I installed Fedora on my work provided laptop for a while - LibreOffice is the reason I wiped it back to the corporate image.
Got sick of logging into another Windows host because customers would send me Excel spreadsheets with OLE embedded attachments of text files... Also sick of PPTs created in PowerPoint not displaying correctly or visa-versa.
I mean I could do almost everything else and having a good native terminal and decent multi-monitor support was awesome. I actually turned my corporate image into a KVM VM - I'd just fire it up and RDP to it when needed...
Cygwin and Windows 10 native has been working much better for me.
You know, Lenovo says the same about the Thinkpad, yet there are people re-soldering the TPMs... before that you could simply replace, read or re-program a little eeprom. The general public should know now there is a difference with what can be done vs. what can be done.
The point you are missing is that the laptop must be usable in it's freshly stolen form for software tracking to be of any use - or else why would someone leave it powered on.
And often the person who steals the laptop doesn't hold onto it... they flip it... often as a laptop they "forgot the password to, just go to a computer shop to have it reset"
Once a computer store came to me to reset a BIOS password on a laptop for one of their customers. I reset the password and noticed the windows installation was configured to join to a domain... so I reset the local account, recovered the outlook PST file and called the former user of the laptop. It was a corporate laptop that was stolen from his garage a week prior. The police came to my work and I was summoned to show up in court as a witness to a stupid possession of stolen property charge in another city. I had to take time off for it and everything.
That said, the "useless security" was enough to get the laptop to the point where a number of people who had the technical ability to do the right thing could...
Just FYI, the main law is being broken is that the VoIP providers are unlicensed telecommunications providers.
In order to be a licensed telecommunications provider, your company must meet certain ownership requirements and comply with government oversight. Part of the government oversight is the tariffs charged. Part of the ownership requirements ensures profit for the country.
Since the infrastructure to provide the internet is subsidized by international minutes (remember where the content, and where Saudi is) VoIP in its most common form is used as rate/toll bypass telecommunications fraud. Same like reconfiguring someone's voice mail to forward to an international number.
There is no technical reason why VoIP can be cheaper than what the telecommunications providers can provide. They could provide VoIP too or terminate the call through TDMoIP, lower codec quality etc... but this is whole thing is not about the COST of the call. It's about the margins and ownership. The telecommunications companies employ thousands of Saudi nationals. The Saudi nationals do not care about VoIP. This mostly does not effect them, it effects the expatriates. And even then, it only effects the expatriates who came to Saudi on contracts that don't pay them enough to make phone calls.
Skype has been typically allowed to operate in many middle eastern countries but only for PC to PC video calling. Skype-in and Skype-out services as well as access to the website to download and market the client was typically blocked.
Yes, the NSA scandal probably has some impact on the recent re-evaluation of Skype.
A black market will exist as long as there is a reason for it. The more money that is siphoned out of our pockets by the swine of an unproductive industry, the further we will go to protect our interests. I'd love to believe Hollywood helped better our education system or somehow improved our standards of living... and maybe it is anti-american to believe it has taken more then it has given... yet I pay a hidden tax on all my blank media and generate add revenue for the american music lables on my youtube video that happened to catch an audio clip in the background. I spend more than a meal or hour of minimum wage on a single album or movie screening. Oh... and I'm NOT an American. I am Canadian.
Back in the day, you could get cars with car phones that worked with Bluetooth Sim Access Profile - those car phones had fixed antennas mounted outside so could broadcast up to 1 watt... but then came the iphone... since the iPhone was so trendy and hip (yet not supporting SAP or copy and paste) BMW/Mercedes stopped selling such equipped bluetooth car phones instead opting for the crappy reception of your crappy mobile located inside your metal box.
When one is an arrogant self-absorbed prick who thinks impeeding traffic is their personally-granted-god-given right, they cause other arrogant self-absorbed pricks to follow too close, pass improperly or try and "make up time" - so collectively all such pricks create the situation for all motorists...
Unlike the 60's (when the speed limits were set) - your car won't just explode when you cross 70mph.
Since they have lights, cameras, radios, and friends with tools that can turn $1000 Z rated tires into litter... possibly more effectively then you'd wan't to risk...
So Netflix has a policy to stop side-channel sales and distribution? You mean you can't reach a new audience through Netflix and tell them to use a competing distribution channel?
When is the last time you saw a commercial for CNN on Fox News?! You havent?? - CRY FOWL!
Never under-estimate the stupidity of consumers... I mean, we will probably end up with tassimo style 3d printers that you put in a pod of plastic and end up with forks/straws etc... not because it was a good idea or that tassimo machines make better/easier/cheaper coffees then a real espresso maker... but because consumers are stupid.
Feeding the appetite for war, of course. We can't do too many things at once and a country at war with someone/something will be united instead of at war with itself.
I have always been anal about not touching the bulb... and I have gone through at least 5 silverstar ultra bulbs in 5 years. After my last spare goes, I'll try some other bulb manufacturer.
I think what the guy means by no "huge development community" is no geeks with interest in doing it, just because. ARM is different then x86 and I would assume to make a good port on ARM, there would be a lot of specific x86 hacks that need to be revisited
And re: "massive software repository": The people who are interested in rasberry pi need to be interested in it for a particular prupose... since debian has a huge software repository, there are likely many more users who will be interested in the well established linux that fits their purpose vs the port of beos with few apps
So what I interpreted from that is there is no want to do it... That and porting your own OS is a lot different then porting a community written OS that is made to be binary compatible with another closed source OS to another architecture.
The concept of file ownership/permissions != DRM... file ownership/permissions are supposed to be a way to stop you from getting owned - the concept and implemnentation it's a simple method of sandboxing dumb users or poorly writen applications from writing to places it should not be able to. Every modern operating system does this.
I think you miss the point that he is making, with any process/application to be able to write to any other process or application, it creates a completely untrusted environment where you cannot expect the system to be in any state when you cannot completely control it's inputs. Combine that with many alternatives available that are more secure/sane by design, there aren't many uses for it...
Sure maybe it can go in a stand alone video editor... but why would you when you can put linux on that same machine and connect it to the internet/render farm and not have to worry about it getting pwned in a javascript buffer overflow
In the 90's (with the exception of monochrome displays) I don't think your monitor ever cared about the colour depth vs. resolution. It was your graphics card that cared. Your graphics card only had a limited amount of memory so maybe it could not store 24bits of colour information*786432 pixels changing/refreshing 60+ times a second. Your monitor cared only about how fast and accurately it could scan horizontally and vertically across it's shadow mask. Your monitor would have only certain clocks it could lock onto (modes) where it could excite the right red, green and blue phosphorus dots and a certain power of the electron gun(meaning cheap displays would get darker at high resolutions, or you had to modify the brightness dial when changing resolutions) - but the monitor itself could always display 24-bit colour if it could display any 256 colours. Even in 256 colour mode, many applications took advantage of modifying the colour pallet (when supported by the graphics driver) to reproduce any single colour multiple times. Applications would also use dithering to reproduce colors beyond the 256 colour or 16-bit pallet (which was most effective at high resolution). The monitors, being analog, did not care about the colour depth - they just had an analog electron gun that would excite from dark to full bright... sure, some had poor gammut or contrast... but they would still produce the picture regardless of your display mode at the resolutions it supported.
Yeah you and me both. I owned everything from the 8-bit sound blaster (that had the proprietary CDROM interface) to the high end Audigies but that all went to shit with the SB Live and Audigy
I actually thought about giving Creative one more try and bought an Audigy 2 ZS, but it and it's drivers sucked. I traded it in (paid a hefty restocking fee) and paid extra the Asus Xonar STX.
They HAD me as a loyal customer, but now I own nothing of theirs.
I bought an Asus XONAR Essesence STX because I listen with headphones often. Best purchase ever. For headphones, you can notice the clairity difference between headphones plugged into the reciever (connected by S/PDIF) and the analog headphone port. There is NO background noise on the head phones and it can drive headphones with unreasonable power at instant permenant hearing damage levels.
For digital out, it allows the card to send a Dolby Digital signal out over the S/PDIF - which is of huge value in that it stops my reciever from switching in and out of dolby digital when I pop in a DVD. Also, I don't have to mess with the controls on the reciever. I can choose the headphone or digital out from software and leave everything connected.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can get the STX for $50:(
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I installed Fedora on my work provided laptop for a while - LibreOffice is the reason I wiped it back to the corporate image.
Got sick of logging into another Windows host because customers would send me Excel spreadsheets with OLE embedded attachments of text files...
Also sick of PPTs created in PowerPoint not displaying correctly or visa-versa.
I mean I could do almost everything else and having a good native terminal and decent multi-monitor support was awesome.
I actually turned my corporate image into a KVM VM - I'd just fire it up and RDP to it when needed...
Cygwin and Windows 10 native has been working much better for me.
You know, Lenovo says the same about the Thinkpad, yet there are people re-soldering the TPMs... before that you could simply replace, read or re-program a little eeprom. The general public should know now there is a difference with what can be done vs. what can be done.
The point you are missing is that the laptop must be usable in it's freshly stolen form for software tracking to be of any use - or else why would someone leave it powered on.
And often the person who steals the laptop doesn't hold onto it... they flip it... often as a laptop they "forgot the password to, just go to a computer shop to have it reset"
Once a computer store came to me to reset a BIOS password on a laptop for one of their customers. I reset the password and noticed the windows installation was configured to join to a domain... so I reset the local account, recovered the outlook PST file and called the former user of the laptop. It was a corporate laptop that was stolen from his garage a week prior. The police came to my work and I was summoned to show up in court as a witness to a stupid possession of stolen property charge in another city. I had to take time off for it and everything.
That said, the "useless security" was enough to get the laptop to the point where a number of people who had the technical ability to do the right thing could...
Mind you, it was an inconvenience to me to do so.
Just FYI, the main law is being broken is that the VoIP providers are unlicensed telecommunications providers.
In order to be a licensed telecommunications provider, your company must meet certain ownership requirements and comply with government oversight.
Part of the government oversight is the tariffs charged. Part of the ownership requirements ensures profit for the country.
Since the infrastructure to provide the internet is subsidized by international minutes (remember where the content, and where Saudi is) VoIP in its most common form is used as rate/toll bypass telecommunications fraud. Same like reconfiguring someone's voice mail to forward to an international number.
There is no technical reason why VoIP can be cheaper than what the telecommunications providers can provide. They could provide VoIP too or terminate the call through TDMoIP, lower codec quality etc... but this is whole thing is not about the COST of the call. It's about the margins and ownership. The telecommunications companies employ thousands of Saudi nationals. The Saudi nationals do not care about VoIP. This mostly does not effect them, it effects the expatriates. And even then, it only effects the expatriates who came to Saudi on contracts that don't pay them enough to make phone calls.
Skype has been typically allowed to operate in many middle eastern countries but only for PC to PC video calling. Skype-in and Skype-out services as well as access to the website to download and market the client was typically blocked.
Yes, the NSA scandal probably has some impact on the recent re-evaluation of Skype.
A black market will exist as long as there is a reason for it. The more money that is siphoned out of our pockets by the swine of an unproductive industry, the further we will go to protect our interests. I'd love to believe Hollywood helped better our education system or somehow improved our standards of living... and maybe it is anti-american to believe it has taken more then it has given... yet I pay a hidden tax on all my blank media and generate add revenue for the american music lables on my youtube video that happened to catch an audio clip in the background. I spend more than a meal or hour of minimum wage on a single album or movie screening. Oh... and I'm NOT an American. I am Canadian.
Yes, when all my friends are recommending and linking to content on malware sites I'll probably want to check them out!
Back in the day, you could get cars with car phones that worked with Bluetooth Sim Access Profile - those car phones had fixed antennas mounted outside so could broadcast up to 1 watt... but then came the iphone... since the iPhone was so trendy and hip (yet not supporting SAP or copy and paste) BMW/Mercedes stopped selling such equipped bluetooth car phones instead opting for the crappy reception of your crappy mobile located inside your metal box.
When one is an arrogant self-absorbed prick who thinks impeeding traffic is their personally-granted-god-given right, they cause other arrogant self-absorbed pricks to follow too close, pass improperly or try and "make up time" - so collectively all such pricks create the situation for all motorists...
Unlike the 60's (when the speed limits were set) - your car won't just explode when you cross 70mph.
Since they have lights, cameras, radios, and friends with tools that can turn $1000 Z rated tires into litter... possibly more effectively then you'd wan't to risk...
So Netflix has a policy to stop side-channel sales and distribution? You mean you can't reach a new audience through Netflix and tell them to use a competing distribution channel?
When is the last time you saw a commercial for CNN on Fox News?! You havent?? - CRY FOWL!
Never under-estimate the stupidity of consumers... I mean, we will probably end up with tassimo style 3d printers that you put in a pod of plastic and end up with forks/straws etc... not because it was a good idea or that tassimo machines make better/easier/cheaper coffees then a real espresso maker... but because consumers are stupid.
Not to rain on your parade, but wit is best served dry.
Feeding the appetite for war, of course. We can't do too many things at once and a country at war with someone/something will be united instead of at war with itself.
To be fair, it seems many group Canada and the U.S. together or often just call us all "the west"
I have always been anal about not touching the bulb... and I have gone through at least 5 silverstar ultra bulbs in 5 years. After my last spare goes, I'll try some other bulb manufacturer.
Is that really the floppy driver's source code?!
Is this the display driver detection source code?!
Driver of the screen
impliment vesa if is seen
else just bitch and scream
I think what the guy means by no "huge development community" is no geeks with interest in doing it, just because. ARM is different then x86 and I would assume to make a good port on ARM, there would be a lot of specific x86 hacks that need to be revisited
And re: "massive software repository": The people who are interested in rasberry pi need to be interested in it for a particular prupose... since debian has a huge software repository, there are likely many more users who will be interested in the well established linux that fits their purpose vs the port of beos with few apps
So what I interpreted from that is there is no want to do it...
That and porting your own OS is a lot different then porting a community written OS that is made to be binary compatible with another closed source OS to another architecture.
The concept of file ownership/permissions != DRM... file ownership/permissions are supposed to be a way to stop you from getting owned - the concept and implemnentation it's a simple method of sandboxing dumb users or poorly writen applications from writing to places it should not be able to. Every modern operating system does this.
I think you miss the point that he is making, with any process/application to be able to write to any other process or application, it creates a completely untrusted environment where you cannot expect the system to be in any state when you cannot completely control it's inputs. Combine that with many alternatives available that are more secure/sane by design, there aren't many uses for it...
Sure maybe it can go in a stand alone video editor... but why would you when you can put linux on that same machine and connect it to the internet/render farm and not have to worry about it getting pwned in a javascript buffer overflow
In the 90's (with the exception of monochrome displays) I don't think your monitor ever cared about the colour depth vs. resolution. It was your graphics card that cared. Your graphics card only had a limited amount of memory so maybe it could not store 24bits of colour information*786432 pixels changing/refreshing 60+ times a second. Your monitor cared only about how fast and accurately it could scan horizontally and vertically across it's shadow mask. Your monitor would have only certain clocks it could lock onto (modes) where it could excite the right red, green and blue phosphorus dots and a certain power of the electron gun(meaning cheap displays would get darker at high resolutions, or you had to modify the brightness dial when changing resolutions) - but the monitor itself could always display 24-bit colour if it could display any 256 colours. Even in 256 colour mode, many applications took advantage of modifying the colour pallet (when supported by the graphics driver) to reproduce any single colour multiple times. Applications would also use dithering to reproduce colors beyond the 256 colour or 16-bit pallet (which was most effective at high resolution). The monitors, being analog, did not care about the colour depth - they just had an analog electron gun that would excite from dark to full bright... sure, some had poor gammut or contrast... but they would still produce the picture regardless of your display mode at the resolutions it supported.
Ha, you think app stores are about saving bandwidth and they will be replaced by HTML5? What kool-aid have you been into? :)
Yeah you and me both. I owned everything from the 8-bit sound blaster (that had the proprietary CDROM interface) to the high end Audigies but that all went to shit with the SB Live and Audigy
I actually thought about giving Creative one more try and bought an Audigy 2 ZS, but it and it's drivers sucked. I traded it in (paid a hefty restocking fee) and paid extra the Asus Xonar STX.
They HAD me as a loyal customer, but now I own nothing of theirs.
Surely you jest - every motherboad I had from that era I have replaced capacitors on, then binned because it was still too slow.
You just aren't amplifying the noise anymore... the noise is still there.
I bought an Asus XONAR Essesence STX because I listen with headphones often. Best purchase ever. For headphones, you can notice the clairity difference between headphones plugged into the reciever (connected by S/PDIF) and the analog headphone port. There is NO background noise on the head phones and it can drive headphones with unreasonable power at instant permenant hearing damage levels.
For digital out, it allows the card to send a Dolby Digital signal out over the S/PDIF - which is of huge value in that it stops my reciever from switching in and out of dolby digital when I pop in a DVD. Also, I don't have to mess with the controls on the reciever. I can choose the headphone or digital out from software and leave everything connected.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can get the STX for $50 :(