There is indeed value in having a controlled platform, but there is also value in having choice. I'm of the opinion that the Apple-provided software is fine as it is, DRM and all. I don't care, as long as it doesn't prevent an advanced user from replacing the entire OS with something of their choosing. If I want Linux, I'll wipe out the iPad OS entirely... or dual-boot, that would be nice.
As long as Apple respects the boundaries between hardware and software, I have no problem with it. It's when they make the two parts indivisible that choice is eliminated, and that's when people start flinging the Fisher Price moniker.
HTML5 doesn't actually specify a native, portable video format. It only specifies the TAG that will reference the video file. Implementation details are left as an exercise for the content providers and browser developers. In layman's terms, whatever Google decides is best will become the de facto standard. Whether that's H.264, Theora, or something else, it's not for the W3C to decide.
In light of this non-commited stance, Flash video is at least slightly better than HTML5 Video tags, since the codecs are bundled with the Flash player, so anywhere you can run Flash, you can play Flash video. With HTML5, you could (and will) end up with a scenario where the browser supports HTML5, but lacks the required codec to play a certain video, and then we're right back where we started fifteen years ago with platform-specific media support. E.g. Sorenson codecs on Mac, WMV on Windows, and MP4 / H.264 locked away in patent hell.
The problem is that the real geeks typically use a CLI for most tasks. Sure, I'm typing this into Firefox right now, but the prime reason my office PC runs Linux and KDE is to give me quick and easy access to any number of terminal screens running Bash. Even though I'm running in graphical mode, I'm still filling these displays with mostly text. Real programmers don't write software by drawing lines between glyphed boxes. Even visual development tools only provide a shortcut for putting the interface together, the actual functionality is still done by typing into a code box, and I don't see that changing, ever.
That's a different battle. Slick vs simple is a cosmetic upgrade, and it does require a bit more effort. What free software typically lacks is a good simple interface. Slickness is just a veneer on top of solid spatial organization, but if even the base UI is an infuriating mess of dysfunctional chrome, a million artists couldn't make it work.
The GP mentioned the Office Ribbon. That's a fantastic example of a slick interface. People complained, because it's different; not all that different from many other visually-oriented apps from Adobe, Corel et al., but different from the previous release of Office. What they did is they took hundreds of commands, removed one click from them (the initial pull-down click), and made them far easier to identify at a glance. You can take a person who's never used Office before, sit them in front of Word or Excel, they will figure stuff out on their own in a matter of minutes, and more importantly they won't be scared of the UI, because everything on the screen is saying "Go ahead, click me!". That, by definition, is what a great interface should be, not the stone-wall of intimidation that most apps put forth.
To say the old Office interface wasn't broke, that's an incredibly short-sighted view. It wasn't broke back then, because we didn't have any idea what "better" could possibly look like. Now we know, and in hindsight, the old way was pretty terrible. The same thing happened when everyone migrated from the DOS-based WordPerfect 5.1 to the GUI-based 6 or 7 (6.0 was a terrible bug-fest, much like Vista many waited for 7). People whined that their decade-old and memorized Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F11-A-5 command sequences didn't work in Windows. Yeah ok, you need to retrain, and that does suck, but the average human doesn't want to memorize a gazillion non-representative keyboard commands just to type a few words out into a file. Back when ever computer user was either technically competent or laboriously trained, cryptic interfaces were OK, but it is folly to assume the old UI is compatible with the modern user, because today's user is nothing like the old ones.
You hit the nail right on the head. How many times have I looked at an App's description, then turned away because I was "on the fence" ? What I would love is a 48 hour refund window. Buy the app, try it out, and if it is absolute shite (like most are), get your $2.99 back. You might be saying "three bucks is nothing", and you're right, but I am quite vehemently opposed to giving those three bucks to some asshat who can deliver a great writeup for a shitty app. The store ratings are also useless, because it's a well known fact that 99% of users are clueless idiots, so unless I am a also a clueless idiot, those ratings won't apply to me.
Prime example: RDP and VNC clients. There's about a dozen or so out there, and I've tried them all. All but one of them suck ass, whether it's sluggish performance, lack of configurability, or in one case I was expected to register all my usernames and passwords to a 3rd party so the app could sign in to their web service, just to give me back my logins. They also don't come cheap, $9.99 up to $24.99 for some of these stinkers. Am I really expected to spend $100 trying all these things, just to settle on the one that is indeed everything I want it to be ? Is it fair to the one good app, that all the others got paid anyway ? I think not. That one great developer deserves compensation and praise, the other 10 deserve a kick in the nuts and a chargeback fee.
My big issue with this is that I don't understand WHY Lenovo would spend the effort, no matter how small, to research and redesign a keyboard just to remove one key. It doesn't seem like a significant cost-cutting measure, nor do I see any usability improvement, and they've already drawn the negative attention of a few million geeks. Most laptops are already a usability nightmare from the get-go, so why focus on this meaningless change ?
If anything, I'd want to see them ADD keys. Give me back the numpad, add macro keys or modifiers a-la Logitech G-series, ditch the clitmouse and add a trackball or something... Think about how a real road warrior would use the laptop and make it work FOR THOSE PEOPLE. The average home user doesn't care, and is far more likely to treat the laptop as a crap desktop, using an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Let me get this straight: People with low-end hardware can pay a fee to run the games on OnLive's hardware, and stream the video over the internet ? How is that better than spending money ONCE on a mid-range GPU and running the game yourself ? What about bandwidth surcharges ? High-def video doesn't come light, most people will blow their monthly caps in no time.
A modest gaming-ready card is $100 or so. Even if OnLive charged only $9.99 / mo, in less than a year the GPU is a cheaper option. The other thing is when you cancel your OnLive subscription, you can't play anymore. That GPU is yours forever until it dies in a fire. If and when you feel the urge to upgrade, you can sell the old GPU for 20-30% of the cost of a new one.
Am I missing something, or is this whole business idea an exercise in futility ? I get that most people are dumb as dirt, but come on...
I don't need $1200 worth of GPUs, but those curve-mapped polygons sure are shiny! It's also highly dependent on your display resolution. On a 19" to 22" display, the $100 cards do a decent enough job and you might not benefit from the higher quality settings anyway, but on a 27" LCD or HDTV, the extra perks a high-end GPU brings can make a pretty game absolutely dazzling. One great example is the recently released "Dirt 2" racing game. It runs surprisingly well on low-end hardware, but is absolutely jaw-dropping on an SLI rig with a large display. The high cost of such hardware means that eye-candy is mostly for show, right now, but as always, this year's eye-candy is next year's baseline.
they only take that position when they are the bigger dog or when it's not their puppy being eaten.
That is why I hate banks. I, for one, do not partake in the massive ponzi scheme that is the lending industry. I once did, got burned badly, and now I live on cash. I have a chequing account, but no loans nor revolving credit cards. My life is so much better, I know exactly what I can afford, and I'm not siphoning 10-15% of my already-tight income to a small family of profiteering gluttons.
The fact that a $0.01 overdraft can cost a person between $30 and $75 in overlimit fees, to me that's patently ridiculous. If that's not usury, then I don't know what is. Banks invented the game, and they keeping making up new rules or changing existing ones, whatever makes them richer. In my dictionary, that's called cheating. What's worse is that it is becoming ever more difficult to avoid playing the banking game, now that almost all payroll is handled via direct deposit. Now I'm of the firm opinion that if a beneficial service is required by the great majority of citizens, it should be socialized and the profit factor eliminated from the equation. Remove profit from banking and we end up with lower fees, saner interest rates and less irresponsible lending.
Now those of you who are thinking about bashing me over the socialist angle, consider this: a great many of us support free software as a cost-effective and democratic alternative to paid apps. How are socialized government services any different ?
There's more than one angle to it, here's a few I can personally relate to:
1. Some of this for-profit software seems outrageously overpriced for its functionality, a position of greed that can only be protected by eliminating all affordable alternatives. This results in hostile takeovers of free-software projects, or abusive litigation to destroy the projects, which rarely have any funding to support a court battle.
2. High quality free software stimulates innovation, in both the free and for-profit realms, and the pursuit of knowledge is generally considered a good thing.
3. Free software has been the backbone of the internet for a very long time, and has enabled widespread adoption of technology and education in areas that could not afford commercial software.
4. We don't want to be fighting the for-profit sector, which has its rightful place in the industry. They are the ones picking fights IN LIEU OF releasing superior products, and we have to defend what we think is right.
You lump bomb threats in with spam and DoS, yet I can't recall any incident in the history of computing where spam or DoS directly caused a person's death.
The core of the matter is there are rampant abuses of civil liberties, and the CoS is a highly visible icon of such abuse. If the CoS is allowed to continue, then we open the door for any and all wacked-out works of fiction to be labeled as "religion", and to benefit from the irrational exclusions and bypasses applied thereto.
Really, what's preventing me from founding the "Church of Spam" and claiming that UCE is protected religion speech ? We could all worship the holy Tomlinson, and each level of (paid) membership would open up access to secret RFCs until one attains "High Daemon" rank, where the subtle intricacies of SMTP are finally revealed.
Seriously man, FUCK Scientology. They deserve everything that's coming to them.
If the DoS here stands for "Denial of Scientology", I'd say it's fair game.
Look at it this way: most Americans of middle-eastern descent or Muslim faith have been steadily harassed and mistreated over at least the past 8 years, even though less than 1 per 100 MILLION have been identified as known criminals, and the supposed Muslim-originated attack on the WTC resulted in 2976 counted deaths. That's two victims for every million Muslims.
Scientologists' numbers are unknown, but are estimated to be less than 100,000. And yet, they are known to be responsible for at least two of their own members' deaths, an order of magnitude greater than the so-called "Muslim terrorists". So why the hell are we fighting in the middle east, when Scientology has shown to be 10 times deadlier per-capita ?
A meta-terrorist who wants to bring attention to the ridiculousness of the global terror-scare ?
Hell, I'd blow up a Reese's cup with 9000 pounds of C4, if it could potentially knock some sense back into the average bomb-fearing citizen (clue: it won't; people are terminally stupid).
I think the question should be: What was Rupert Murdoch doing in the Nixon era, and would it have been considered harmful to society at large ?
The cat has been let out of the bag: Fox is universally known as a heavily biased and manipulative expression of Mr Murdoch's personal interests. I don't even live in the same country and I barely watch TV, yet I can immediately recognize a Fox broadcast or even just a screenshot. It always follows the same format: a fat half-English skeevy-looking talking suit, large bolded sensationalist headline, scrolling ticker about something scandalous, and either a picture of an a mushroom cloud or another half-English sock puppet reciting his prepared statements. If that's what they call news, I wonder how they'd react to the old Power Rangers kids shows.
It's good that someone is trying to analyze and criticize the Obama administration, but coming from Fox it bears very little credibility. The same content, on a different network, would almost automatically be taken more seriously. The simple fact that one of their leading hosts' catchphrase is "shut up", well that's just a crowning embarrassment.
The problem with any modern connector is licensing. Every time you buy a cable, or a device with {XYZ connector}, some smug bastard gets paid for "inventing" that connector. It's rarely about "what is technically superior", usually it's "what's the cheapest standard we can shove down people's throats".
Licensing is why today's computers have umpteen slow inefficient USB ports, and zero or one Firewire ports. Apple fucked that one up by charging $20 or so per Firewire device for the longest time, they only lowered the licensing fee long after the war was lost.
The thing about VESA though, none of the major manufacturers really give a crap what VESA thinks. VESA dreams up these "standards", charges a lot of money for the specs, which results in them being largely ignored. The freebies they offer are mostly crap, either obsolete or just plain old stupid. They're like the IEEE's retarded step-cousin, on crack.
Some of us believe the internet should be free to use for anyone and everyone. There's a big difference between a personal vehicle (which itself is horribly inefficient and vain, but that's for another post), and access to a global information network where the only cost is related to the "onramp".
If someone drives off with your car, you no longer have use of your car. If someone checks their email over a small slice of your bandwidth, you're not being deprived of anything. All you really need to do is keep your internal network secure, and maybe put in some sane speed limits to deter abuse.
Wouldn't it be nice if all WiFi routers came with these features built-in and easy to configure ? I'd be fine with allowing web and mail traffic, but not idiotic Limewire and the virulent teens who use it. If it means I can whip out my laptop anywhere in the city and feed trolls on slashdot, or knock off a few work items while I wait for the damned bus to show up, then I'm all for moderate, conscientious sharing. It won't kill you, it won't help the terrorists win (hint: they won a long time ago), it won't replace your corn flakes with paint chips, so why are you complaining so much ?
I get that this is considered pinko/commie thinking, so all I can do is politely flip the bird and pray your so-called economy continues its freefall toward obsoletion.
"90% of the time I've seen a wigger with a 12-inch exhaust, he's cut me off, cut across the 3-lane highway, and rammed his gas-powered mobile subwoofer into the exit lane at 140kph."
"90% of the time I've seen a white guy in a luxury SUV, he's cut me off, cut across the 3-lane highway, and rammed his gas-powered mobile ego into the exit lane at 140kph."
"90% of the time I've seen an asian woman in an Acura, she's stopped in the middle of a busy intersection at the green, waiting for it to turn red and everyone to honk before turning left anyway"
"90% of the time I've seen a dirty cop shooting radar, everyone jammed the brakes, slowed to half the speed limit, and stared at the fucker while rear-ending the car in front of them."
100% of the time I've recognized these common stereotypes, I've taken preventive measures to steer clear of them, and saved myself much injury, expense and frustration. Assume everyone is criminally stupid and you will never be disappointed.
I hate that, when pressed, he said it was a funny and odd coincidence. He should have stood up and said "Yes, I wrote 'Fuck You' on purpose. Fuck You, Ammiano! Fuck You and your stupid bill!"
And then I would have instantly moved to California... fuck yeah!
We're talking about email, not Exchange. Big difference! Our postfix boxes at the office have been up for (checks) 250 days, which is when we deployed them in the first place. Our exchange server has a hissy fit every couple of months, out of the blue, necessitating a reboot. Nevermind the fact that the postfix machines go through half a million emails daily, while the Exchange box might see a hundred.
With a local mail server, you have two things to worry about: the network, and power. If you have those two, you're up. Ok, three if you count the idiot A+ tech who keeps patching boxes that don't need fixing.
With GMail, or any other cloud service, you now have to worry about all of the above, plus your internet modem/AP, the backhaul, the ISP's network (fancy Cisco switches that love to melt at great expense), their backbone peers, the peer's network, the backhaul to Google (and all hops along the way), and finally Google's network and power. All that for interoffice messaging, man that's a lot that can (and regularly does) go wrong.
So many failure points for a critical business service, well maybe I'm old-fashioned but I wouldn't trust it so much, when the locally-hosted alternative is so easily and cheaply available. Also, good luck getting a Google employee to help you when the service goes down. At least when the sysadmin is in-house, he/she will be at least somewhat motivated to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, because their only client is you, the employer.
Only if the printer is in a public place. Chances are, if you're in an apartment building, that printer is in the victim's apartment, where only they can see it.
Or do you have a disturbing habit of parking your printer outside overnight ?
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There is indeed value in having a controlled platform, but there is also value in having choice. I'm of the opinion that the Apple-provided software is fine as it is, DRM and all. I don't care, as long as it doesn't prevent an advanced user from replacing the entire OS with something of their choosing. If I want Linux, I'll wipe out the iPad OS entirely... or dual-boot, that would be nice.
As long as Apple respects the boundaries between hardware and software, I have no problem with it. It's when they make the two parts indivisible that choice is eliminated, and that's when people start flinging the Fisher Price moniker.
HTML5 doesn't actually specify a native, portable video format. It only specifies the TAG that will reference the video file. Implementation details are left as an exercise for the content providers and browser developers. In layman's terms, whatever Google decides is best will become the de facto standard. Whether that's H.264, Theora, or something else, it's not for the W3C to decide.
In light of this non-commited stance, Flash video is at least slightly better than HTML5 Video tags, since the codecs are bundled with the Flash player, so anywhere you can run Flash, you can play Flash video. With HTML5, you could (and will) end up with a scenario where the browser supports HTML5, but lacks the required codec to play a certain video, and then we're right back where we started fifteen years ago with platform-specific media support. E.g. Sorenson codecs on Mac, WMV on Windows, and MP4 / H.264 locked away in patent hell.
The problem is that the real geeks typically use a CLI for most tasks. Sure, I'm typing this into Firefox right now, but the prime reason my office PC runs Linux and KDE is to give me quick and easy access to any number of terminal screens running Bash. Even though I'm running in graphical mode, I'm still filling these displays with mostly text. Real programmers don't write software by drawing lines between glyphed boxes. Even visual development tools only provide a shortcut for putting the interface together, the actual functionality is still done by typing into a code box, and I don't see that changing, ever.
That's a different battle. Slick vs simple is a cosmetic upgrade, and it does require a bit more effort. What free software typically lacks is a good simple interface. Slickness is just a veneer on top of solid spatial organization, but if even the base UI is an infuriating mess of dysfunctional chrome, a million artists couldn't make it work.
The GP mentioned the Office Ribbon. That's a fantastic example of a slick interface. People complained, because it's different; not all that different from many other visually-oriented apps from Adobe, Corel et al., but different from the previous release of Office. What they did is they took hundreds of commands, removed one click from them (the initial pull-down click), and made them far easier to identify at a glance. You can take a person who's never used Office before, sit them in front of Word or Excel, they will figure stuff out on their own in a matter of minutes, and more importantly they won't be scared of the UI, because everything on the screen is saying "Go ahead, click me!". That, by definition, is what a great interface should be, not the stone-wall of intimidation that most apps put forth.
To say the old Office interface wasn't broke, that's an incredibly short-sighted view. It wasn't broke back then, because we didn't have any idea what "better" could possibly look like. Now we know, and in hindsight, the old way was pretty terrible. The same thing happened when everyone migrated from the DOS-based WordPerfect 5.1 to the GUI-based 6 or 7 (6.0 was a terrible bug-fest, much like Vista many waited for 7). People whined that their decade-old and memorized Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F11-A-5 command sequences didn't work in Windows. Yeah ok, you need to retrain, and that does suck, but the average human doesn't want to memorize a gazillion non-representative keyboard commands just to type a few words out into a file. Back when ever computer user was either technically competent or laboriously trained, cryptic interfaces were OK, but it is folly to assume the old UI is compatible with the modern user, because today's user is nothing like the old ones.
You hit the nail right on the head. How many times have I looked at an App's description, then turned away because I was "on the fence" ? What I would love is a 48 hour refund window. Buy the app, try it out, and if it is absolute shite (like most are), get your $2.99 back. You might be saying "three bucks is nothing", and you're right, but I am quite vehemently opposed to giving those three bucks to some asshat who can deliver a great writeup for a shitty app. The store ratings are also useless, because it's a well known fact that 99% of users are clueless idiots, so unless I am a also a clueless idiot, those ratings won't apply to me.
Prime example: RDP and VNC clients. There's about a dozen or so out there, and I've tried them all. All but one of them suck ass, whether it's sluggish performance, lack of configurability, or in one case I was expected to register all my usernames and passwords to a 3rd party so the app could sign in to their web service, just to give me back my logins. They also don't come cheap, $9.99 up to $24.99 for some of these stinkers. Am I really expected to spend $100 trying all these things, just to settle on the one that is indeed everything I want it to be ? Is it fair to the one good app, that all the others got paid anyway ? I think not. That one great developer deserves compensation and praise, the other 10 deserve a kick in the nuts and a chargeback fee.
My big issue with this is that I don't understand WHY Lenovo would spend the effort, no matter how small, to research and redesign a keyboard just to remove one key. It doesn't seem like a significant cost-cutting measure, nor do I see any usability improvement, and they've already drawn the negative attention of a few million geeks. Most laptops are already a usability nightmare from the get-go, so why focus on this meaningless change ?
If anything, I'd want to see them ADD keys. Give me back the numpad, add macro keys or modifiers a-la Logitech G-series, ditch the clitmouse and add a trackball or something... Think about how a real road warrior would use the laptop and make it work FOR THOSE PEOPLE. The average home user doesn't care, and is far more likely to treat the laptop as a crap desktop, using an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
About as easy as typing "YOU ALL SUCK DICK" by accident, when you really meant to say "hi."
The keys are like, right next to each other
Let me get this straight: People with low-end hardware can pay a fee to run the games on OnLive's hardware, and stream the video over the internet ? How is that better than spending money ONCE on a mid-range GPU and running the game yourself ? What about bandwidth surcharges ? High-def video doesn't come light, most people will blow their monthly caps in no time.
A modest gaming-ready card is $100 or so. Even if OnLive charged only $9.99 / mo, in less than a year the GPU is a cheaper option. The other thing is when you cancel your OnLive subscription, you can't play anymore. That GPU is yours forever until it dies in a fire. If and when you feel the urge to upgrade, you can sell the old GPU for 20-30% of the cost of a new one.
Am I missing something, or is this whole business idea an exercise in futility ? I get that most people are dumb as dirt, but come on...
I don't need $1200 worth of GPUs, but those curve-mapped polygons sure are shiny! It's also highly dependent on your display resolution. On a 19" to 22" display, the $100 cards do a decent enough job and you might not benefit from the higher quality settings anyway, but on a 27" LCD or HDTV, the extra perks a high-end GPU brings can make a pretty game absolutely dazzling. One great example is the recently released "Dirt 2" racing game. It runs surprisingly well on low-end hardware, but is absolutely jaw-dropping on an SLI rig with a large display. The high cost of such hardware means that eye-candy is mostly for show, right now, but as always, this year's eye-candy is next year's baseline.
they only take that position when they are the bigger dog or when it's not their puppy being eaten.
That is why I hate banks. I, for one, do not partake in the massive ponzi scheme that is the lending industry. I once did, got burned badly, and now I live on cash. I have a chequing account, but no loans nor revolving credit cards. My life is so much better, I know exactly what I can afford, and I'm not siphoning 10-15% of my already-tight income to a small family of profiteering gluttons.
The fact that a $0.01 overdraft can cost a person between $30 and $75 in overlimit fees, to me that's patently ridiculous. If that's not usury, then I don't know what is. Banks invented the game, and they keeping making up new rules or changing existing ones, whatever makes them richer. In my dictionary, that's called cheating. What's worse is that it is becoming ever more difficult to avoid playing the banking game, now that almost all payroll is handled via direct deposit. Now I'm of the firm opinion that if a beneficial service is required by the great majority of citizens, it should be socialized and the profit factor eliminated from the equation. Remove profit from banking and we end up with lower fees, saner interest rates and less irresponsible lending.
Now those of you who are thinking about bashing me over the socialist angle, consider this: a great many of us support free software as a cost-effective and democratic alternative to paid apps. How are socialized government services any different ?
There's more than one angle to it, here's a few I can personally relate to:
1. Some of this for-profit software seems outrageously overpriced for its functionality, a position of greed that can only be protected by eliminating all affordable alternatives. This results in hostile takeovers of free-software projects, or abusive litigation to destroy the projects, which rarely have any funding to support a court battle.
2. High quality free software stimulates innovation, in both the free and for-profit realms, and the pursuit of knowledge is generally considered a good thing.
3. Free software has been the backbone of the internet for a very long time, and has enabled widespread adoption of technology and education in areas that could not afford commercial software.
4. We don't want to be fighting the for-profit sector, which has its rightful place in the industry. They are the ones picking fights IN LIEU OF releasing superior products, and we have to defend what we think is right.
That's funny, 5 hits per second is nothing these days. Youtube gets over 11000 hits per second. You'd think the CoS could afford a decent pipe...
You lump bomb threats in with spam and DoS, yet I can't recall any incident in the history of computing where spam or DoS directly caused a person's death.
The core of the matter is there are rampant abuses of civil liberties, and the CoS is a highly visible icon of such abuse. If the CoS is allowed to continue, then we open the door for any and all wacked-out works of fiction to be labeled as "religion", and to benefit from the irrational exclusions and bypasses applied thereto.
Really, what's preventing me from founding the "Church of Spam" and claiming that UCE is protected religion speech ? We could all worship the holy Tomlinson, and each level of (paid) membership would open up access to secret RFCs until one attains "High Daemon" rank, where the subtle intricacies of SMTP are finally revealed.
Seriously man, FUCK Scientology. They deserve everything that's coming to them.
If the DoS here stands for "Denial of Scientology", I'd say it's fair game.
Look at it this way: most Americans of middle-eastern descent or Muslim faith have been steadily harassed and mistreated over at least the past 8 years, even though less than 1 per 100 MILLION have been identified as known criminals, and the supposed Muslim-originated attack on the WTC resulted in 2976 counted deaths. That's two victims for every million Muslims.
Scientologists' numbers are unknown, but are estimated to be less than 100,000. And yet, they are known to be responsible for at least two of their own members' deaths, an order of magnitude greater than the so-called "Muslim terrorists". So why the hell are we fighting in the middle east, when Scientology has shown to be 10 times deadlier per-capita ?
Don't even get me started on catholicism :P
Amen, brother! Wal-Mart is a heavyweight player in this so-called recession.
A meta-terrorist who wants to bring attention to the ridiculousness of the global terror-scare ?
Hell, I'd blow up a Reese's cup with 9000 pounds of C4, if it could potentially knock some sense back into the average bomb-fearing citizen (clue: it won't; people are terminally stupid).
I think the question should be: What was Rupert Murdoch doing in the Nixon era, and would it have been considered harmful to society at large ?
The cat has been let out of the bag: Fox is universally known as a heavily biased and manipulative expression of Mr Murdoch's personal interests. I don't even live in the same country and I barely watch TV, yet I can immediately recognize a Fox broadcast or even just a screenshot. It always follows the same format: a fat half-English skeevy-looking talking suit, large bolded sensationalist headline, scrolling ticker about something scandalous, and either a picture of an a mushroom cloud or another half-English sock puppet reciting his prepared statements. If that's what they call news, I wonder how they'd react to the old Power Rangers kids shows.
It's good that someone is trying to analyze and criticize the Obama administration, but coming from Fox it bears very little credibility. The same content, on a different network, would almost automatically be taken more seriously. The simple fact that one of their leading hosts' catchphrase is "shut up", well that's just a crowning embarrassment.
Beck is an infantile baby.
That's the best kind! Senile babies are an entirely different beast...
The problem with any modern connector is licensing. Every time you buy a cable, or a device with {XYZ connector}, some smug bastard gets paid for "inventing" that connector. It's rarely about "what is technically superior", usually it's "what's the cheapest standard we can shove down people's throats".
Licensing is why today's computers have umpteen slow inefficient USB ports, and zero or one Firewire ports. Apple fucked that one up by charging $20 or so per Firewire device for the longest time, they only lowered the licensing fee long after the war was lost.
The thing about VESA though, none of the major manufacturers really give a crap what VESA thinks. VESA dreams up these "standards", charges a lot of money for the specs, which results in them being largely ignored. The freebies they offer are mostly crap, either obsolete or just plain old stupid. They're like the IEEE's retarded step-cousin, on crack.
Some of us believe the internet should be free to use for anyone and everyone. There's a big difference between a personal vehicle (which itself is horribly inefficient and vain, but that's for another post), and access to a global information network where the only cost is related to the "onramp".
If someone drives off with your car, you no longer have use of your car. If someone checks their email over a small slice of your bandwidth, you're not being deprived of anything. All you really need to do is keep your internal network secure, and maybe put in some sane speed limits to deter abuse.
Wouldn't it be nice if all WiFi routers came with these features built-in and easy to configure ? I'd be fine with allowing web and mail traffic, but not idiotic Limewire and the virulent teens who use it. If it means I can whip out my laptop anywhere in the city and feed trolls on slashdot, or knock off a few work items while I wait for the damned bus to show up, then I'm all for moderate, conscientious sharing. It won't kill you, it won't help the terrorists win (hint: they won a long time ago), it won't replace your corn flakes with paint chips, so why are you complaining so much ?
I get that this is considered pinko/commie thinking, so all I can do is politely flip the bird and pray your so-called economy continues its freefall toward obsoletion.
Ok, I'll play:
"90% of the time I've seen a wigger with a 12-inch exhaust, he's cut me off, cut across the 3-lane highway, and rammed his gas-powered mobile subwoofer into the exit lane at 140kph."
"90% of the time I've seen a white guy in a luxury SUV, he's cut me off, cut across the 3-lane highway, and rammed his gas-powered mobile ego into the exit lane at 140kph."
"90% of the time I've seen an asian woman in an Acura, she's stopped in the middle of a busy intersection at the green, waiting for it to turn red and everyone to honk before turning left anyway"
"90% of the time I've seen a dirty cop shooting radar, everyone jammed the brakes, slowed to half the speed limit, and stared at the fucker while rear-ending the car in front of them."
100% of the time I've recognized these common stereotypes, I've taken preventive measures to steer clear of them, and saved myself much injury, expense and frustration. Assume everyone is criminally stupid and you will never be disappointed.
"Proven wrong tomorrow" is worse, because it means we're ignorant for one day too many.
I hate that, when pressed, he said it was a funny and odd coincidence. He should have stood up and said "Yes, I wrote 'Fuck You' on purpose. Fuck You, Ammiano! Fuck You and your stupid bill!"
And then I would have instantly moved to California... fuck yeah!
We're talking about email, not Exchange. Big difference! Our postfix boxes at the office have been up for (checks) 250 days, which is when we deployed them in the first place. Our exchange server has a hissy fit every couple of months, out of the blue, necessitating a reboot. Nevermind the fact that the postfix machines go through half a million emails daily, while the Exchange box might see a hundred.
With a local mail server, you have two things to worry about: the network, and power. If you have those two, you're up. Ok, three if you count the idiot A+ tech who keeps patching boxes that don't need fixing.
With GMail, or any other cloud service, you now have to worry about all of the above, plus your internet modem/AP, the backhaul, the ISP's network (fancy Cisco switches that love to melt at great expense), their backbone peers, the peer's network, the backhaul to Google (and all hops along the way), and finally Google's network and power. All that for interoffice messaging, man that's a lot that can (and regularly does) go wrong.
So many failure points for a critical business service, well maybe I'm old-fashioned but I wouldn't trust it so much, when the locally-hosted alternative is so easily and cheaply available. Also, good luck getting a Google employee to help you when the service goes down. At least when the sysadmin is in-house, he/she will be at least somewhat motivated to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, because their only client is you, the employer.
Only if the printer is in a public place. Chances are, if you're in an apartment building, that printer is in the victim's apartment, where only they can see it.
Or do you have a disturbing habit of parking your printer outside overnight ?