We see some pressing need to "check out of the house" with IE on one random afternoon, but there is a particular annoyance: the site-specific invitation to download alt-browsers we already have. Webpages have no way of determining when you upgraded, and it feels like we're being policed for forgetting that the site is naggy when it sees the wrong browser.
I have no axe to grid, but cash-minded jerks might leave small businesses out there for the likewise displeasure. Large businesses already avoid most evangelizing and keep it random, or only based on some repeat threshold rather than every time I reload the pages that day (see Youtube's IE6 upgrade behavior). So far small sites haven't been PR-conscious in their warning's implementation, so it's permanent code with possibly deleterious effects on corporate users forced to use IE from work, for example
Also, IE's page-top yellow sliding dialog isn't an HTML API --they introduced it for internal ActiveX / security / zone warnings, and as more sites mimic that behavior with javascript, the more it will be ignored the same way as popups did.
Can someone tell me the major reason as to why those capable of joining Facebook refuse to join?
Kinda like joining a cult. Getting in is *easy* and peers tend to pressure you for the "joys" of it. Then you are bound to new "social" duties: hear/see things and respond to people you had little interest in seeing before. You're trapped at a IRL yearly family party, except the gossiping goes on 24/7 and you can't hide what you said.
Some of us rather enjoy a relationship w/ people sans 500 million others sitting on the back row (plus advertisers and 5.5 billion others when leaks spring.)
The laughingly low vertical resolution has another problem, compounded by how weak built-in Intel graphics performance is:
You can flip a laptop sideways and try rotating the text, but last I checked, Windows had a very noticeable refresh problem when paging up and down slashdot. I was surprised when finding that Ubuntu 10.10 has no such problems, so I guess it's not the hardware.
There is a usability concern in that the ratio is too different; Chromium/Ubuntu had a problem centering Youtube videos on fullscreen so about 1/5 of the righthand part was cut off, and Firefox centered fine, but the video doesn't stretch to fill the screen (faces would look too skewed, I guess) the problem is that the letterbox effect puts the size of blackbars for current HDtvs centered for 4:3 to shame.
We should feel cheated that portable laptops rarely get past 800 vertical pixels (14 inches and below,) considering that 5 years ago the old Dell D800 could pack 1920x1200 in 15.4" for business sectors. Search dell d800 resolution and read the official Dell PDF. That same WUXGA isn't common at brick and mortar Best Buys in NY unless you're going for the 21 inch monster "lap"tops.
Only heard "foxfire" once, and probably from an old female professor who wasn't technical. The university has about 1000+ staff/professors and so, and we even got our share of 10k+ students, and I worked there more than 3 years.
Two more years after that, but no. I'm on the East Coast of the US, if that will help. I can only reckon that Firefox sounds too much like firefly. Er, NVM that, google says that besides some small company at foxfire.com whose only webpage states they're not firefox, approve of it. A better guess is that the second search result points to a Novel by Joyce Carol Oates and a 1996 film that earned 50% ratings at imdb.
I'll have to take you up on the comment "IE still pre-installed on every single Windows computer", though. In the EU, while it may technically be pre-installed, users now have to specify which browser they want on first run.
That happened only this year, amid a world recession unfriendly to new PC purchases, and only on Windows 7 (and after its November 2009 launch dates too, so you can be sure boxed copies everywhere were sold without the update.)
It doesn't affect the most popular Windows OS, XP, as confirmed by a recent/. story. These EU users will have little impace in world-wide stats unless they defied their economies and had a huge increase in sales we haven't heard about.
Hmm, please excuse me if the argument might have sounded harsh.
I clean spyware for my teen-ridden kin group. It's funny when I ask parents, or even the teens I know to use the PC's. They're almost always clueless what the toolbars are for.
The only justified one is a quick translation bar for IE, added this year in one PC out of half a dozen I've tended to for a nearly 15 years. Everything else is just bundled with MSN, games (ugh, wildtangent)/cursors or their [secret] pr0nsites. I have never found a complaint after killing even non-threatening bars when they are in the face of popup-related distress.
Chicken and the egg problem detected here in reverse ("who LEFT first.")
IE9 will be out some indeterminate number of weeks AFTER the fixed date of end-of-life for XP. Assuming that MS does give out IE9 to all XP users who we reckon "Just Won't Upgrade," that will work against solving the upgrade problem, won't it?
It's just like further spoiling a spoiled child for later to avoid problems now. Eventually you have a blowout situation and realize the line should have been drawn much earlier.
Let's think about what matters, and not percentages. We have a rollout of HTML5 for which the other browsers are readier.
And I'd dare say my post isn't even about that. It's about the [apparent] lack of support for ipv6. I tested IE8, Opera 10.62, Safari 4.04 and Firefox 3.6.6 through a 6to4 tunnel to find that they will fail miserably parsing IP's in v6 notation.
The standard unicast 2002:c058:6301::0 was flagged bad because all sources list it using the shortcut 2002:c058:6301::. I have found even shells to fail to ping because the damn v6 abreviations aren't expanded internally. Since our mainstream XP supported v6 at its release, two OS's ago, router makers, browser devs and shell tool makers can't be excused after a decade just because the standard isn't finalized: think of wireless N having support everywhere WAY before there was a "standard."
The next 5 to 10 years IT pros worldwide must test bare ipv6 addresses like I did, confirming correctness in their DNS and DHCPv6 while eventually pushing ipv6 to their enterprise. Even if my tunnel were found misconfigured or something, I know others will find the same timesinks. Finding you'll have a hard time implementing v4-less environments for their pro infrastructure isn't a good thing. The browsers give clueless errors ranging from "internal communications issue" (opera) to "unknown webkit error" when I feed google's ip, even if I format it with brackets as suggested http://20014860800f00000093/
The bracket notation is NOT something I've read officially, and you cannot expect anyone to know that all sites need that --instead the browser should just stop assuming that colons in your address bars stand for port numbers. Safari said it can't find the port "2001:4860" before I was forced to find out about the brackets while researching. If laymen can't be expected currently to immediately board an ipv6 site in an ipv6-ready environment, then it's all for naught.
The largest portion of piracy comes from torrent traffic. The rest probably download from Rapidshare or stream flash movies megavideo and so on. This intermediate model actually hosts the file, but lures you with subscriptions to remove intermediate, nagging and artificial speedbumps for 'free' users.
The most notorious speedbump is making you and each potential subscriber click and wait a number of seconds to read their nagware prior to downloading. They only provide dynamic links that refuse "resume-from" funcionality, on purpose. If your wireless connection burps halfway through, you'll be nagged at again and start the download over and over because they refuse offset requests.
Because the content best known by Rapidshare users is pr0n that isn't paid for / uploaded to dedicated distribution hosts, everyone quietly sucks their lip and ignores the nagging, subscribes to remove the capping, or finds a different free service for their own future, semi-anonymous uploads.
Why don't we have a generic TCP/IP transfer protocol which caches things at every hop it passed through?
These avoidable/extra storage costs and multiple-transfer bandwidth are what helped ISP's decide to kill Usenet.
Plus the looming ISP realization that our now huge HD's and collective pipes increase their costs by orders of magnitude than their olde bunch of text / JPG files (fractioning their profits by the same amount.)
It's because it competes with them... If BitTorrent had a good reputation then indie filmmakers would use it to distribute their films to customers, perhaps as encrypted files with DRM
I understand your idea isn't meant to be an absolute or finished thought. Just for kicks, though, DRM itself is meant to work upon a purchase for a single user, a one-time use key on a single machine or restricted hardware, or killing content playability based on an expiration dates.
The contradiction is that DRM is meant to narrow down while torrenting makes available, even if it's a single watermarked file to dozens of sharers... why would users want to grab something from a cloud after fully knowing that only one machine is meant to unlock the available file? The only way this can work is if you have anonymizing where everyone shares everyone else's bandwidth but nobody really knows what's being shared until they have their expected set of bytes. See the WoW patch distribution method.
Slightly OT, if you're still into Toshiba laptops, give Ubuntu 10.10 a try. I reported some software and live-boot problems from USB before taking a closer look at this RC, but hardware wise, my 3 year old U305 model is running much like Windows.
I had skipped on 10.04 but updated kernels and the expected 9.04 backporting updates provided no improvement. Then, suddenly, 10.10 had my dual-monitor support, sleep, wobbly windows, blueetooth and the unfixable 0%-OR-100% volume-wheel-input working properly, all in a single major upgrade. I followed ubuntu from before even owning this laptop. YMMV since the RC came out only a couple days ago, and I will "rage" over whatever may have broken without my noticing...:)
I agree, but to be fair, you have only owned "inside" the OS X era and not "across into it from OS 9." OS 10 doesn't reinvent as many things from one 0.1 version to another, according to more attentive slashdotters than I as a former mac user.
Just like we can't upgrade a 2003 XP PC to Vista(*) it was maybe similarly expensive to upgrade a 1998 G3 mac (not imac) from its stock 32MB to the suggested 128 RAM IIRC, besides bringing the CPU up from a then-unusable 233 to a more practical 400Mhz range. Note the words "Similarly expensive," because the Mac was more scalable, while Windows PC upgrades to Vista-Aero were hit or miss due to the crappy stock GPU performance common on Wintels till Vista's release.
* practical computing power for it lagged a full year after Vista's launch. It's still sadly common to see stores selling NEW PC's scoring 2.x and 3.x out of 5, 6 or whatever on the official Windows benchmark.
"I'm guessing you missed out on the System 7 fiasco, when something like a third of all older Mac apps stopped working?"
Jeez, that's uncalled for. We might suppose Mac OS 10.0 brought him in, and 10.5 had him leave in disgust or something? But System 7... is extremely old. Nearly two decades, even. I cut my teeth on 7 back in 1996 and had no idea about that break till 14 years later.
Anyway, I do see your point on versions breaking stuff. I started with DOS / windows 3 / Windows 95, more or less.
Win95 broke some functionality in my autoexec scripts. Nothing big, but I missed having control of the PC boot process that Win3 previously allowed. Win98 broke one of my JetFighter games. It also forced IE4 on us --MS's first major messup that allowed broken webpages/viruses to crash my whole OS shell. It stopped bundling with QBasic Win2k broke my DOS compilers (Rhide), forced Guest Network access off and killed Reverb on my sound card. It also killed the very first $150 Logitech Quickcam Pro (drivers never came out for it). It also killed the venerable "reboot to DOS" option that was good for playing games in true DOS mode. I'm not sure if WinME did that first, though. WinXP broke Final Fantasy 7 PC and my user escalation trick where my privileged DOS window could be escalated into an explorer.exe or control panel shell without wasting 10 minutes to log my users out, log myself in, log out and log the users back in. Vista broke microphone-output-through-your-speakers and full-screen dos forever. The dll-replacement hack means I'll lose Aero now and who-knows-what later. It also lacks a bunch of VB dll files that old shareware requires to run --this probably happened during XP; redownloading and virus checking them is annoying. Seven --haven't owned it yet.
MacOS 10 broke a legacy of pre-carbon and probably carbon applications, but at least provided an OS 9 emulator before that too was obsoleted half a decade ago. Not sure what's broken through the 0.1 version changes, because I no longer own a working Mac.
Regarding VS, Enterprise is still Enterprise, not free. We are misled since VS Express did compile our DOS-only-GUI Computer Science homework, to believe that utilizing MS's C++ compiler freely means we get a *visual* Windows GUI designer should they we ever become Win32 programmers. Why do they even call it Visual if they withhold the visual component part in the free version?;-) We miss out on MFC, ATL and anything related to dialogs for Win32 code. When we actually need forms (GUIs) for Win32 stuff in C++, MFC, Dot Net or ATL or WTL GUI's, VS Express fails. Coding them in by hand is hardcore, and Code::Blocks or DevC++ or even VS Express are nowhere near replacing that, the most elusive feature found only in the Pro versions.
For that, we need non-express cash (or illegal hacks.) The US link(*) lists 1200 dollars for Pro and $799 for upgrades. Well, I've seen Adobe software in the several thousands, so it's not too crazy. VS 2010 seems to be real cheap in Spain --only $500 euros.
Moral of the stories: Stay Reasonably Current. Yes, you. Yes, even if it still works fine. Keep your software current. Keep your hardware current. Abandon old technologies and embrace new ones. (floppy->flash, modem->dsl, etc) Or pay the price.
Having worked IT with college students and seeing a couple old companies' hardware, I agree with your post fully. Replying here so I can refer back to it when I need to strengthen my testimony.
I'm a no-upgrade kinda person with 5-to-10 year old computers. The last five years I noticed that eventually some great game or media gets stuck in an unreachable drive and it's emulators or ebay to recover the lost hardware / reader.
A few weeks ago I visited someone after 7 years to check her Windows 98 PC before it gets pushed to low-income relatives in a different country. It was late at night, and by chance I found copies of a few my old MIDI files (c. 1996) and special program had ended up there almost by chance. That was a copy of data long buried in some long-misplaced disk image file or possibly wiped from the 3 or 4 machines I have wiped through the years. The Problem: I could not get the files out since Win98 cannot read today's USB stick... and I had no blank floppies with me that day either.
I'll eventually find some way of getting the MIDI files, but my one chance was gone because standards shifted away from floppies so much that we never carry them in our toolbox anymore.
I have a number of friends and family that ask me to fix their computers on a regular basis. I've upgraded all of them to Windows 7 [...] not one of them has contracted a virus of any kind.
I sincerely hope you meant you've paid the $100 per computer per friend MS upgrade fee doing that. But you're a slashdotter, so I doubt 1/2 of your family victims would fork extra cash. It's hard to convince people that "fixing" is NOT the cheapest way to get back go their Windows desktop, and that instead of the customarily-free virus wipe, they need to lose or back up their files, pay for a boxed OS you'll purchase another day, and THEN learn to use the new OS and get all their data and long-forgotten application installers back in the right place.
Pirated W7 Ultimate is "free" for "us geeks and our friends" and a net profit for Microsoft. Microsoft wins since your friends' PC's already got counted in surveys like TFA (compare to Adobe gaining contracts from businesses loving its reported 90+% worldwide adoption rate, though we want Flash to stop growing.) We lose because next time, your friends will ask for Pirated Office 2007, and eventually our dinosaur Windows PCs and Linux PC's can't open files and we're being asked to install pirated copies so we can enjoy their piracy-hinged benefits. It's like a viscious circle or a virus.
If you did pay, then please don't feel I meant any harm. I am just annoyed by the bar being raised when those same guys that yell at me on the web to "just upgrade already" are profiting unfairly from a model where they can "get" and make products out of Adobe Suite, Visual Studio Enterprise, Vista Ultimate and VMWare when we all know the multi-thousand-dollar licenses are only affordable if your company forks over the cash, or you are very rich. People online just assume their choices will be repeated by similarly pirating professionals. Living in the US, it's a bit harder to avoid getting caught, especially with company audits, college/*IAA contracts and ISP cooperation.
I concur that web rendering has become the deal-breaker with dinosaur OS's, more than lack of updates, AV or firewalls.
The PIII I left at my dad's house came with W2K back in 2001. For kicks, I installed W98 a couple years later and loved its blazing speed; hated how bad the free antivirus support was back in 2003. It could render things fine.
Which brings me to the next point: I also have a 1998 G3 mac with IE4.5, Netscape 4 and iCab. The rendering there was attrocious by 2005, with hotmail and MSN being the biggest problems.
Prior to web 2.0, you could already pages fail to render. Going further back in OS time, I present my Windows 95 rev. B system (housed in the then precious emulation that VPC 2.4 provided.) IE 3 or 4 (not sure which) had tons of problems rendering everything. Lots of pages, including slashdot, rendered really, really tall, because the browsers could render frames, but didn't know anything about our now-worldwide left-hand / right-hand sitemaps / ad sections.
Heck, back in 2004 I played around with a Windows 95 OEM install for an old Thinkpad laptop running at 25Mhz. It came with IE2, and you can plainly see script tags completely in the open, and absolutely no sites rendering properly. It scares me to think that 10 or 15 years from now our trusty HTML3 and 4 will be gone completely, and that our "soon-to-be-in-the-museum" PC's won't be able to render squat because IE9 or 10 will be uninstallable there, for example. It is worse because the trend I see is for HTML to fail invisibly, and at least my IE2 PC could show a layman that there was something seriously asking for an expert to be brought over. Tomorrow, I see people just going "mister webmaster, before I put my subscription/cash elsewhere, you must fix your web 4.0+ site for my dinosaur browser."
I never suspected an RC would drop the same day I downloaded the beta. I barely got 9.04 when 10.04 was still gestating in the dev channels, being the cautious anti-upgrade type. 6 months isn't good for production, but does help me find a slightly more functional distro without having to wait a whole year.
I'm had to look at my Chrome history and concluded that themirror.mcs.anl.gov synched the contents too late. All the links say they had the files around 30-sept-2010 06:20am. My downloaded, already tested iso is no longer listed there, I see "rc-desktop-i386.iso" now, but my download was ubuntu-10.10-beta-desktop-i386.iso about 12 hours later than those timestamps claim. File transfers keep old timestamps when done right. I will have to redownload since my beta is 2 weeks old.
My experience was that the USB image from the ISO failed to boot my laptop. I had to press SHIFT before the ID string freezes and type help into the boot command. Picking some random option, I was able to boot. I was pleasantly surprised that my bluetooth did get detected properly and could even initiate a phone connection. However, file transfers failed both ways. I also confirmed that MP3 playback sucks (Shuttleworth has removed the prior option to helpfully download from universe.) Rhythmbox tries to select the correct codecs and fails. I also found that Firefox 3.6.9 is included, but fails to install all 3 flash options because of some package issue. Maybe my beta had all those broken.
I don't like that the DVD download isn't available for intel's 64 bit processors. As for the rest, I did notice that the outofbox app list is pretty damn skimpy compared to 2005. I have felt less and less interest in trying live releases. With Ubuntu, I'll give it another year before giving up altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
We see some pressing need to "check out of the house" with IE on one random afternoon, but there is a particular annoyance: the site-specific invitation to download alt-browsers we already have. Webpages have no way of determining when you upgraded, and it feels like we're being policed for forgetting that the site is naggy when it sees the wrong browser.
I have no axe to grid, but cash-minded jerks might leave small businesses out there for the likewise displeasure. Large businesses already avoid most evangelizing and keep it random, or only based on some repeat threshold rather than every time I reload the pages that day (see Youtube's IE6 upgrade behavior). So far small sites haven't been PR-conscious in their warning's implementation, so it's permanent code with possibly deleterious effects on corporate users forced to use IE from work, for example
Also, IE's page-top yellow sliding dialog isn't an HTML API --they introduced it for internal ActiveX / security / zone warnings, and as more sites mimic that behavior with javascript, the more it will be ignored the same way as popups did.
Thanks. With your tip I found a review and it looks like an able candidate, if just from the posted WEI scores.
Glad to see you pay attention to comments and are willing to assist long after others stop moderating a thread.
Can someone tell me the major reason as to why those capable of joining Facebook refuse to join?
Kinda like joining a cult. Getting in is *easy* and peers tend to pressure you for the "joys" of it.
Then you are bound to new "social" duties: hear/see things and respond to people you had little interest in seeing before. You're trapped at a IRL yearly family party, except the gossiping goes on 24/7 and you can't hide what you said.
Some of us rather enjoy a relationship w/ people sans 500 million others sitting on the back row (plus advertisers and 5.5 billion others when leaks spring.)
The laughingly low vertical resolution has another problem, compounded by how weak built-in Intel graphics performance is:
You can flip a laptop sideways and try rotating the text, but last I checked, Windows had a very noticeable refresh problem when paging up and down slashdot. I was surprised when finding that Ubuntu 10.10 has no such problems, so I guess it's not the hardware.
There is a usability concern in that the ratio is too different; Chromium/Ubuntu had a problem centering Youtube videos on fullscreen so about 1/5 of the righthand part was cut off, and Firefox centered fine, but the video doesn't stretch to fill the screen (faces would look too skewed, I guess) the problem is that the letterbox effect puts the size of blackbars for current HDtvs centered for 4:3 to shame.
We should feel cheated that portable laptops rarely get past 800 vertical pixels (14 inches and below,) considering that 5 years ago the old Dell D800 could pack 1920x1200 in 15.4" for business sectors. Search dell d800 resolution and read the official Dell PDF.
That same WUXGA isn't common at brick and mortar Best Buys in NY unless you're going for the 21 inch monster "lap"tops.
Only heard "foxfire" once, and probably from an old female professor who wasn't technical. The university has about 1000+ staff/professors and so, and we even got our share of 10k+ students, and I worked there more than 3 years.
Two more years after that, but no. I'm on the East Coast of the US, if that will help.
I can only reckon that Firefox sounds too much like firefly. Er, NVM that, google says that besides some small company at foxfire.com whose only webpage states they're not firefox, approve of it. A better guess is that the second search result points to a Novel by Joyce Carol Oates and a 1996 film that earned 50% ratings at imdb.
Thanks.
I'm sorry to have been wrong. It's good to hear it's out on XP.
I wish the ruling had included the whole world, because it would me save lots of time.
I'll have to take you up on the comment "IE still pre-installed on every single Windows computer", though. In the EU, while it may technically be pre-installed, users now have to specify which browser they want on first run.
That happened only this year, amid a world recession unfriendly to new PC purchases, and only on Windows 7 (and after its November 2009 launch dates too, so you can be sure boxed copies everywhere were sold without the update.)
It doesn't affect the most popular Windows OS, XP, as confirmed by a recent /. story. These EU users will have little impace in world-wide stats unless they defied their economies and had a huge increase in sales we haven't heard about.
Hmm, please excuse me if the argument might have sounded harsh.
I clean spyware for my teen-ridden kin group. It's funny when I ask parents, or even the teens I know to use the PC's. They're almost always clueless what the toolbars are for.
The only justified one is a quick translation bar for IE, added this year in one PC out of half a dozen I've tended to for a nearly 15 years. Everything else is just bundled with MSN, games (ugh, wildtangent)/cursors or their [secret] pr0nsites. I have never found a complaint after killing even non-threatening bars when they are in the face of popup-related distress.
Chicken and the egg problem detected here in reverse ("who LEFT first.")
IE9 will be out some indeterminate number of weeks AFTER the fixed date of end-of-life for XP. Assuming that MS does give out IE9 to all XP users who we reckon "Just Won't Upgrade," that will work against solving the upgrade problem, won't it?
It's just like further spoiling a spoiled child for later to avoid problems now. Eventually you have a blowout situation and realize the line should have been drawn much earlier.
Let's think about what matters, and not percentages. We have a rollout of HTML5 for which the other browsers are readier.
And I'd dare say my post isn't even about that. It's about the [apparent] lack of support for ipv6. I tested IE8, Opera 10.62, Safari 4.04 and Firefox 3.6.6 through a 6to4 tunnel to find that they will fail miserably parsing IP's in v6 notation.
The standard unicast 2002:c058:6301::0 was flagged bad because all sources list it using the shortcut 2002:c058:6301::. I have found even shells to fail to ping because the damn v6 abreviations aren't expanded internally. Since our mainstream XP supported v6 at its release, two OS's ago, router makers, browser devs and shell tool makers can't be excused after a decade just because the standard isn't finalized: think of wireless N having support everywhere WAY before there was a "standard."
The next 5 to 10 years IT pros worldwide must test bare ipv6 addresses like I did, confirming correctness in their DNS and DHCPv6 while eventually pushing ipv6 to their enterprise. Even if my tunnel were found misconfigured or something, I know others will find the same timesinks. Finding you'll have a hard time implementing v4-less environments for their pro infrastructure isn't a good thing. The browsers give clueless errors ranging from "internal communications issue" (opera) to "unknown webkit error" when I feed google's ip, even if I format it with brackets as suggested http://20014860800f00000093/
The bracket notation is NOT something I've read officially, and you cannot expect anyone to know that all sites need that --instead the browser should just stop assuming that colons in your address bars stand for port numbers. Safari said it can't find the port "2001:4860" before I was forced to find out about the brackets while researching. If laymen can't be expected currently to immediately board an ipv6 site in an ipv6-ready environment, then it's all for naught.
I'm surprised the lameness filter let that through. :)
Oh well, can't blame /. for letting freedom have the upper hand, and letting moderation rule out the true page lenghtening post.
The largest portion of piracy comes from torrent traffic. The rest probably download from Rapidshare or stream flash movies megavideo and so on. This intermediate model actually hosts the file, but lures you with subscriptions to remove intermediate, nagging and artificial speedbumps for 'free' users.
The most notorious speedbump is making you and each potential subscriber click and wait a number of seconds to read their nagware prior to downloading. They only provide dynamic links that refuse "resume-from" funcionality, on purpose. If your wireless connection burps halfway through, you'll be nagged at again and start the download over and over because they refuse offset requests.
Because the content best known by Rapidshare users is pr0n that isn't paid for / uploaded to dedicated distribution hosts, everyone quietly sucks their lip and ignores the nagging, subscribes to remove the capping, or finds a different free service for their own future, semi-anonymous uploads.
Why don't we have a generic TCP/IP transfer protocol which caches things at every hop it passed through?
These avoidable/extra storage costs and multiple-transfer bandwidth are what helped ISP's decide to kill Usenet.
Plus the looming ISP realization that our now huge HD's and collective pipes increase their costs by orders of magnitude than their olde bunch of text / JPG files (fractioning their profits by the same amount.)
It's because it competes with them ... If BitTorrent had a good reputation then indie filmmakers would use it to distribute their films to customers, perhaps as encrypted files with DRM
I understand your idea isn't meant to be an absolute or finished thought. Just for kicks, though, DRM itself is meant to work upon a purchase for a single user, a one-time use key on a single machine or restricted hardware, or killing content playability based on an expiration dates.
The contradiction is that DRM is meant to narrow down while torrenting makes available, even if it's a single watermarked file to dozens of sharers... why would users want to grab something from a cloud after fully knowing that only one machine is meant to unlock the available file? The only way this can work is if you have anonymizing where everyone shares everyone else's bandwidth but nobody really knows what's being shared until they have their expected set of bytes. See the WoW patch distribution method.
Meant to be [pf]unny on the "hard" part. Thanks for checking :)
Slightly OT, if you're still into Toshiba laptops, give Ubuntu 10.10 a try. I reported some software and live-boot problems from USB before taking a closer look at this RC, but hardware wise, my 3 year old U305 model is running much like Windows.
I had skipped on 10.04 but updated kernels and the expected 9.04 backporting updates provided no improvement. Then, suddenly, 10.10 had my dual-monitor support, sleep, wobbly windows, blueetooth and the unfixable 0%-OR-100% volume-wheel-input working properly, all in a single major upgrade. I followed ubuntu from before even owning this laptop. YMMV since the RC came out only a couple days ago, and I will "rage" over whatever may have broken without my noticing... :)
I agree, but to be fair, you have only owned "inside" the OS X era and not "across into it from OS 9." OS 10 doesn't reinvent as many things from one 0.1 version to another, according to more attentive slashdotters than I as a former mac user.
Just like we can't upgrade a 2003 XP PC to Vista(*) it was maybe similarly expensive to upgrade a 1998 G3 mac (not imac) from its stock 32MB to the suggested 128 RAM IIRC, besides bringing the CPU up from a then-unusable 233 to a more practical 400Mhz range. Note the words "Similarly expensive," because the Mac was more scalable, while Windows PC upgrades to Vista-Aero were hit or miss due to the crappy stock GPU performance common on Wintels till Vista's release.
* practical computing power for it lagged a full year after Vista's launch. It's still sadly common to see stores selling NEW PC's scoring 2.x and 3.x out of 5, 6 or whatever on the official Windows benchmark.
"I'm guessing you missed out on the System 7 fiasco, when something like a third of all older Mac apps stopped working?"
Jeez, that's uncalled for. We might suppose Mac OS 10.0 brought him in, and 10.5 had him leave in disgust or something? But System 7... is extremely old. Nearly two decades, even. I cut my teeth on 7 back in 1996 and had no idea about that break till 14 years later.
Anyway, I do see your point on versions breaking stuff. I started with DOS / windows 3 / Windows 95, more or less.
Win95 broke some functionality in my autoexec scripts. Nothing big, but I missed having control of the PC boot process that Win3 previously allowed.
Win98 broke one of my JetFighter games. It also forced IE4 on us --MS's first major messup that allowed broken webpages/viruses to crash my whole OS shell. It stopped bundling with QBasic
Win2k broke my DOS compilers (Rhide), forced Guest Network access off and killed Reverb on my sound card. It also killed the very first $150 Logitech Quickcam Pro (drivers never came out for it). It also killed the venerable "reboot to DOS" option that was good for playing games in true DOS mode. I'm not sure if WinME did that first, though.
WinXP broke Final Fantasy 7 PC and my user escalation trick where my privileged DOS window could be escalated into an explorer.exe or control panel shell without wasting 10 minutes to log my users out, log myself in, log out and log the users back in.
Vista broke microphone-output-through-your-speakers and full-screen dos forever. The dll-replacement hack means I'll lose Aero now and who-knows-what later. It also lacks a bunch of VB dll files that old shareware requires to run --this probably happened during XP; redownloading and virus checking them is annoying.
Seven --haven't owned it yet.
MacOS 10 broke a legacy of pre-carbon and probably carbon applications, but at least provided an OS 9 emulator before that too was obsoleted half a decade ago. Not sure what's broken through the 0.1 version changes, because I no longer own a working Mac.
Why can't people ever be happy when enterprising amateurs do something cool?
We are! Whenever you see the hardhack tag, someone was very happy and envious for a fellow geek.
I appreciate your reply --it's a touchy subject.
Regarding VS, Enterprise is still Enterprise, not free. We are misled since VS Express did compile our DOS-only-GUI Computer Science homework, to believe that utilizing MS's C++ compiler freely means we get a *visual* Windows GUI designer should they we ever become Win32 programmers. Why do they even call it Visual if they withhold the visual component part in the free version? ;-) We miss out on MFC, ATL and anything related to dialogs for Win32 code. When we actually need forms (GUIs) for Win32 stuff in C++, MFC, Dot Net or ATL or WTL GUI's, VS Express fails. Coding them in by hand is hardcore, and Code::Blocks or DevC++ or even VS Express are nowhere near replacing that, the most elusive feature found only in the Pro versions.
For that, we need non-express cash (or illegal hacks.) The US link(*) lists 1200 dollars for Pro and $799 for upgrades. Well, I've seen Adobe software in the several thousands, so it's not too crazy. VS 2010 seems to be real cheap in Spain --only $500 euros.
I tested VS Express, still the only free-tier version on MS's website. To MS's credit there are demos for pro and enterprise that I may check out.
* Had trouble getting URLs for the USA due to browser/server region redirects. Thanks, Ubuntu 10.10 RC for Spanish/USA! ;)
Moral of the stories: Stay Reasonably Current. Yes, you. Yes, even if it still works fine. Keep your software current. Keep your hardware current. Abandon old technologies and embrace new ones. (floppy->flash, modem->dsl, etc) Or pay the price.
Having worked IT with college students and seeing a couple old companies' hardware, I agree with your post fully. Replying here so I can refer back to it when I need to strengthen my testimony.
I'm a no-upgrade kinda person with 5-to-10 year old computers. The last five years I noticed that eventually some great game or media gets stuck in an unreachable drive and it's emulators or ebay to recover the lost hardware / reader.
A few weeks ago I visited someone after 7 years to check her Windows 98 PC before it gets pushed to low-income relatives in a different country. It was late at night, and by chance I found copies of a few my old MIDI files (c. 1996) and special program had ended up there almost by chance. That was a copy of data long buried in some long-misplaced disk image file or possibly wiped from the 3 or 4 machines I have wiped through the years. The Problem: I could not get the files out since Win98 cannot read today's USB stick... and I had no blank floppies with me that day either.
I'll eventually find some way of getting the MIDI files, but my one chance was gone because standards shifted away from floppies so much that we never carry them in our toolbox anymore.
I have a number of friends and family that ask me to fix their computers on a regular basis. I've upgraded all of them to Windows 7 [...] not one of them has contracted a virus of any kind.
I sincerely hope you meant you've paid the $100 per computer per friend MS upgrade fee doing that. But you're a slashdotter, so I doubt 1/2 of your family victims would fork extra cash. It's hard to convince people that "fixing" is NOT the cheapest way to get back go their Windows desktop, and that instead of the customarily-free virus wipe, they need to lose or back up their files, pay for a boxed OS you'll purchase another day, and THEN learn to use the new OS and get all their data and long-forgotten application installers back in the right place.
Pirated W7 Ultimate is "free" for "us geeks and our friends" and a net profit for Microsoft. Microsoft wins since your friends' PC's already got counted in surveys like TFA (compare to Adobe gaining contracts from businesses loving its reported 90+% worldwide adoption rate, though we want Flash to stop growing.) We lose because next time, your friends will ask for Pirated Office 2007, and eventually our dinosaur Windows PCs and Linux PC's can't open files and we're being asked to install pirated copies so we can enjoy their piracy-hinged benefits. It's like a viscious circle or a virus.
If you did pay, then please don't feel I meant any harm. I am just annoyed by the bar being raised when those same guys that yell at me on the web to "just upgrade already" are profiting unfairly from a model where they can "get" and make products out of Adobe Suite, Visual Studio Enterprise, Vista Ultimate and VMWare when we all know the multi-thousand-dollar licenses are only affordable if your company forks over the cash, or you are very rich. People online just assume their choices will be repeated by similarly pirating professionals. Living in the US, it's a bit harder to avoid getting caught, especially with company audits, college/*IAA contracts and ISP cooperation.
I concur that web rendering has become the deal-breaker with dinosaur OS's, more than lack of updates, AV or firewalls.
The PIII I left at my dad's house came with W2K back in 2001. For kicks, I installed W98 a couple years later and loved its blazing speed; hated how bad the free antivirus support was back in 2003. It could render things fine.
Which brings me to the next point: I also have a 1998 G3 mac with IE4.5, Netscape 4 and iCab. The rendering there was attrocious by 2005, with hotmail and MSN being the biggest problems.
Prior to web 2.0, you could already pages fail to render. Going further back in OS time, I present my Windows 95 rev. B system (housed in the then precious emulation that VPC 2.4 provided.) IE 3 or 4 (not sure which) had tons of problems rendering everything. Lots of pages, including slashdot, rendered really, really tall, because the browsers could render frames, but didn't know anything about our now-worldwide left-hand / right-hand sitemaps / ad sections.
Heck, back in 2004 I played around with a Windows 95 OEM install for an old Thinkpad laptop running at 25Mhz. It came with IE2, and you can plainly see script tags completely in the open, and absolutely no sites rendering properly. It scares me to think that 10 or 15 years from now our trusty HTML3 and 4 will be gone completely, and that our "soon-to-be-in-the-museum" PC's won't be able to render squat because IE9 or 10 will be uninstallable there, for example. It is worse because the trend I see is for HTML to fail invisibly, and at least my IE2 PC could show a layman that there was something seriously asking for an expert to be brought over. Tomorrow, I see people just going "mister webmaster, before I put my subscription/cash elsewhere, you must fix your web 4.0+ site for my dinosaur browser."
I never suspected an RC would drop the same day I downloaded the beta. I barely got 9.04 when 10.04 was still gestating in the dev channels, being the cautious anti-upgrade type. 6 months isn't good for production, but does help me find a slightly more functional distro without having to wait a whole year.
I'm had to look at my Chrome history and concluded that themirror.mcs.anl.gov synched the contents too late. All the links say they had the files around 30-sept-2010 06:20am. My downloaded, already tested iso is no longer listed there, I see "rc-desktop-i386.iso" now, but my download was ubuntu-10.10-beta-desktop-i386.iso about 12 hours later than those timestamps claim. File transfers keep old timestamps when done right. I will have to redownload since my beta is 2 weeks old.
My experience was that the USB image from the ISO failed to boot my laptop. I had to press SHIFT before the ID string freezes and type help into the boot command. Picking some random option, I was able to boot. I was pleasantly surprised that my bluetooth did get detected properly and could even initiate a phone connection. However, file transfers failed both ways. I also confirmed that MP3 playback sucks (Shuttleworth has removed the prior option to helpfully download from universe.) Rhythmbox tries to select the correct codecs and fails. I also found that Firefox 3.6.9 is included, but fails to install all 3 flash options because of some package issue. Maybe my beta had all those broken.
I don't like that the DVD download isn't available for intel's 64 bit processors. As for the rest, I did notice that the outofbox app list is pretty damn skimpy compared to 2005. I have felt less and less interest in trying live releases. With Ubuntu, I'll give it another year before giving up altogether.