Your first mistake is assuming the Chinese government should operate similarly to the Italian government. In case you hadn't noticed, China is still pretty low on the list of "Top countries that respect basic human rights". That's probably why there are so many Chinese expats all over the world, but who am I to say... I've never been there!
Is it just me, or does it seem rather contrived that the FBI would (successfully) use a trojan to catch a criminal who is at least someone technically proficient ? Presumably the con would be surfing through a proxy at the very least, and is probably not the kind of user who runs unsolicited downloads from public web sites.
Call me crazy, but I'd say this smells like a piece of theatre. Now I'm not saying the FBI hired the con, but sometimes I wonder... In an increasingly complex tech world, maybe they feel the need to put on a show, to make people believe the FBI still has things under control.
Sure, you have choice, but your choices are limited. Everyone offers similar plans, at similar price points, and there's no real distinction besides the name on your monthly bill. There's also very little progress over time, they're all resting on their laurels, never upgrading their infrastructure beyond the bare minimum.
That's not competition, that's stagnation. Only a non-competitive market can sustain stagnation.
If Stardock was able to identify which connections were from illegitimately acquired copies, why didn't they just shut them out ?
The argument for piracy is that file sharing brings no extra cost to the developer/producer, but when a central multiplayer server is involved, that is considered an extra service and thus is NOT cost-free.
What they could have done in this case, is what many others have done for over a decade: have the user create a multiplayer account that is tied to their CD key, only one account per key. That shuts out the pirated copies, avoids the use of intrusive DRM, and keeps the game servers uncluttered for the benefit of paid users.
Google is unaffected by this meaningless verdict. The cartels sued four mostly political figures who had no money to defend themselves, and won despite a theatrics worthy of My Cousin Vinnie. This whole ordeal was more of a social media stunt than any realistic legal matter, and by that measure it is a great success, as people everywhere are panicking over the outcome.
Google, on the other hand, is a giant corporation with billions of dollars, filled with many bright minds and, I'm sure, armed with the world's top lawyers. They are no strangers to the copyright issues. Were the MAFIAA to go after Google, they would be facing a very different battle, one they could actually lose, because Google has ample resources to not only put up a real fight, but also lay the groundwork for copyright reform, should the verdict land in Google's favor, with the fruits of that effort trickling down to torrent trackers and any other content indexes.
It's quite simple, really: You don't fuck with Google, because Google fucks back.
Why are we so quick to indulge in righteous outrage?
Because every other time a big corporation has tried this sort of "marketing experiment", it has been a laughable, humiliating, leisure-suit-wetting joke of a failure. Why should this time be any different ? It's the same idiots running the show, just a different venue.
I don't know about you, but when I'm shopping for a vehicle, I don't check Twitter or Youtube. I look at customer complaint forums, and ask friends and coworkers about their experiences. I check trade-in and auction lots, to see if people are ditching a particular model sooner than normal. You don't want to hear about the people who love their cars, you want the ones who hate them, and you want to know why.
On a related note, why should I take car buying advice from a bribed attention whore ? A normal person would have to be MADLY IN LOVE with their car, for them to blog about it on a regular basis. Where I'm from, we call those people wiggers, and their opinion is worth less than fuckall to me.
Respecting their customer base would mean selling cars that don't die after five years, that don't have a thousand little plastic pieces where there should be metal, that actually hit the advertised fuel efficiency numbers without driving like a goddamned latte-chugging grass-eating Prius owner.
Social advertising does not magically compensate for an inferior product. Ford lost their direction a long time ago, and instead of fixing the obvious problems, they spend most of their time and money chasing rainbows.
That only works for very trivial encryption algorithms, where you can map the unencrypted string character-by-character to its enciphered value.
The reason for this is you don't know where the text resides within the document, so if your cipher is not position-independent, you're screwed. Hint: anything more robust than XOR or ROT13 will be position-dependent.
Example for the truly dense: Let's say you have two strings. One is "Harry" and the other is "Barry". They only differ by one character, so if your cipher results in encrypted data that still differs by a single character, it becomes quite obvious that the two strings are very similar. To an attacker, this says your data is very easy to decipher, as it is effectively a 1-to-1 code list. You can perform a frequency attack or a few other stastical techniques to very easily find a decryption table, and in the case of binary data, you can look for telltale patterns like JPEG headers or other predictable, repetitive structures.
It's not about fiber or infrastructure or anything like that. It's about Bell playing dirty and dodging the anti-monopoly laws that were specifically enacted to keep Bell under control.
Every single move is a direct attack to shut out resellers and competitors. With this particular predatory billing strategy, they are guaranteeing that any DSL reseller goes out of business because the "wholesale" cost is greater than their own 1st-tier retail service. At the same time, the low caps proposed are ensuring that their users won't be able to ditch their $200/month DTV and phone bills in favor of IPTV and VoIP.
You guys in the states see the same bullshit, although it is not _quite_ as dramatic (yet) because you still have a handful of telecoms fighting over the market. Up here Bell is god, and has been for nearly a century, because every time they've been split up or shoo'd out of an area, they have bought back their shares in the newly-formed companies that replaced them. The few conglomerates they don't own outright, they collude with, like Rogers and Videotron. There is no real competition.
Bell is so ominous up here, many people mistakenly believe it is a crown corporation run by the government. The CRTC, which is supposed to be a media watchdog, is Bell's lap dog. Let me put it to you this way: If the Bush family ran a telco the way they ran a country, Bell Canada would be the result.
I had found that document, but it does little more than regurgitate kernel documentation and obvious results. The problem is once you start dealing with moderately decent hardware, the information out there is sorely lacking. I often feel like I'm the only Linux user with a damn job, because everyone else is using crappy old gear, so while it's nice that the author's old hard drives are optimized to their peak performance, it does little to help me milk my fast Raid gear for all its worth, and ultimately it makes it very difficult for me to "sell" Linux to my boss as a superior solution, when there's a generational gap in performance vs the commercial stuff.
For some classes it's just tweaking (e.g. a mage having both arcane and ffb). For others it's a game-changer such as druids, as you can now have a DPS spec, and a healing spec... Classes that used to respec a lot, now don't need to do.
I tend to play DPS, so in my case I can have one spec for balls-to-the-wall destruction, and another with a more balanced setup for longer fights or ones with special conditions (fire vulnerability vs frost, etc).
How can a person's sexual orientation be libelous or slanderous ? It is either correct or incorrect. Offensive, perhaps... largely because modern society is still profoundly homophobic, but that does not turn a mere heckle into a crime.
"Fuck you, you fur-munching straight person" is more humorous than offensive. So why does the word "gay" automatically make that same sentence pure criminal evil ?
I'm still waiting for the study that finds a link between high grades and financial success.
It seems to me, the more brains you have, the more the dumb people want to exploit you. Do you really think it matters whether some kid can regurgite a 3.5 or a 4.0 GPA ? Will that make our world less fucked up ? No. I'd rather have happy social technically-comfortable Facebookers than an arrogant pool of world-ending bookworms.
Why do you call it copy protection, when it is nothing more than a hardware-based lockout ? You can copy the OSX installation media in any DVD burner with practically any software. There is no copy protection.
Installing OSX on a PC is a violation of the terms of service, that stupid little contract with the "I Agree" button. It has nothing to do with copyright.
You just confirmed my statements, intentionally or not.
Let me put it to you this way: I've been using Linux in various forms since the early 90's. In fact, the very first Linux distro I tried was Slackware 1.0. I said tried, not used, because I couldn't even get the damned thing to install. I've obviously overcome that hurdle, I think the first Linux I seriously used as a desktop was RedHat. I ran it for a few months, mostly in text mode as X11 was still pretty clumsy back then, if it even ran at all on your hardware.
Today, I run a mix of Debian, CentOS, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and while I have no difficulty managing them all, I still run into stupid issues, mostly with the Ubuntu and Gentoo desktops (I don't run X on the other distros). Ubuntu tries so hard to be friendly that it creates problems of its own, everything is nerfed and debugging becomes a battle. Every single Ubuntu forum reads like a goddamned LifeHacker post, do this / do that / now wasn't that easy? Well I don't know about you, but I never learned much by having other people do all the thinking for me.
Case in point: just last night I wasted a few hours trying to tweak my file server's write performance. One would expect a search for "linux disk tuning" to yield at least a few pertinent hits, but for the most part, what I found were a bunch of bumbling fools posting nonsensical benchmarks on ghetto hardware, with a side of random/proc tweaks without any explanation of why of how they got there. What I did find were a bunch of people saying things like "That's a useless benchmark", "how often do you write large contiguous files anyway?" and "you should buy a 3ware controller". The question was not "Am I stupid", it was "How can I tune the disk subsystem for maximum contiguous write performance".
When we have assholes calling the smart guys idiots and refusing to cooperate on legitimate problems, we end up with a culture of ignorance. If people don't want to be helpful, then I don't know why they're hanging out in help forums. If all you want is to throw around random verbal abuse, get married or something:P
Friendly, perhaps, but not quite resourceful. The decentralized nature of the Linux community means we don't have "official" support people, you know, people who are die-hard experts at identifying, troubleshooting and solving problems. Instead we have a bunch of so-called "power users" repeating the same half-truths and suggesting solutions that go "This is what I did, if you're doing anything differently then I have no clue" or "I heard so-and-so hardware was junk, so that MUST be your problem". It's this monkey-see monkey-do stuff that doesn't actually help, because there is no explanation, no teaching just band-aids.
It also means we don't do proper user testing. For example, in my job, whenever we build a new interface or web page, beyond normal testing we usually get the sales guy to run through it. He represents the typical web-savvy office user, but has no coding experience. Even he is more nimble than our average user, from the bits and bobs he's learned from us over time, but he's great for finding UI annoyances like non-obvious buttons, formatting issues and misplaced widgets.
Here, I'll give you one concrete example of what I deem a UI failure: the Gnome file-open dialog. It has auto-completion, but instead of listing possibilities in a drop-down, or shadowing it inline (like IE's autocomplete), it just replaces my text box with whatever it finds, and moving my cursor to the end as I type. That means if I'm blindly typing a filename like "somefile.txt", I might end up with "someotherdoc.docfile.tgaxt" as it found "someotherdoc.doc" and "somefile.tga" while I typed. That, in my opinion, is code that should never have shipped! When the default usage pattern is ruined, it is a critical failure and the typical Linux desktop is full of these.
... if it weren't riddled with fanboyism and aggressive language.
In contrast, although far from superior, Windows provides [...] Once again Microsoft's monopoly means Windows is swallowing up another market.
Wrong. Fail. Abort. Windows is swallowing up another market because Linux doesn't belong on the average user's netbook, for the same reasons it doesn't belong on the average user's desktop. It is a usability nightmare, you need to be a network engineer AND programmer to fix it when it breaks, and perhaps most importantly the Linux community is hostile and unhelpful toward non-techies.
I am a network geek and programmer, and I still get pissed off at Linux on a daily basis because things that should just work, do not. Usability issues never get addressed, no one wants to touch them. "My app is fine, go fuck yourself" is the general attitude I see among app developers/maintainers. Maybe they're sick of replying "RTFM" to every single question, but to me that is a symptom of bad code. Joe Random doesn't read the README, nor should he need to. If you can spend the time to write a long, complicated README, you could spend that same time writing a small script that does all those contrived pre-installation steps for the user.
The problem is that we programmers are terrible users, because we don't use computers the way non-programmers do. The goofy little apps and utilities I make for myself, they have the most spartan, militaristic interfaces because I write the code first, then wrap buttons and knobs around it. I know how to use my stuff, because I'm the guy who built it. I know which bits of code fire when I click this or type that. Joe Random does not. We need to fix our apps to be so intuitive, even Joe Random's retarded stepchild can use them.
The netbook does not matter. Other than the size factor, it is hardly different from 3-4 year old laptops, and like any laptop, usability is top priority. If we want Linux to rock netbooks, we need to make it usable.
How are we supposed to deal with the child-porn problem if we're not allowed to discuss it ? People revert to an apelike mental state the moment you mention pedophilia.
Want to mess with that prick who cut you off on the highway ? Call 911 and tell them you saw him rape a 6 year old, he will be arrested and detained within the hour, and those lovely cops will make sure to tell everyone he's a pedophile before the day is done. Not a single neuron will fire, nobody will dare think about evidence or motive. It's like the term "kiddie porn" is the root password to society, with it you can get anything done to anyone.
If they really want to combat child pornography, they need to attack the source: producers. Hiding links will not make it go away. Revoking domains will not make it go away. Shutting down servers wont' even make it go away. Our beloved Streisand effect ensures that any and all censorship is met with an even greater riposte.
If you despise these welfare clients so much, why do you serve them ? I've always been of the attitude that if a client isn't worthy of your time, you should ditch them. Are you so desperate for business that you can't afford to skip bad clients ? By allowing yourself to be abused (by clients, by the state insurance system), you are perpetuating the problem for yourself and every other practitioner.
Give them an appointment 18 months away, let them bounce around until they find someone pathetic enough to cope with them. You can then focus on clients that are worth your time and attention.
If I took every single crappy gig people flung at my head, I'd be broke, bitter and genocidal. Oh, wait... I already am!
Why can't they just code the Win7 installer to wipe out old betas ? They built the damn OS, they should know which files it owns be able to tell the difference between OS code and user-created content:P
How is C any worse than Java, where your classes' interfaces have helper classes to instantiate someone else's classes and maybe one in 30 lines of code actually does something tangible. It's real cute to make everything modular, but in practice it ends up being idealist bullshit that never gets put to real use, because there are very few coders who can wrap their head around truly useful OO designs.
A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. It doesn't matter whether you pay $79 or $799 for a drive, it is just as likely to crash, burn and lose all your data as any other. The sole difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives lies in the firmware. It might have more aggressive queue deadlines, or be configured to "fail" as soon as a single defect is identified (even though it can remap them with spare sectors). In many cases they are 100% identical.
It's all just markup, and in some rare cases you might get an extra year or two on the warranty. I'd much rather buy ten cheap drives and have a bunch of spares, than buy the "enterprise" model and have it die just as catastrophically.
There's no shortage of FUD threatening that if you use a cheap drive in a server, your wife will cheat on you with a Seagate engineer, your first-born child with "go gay", coworkers will laugh at you and call you "Cheapy McCheaperson" behind your back, and Larry Ellison will reach down from his bearded throne and slap you across the face with a greased-up midget.
If an enterprise SSD comes with an enterprise-class warranty that justifies the cost, great! If not then you're a sucker for buying it, as the vendor laughs all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Your first mistake is assuming the Chinese government should operate similarly to the Italian government. In case you hadn't noticed, China is still pretty low on the list of "Top countries that respect basic human rights". That's probably why there are so many Chinese expats all over the world, but who am I to say... I've never been there!
Is it just me, or does it seem rather contrived that the FBI would (successfully) use a trojan to catch a criminal who is at least someone technically proficient ? Presumably the con would be surfing through a proxy at the very least, and is probably not the kind of user who runs unsolicited downloads from public web sites.
Call me crazy, but I'd say this smells like a piece of theatre. Now I'm not saying the FBI hired the con, but sometimes I wonder... In an increasingly complex tech world, maybe they feel the need to put on a show, to make people believe the FBI still has things under control.
*claps enthusiastically* /thread
Sure, you have choice, but your choices are limited. Everyone offers similar plans, at similar price points, and there's no real distinction besides the name on your monthly bill. There's also very little progress over time, they're all resting on their laurels, never upgrading their infrastructure beyond the bare minimum.
That's not competition, that's stagnation. Only a non-competitive market can sustain stagnation.
If Stardock was able to identify which connections were from illegitimately acquired copies, why didn't they just shut them out ?
The argument for piracy is that file sharing brings no extra cost to the developer/producer, but when a central multiplayer server is involved, that is considered an extra service and thus is NOT cost-free.
What they could have done in this case, is what many others have done for over a decade: have the user create a multiplayer account that is tied to their CD key, only one account per key. That shuts out the pirated copies, avoids the use of intrusive DRM, and keeps the game servers uncluttered for the benefit of paid users.
Google is unaffected by this meaningless verdict. The cartels sued four mostly political figures who had no money to defend themselves, and won despite a theatrics worthy of My Cousin Vinnie. This whole ordeal was more of a social media stunt than any realistic legal matter, and by that measure it is a great success, as people everywhere are panicking over the outcome.
Google, on the other hand, is a giant corporation with billions of dollars, filled with many bright minds and, I'm sure, armed with the world's top lawyers. They are no strangers to the copyright issues. Were the MAFIAA to go after Google, they would be facing a very different battle, one they could actually lose, because Google has ample resources to not only put up a real fight, but also lay the groundwork for copyright reform, should the verdict land in Google's favor, with the fruits of that effort trickling down to torrent trackers and any other content indexes.
It's quite simple, really: You don't fuck with Google, because Google fucks back.
Why are we so quick to indulge in righteous outrage?
Because every other time a big corporation has tried this sort of "marketing experiment", it has been a laughable, humiliating, leisure-suit-wetting joke of a failure. Why should this time be any different ? It's the same idiots running the show, just a different venue.
I don't know about you, but when I'm shopping for a vehicle, I don't check Twitter or Youtube. I look at customer complaint forums, and ask friends and coworkers about their experiences. I check trade-in and auction lots, to see if people are ditching a particular model sooner than normal. You don't want to hear about the people who love their cars, you want the ones who hate them, and you want to know why.
On a related note, why should I take car buying advice from a bribed attention whore ? A normal person would have to be MADLY IN LOVE with their car, for them to blog about it on a regular basis. Where I'm from, we call those people wiggers, and their opinion is worth less than fuckall to me.
Respecting their customer base would mean selling cars that don't die after five years, that don't have a thousand little plastic pieces where there should be metal, that actually hit the advertised fuel efficiency numbers without driving like a goddamned latte-chugging grass-eating Prius owner.
Social advertising does not magically compensate for an inferior product. Ford lost their direction a long time ago, and instead of fixing the obvious problems, they spend most of their time and money chasing rainbows.
That only works for very trivial encryption algorithms, where you can map the unencrypted string character-by-character to its enciphered value.
The reason for this is you don't know where the text resides within the document, so if your cipher is not position-independent, you're screwed. Hint: anything more robust than XOR or ROT13 will be position-dependent.
Example for the truly dense: Let's say you have two strings. One is "Harry" and the other is "Barry". They only differ by one character, so if your cipher results in encrypted data that still differs by a single character, it becomes quite obvious that the two strings are very similar. To an attacker, this says your data is very easy to decipher, as it is effectively a 1-to-1 code list. You can perform a frequency attack or a few other stastical techniques to very easily find a decryption table, and in the case of binary data, you can look for telltale patterns like JPEG headers or other predictable, repetitive structures.
It's not about fiber or infrastructure or anything like that. It's about Bell playing dirty and dodging the anti-monopoly laws that were specifically enacted to keep Bell under control.
Every single move is a direct attack to shut out resellers and competitors. With this particular predatory billing strategy, they are guaranteeing that any DSL reseller goes out of business because the "wholesale" cost is greater than their own 1st-tier retail service. At the same time, the low caps proposed are ensuring that their users won't be able to ditch their $200/month DTV and phone bills in favor of IPTV and VoIP.
You guys in the states see the same bullshit, although it is not _quite_ as dramatic (yet) because you still have a handful of telecoms fighting over the market. Up here Bell is god, and has been for nearly a century, because every time they've been split up or shoo'd out of an area, they have bought back their shares in the newly-formed companies that replaced them. The few conglomerates they don't own outright, they collude with, like Rogers and Videotron. There is no real competition.
Bell is so ominous up here, many people mistakenly believe it is a crown corporation run by the government. The CRTC, which is supposed to be a media watchdog, is Bell's lap dog. Let me put it to you this way: If the Bush family ran a telco the way they ran a country, Bell Canada would be the result.
I had found that document, but it does little more than regurgitate kernel documentation and obvious results. The problem is once you start dealing with moderately decent hardware, the information out there is sorely lacking. I often feel like I'm the only Linux user with a damn job, because everyone else is using crappy old gear, so while it's nice that the author's old hard drives are optimized to their peak performance, it does little to help me milk my fast Raid gear for all its worth, and ultimately it makes it very difficult for me to "sell" Linux to my boss as a superior solution, when there's a generational gap in performance vs the commercial stuff.
For some classes it's just tweaking (e.g. a mage having both arcane and ffb). For others it's a game-changer such as druids, as you can now have a DPS spec, and a healing spec... Classes that used to respec a lot, now don't need to do.
I tend to play DPS, so in my case I can have one spec for balls-to-the-wall destruction, and another with a more balanced setup for longer fights or ones with special conditions (fire vulnerability vs frost, etc).
How can a person's sexual orientation be libelous or slanderous ? It is either correct or incorrect. Offensive, perhaps... largely because modern society is still profoundly homophobic, but that does not turn a mere heckle into a crime.
"Fuck you, you fur-munching straight person" is more humorous than offensive. So why does the word "gay" automatically make that same sentence pure criminal evil ?
I'm still waiting for the study that finds a link between high grades and financial success.
It seems to me, the more brains you have, the more the dumb people want to exploit you. Do you really think it matters whether some kid can regurgite a 3.5 or a 4.0 GPA ? Will that make our world less fucked up ? No. I'd rather have happy social technically-comfortable Facebookers than an arrogant pool of world-ending bookworms.
Why do you call it copy protection, when it is nothing more than a hardware-based lockout ? You can copy the OSX installation media in any DVD burner with practically any software. There is no copy protection.
Installing OSX on a PC is a violation of the terms of service, that stupid little contract with the "I Agree" button. It has nothing to do with copyright.
You just confirmed my statements, intentionally or not.
Let me put it to you this way: I've been using Linux in various forms since the early 90's. In fact, the very first Linux distro I tried was Slackware 1.0. I said tried, not used, because I couldn't even get the damned thing to install. I've obviously overcome that hurdle, I think the first Linux I seriously used as a desktop was RedHat. I ran it for a few months, mostly in text mode as X11 was still pretty clumsy back then, if it even ran at all on your hardware.
Today, I run a mix of Debian, CentOS, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and while I have no difficulty managing them all, I still run into stupid issues, mostly with the Ubuntu and Gentoo desktops (I don't run X on the other distros). Ubuntu tries so hard to be friendly that it creates problems of its own, everything is nerfed and debugging becomes a battle. Every single Ubuntu forum reads like a goddamned LifeHacker post, do this / do that / now wasn't that easy? Well I don't know about you, but I never learned much by having other people do all the thinking for me.
Case in point: just last night I wasted a few hours trying to tweak my file server's write performance. One would expect a search for "linux disk tuning" to yield at least a few pertinent hits, but for the most part, what I found were a bunch of bumbling fools posting nonsensical benchmarks on ghetto hardware, with a side of random /proc tweaks without any explanation of why of how they got there. What I did find were a bunch of people saying things like "That's a useless benchmark", "how often do you write large contiguous files anyway?" and "you should buy a 3ware controller". The question was not "Am I stupid", it was "How can I tune the disk subsystem for maximum contiguous write performance".
When we have assholes calling the smart guys idiots and refusing to cooperate on legitimate problems, we end up with a culture of ignorance. If people don't want to be helpful, then I don't know why they're hanging out in help forums. If all you want is to throw around random verbal abuse, get married or something :P
Friendly, perhaps, but not quite resourceful. The decentralized nature of the Linux community means we don't have "official" support people, you know, people who are die-hard experts at identifying, troubleshooting and solving problems. Instead we have a bunch of so-called "power users" repeating the same half-truths and suggesting solutions that go "This is what I did, if you're doing anything differently then I have no clue" or "I heard so-and-so hardware was junk, so that MUST be your problem". It's this monkey-see monkey-do stuff that doesn't actually help, because there is no explanation, no teaching just band-aids.
It also means we don't do proper user testing. For example, in my job, whenever we build a new interface or web page, beyond normal testing we usually get the sales guy to run through it. He represents the typical web-savvy office user, but has no coding experience. Even he is more nimble than our average user, from the bits and bobs he's learned from us over time, but he's great for finding UI annoyances like non-obvious buttons, formatting issues and misplaced widgets.
Here, I'll give you one concrete example of what I deem a UI failure: the Gnome file-open dialog. It has auto-completion, but instead of listing possibilities in a drop-down, or shadowing it inline (like IE's autocomplete), it just replaces my text box with whatever it finds, and moving my cursor to the end as I type. That means if I'm blindly typing a filename like "somefile.txt", I might end up with "someotherdoc.docfile.tgaxt" as it found "someotherdoc.doc" and "somefile.tga" while I typed. That, in my opinion, is code that should never have shipped! When the default usage pattern is ruined, it is a critical failure and the typical Linux desktop is full of these.
... if it weren't riddled with fanboyism and aggressive language.
In contrast, although far from superior, Windows provides [...] Once again Microsoft's monopoly means Windows is swallowing up another market.
Wrong. Fail. Abort. Windows is swallowing up another market because Linux doesn't belong on the average user's netbook, for the same reasons it doesn't belong on the average user's desktop. It is a usability nightmare, you need to be a network engineer AND programmer to fix it when it breaks, and perhaps most importantly the Linux community is hostile and unhelpful toward non-techies.
I am a network geek and programmer, and I still get pissed off at Linux on a daily basis because things that should just work, do not. Usability issues never get addressed, no one wants to touch them. "My app is fine, go fuck yourself" is the general attitude I see among app developers/maintainers. Maybe they're sick of replying "RTFM" to every single question, but to me that is a symptom of bad code. Joe Random doesn't read the README, nor should he need to. If you can spend the time to write a long, complicated README, you could spend that same time writing a small script that does all those contrived pre-installation steps for the user.
The problem is that we programmers are terrible users, because we don't use computers the way non-programmers do. The goofy little apps and utilities I make for myself, they have the most spartan, militaristic interfaces because I write the code first, then wrap buttons and knobs around it. I know how to use my stuff, because I'm the guy who built it. I know which bits of code fire when I click this or type that. Joe Random does not. We need to fix our apps to be so intuitive, even Joe Random's retarded stepchild can use them.
The netbook does not matter. Other than the size factor, it is hardly different from 3-4 year old laptops, and like any laptop, usability is top priority. If we want Linux to rock netbooks, we need to make it usable.
How are we supposed to deal with the child-porn problem if we're not allowed to discuss it ? People revert to an apelike mental state the moment you mention pedophilia.
Want to mess with that prick who cut you off on the highway ? Call 911 and tell them you saw him rape a 6 year old, he will be arrested and detained within the hour, and those lovely cops will make sure to tell everyone he's a pedophile before the day is done. Not a single neuron will fire, nobody will dare think about evidence or motive. It's like the term "kiddie porn" is the root password to society, with it you can get anything done to anyone.
If they really want to combat child pornography, they need to attack the source: producers. Hiding links will not make it go away. Revoking domains will not make it go away. Shutting down servers wont' even make it go away. Our beloved Streisand effect ensures that any and all censorship is met with an even greater riposte.
If you despise these welfare clients so much, why do you serve them ? I've always been of the attitude that if a client isn't worthy of your time, you should ditch them. Are you so desperate for business that you can't afford to skip bad clients ? By allowing yourself to be abused (by clients, by the state insurance system), you are perpetuating the problem for yourself and every other practitioner.
Give them an appointment 18 months away, let them bounce around until they find someone pathetic enough to cope with them. You can then focus on clients that are worth your time and attention.
If I took every single crappy gig people flung at my head, I'd be broke, bitter and genocidal. Oh, wait... I already am!
Why can't they just code the Win7 installer to wipe out old betas ? They built the damn OS, they should know which files it owns be able to tell the difference between OS code and user-created content :P
I am sorely disappointed in you guys. Give ol' Jeff Fahey some love!
As famously said by a former president:
"When the President does it, that means it is not illegal"
Welcome to the country you helped create.
How is C any worse than Java, where your classes' interfaces have helper classes to instantiate someone else's classes and maybe one in 30 lines of code actually does something tangible. It's real cute to make everything modular, but in practice it ends up being idealist bullshit that never gets put to real use, because there are very few coders who can wrap their head around truly useful OO designs.
I love that term "Enterprise storage".
A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. It doesn't matter whether you pay $79 or $799 for a drive, it is just as likely to crash, burn and lose all your data as any other. The sole difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives lies in the firmware. It might have more aggressive queue deadlines, or be configured to "fail" as soon as a single defect is identified (even though it can remap them with spare sectors). In many cases they are 100% identical.
It's all just markup, and in some rare cases you might get an extra year or two on the warranty. I'd much rather buy ten cheap drives and have a bunch of spares, than buy the "enterprise" model and have it die just as catastrophically.
There's no shortage of FUD threatening that if you use a cheap drive in a server, your wife will cheat on you with a Seagate engineer, your first-born child with "go gay", coworkers will laugh at you and call you "Cheapy McCheaperson" behind your back, and Larry Ellison will reach down from his bearded throne and slap you across the face with a greased-up midget.
If an enterprise SSD comes with an enterprise-class warranty that justifies the cost, great! If not then you're a sucker for buying it, as the vendor laughs all the way to the bank.