understood everything you signed on, I might have to offer the blind man the contract in Braille but I don't have to make sure he reads it or understands it, only that he's been given the opportunity to do so and then signed indicating the contract was accepted. I guarantee you that if you go into any court room and say "I didn't bother to read it, I just agreed to it" or "I read it but it made no sense so I agreed to it anyway" you will lose.
The two sentences you might have some luck with is "As I understood this paragraph, it meant..." or "This part is unconscionable and no reasonable man would sign this if he'd seen it". In the first you're arguing that the meaning appeared to be clear, so you did your part but the contract was deceptive. In the second part you're arguing they hid a poison needle in a very big haystack. However, it only works for things you couldn't reasonably expect to find, like handing over your firstborn. If they show that these are common industry terms and conditions it's not going to fly, because no matter if you find the terms unreasonable or not it's not unusual that they're there. You won't be able to argue they came as a surprise.
To everyone that's telling "oh you didn't buy it, you licensed it!" or "But you clicked OK on the EULA!" or any variation on that theme. I'm pretty confident I could effortlessly sue the silly pants off any company that did this to me...
To use the word effortlessly is this context is clear proof you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Well, that depends if it's the device that's rooted or the communications that have a backdoor. Most countries have laws that demand police should be able to install wiretaps. It doesn't matter what ISP I go with, no matter which one my line could be tapped. Nor does it matter what phone carrier I go with, my line could be tapped. It's the law. So far there's no general requirement for software - and they'd have a helluva some convincing Firefox to include a backdoor when I use https to my bank - or was that some nasty criminal business? But emails, as far I've understood them they're like sending around postcards - if you can look at the bits flowing through you can read them. If you want any kind of security from the network it's running over, you have to encrypt them. But it's much easier to slap a "If you're not the intended recipient, please don't read" sticker on your postcard, instead of real security.
If your really paranoid, you can read the code yourself or find someone you trust to do it for you.
The Linux kernel is 14 million lines of code alone, when I type in a password I'm guessing between the kernel, xorg and the browser at least double that. Even if only a tiny bit of the code paths are touched, what's to say there's not a trigger set up somewhere to peek at some buffers? It also probably doesn't include the compiler that converts it to binary code. Maybe a huge organization like say "the military" can look through it all, but you? And your friends? Practically the only thing you could be really, really sure of would be something small and hand coded in assembler. And that doesn't count hardware bugs, can you be sure there's no magic sequence you can play to your network card to cause it to start dumping memory out to a three letter agency? Particularly with a cell phone, you have no packet inspection between the cell phone and the tower. Even if you read every line of code in Android and the compiler you compiled it with, there could still be software hidden in the parts that run the radio and such that can spy on you. If there was something really, really critical I'd like an air gap, I'd have a non-networked computer and an USB stick. Because you can't really trust your gear, but it won't be able to communicate by magic. Of course there's some very convoluted ways around that, but then again there's simple ways like a $5 wrench.
Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find.
If you mean "Torvalds on down" as the people working on the kernel, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is very rare that any serious regression slips by on that level. Most of the problems Ubuntu have had are because of the poorly tested software stack they put on top, like for example PulseAudio or NetworkManager, that broken Bluetooth stack and so on. Of course it makes little difference to the end user, but there's nothing the kernel can do if it never actually sends the audio to the hardware or goes in an infinite loop, UI settings are ignored or set wrong or it's a user space driver that is borked. In fact, the problem is that they don't have a Torvalds who give them the hairdryer treatment when they generate crap and break things that used to be working, because they don't report to him at all. I do agree that the integration tests are lacking, there's not nearly enough testing all the way from UI to hardware doing what it should. But the lowest part of that stack that Linus manages is the one that gives the least grounds for concern.
But, one would think these days, buyers would have futures to end this type of supply problem.. Like every other manufacturing industry.
Futures only set a price, they don't magically mean that a factory that's underwater will still deliver. Contracts typically have a "force majeure" clause so they don't have to deliver in this case. And they will take priority, so the more is secured with futures the worse the price changes in the open market will be. You can't make a shortage go away with contracts.
Their core issues have been under constant assault with harsher laws, less privacy and deterioration of due process. There's very little ground that's been gained, the question is how much more would have been lost without them. They've been in public debates, organized demonstrations, written opinion pieces for the papers and tried to influence other parties. The main battle has been for the public opinion, saying this is not wrong. This should not be illegal. It means a lot to have public faces saying that, a million people go speeding too but nobody stands up and says speed limits should be abolished. That it's not something you do just because you can get away with it, but that sharing is right.
Lately here in Norway there's been a lot of articles saying in no unclear terms that the domestic book industry has purposely sabotaged the Norwegian eBooks. They've launched a service that's so poor, confusing and splintered that it's being called a planned failure. And of course, you won't find these books on international sites like Amazon, Apple etc. - it's their crappy "Book Cloud" or the paper edition. Did I mention that three companies own pretty much the whole domestic publishing industry and all the major bookshops? You wouldn't want to cut out the middle man when you are the middle man. What do I expect will fix it? Piracy. Lately piracy, not copyright has been the dominant source of innovation in the entertainment industry and they are dragged kicking and screaming along.
The most important part of Moore's Law was it essentially saying that your new toy will be far better than your old one before it even breaks.
I wouldn't put it that way, because then you get into the messy part of whether a 2 GHz computer is twice as good as a 1 GHz computer, not just twice as fast. Honestly, computers have scaled faster than I've been able to scale my use for them. My upgrades are increasingly a matter of luxury rather than need. You can always say you will find new uses, but it's not like people are going to stop listening to music because playing music takes 0.1% CPU power. Or watching HD movies for that matter, now that we have hardware acceleration for that too. Even for games it's diminishing returns as you use more and more processing power getting details right. So even if you keep Moore's "law" going, it becomes less and less significant to people.
Many options were considered, none found effective and reliable against the fine, dry dust on Mars. In fact that was the whole reason the original mission was limited to three months, if they knew a good way to remove it they would have. Luckily winds clear the panels from time to time, the weather hasn't helped recently but it's still running after 8 years and tilting towards the sun is no big deal. Why would you bother to change a design that works so well? Maybe give it a slightly bigger solar panel so it has a bit better margins but overall there's no reason to change it. By the way, how many times do you think this exact suggestion has come up over the last 8 years?
If they don't give you the disc, and the recovery feature in the OEM crap doesn't work... none of what you say is true. And I've seen far too many computers which came with absolutely no media for the OS. Besides, the amount of shit that is usually in an OEM install often makes it almost unusable. On my mother-in-law's Toshiba laptop I had to strip out all of their crap to make the machine usable. It was full of wizards, and other tools designed to hand hold you so much that the computer had no CPU and memory left to actually do anything... the retail copy has none of that shit. (...) For me, paying the retail price for the OS means I don't have to go through some of the bullshit I have had to go through by not having the install media, which has left me stranded without being able to reinstall unless I was going to get a pirated copy. As I said, my wife's shitty HP laptop came with no install media for Win 7, and the process of creating the restore disk failed and couldn't be retried.
Agree perfectly, I wasn't talking about buying from an OEM, I was talking about buying the OEM version from Microsoft - which obviously means you have a proper disc and with absolutely none of the shit OEMs install. It's exactly the same as retail apart from the motherboard restriction and the way they're priced doing OS upgrades doesn't make sense - just buy a new OEM disc.
Brevity is your friend when you are drafting a Constitution.
No, it's really not. You just move the mile long discussions somewhere else, to say the courts that try using related texts to divine exactly what the meaning of that one or two sentences was. Not to mention a proper definition of the terms used. To take one of the classics:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Does the right to bear arms exist to form a well regulated militia or is the militia just an example? No, I'm not looking to take that discussion again. I'm just pointing out that if they'd taken one or two more sentences to precisely describe it, nobody would be in any doubt. So instead of looking at the law, they're looking at federalist papers and such that only represents the opinions of some of the founders, not something actually agreed on and passed as law. Fine if you need something to show the masses then "Right to bear arms" is a perfectly reasonable summary. But behind that there ought to be an exact, unambiguous description of that right. If you mean for it to include both concealed and not concealed weapons it's much better to have that actually written down than thinking it's implied. Putting it down into law means that yes, we did think about that and yes, we do mean it this way. Otherwise you get shit like people trying to interpret "limited times" in the constitution to be infinity minus a day. It doesn't have to be a book, but it should have at least been a pamphlet. The ten bullet points are more like the 18th century version of a Powerpoint presentation.
I know the last few PCs I've bought I've insisted I receive a full boxed install media... not the OEM, but the retail one, and I pay for it. Because if you don't have this, when your Windows system needs to be rebuilt, you're probably hosed.
You can reinstall on the same hardware as many times as you like. You can change everything but the motherboard freely. The OEM license will let you replace a defective motherboard for one of the same type, like a warranty replacement. Not sure how hard it is with a compatible motherboard. In any case, full retail licenses are a ripoff. To take the prices from Norway:
Upgrade: 539 NOK OEM: 774 NOK Full version: 1342 NOK
Let's do the math here, assuming the next/last Windows version also had the same prices. Full version + upgrade = 1342 + 539 = 1881 NOK. Two OEM licenses? 2*774 = 1548 NOK. But wait, I still have a full version after the upgrade, so I can do more upgrades. Full + 2*upgrade = 1342 + 2*539 = 2420 NOK. Three OEM licenses? 3*774 = 2322 NOK, still cheaper. Okay maybe with three upgrades it's a little cheaper. So if you paid for the full version of XP, then the upgrade to Vista, then to Win7 and then to Metro then maybe you'll have saved a few bucks. On the other hand you'd have one license, I'd actually have four licenses, one for XP, one for Vista, one for Win7 and one for Metro to use or sell or give away with the older mobos. And if you want to skip a generation like I did with Vista, well you'd have to wait for Metro+1 before getting ahead. In short, the retail versions are for suckers with too much money to burn, they're priced so that no rational person would buy them.
Perhaps Microsoft anticipated this and the images will be digitally signed.
They almost certainly are, otherwise this would be almost pointless. The problem is, how do you know it's actually been applied correctly? If I was a virus writer, I'd replace the real reset button with a fake one that did appear to clear everything but in reality gave you an empty, rooted box. To do this properly you don't only need a signed file but also a secure environment, like in the BIOS or something like that which hopefully hasn't been compromised.
Now, I write very modular code, so I COULD try to sell the copies of the programs and enforce artificial scarcity via DRM; However, only my effort of creation is scarce -- copies are in infinite supply. Eco101: If (supply == infinity) then price = 0;// regardless of cost to create. As you can see, to charge per copy is folly.
The problem is that the custom development model doesn't work for mass produced software. If it costs you $100 to implement and 1000 people would get $1 value from it, then obviously benefit > cost and it should happen. Does it? No, because individually it's $100 cost and $1 benefit. The point isn't "charging for copy-paste", it's "distributing the cost of my effort over all those who benefit from it". The more people you have to get coordinated, the harder it gets and the more it turns into a waiting game of trying not to be the one paying so you get the improvements for free (unless they're held in a private fork, which is usually not the case).
A copy of MS Office costs about 2 days worth of minimum wage pay $119 / ($7.25/hr), how much custom development for OpenOffice do I get for that? Very, very little. The effort isn't any less, it's just that all the cost is pushed to the edges where new development occurs. No industry works like that, it's not like Ford puts all the R&D cost of a new car on the first one off the assembly line. That cost is distributed over all the cars of that model. Paying per copy distributes the cost across all users of your software. Fair? Perhaps not ideally so, but having one pay and everyone else benefit isn't either. Yes in fairy tale land they'd all chip in to a big bounty and a neutral arbitrator would determine if the bounty has been fulfilled and it'd all be flowers and sunshine. In reality, not so much.
No, trust me you don't. It's like asking what the Force is made of, or what happened to the Matrix. Luckily, there were no sequels. And before you object, you better read xkcd...
I was listening to my dad about computers the size of rooms and vacuum tubes, when I grew up with it the fact that you could stuff the power of a 286 into a PC was like a thing of wonder. Then I look at my iPhone and realize I didn't have a cell phone or any Internet at all, never mind that it runs a million circles around the 286. Kids today will think I grew up in the stone age just I thought my dad grew up in the stone age. I don't think it really matters where you are in time, you'll look much the same on the past, present and future. I think it's part of a mental coping mechanism working like a Goldilocks zone, we muse about the past and the future but overall we're happiest living when we did. We're a product of our time, I can't really imagine myself growing up 20 years earlier or 20 years later and still being myself. I like being where I've been because it's what made me into the person I am today.
Presumably because it's doing a lot of "smartphony" stuff like checking my email. Going abroad I turned off all data traffic turning it into a dumbphone with games. And unless I was bored and used it to game, it lasted practically forever. And my iPhone will usually last through the weekend from Friday morning to Sunday evening under normal use. If yours won't last a day, I think your "low to moderate use" is someone else's heavy use. Or it's a crappy phone.
The recording artists threw a fit and they were told to stick a sock in it. EVERYONE had copies. Everyone also had some originals. The same is true today.
True, but back then it was a practical necessity, somebody had to have an original to copy from - generational copies sounded worse and so they would sell one copy to every clique in the network, if not to every person. Today that is only a social barrier, people only have originals because they choose to buy originals. If people decided to stop buying originals, well perfect copies would still be available on the Internet. We've seen it when prerelease games or movies leak to the Internet, from that single copy it can boom into millions faster than the blink of an eye. The courts don't have any chance to process a "war on pirates" that's much, much larger than the war on drugs and with far less public support. A few hundred thousands copyright holders can't control hundreds of millions of consumers if those consumers refuse to cooperate. The whole thing reminds me of the scene from the Gandhi movie where he tells people to make their own salt and the British arrest everyone and their mother, the prisons fill up with tens and tens of thousands of prisoners yet once millions and millions of Indians take that right for themselves, there's nothing the government can do to stop them. Copyright ends when we the people say enough is enough, and I don't mean through Congress. It ends when people stop respecting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, are you saying the executive is what makes or breaks the company and is modded to +5? I thought the slashdot meme was that they were just the 1%ers raking in the millions for playing golf and being part of the old boys club, while the engineers do all the work. If they're actually important, paying to get a good one makes sense. Oh, you may still get a shyster at the CEO-level too, but if you pay peanuts then you'll definitively only get monkeys because the best people will go where they get paid well. But that super expensive CEO often isn't worth it, just like that super expensive contractor that's charging three times what everyone else does. Same game, just with a few more zeros to the paycheck...
Seeing as this Ubuntu respin has never been officially endorsed by Canonical
If something called Ubuntu TV and presented by Canonical isn't endorsed by Canonical they must be pretty schizophrenic over there ;). Anyway, did Canonical need the endorsement of Debian to create Ubuntu? Or did Mint need the endorsement of Canonical? I don't see why Canonical should have to ask permission to make a respin of MythTV. If they could actually get some market traction (which I'm not holding my breath for) then patches and improvements will hopefully make their way back. Or not, since there's no law that require you to work well with upstream. If it turns out to be nothing but MythTV with a skin I'm sure most people will hear about that anyway.
For the most part, neither are worth repairing anymore. I remember my parents' CRT broke, my mom absolutely wanted it fixed even though it was 10 years old. The cost came out to about 1/3rd of what a new TV would cost and with no guarantee that any of the other old components won't fail soon. I bought an LCD that failed spectacularly 5 years later, at that time you got an LCD that had better picture, more inputs and of the same size for 17% of the price. The CRTs are like the IBM PCs that failed spectacularly in the 80s, they were built to last 20 years with expensive repairs. They were run into the ground by cheap clones that people used as long as they worked, then threw away and bought a new one.
And no, this isn't some kind of conspiracy. It's just that repairing something takes a large distributed network of skilled people with the right tools and an inventory of parts, with parts becoming increasingly integrated and the interconnects finer and finer. Meanwhile building highly specialized assembly lines that just churn them out in the thousands or millions and do precision point welding in clean rooms has gotten cheaper and cheaper. Less and less items are actually repaired, even refurbished items are typically returned for other reasons not because they're broken. If you return something on warranty, they're just likely to take another box off the assembly line as a replacement. It's only a matter of who carries the cost of that risk.
Anyways, my point is, as long as people are sitting at a desk using a computer, there will be desktop computers.
People will still be using a computer on their desktop, but I'm not so sure they'll need a desktop computer - at least not in any traditional sense. Already you have machines like the Transformer Prime that blurs the line between tablet and laptop. With smart phones now getting quad core processors, a gigabyte or more of RAM and 32GB+ of storage, full HD decoding in hardware and so on I think the whole line between phone, tablet, laptop and desktop will start to blur. That your "desktop computer" is just your phone with a breakout box for keyboard, mouse, screen and so on - and presumably a bluetooth headset so you don't have to undock to answer the phone. I suppose you can make it more complicated with hybrid graphics, NUMA, additional media libraries etc. when you dock, but I don't really think it's necessary. As long as you're docked and not power constrained, many people will do just fine with the power of their phone.
1) It's total destruction.
2) This is their problem, not mine.
3) No
The first one I only accepted because well it could get lost or stolen, I should have backups anyway and hopefully it'll be as rare as actually losing the phone. It's remote wipe, not remote control. But I might also not run to IT security until I'm sure it's gone for good. As for the last point, that I have everything on one phone means I'll carry it almost always. If I had to have a separate work phone, well then if I'm not on call with pay then tough shit. Maybe the IT department see this as a problem but for the company it should mostly be a win-win so I don't think it's unreasonable that they take the cost of their security system. But then I've never been a huge fan of bring your own gear, except for the phone. It's enough to carry one phone, I'm perfectly happy to let the company supply me with a laptop and whatever else I need to do my job.
The basis of legal contracts is that BOTH sides know, understand, and agree to the contract. If it can be demonstrated that either side could not be expected to reasonably know, understand, or agree to everything in a contract then the contract is invalid.
I think your legal theory that as long as you're oblivious to what you're signing on it won't stick is mostly your own imagination talking. When you are offered a contract the burden is generally on you to understand what you are signing, including getting any necessary help to do that. It's not my burden to prove that you understood everything you signed on, I might have to offer the blind man the contract in Braille but I don't have to make sure he reads it or understands it, only that he's been given the opportunity to do so and then signed indicating the contract was accepted. I guarantee you that if you go into any court room and say "I didn't bother to read it, I just agreed to it" or "I read it but it made no sense so I agreed to it anyway" you will lose.
The two sentences you might have some luck with is "As I understood this paragraph, it meant..." or "This part is unconscionable and no reasonable man would sign this if he'd seen it". In the first you're arguing that the meaning appeared to be clear, so you did your part but the contract was deceptive. In the second part you're arguing they hid a poison needle in a very big haystack. However, it only works for things you couldn't reasonably expect to find, like handing over your firstborn. If they show that these are common industry terms and conditions it's not going to fly, because no matter if you find the terms unreasonable or not it's not unusual that they're there. You won't be able to argue they came as a surprise.
To everyone that's telling "oh you didn't buy it, you licensed it!" or "But you clicked OK on the EULA!" or any variation on that theme. I'm pretty confident I could effortlessly sue the silly pants off any company that did this to me...
To use the word effortlessly is this context is clear proof you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Well, that depends if it's the device that's rooted or the communications that have a backdoor. Most countries have laws that demand police should be able to install wiretaps. It doesn't matter what ISP I go with, no matter which one my line could be tapped. Nor does it matter what phone carrier I go with, my line could be tapped. It's the law. So far there's no general requirement for software - and they'd have a helluva some convincing Firefox to include a backdoor when I use https to my bank - or was that some nasty criminal business? But emails, as far I've understood them they're like sending around postcards - if you can look at the bits flowing through you can read them. If you want any kind of security from the network it's running over, you have to encrypt them. But it's much easier to slap a "If you're not the intended recipient, please don't read" sticker on your postcard, instead of real security.
If your really paranoid, you can read the code yourself or find someone you trust to do it for you.
The Linux kernel is 14 million lines of code alone, when I type in a password I'm guessing between the kernel, xorg and the browser at least double that. Even if only a tiny bit of the code paths are touched, what's to say there's not a trigger set up somewhere to peek at some buffers? It also probably doesn't include the compiler that converts it to binary code. Maybe a huge organization like say "the military" can look through it all, but you? And your friends? Practically the only thing you could be really, really sure of would be something small and hand coded in assembler. And that doesn't count hardware bugs, can you be sure there's no magic sequence you can play to your network card to cause it to start dumping memory out to a three letter agency? Particularly with a cell phone, you have no packet inspection between the cell phone and the tower. Even if you read every line of code in Android and the compiler you compiled it with, there could still be software hidden in the parts that run the radio and such that can spy on you. If there was something really, really critical I'd like an air gap, I'd have a non-networked computer and an USB stick. Because you can't really trust your gear, but it won't be able to communicate by magic. Of course there's some very convoluted ways around that, but then again there's simple ways like a $5 wrench.
Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find.
If you mean "Torvalds on down" as the people working on the kernel, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is very rare that any serious regression slips by on that level. Most of the problems Ubuntu have had are because of the poorly tested software stack they put on top, like for example PulseAudio or NetworkManager, that broken Bluetooth stack and so on. Of course it makes little difference to the end user, but there's nothing the kernel can do if it never actually sends the audio to the hardware or goes in an infinite loop, UI settings are ignored or set wrong or it's a user space driver that is borked. In fact, the problem is that they don't have a Torvalds who give them the hairdryer treatment when they generate crap and break things that used to be working, because they don't report to him at all. I do agree that the integration tests are lacking, there's not nearly enough testing all the way from UI to hardware doing what it should. But the lowest part of that stack that Linus manages is the one that gives the least grounds for concern.
But, one would think these days, buyers would have futures to end this type of supply problem.. Like every other manufacturing industry.
Futures only set a price, they don't magically mean that a factory that's underwater will still deliver. Contracts typically have a "force majeure" clause so they don't have to deliver in this case. And they will take priority, so the more is secured with futures the worse the price changes in the open market will be. You can't make a shortage go away with contracts.
Their core issues have been under constant assault with harsher laws, less privacy and deterioration of due process. There's very little ground that's been gained, the question is how much more would have been lost without them. They've been in public debates, organized demonstrations, written opinion pieces for the papers and tried to influence other parties. The main battle has been for the public opinion, saying this is not wrong. This should not be illegal. It means a lot to have public faces saying that, a million people go speeding too but nobody stands up and says speed limits should be abolished. That it's not something you do just because you can get away with it, but that sharing is right.
Lately here in Norway there's been a lot of articles saying in no unclear terms that the domestic book industry has purposely sabotaged the Norwegian eBooks. They've launched a service that's so poor, confusing and splintered that it's being called a planned failure. And of course, you won't find these books on international sites like Amazon, Apple etc. - it's their crappy "Book Cloud" or the paper edition. Did I mention that three companies own pretty much the whole domestic publishing industry and all the major bookshops? You wouldn't want to cut out the middle man when you are the middle man. What do I expect will fix it? Piracy. Lately piracy, not copyright has been the dominant source of innovation in the entertainment industry and they are dragged kicking and screaming along.
The most important part of Moore's Law was it essentially saying that your new toy will be far better than your old one before it even breaks.
I wouldn't put it that way, because then you get into the messy part of whether a 2 GHz computer is twice as good as a 1 GHz computer, not just twice as fast. Honestly, computers have scaled faster than I've been able to scale my use for them. My upgrades are increasingly a matter of luxury rather than need. You can always say you will find new uses, but it's not like people are going to stop listening to music because playing music takes 0.1% CPU power. Or watching HD movies for that matter, now that we have hardware acceleration for that too. Even for games it's diminishing returns as you use more and more processing power getting details right. So even if you keep Moore's "law" going, it becomes less and less significant to people.
Since the popular definition of Moore's Law is exponential growth in any tech-related field, I'd say approximately never..
Many options were considered, none found effective and reliable against the fine, dry dust on Mars. In fact that was the whole reason the original mission was limited to three months, if they knew a good way to remove it they would have. Luckily winds clear the panels from time to time, the weather hasn't helped recently but it's still running after 8 years and tilting towards the sun is no big deal. Why would you bother to change a design that works so well? Maybe give it a slightly bigger solar panel so it has a bit better margins but overall there's no reason to change it. By the way, how many times do you think this exact suggestion has come up over the last 8 years?
If they don't give you the disc, and the recovery feature in the OEM crap doesn't work ... none of what you say is true. And I've seen far too many computers which came with absolutely no media for the OS. Besides, the amount of shit that is usually in an OEM install often makes it almost unusable. On my mother-in-law's Toshiba laptop I had to strip out all of their crap to make the machine usable. It was full of wizards, and other tools designed to hand hold you so much that the computer had no CPU and memory left to actually do anything ... the retail copy has none of that shit.
(...)
For me, paying the retail price for the OS means I don't have to go through some of the bullshit I have had to go through by not having the install media, which has left me stranded without being able to reinstall unless I was going to get a pirated copy. As I said, my wife's shitty HP laptop came with no install media for Win 7, and the process of creating the restore disk failed and couldn't be retried.
Agree perfectly, I wasn't talking about buying from an OEM, I was talking about buying the OEM version from Microsoft - which obviously means you have a proper disc and with absolutely none of the shit OEMs install. It's exactly the same as retail apart from the motherboard restriction and the way they're priced doing OS upgrades doesn't make sense - just buy a new OEM disc.
Brevity is your friend when you are drafting a Constitution.
No, it's really not. You just move the mile long discussions somewhere else, to say the courts that try using related texts to divine exactly what the meaning of that one or two sentences was. Not to mention a proper definition of the terms used. To take one of the classics:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Does the right to bear arms exist to form a well regulated militia or is the militia just an example? No, I'm not looking to take that discussion again. I'm just pointing out that if they'd taken one or two more sentences to precisely describe it, nobody would be in any doubt. So instead of looking at the law, they're looking at federalist papers and such that only represents the opinions of some of the founders, not something actually agreed on and passed as law. Fine if you need something to show the masses then "Right to bear arms" is a perfectly reasonable summary. But behind that there ought to be an exact, unambiguous description of that right. If you mean for it to include both concealed and not concealed weapons it's much better to have that actually written down than thinking it's implied. Putting it down into law means that yes, we did think about that and yes, we do mean it this way. Otherwise you get shit like people trying to interpret "limited times" in the constitution to be infinity minus a day. It doesn't have to be a book, but it should have at least been a pamphlet. The ten bullet points are more like the 18th century version of a Powerpoint presentation.
I know the last few PCs I've bought I've insisted I receive a full boxed install media ... not the OEM, but the retail one, and I pay for it. Because if you don't have this, when your Windows system needs to be rebuilt, you're probably hosed.
You can reinstall on the same hardware as many times as you like. You can change everything but the motherboard freely. The OEM license will let you replace a defective motherboard for one of the same type, like a warranty replacement. Not sure how hard it is with a compatible motherboard. In any case, full retail licenses are a ripoff. To take the prices from Norway:
Upgrade: 539 NOK
OEM: 774 NOK
Full version: 1342 NOK
Let's do the math here, assuming the next/last Windows version also had the same prices. Full version + upgrade = 1342 + 539 = 1881 NOK. Two OEM licenses? 2*774 = 1548 NOK. But wait, I still have a full version after the upgrade, so I can do more upgrades. Full + 2*upgrade = 1342 + 2*539 = 2420 NOK. Three OEM licenses? 3*774 = 2322 NOK, still cheaper. Okay maybe with three upgrades it's a little cheaper. So if you paid for the full version of XP, then the upgrade to Vista, then to Win7 and then to Metro then maybe you'll have saved a few bucks. On the other hand you'd have one license, I'd actually have four licenses, one for XP, one for Vista, one for Win7 and one for Metro to use or sell or give away with the older mobos. And if you want to skip a generation like I did with Vista, well you'd have to wait for Metro+1 before getting ahead. In short, the retail versions are for suckers with too much money to burn, they're priced so that no rational person would buy them.
Perhaps Microsoft anticipated this and the images will be digitally signed.
They almost certainly are, otherwise this would be almost pointless. The problem is, how do you know it's actually been applied correctly? If I was a virus writer, I'd replace the real reset button with a fake one that did appear to clear everything but in reality gave you an empty, rooted box. To do this properly you don't only need a signed file but also a secure environment, like in the BIOS or something like that which hopefully hasn't been compromised.
Actually with Linux' numbering scheme, we will probably get to 3.11, after 3.10 and 3.9. You just have to wait another couple years for the punchline.
Now, I write very modular code, so I COULD try to sell the copies of the programs and enforce artificial scarcity via DRM; However, only my effort of creation is scarce -- copies are in infinite supply. Eco101: // regardless of cost to create.
If (supply == infinity) then price = 0;
As you can see, to charge per copy is folly.
The problem is that the custom development model doesn't work for mass produced software. If it costs you $100 to implement and 1000 people would get $1 value from it, then obviously benefit > cost and it should happen. Does it? No, because individually it's $100 cost and $1 benefit. The point isn't "charging for copy-paste", it's "distributing the cost of my effort over all those who benefit from it". The more people you have to get coordinated, the harder it gets and the more it turns into a waiting game of trying not to be the one paying so you get the improvements for free (unless they're held in a private fork, which is usually not the case).
A copy of MS Office costs about 2 days worth of minimum wage pay $119 / ($7.25/hr), how much custom development for OpenOffice do I get for that? Very, very little. The effort isn't any less, it's just that all the cost is pushed to the edges where new development occurs. No industry works like that, it's not like Ford puts all the R&D cost of a new car on the first one off the assembly line. That cost is distributed over all the cars of that model. Paying per copy distributes the cost across all users of your software. Fair? Perhaps not ideally so, but having one pay and everyone else benefit isn't either. Yes in fairy tale land they'd all chip in to a big bounty and a neutral arbitrator would determine if the bounty has been fulfilled and it'd all be flowers and sunshine. In reality, not so much.
No, trust me you don't. It's like asking what the Force is made of, or what happened to the Matrix. Luckily, there were no sequels. And before you object, you better read xkcd...
I was listening to my dad about computers the size of rooms and vacuum tubes, when I grew up with it the fact that you could stuff the power of a 286 into a PC was like a thing of wonder. Then I look at my iPhone and realize I didn't have a cell phone or any Internet at all, never mind that it runs a million circles around the 286. Kids today will think I grew up in the stone age just I thought my dad grew up in the stone age. I don't think it really matters where you are in time, you'll look much the same on the past, present and future. I think it's part of a mental coping mechanism working like a Goldilocks zone, we muse about the past and the future but overall we're happiest living when we did. We're a product of our time, I can't really imagine myself growing up 20 years earlier or 20 years later and still being myself. I like being where I've been because it's what made me into the person I am today.
No, but it does come with its own OS...
Presumably because it's doing a lot of "smartphony" stuff like checking my email. Going abroad I turned off all data traffic turning it into a dumbphone with games. And unless I was bored and used it to game, it lasted practically forever. And my iPhone will usually last through the weekend from Friday morning to Sunday evening under normal use. If yours won't last a day, I think your "low to moderate use" is someone else's heavy use. Or it's a crappy phone.
The recording artists threw a fit and they were told to stick a sock in it. EVERYONE had copies. Everyone also had some originals. The same is true today.
True, but back then it was a practical necessity, somebody had to have an original to copy from - generational copies sounded worse and so they would sell one copy to every clique in the network, if not to every person. Today that is only a social barrier, people only have originals because they choose to buy originals. If people decided to stop buying originals, well perfect copies would still be available on the Internet. We've seen it when prerelease games or movies leak to the Internet, from that single copy it can boom into millions faster than the blink of an eye. The courts don't have any chance to process a "war on pirates" that's much, much larger than the war on drugs and with far less public support. A few hundred thousands copyright holders can't control hundreds of millions of consumers if those consumers refuse to cooperate. The whole thing reminds me of the scene from the Gandhi movie where he tells people to make their own salt and the British arrest everyone and their mother, the prisons fill up with tens and tens of thousands of prisoners yet once millions and millions of Indians take that right for themselves, there's nothing the government can do to stop them. Copyright ends when we the people say enough is enough, and I don't mean through Congress. It ends when people stop respecting it.