FYI, bringing up that Obama's middle name is Hussein at every opportunity makes you sound like a racist cunt and probably goes a long way towards making people not listen to you.
My favorite part about comments like this is that there's no way anybody could reasonably look at the body available evidence on the subject and come to this extreme of a position. I can go ahead and write the poster off as deficient and not even have to worry about having any sort of adult debate on the issue.
That is again simple to solve. Don't just take any battery that they give you to trade in. Only take the battery with the correct RFID/other authentication to show it was the one that was given out by the system.
Fine, the next time you are in a horrific car crash that causes you horrible burns and two leg amputations, remember that it is good because people die in car wrecks every day!
Er, what the hell kind of accounting is that? This isn't about Cook's salary, it is about the value of stocks he will potentially be given. The value gleaned by Jobs via stock was not $1 a year. He owns 5.426 million Apple stocks.
Er, I'm not blaming Windows (the analogue for Android in your example) for letting iTunes install Quicktime when it really shouldn't, so I'm not sure how your comparison works at all. I'm complaining about shady (but technically not malware) riders being packaged with legitimate software. These are things that frequently somebody might install on purpose, so I can't have a reasonable corporate policy blocking their installation, but on 95% or more of the computers I manage aren't doing anything for the user besides eating ram, lengthening startup times, and frequently taking up screen real estate.
And no, I specifically mean qttask.exe. Although I would personally prefer not having iTunes pop up whenever I plug my phone into a computer to charge, at least it isn't directly slimy to try to load an appropriate application when I plug in a device.
I am perfectly capable of avoiding the file extension change. The random technically-inept desktop users I support day to day at my job are not. They also have the option to opt out of installing every stupid bundled toolbar known to man when they try to install basic applications like Adobe Reader and Flash, but they don't do that, either. And where do I opt out of having Quicktime add itself to my startup list?
That'd be great. Then I wouldn't have to constantly reset file associations and remove yet another useless "quick launch" application from the startup list when one of the desktops I support gets iTunes installed on it.
Yes, because installing a media player than wants to take control of video file extensions to manage a cell phone that I don't even have any video files on is analogous to installing Java to run Java. Thank you for your brilliant insight.
That is, of course, assuming the following three things:
1.) The password is long.
2.) The password is not going to be defeated much more quickly by a dictionary attack
3.) Your managers don't all have the password written down on pieces of paper that are easily discovered by somebody in the office
If your execs let you have all three, you are very, very lucky. On top of that, it is generally much easier to do social engineering on a wireless key than anything else. How are you going to prevent the VP of Ass Slapping from giving out your wireless key to a "client" who just needs to get on your wireless right quick to email something to his boss? Are you going to get your hands on every device in the building every time somebody leaves the company on bad terms so you can change the passphrase, or are you expecting your dumbass C-level execs to be able to type in "80()Dj10qA)" on their touchscreen keyboard? Or do you think there is a chance in hell that you'll convince them to implement more complicated authentication than a passphrase?
And what's doubly awesome is when you do have somebody get into your system by learning the passphrase, they can come online with a spoofed MAC and client ID so it will be nearly impossible to even tell they are doing it!
iTunes comes with QuickTime... mostly because it requires QuickTime. PS: iTunes also comes with Bonjour for Windows... mostly because it uses Bonjour.
I think I heard that same argument before, only it was about Windows and Internet Explorer. I'm not sure how it could be anything but abusive to make me install Quicktime if I want to do a backup of an iPhone.
Citation needed? I would think that music would have bigger concerns (even though I think they are also made up) on the grounds that you don't need to still use a proprietary console to play an MP3. Because of unique architectures, you can't get a PS3 ROM and running it on a PC with any degree of success, so you still have to get a PS3 and risk blowing a multi-hundred dollar investment if Sony bricks your machine running custom firmware. And you also likely to preclude yourself from access to online play, which is becoming more and more central as time goes on.
On the other hand, the PS3 was never hacked until Other OS was taken away, so there's at least preliminary evidence to indicate that allowing people to install Linux prevents the homebrew community from jailbreaking the system, and the people most likely to break your security are people wanting to run Linux rather than a bunch of 13-year-olds who want to pirate Uncharted.
Given all that, the only benefit I can see for not allowing controlled homebrew is security theater for investors (much like most other DRM schemes out there).
Nothing could be simpler: phone companies don't have the abilty to handle micropayments. It's too expensive for them to meter each call and to bill them individually, hence the flat rate billing.
Congratulations, you are talking directly out of your asshole. Every phone company can itemize all of their calls if they so choose and already have the computer systems to do it.
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing about wireless precluding the need for network engineers. Do you have even the slightest clue what your network engineers do? I'll give you a hint: not cable runs. You can get some guy making less than $15 an hour to pull cables through walls and climb in attics. Why would you need somebody with any technical inclination at all to do that?
Your network engineers are there for ensuring cross-node connectivity and security. When I set up your routes, manage your IPSEC tunnels, and design your firewall rules, I don't give two shits about what you are using for physical connectivity. You could have some cups attached together with strings and it wouldn't change my network design.
In fact, wireless gives me more work to do. Wireless setup, while easy, takes more configuration than plugging a wire into a port. And if your building is of any size and thick construction, I'm going to require a lot more networking nodes to service the whole thing adequately than I need when I can run 300 feet in any direction with a cable. Which means if your douchebag veeps want to be able to walk around the building with their iThingies, I have to make sure the pieces of junk can connect to any wifi hotspot in the building, which is its own set of headaches.
And then there's security. Wireless is an external attack vendor. Yes, it's cute that you think that encrypting your radio signals makes it impossible to eavesdrop. It's even more awesome when somebody somewhere demands that I reduce encryption levels because some older device they have can't even handle WPA2/AES. But here's the thing: bad guys can now sit out in the parking lot and collect your encrypted traffic undetectably. If they use some directional antennas and some feed horns, they might even be able to get farther away. After that, they can sit back and try to brute force your wireless key using their GPUs from the comfort of their homes. After that, they could perform corporate espionage from the cafe next door and if they play their cards right, there is not a damn thing you can do to even tell they are doing it.
I have never set up wireless that was directly attached to somebody's corporate network. When I set up a wifi hotspot at somebody's business, it gives them access to the internet and the internet only. They can securely VPN after that if they want to get to company data.
Does this all still sound like you can just plug in some Linksys routers you got from Fry's and fire your networking guy?
Let's assume for a minute that the grant process is completely fair and the applications are actually worse. Is that automatically a racist assumption? What if there were another cause besides just black people being dumb or affirmative action? Maybe the best and the brightest among white students gravitate towards research, but black students tend to value directly helping their communities and instead spread their smartest more into clinical roles? What if the process is discriminatory specifically to poor people due to their lower quality primary education and therefore worse English compositional skills and black students just happen to get lower grant rates as a function of their early education? Yes, I realize that the articles claim that the studies were controlled for education and demographics, but I didn't see anything that indicated that they were controlling for anything but post-high school education and definitely nothing indicating they were controlling for household income during their formative years.
I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't be so scared of the racism card that we automatically assume there is a racial bias just because there is a measurable anomaly when we decide to measure along racial lines. People can excel or not in a particular domain for reasons other than racial discrimination or genetic inferiority.
But that's a new market, unless I am mistaken and nurses currently carry around laptops. My whole point isn't that people can't come up with novel uses for the computing form factor, it is that for many activities, switching from a mouse and keyboard to a touchscreen is not a viable option.
It's a matter of input devices. A keyboard probably averages triple the input speed of a touchscreen for most users, and you can't very well do anything with finger that requires nearly pixel precision, so a whole lot of image editing is right now. Sure, you can add a mouse and keyboard as peripherals to a tablet, but at that point are you really seeing us move to tablets or just to laptops with detachable input devices?
The only way I can see tablets closer to the current format taking over for anybody wanting to do real work is if we get new input devices that aren't just touchscreens.
For 399 dollars, or in other words a pittance in financial terms, iPads can do ANYTHING the enterprise devs can dream up.
If by "ANYTHING" you mean checking email and editing documents all at a much slower pace than one could on a real computer, then sure. Unfortunately, I have to do real work at my job instead of wasting time playing with an iThingy and cashing in a paycheck on the backs of a bunch of poor hapless engineers, so that doesn't really work out for me.
Even if all of clauses of what you just said were true (though I contend that they are not true of the studios brought in by Valve), Oracle still would not have created Java.
Portal doesn't count because they were Valve before they ever started making Portal. I also invite you to pay special attention to Turtle Rock if you think that being brought in by Valve always works out for the best. They got closed after L4D and given the option to move hundreds of miles to work under Valve's creative direction on a quick cash-in sequel to their own game. That sounds just fabulous.
But that's still not really the point. The point is that they did not create either of the two above mentioned games. Sure, say whatever you want about whether it was savvy on their part to recognize the worth of other people's independent work and whether the buyouts worked out the best for the original devs, but Valve didn't create the franchises.
I will admit that some portion of my lashing out at Valve is not deserved. They certainly are no EA or Activision, and I don't post about those companies anywhere on a regular basis. But everybody recognizes that those companies are insidious and evil. I get tired of hearing a bunch of slobbering fanboys talk about Valve as if it is God's gift to video games. They have only ever put out a handful of products on that both started as Valve projects and weren't sure money sequels. They are guilty of a fair bit of behavior that has not been great for consumers. Just being better than EA and Activision shouldn't be good enough, and this level of devotion is just going to get us as consumers screwed in the end.
My complaint is not that buying out and hiring these dev studios and modders is an overall bad thing. My point is that saying Valve created Team Fortress is like saying Oracle created Java.
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FYI, bringing up that Obama's middle name is Hussein at every opportunity makes you sound like a racist cunt and probably goes a long way towards making people not listen to you.
How about a EO Personal Communicator?
My favorite part about comments like this is that there's no way anybody could reasonably look at the body available evidence on the subject and come to this extreme of a position. I can go ahead and write the poster off as deficient and not even have to worry about having any sort of adult debate on the issue.
Hmm, I'd mod interesting if I could. Using our atmospheric makeup as an energy storage medium is a very interesting concept.
That is again simple to solve. Don't just take any battery that they give you to trade in. Only take the battery with the correct RFID/other authentication to show it was the one that was given out by the system.
Fine, the next time you are in a horrific car crash that causes you horrible burns and two leg amputations, remember that it is good because people die in car wrecks every day!
Er, what the hell kind of accounting is that? This isn't about Cook's salary, it is about the value of stocks he will potentially be given. The value gleaned by Jobs via stock was not $1 a year. He owns 5.426 million Apple stocks.
Oh cool, iPads never break or need service. Good to know.
United estimates a savings of 326,000 gallons of fuel a year due to the lighter load.
And how many gallons of fuel a year are used making all of those 11,000 iPads and shipping them from China?
Er, I'm not blaming Windows (the analogue for Android in your example) for letting iTunes install Quicktime when it really shouldn't, so I'm not sure how your comparison works at all. I'm complaining about shady (but technically not malware) riders being packaged with legitimate software. These are things that frequently somebody might install on purpose, so I can't have a reasonable corporate policy blocking their installation, but on 95% or more of the computers I manage aren't doing anything for the user besides eating ram, lengthening startup times, and frequently taking up screen real estate.
And no, I specifically mean qttask.exe. Although I would personally prefer not having iTunes pop up whenever I plug my phone into a computer to charge, at least it isn't directly slimy to try to load an appropriate application when I plug in a device.
I am perfectly capable of avoiding the file extension change. The random technically-inept desktop users I support day to day at my job are not. They also have the option to opt out of installing every stupid bundled toolbar known to man when they try to install basic applications like Adobe Reader and Flash, but they don't do that, either. And where do I opt out of having Quicktime add itself to my startup list?
That'd be great. Then I wouldn't have to constantly reset file associations and remove yet another useless "quick launch" application from the startup list when one of the desktops I support gets iTunes installed on it.
Yes, because installing a media player than wants to take control of video file extensions to manage a cell phone that I don't even have any video files on is analogous to installing Java to run Java. Thank you for your brilliant insight.
That is, of course, assuming the following three things:
1.) The password is long.
2.) The password is not going to be defeated much more quickly by a dictionary attack
3.) Your managers don't all have the password written down on pieces of paper that are easily discovered by somebody in the office
If your execs let you have all three, you are very, very lucky. On top of that, it is generally much easier to do social engineering on a wireless key than anything else. How are you going to prevent the VP of Ass Slapping from giving out your wireless key to a "client" who just needs to get on your wireless right quick to email something to his boss? Are you going to get your hands on every device in the building every time somebody leaves the company on bad terms so you can change the passphrase, or are you expecting your dumbass C-level execs to be able to type in "80()Dj10qA)" on their touchscreen keyboard? Or do you think there is a chance in hell that you'll convince them to implement more complicated authentication than a passphrase?
And what's doubly awesome is when you do have somebody get into your system by learning the passphrase, they can come online with a spoofed MAC and client ID so it will be nearly impossible to even tell they are doing it!
iTunes comes with QuickTime... mostly because it requires QuickTime. PS: iTunes also comes with Bonjour for Windows... mostly because it uses Bonjour.
I think I heard that same argument before, only it was about Windows and Internet Explorer. I'm not sure how it could be anything but abusive to make me install Quicktime if I want to do a backup of an iPhone.
Citation needed? I would think that music would have bigger concerns (even though I think they are also made up) on the grounds that you don't need to still use a proprietary console to play an MP3. Because of unique architectures, you can't get a PS3 ROM and running it on a PC with any degree of success, so you still have to get a PS3 and risk blowing a multi-hundred dollar investment if Sony bricks your machine running custom firmware. And you also likely to preclude yourself from access to online play, which is becoming more and more central as time goes on.
On the other hand, the PS3 was never hacked until Other OS was taken away, so there's at least preliminary evidence to indicate that allowing people to install Linux prevents the homebrew community from jailbreaking the system, and the people most likely to break your security are people wanting to run Linux rather than a bunch of 13-year-olds who want to pirate Uncharted.
Given all that, the only benefit I can see for not allowing controlled homebrew is security theater for investors (much like most other DRM schemes out there).
Nothing could be simpler: phone companies don't have the abilty to handle micropayments. It's too expensive for them to meter each call and to bill them individually, hence the flat rate billing.
Congratulations, you are talking directly out of your asshole. Every phone company can itemize all of their calls if they so choose and already have the computer systems to do it.
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing about wireless precluding the need for network engineers. Do you have even the slightest clue what your network engineers do? I'll give you a hint: not cable runs. You can get some guy making less than $15 an hour to pull cables through walls and climb in attics. Why would you need somebody with any technical inclination at all to do that?
Your network engineers are there for ensuring cross-node connectivity and security. When I set up your routes, manage your IPSEC tunnels, and design your firewall rules, I don't give two shits about what you are using for physical connectivity. You could have some cups attached together with strings and it wouldn't change my network design.
In fact, wireless gives me more work to do. Wireless setup, while easy, takes more configuration than plugging a wire into a port. And if your building is of any size and thick construction, I'm going to require a lot more networking nodes to service the whole thing adequately than I need when I can run 300 feet in any direction with a cable. Which means if your douchebag veeps want to be able to walk around the building with their iThingies, I have to make sure the pieces of junk can connect to any wifi hotspot in the building, which is its own set of headaches.
And then there's security. Wireless is an external attack vendor. Yes, it's cute that you think that encrypting your radio signals makes it impossible to eavesdrop. It's even more awesome when somebody somewhere demands that I reduce encryption levels because some older device they have can't even handle WPA2/AES. But here's the thing: bad guys can now sit out in the parking lot and collect your encrypted traffic undetectably. If they use some directional antennas and some feed horns, they might even be able to get farther away. After that, they can sit back and try to brute force your wireless key using their GPUs from the comfort of their homes. After that, they could perform corporate espionage from the cafe next door and if they play their cards right, there is not a damn thing you can do to even tell they are doing it.
I have never set up wireless that was directly attached to somebody's corporate network. When I set up a wifi hotspot at somebody's business, it gives them access to the internet and the internet only. They can securely VPN after that if they want to get to company data.
Does this all still sound like you can just plug in some Linksys routers you got from Fry's and fire your networking guy?
Let's assume for a minute that the grant process is completely fair and the applications are actually worse. Is that automatically a racist assumption? What if there were another cause besides just black people being dumb or affirmative action? Maybe the best and the brightest among white students gravitate towards research, but black students tend to value directly helping their communities and instead spread their smartest more into clinical roles? What if the process is discriminatory specifically to poor people due to their lower quality primary education and therefore worse English compositional skills and black students just happen to get lower grant rates as a function of their early education? Yes, I realize that the articles claim that the studies were controlled for education and demographics, but I didn't see anything that indicated that they were controlling for anything but post-high school education and definitely nothing indicating they were controlling for household income during their formative years.
I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't be so scared of the racism card that we automatically assume there is a racial bias just because there is a measurable anomaly when we decide to measure along racial lines. People can excel or not in a particular domain for reasons other than racial discrimination or genetic inferiority.
But that's a new market, unless I am mistaken and nurses currently carry around laptops. My whole point isn't that people can't come up with novel uses for the computing form factor, it is that for many activities, switching from a mouse and keyboard to a touchscreen is not a viable option.
It's a matter of input devices. A keyboard probably averages triple the input speed of a touchscreen for most users, and you can't very well do anything with finger that requires nearly pixel precision, so a whole lot of image editing is right now. Sure, you can add a mouse and keyboard as peripherals to a tablet, but at that point are you really seeing us move to tablets or just to laptops with detachable input devices?
The only way I can see tablets closer to the current format taking over for anybody wanting to do real work is if we get new input devices that aren't just touchscreens.
For 399 dollars, or in other words a pittance in financial terms, iPads can do ANYTHING the enterprise devs can dream up.
If by "ANYTHING" you mean checking email and editing documents all at a much slower pace than one could on a real computer, then sure. Unfortunately, I have to do real work at my job instead of wasting time playing with an iThingy and cashing in a paycheck on the backs of a bunch of poor hapless engineers, so that doesn't really work out for me.
Even if all of clauses of what you just said were true (though I contend that they are not true of the studios brought in by Valve), Oracle still would not have created Java.
Portal doesn't count because they were Valve before they ever started making Portal. I also invite you to pay special attention to Turtle Rock if you think that being brought in by Valve always works out for the best. They got closed after L4D and given the option to move hundreds of miles to work under Valve's creative direction on a quick cash-in sequel to their own game. That sounds just fabulous.
But that's still not really the point. The point is that they did not create either of the two above mentioned games. Sure, say whatever you want about whether it was savvy on their part to recognize the worth of other people's independent work and whether the buyouts worked out the best for the original devs, but Valve didn't create the franchises.
I will admit that some portion of my lashing out at Valve is not deserved. They certainly are no EA or Activision, and I don't post about those companies anywhere on a regular basis. But everybody recognizes that those companies are insidious and evil. I get tired of hearing a bunch of slobbering fanboys talk about Valve as if it is God's gift to video games. They have only ever put out a handful of products on that both started as Valve projects and weren't sure money sequels. They are guilty of a fair bit of behavior that has not been great for consumers. Just being better than EA and Activision shouldn't be good enough, and this level of devotion is just going to get us as consumers screwed in the end.
My complaint is not that buying out and hiring these dev studios and modders is an overall bad thing. My point is that saying Valve created Team Fortress is like saying Oracle created Java.