So the Wii and Android versions of Netflix's client run on Silverlight? That can't be right.... since Netflix "instant" is already on many devices, maybe the time has come for the Linux and perhaps specifically the Myth community to seriously engage with Netflix on getting a version that's viable for Linux? After all, if they can make it work on Android its not too big a jump. I was given a new Samsung HDTV and it even has Netflix "built in" if one connects the ethernet jack on the TV to the network; I was to understand these embedded TV systems were mostly Linux-based. The 5 year ols Philips HDTV I'm using as a monitor is forthcoming about it - the manual and about/options screen on the TV itself has Linux kernel information and GPL stuff. The whole "it can't be financially viable" or "we don't have the capital to invest" arguments have gone out the window after all this time and development on other platforms; I don't think it is unreasonable for a full-featured Linux client.
On the contrary, overclocking is rising. On the standard PC front, it used to require highest-grade components alone, difficult-to-balance cooling (I got my "hardcore" overclocking start during the 486 era - there were some heatsinks that were so heavy that they could actually damage the motherboard), a deep knowledge of settings, and the will to do something that could very well limit your stability or cause your system damage if you fouled up.
Today many items come with a minor factory overclock, and many mid+ level components come with software (Asus is notably good here) that will allow you to overclock easily from within the OS with nearly no chance of damaging your system. Even if you go to the old-fashioned way for big gains, with most motherboards, especially OC-centric boards like Asus' Republic of Gamers (debatedly the best motherboards in existence for OCing and the enthusiast feature set) line and their Sabertooth (which comes in right under RoG boards) boards, have tons of settings to help you overclock. RoG boards have specially BIOS settings if you're going to be using LN2! AMD versions even come with tools to unlock a Phenom II or Athlon processor with limited cores - with the notable exception of Intel themselves, most hardware companies now encourage you to overclock safely and would rather provide value-added features to do so. Today if you foul up with your TIM contact and your temp raises higher, unless you've gone to a level of safety-removal that isn't necessary even for the highest "home" OCs, your board/chip will shut down way before any actual damage occurs.
There are fewer "You must buy new hardware or overclock significantly to even play X" titles out, which is a good thing, but that doesn't mean people aren't overclocking. Enthusiasts who do it for the fun of it will always do so; they like to see big numbers on benchmarks and distributed-computing apps. For those who game or want more performance, they'll continue to do so because its simply a good value. In today's economic climate especially, overclocking is favored over buying ultra-expensive computing parts which have minimal games. Intel's recent pricing and performance line up for the new Sandy Bridge-E Socket 2011 processors is very telling in this regard, and I believe proves that overclocking is quite popular.
3-4 years back, at the launch of the "Core iX series" Intel diverged with their socketing and created a two-tiered system on the desktop. Socket 1156 and the associated P55/H55 chipsets were the Mainstream platform, offering Core i3, i5 and the lowest i7-8xx series. This platform had dual channel RAM and a handful of PCI-E lanes etc... The Enthusiast platform however came on Socket 1366 and X58 chipset, holding an assortment of hyperthreaded Core i7 processors, the QuickPathInterconnect (QPI), TRI-channel RAM, more PCI-E 2.0 lanes, native support for both SLI and CrossFireX multiGPU solutions (which was a big deal as during the Core 2 era and prior, you typically had a board that could do one or the other, not necessarily both) and other great features. Power users gravitated towards 1366/X58 greatly because of overclocking potential and great value. At launch, the Core i7 920 basically had all the same cores/cache/HT as the $1000+ Extreme Edition 965/975; only the speed was different. The Core i7-920 overclocked phenomenally, reaching in excess of 3.6ghz for most enthusiasts with an after-market air cooler from their 2.6ghz start point; all without having to disable hyperthreading or any other processor features! I'm personally typing this on a i7-920 OCed to 4.0ghz on air - those with lucky chips or liquid-cooling systems could reach 4.3 stable with a minor voltage increase.
This OCing performance and value made Socket 1366 popular far beyond Intel's original predictions that it would be limited primarily to workstation use; especially as prices dropped for tri-channel RAM kits and high quality X58 motherboards. Its performance overclocked easily eclipsed the mainstream
I've always appreciated Corsair's products; in an industry where the typical MO is to push out the newest widget, sell before everyone forgets about it or gets upstaged, and never look back, they are one of the few companies that seem to understand that you're making an investment with their hardware. For instance, I wrote them a thank-you email after discovering that they offered two Upgrade Kits for their flagship 800D chassis. When the 800D first launched, SATA6 and USB3.0 weren't included. Had this been LianLi or Silverstone they would have released the "801D" and tell you to upgrade by buying a new $200+ chassis. Corsair on the other hand, offered a couple of $10 kits; one a new backplane for the hotswap SATA board, SATA 6.0 compatible and a new front port assembly with USB3.0 support. I have no second thoughts supporting them.
For years those of us trying to make significant overclocks on our PCs, but not wanting to commit to an additional $500 or so in homebuilt liquid cooling, were left to HUGE air coolers that required $80-120 investment, plus fans and cooling paste. These were huge monoliths that were heavy and difficult to install. The advent of the Corsair self-contained coolers is the first "ready for prime-time" solution that fixes this issue. You are given equal or better cooling than high end air at an equal or better price, with a much easier install process. With Sandy Bridge-E and AMD FX, we're just dipping a toe back into the days when serious cooling is necessary to attain a high overclock, so its great that this hardware is maturing now.
For anyone with a high-end air cooler or looking to build a new system and overclock it, these are probably the best off-the-shelf solutions you're going to find these days that don't have the learning curve of building and maintaining a custom-liquid setup and for most people who aren't trying to break records, they'll give you a ton of extra performance through the overclock.
If I was going to totally through ethics out the window for the pursuit of profit as an "App" developer, I'd easily choose the Apple monoculture. Lets face it, Apple users are used to being free with their money; these people were, in a year that wasn't prefixed by "199", paying $40-60 for a bloody unzipping program. Now, these same people have paid a bloody fortune for a locked down phone and again for a locked down tablet which are both predicated on an "it just works, so long as you make sure you always buy the new one" monoculture, and attached their credit card they use for impulse purchases to it That's PT Barnum-level temptation right there!
So long as one doesn't mind paying for dev access and isn't interested in making programs that strain social mores and/or step on Apple's toes, once you've made it past the gate the walled garden I'm sure appears glorious. You don't have to worry about multiple hardware/software platforms outside the well-documented and very limited iSphere, you are assured your userbase has someone's money to spend, and so long as you abide by The Apple Way For Developers (tm) and kowtow properly to cocoa and objective C, you'll probably watch the dollars roll in.
Honestly I have to say I'm a little disappointed. I know I'll probably be modded to oblivion by daring to question Google, but I really don't see the advantage to Chrome over Firefox. Five years ago Google seemed to be the type of company that actually managed to "Don't Be Evil", but in the past few years, everything from GPlus "Real Names only, thank you" to other questionable uses of personal information and privacy policy suggest that they're being cowed to the almighty dollar. Google as a company makes their money from search and ads; the latter certainly not conducive to a great browsing experience. Hence, Chrome's variant of AdBlock not truly blocking the ads and allowing them to be downloaded at one time, and nothing similar to the power of NoScript easily available. The divide between Chromium and Chrome may grow even greater, with certain features (translate etc..) only available on the proprietary tracked version.
Putting too much faith in any monoculture is a bad idea, especially if they have a vested interest in restricting or guiding your experience for their profit while having demonstrated they're not always forthcoming as to how. The Google of the "You get awesome email, we're only going to put an adwords bar up here that searches terms in your mail and not record all sorts of metrics about what you do, is great. The Google of "Real names only on our social network; anything that loses value for advertisers is a no go. We need to cross reference your want of viagra with your age and type of sexual partner to sell to our clients" is less so, despite the retractions and wobble back and forth. I still have faith that Google is nowhere near as horrid as say, Facebook but I want to let them know that their dominance isn't assured just by existing, lest they become complacent and begin "monetizing" in opposition to ethics; I want to support them providing excellent products, open communication with well understood terms that we can both agree serves our needs.
Firefox is in my experience, an excellent browser and it is one of the few examples of FOSS that fulfills both the layman and geek's needs. I have near limitless control over my browsing experience, great addons, and all without a conflict of interest with the developers. What's really amazing, is that everything from Sync to Personas and even many addon installations can easily be used by those relatively computer illiterate! When I hear geeky breathren say why they changed over to Chrome, they usually cite speed. Personally, I've not had any problems with Firefox's speed and the vast majority of those who I've spoken with who did, loaded it up with 20 addons that heavily tax the browser and RAM below it! Of COURSE bare Chrome is going to be faster if you're giving up Sync/Personas/NoScript/AdBlockPlus/Stylish+Themes/Scriptish+Scripts/Tor/FlashGot/DownloadStatusbar/HTTPSAnywhere and more! I've not met any laypeople who've switched to chrome save for a few who just "heard about it" and transitioned from IE due to advertisement. Is this the volume of switchers at hand? Normal users who just found it better than IE? Strangely, I figured most of them would already have heard about Firefox in years goneby from computer literate friends and family. I've not met one to date who switched from Firefox to Chromium so I can't list there.
Mozilla's products, including Firefox seem to be everything that the FOSS/geeky user metric wants; nearly a holy grail in that they can give limitless power to the powerusers without impeding the novice. They provide the best experience possible, customizable for any taste on any platform, without an ulterior motive contrary to the goals of the project. I don't see how Chrome even comes close, encumbered with Google's business model in mind.
If you eliminate many of the political and economic structures put in place that do not benefit doctors or patients but only enrich equipment manufacturers and big pharma, this would not be an issue. Look at the bidding a few years back on the contract for flu vaccine nasal mist that went exclusively to Med Immune, who created a couple of contaminated batches causing delay, went with the wrong strain despite being told otherwise which led to it being less effective than it could have been, and basically were allowed to be the sole manufacturer despite tons of fuckups - of course, they built a new building and showed record profits because of the contract awarded to them. We have a system now where the answer to "We need lots of influenza vaccine now!" is "create a drawn out bidding war amongst big companies for exclusive rights to manufacture it", in some cases. End that kind of thinking to save billions.
The WHO is making both correct and incorrect statements - things don't have to be completely black and white.
What was the incentive for Dr. Salk to create the polio vaccine without a patent that exclusively gave himself or a corporate backer the right to manufacture said vaccine? There are many solutions to the issue of R&D funding - I favor a bounty/reward system. It would save billions per year if we paid a "bounty" when private industry developed an otherwise patentable drug or device, which would then enter the public domain. Not unlike the telecoms, there's a huge amount of public money being funneled into private industry in the forms of grants and whatnot, but the results of said development are patented and owned by the private industry themselves. The system we have now is completely corrupt and serves to enrich the few at the cost of the many; its completely unnecessary and we can do much better.
Its so much cheaper to just let industrial runoff flow untreated into a nearby river and makes your "limited budget" go much farther, but does that make it a good idea? The whole reason that budgets are so expensive and money is so limited is due to the polices that allow the pharmaceutical industry to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else. Arguing about the additional cost of making vaccinations without toxic adulterants is like the Republicans yelling about NASA's budget being "Government Waste" while our defense spending for 2.5 wars is completely ignored.
You really can't see the benefits of eliminating not just mercury but a whole host of toxic substances? This is completely divorced from the issue of mercury in and of itself causing autism - I'm not saying that; I agree that it isn't accurate. Developing nations with poor restrictions have become dumping grounds for all sorts of hazardous substances because its cheaper. This ban isn't just about vaccines you understand, but also would keep it from being used in other forms for other uses as well. This is absolutely of paramount importance, forgetting vaccines. Vaccines are simply a wedge issue. I've seen patients who spent their childhood in developing nations and had exposure to heavy metals, organic and inorganic toxins way beyond the average American etc... all a factor in their chronic illness that when treated, gave them more of their life back than they'd ever thought possible. These are often people who have limited access to healthcare and greater exposure to risks of all sorts, so trying to regulate for the safe disposal of toxic materials and limiting both exposure and toxic burden can only benefit. Yes, its often more expensive to do things right than to halfass and harm them, but if you had a child with a compromised HLA-DR4 genotype that didn't allow them to process and excrete certain toxins nearly as well as someone with a different allele I think you'd feel differently.
America's information infrastructure has more roadblocks and half-built bridges-to-nowhere than many developed nations simply because of corporate greed. Where Asian and (some) European nations are looking towards gigabit fiber to the home and inexpensive 4G mobile plans, We in America (our Canadian, UK, and Australian friends too, if I am understanding correctly) are stuck with sky-high prices, caps and other restrictions.
Telecoms have basically bent the government to their will through extensive lobbying and backroom deals. AT&T has been broken up, reformed, broken up again and now they're set to do it again on the Mobile set by absorbing T-Mobile making them the only nationwide GSM provider in the country. Everyone else is piggybacking on Verizon's CDMA network, Sprint being the largest. Just like their landline divisions, the mobile telecoms receive large subsidies of our tax dollars every time they cry to Washington about their infrastructure - the very same infrastructure they advertise as being magically unlimited but make policies that completely oppose its perception, all the while raising direct to consumer prices. Like many other "too big to fail" businesses in the United States, all they care about is the continual dual-pronged infusion of cash from the American people direct to their quarterly statement. They maintain the absolute minimum they can justify to do this while through a combination of puppet-legislation and local business deals they lock out anyone else who might provide better service. From suing towns for implementing municipal, public fiber broadband in supposed violation of county or state wide exclusivity agreements, to not allowing any other companies to use "their" hardware be it fiber or copper in the ground, to airwaves and towers on the mobile set (Wonder why all the contract-less phones are CDMA for the most part instead of the much easier prepaid SIM GSM system that most nations have? Well, only Verizon decided it could make a profit by selling bandwidth to Sprint, Cricket, TrackFone etc.... AT&T decided they could do better by NOT allowing others to use "their" GSM towers etc...) they've created a little nest for themselves with our money.
Is it not time to take it back? The nations with the very best infrastructure, including information infrastructure have top-of-the-line hardware owned by the citizens of that nation. We already regulate information infrastructure and subsidize these telecoms to build it, but we allow them to retain private ownership of things built with public funds. Lets fix that. One of the best ways we could help to put an end to this recession would be a modern "New Deal 2: The Rooseveltening!". Lets put people to work repairing and modernizing our infrastructure, including that for information. If we truly believe that information work is one of the things that America is best at and that the Internet is of such importance, than we need to stop control of its access being in the hands of those that only care about profit.
With "We The People" owning and maintaining information infrastructure, it actually widens the gap for private business to have a role to play as well. The government could lease access to both private business and public organizations/co-ops to act as ISPs. Right now, I can't just start up a company to compete with Verizon or Comcast - they control the very lines in the ground and won't allow me to use them. Good luck getting 99% of newcomers to want to lay their own hardware and plant their own towers! Nationalized infrastructure would even the playing field completely to allow competition!
For both landline and mobile infrastructure, we have the equivalent of a patchwork system of heavily subsidized toll roads, filled with potholes. So the owners of said roads don't have the fix the potholes, they petition to set speed limits way below what they should be. With the People controlling the hardware, we'd have the same kind of success we did with the creation of Eisenhower's Inte
You're being more than a little melodramatic with your phrasing. The costs of making safer vaccines are in the range of pennies. In the particular instance of multi-use vials vs unit dosing, unit dosing is by far a more preferable way to deal with the extremely poor. Sure, per dose its more to have unit dose packaging, but if you think about the huge amounts of money that come from 'deferred" single vials its actually MUCH cheaper in the long run. There was actually a pretty decent WHO report on this not long ago that applies to ALL medicine. Basically, if someone swipes the one giant bottle/vial of vaccine or painkiller than you're out a ton of doses plus you have to deal with the not cost negative effects of black market sales (not just for abuseable substances either. In Africa for instance there's a black market of trading supposedly surplus medical supplies for other goods - of course, they're really stolen etc..).
The mildly increased cost can easily be handled by a variety of options from eliminating drug patents to making laws against these adulterants in medical equipments like some nations have done. You're not lamenting the "extra cost" of making medical supplies that don't include lead, because it has been mandated that keeping lead out of modern medical supplies is just part of manufacturing; the cost is negligible and we're all better for it. Making socially and medically viable regulations and cutting a lot of the red tape + loopholes that corps fulfilling these contracts use to save money at the cost of people's health will make sure that the most healthful drugs and supplies are produced at the lowest price.
There are multitudes of benefits that come from this kind of ban. A few cents difference on a healthful product is far from one of the major issues that organizations face getting the destitute vaccinated.
I've been involved in a lot of research regarding many persistent diseases and the poorly understood pathogens that cause them. I won't go deeply into the whole debate here but suffice it to say that no amount of mercury, regardless of form, is good for the body. While the whole "Vaccines just cause autism" thing isn't accurate either, realize that the vast majority of studies that try to say that the forms of mercury used in vaccines is safe, are paid for by industries that find it the cheapest thing to use as a stabilizer. I've personally cared for and turned around patients with many conditions from supposed "autism" and "MS", fibroymalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, by finding the real cause of their illness (these conditions are all real, but they are SYMPTOMS the same way "chest pain" is not a complete diagnosis) and sometimes that has involved vaccines, heavy metal exposure at amounts normally thought to be safe, and a variety of other facets that are dismissed by the powers that be due to hubris or financial graft.
Suffice it to say for a totally healthy individual vaccines themselves are not bad, but many of the impurities, stabilizers, and components that have little to do with the vaccine itself can cause reactions, including latent reactions or add to a cumulative issue. From mercury derivatives to allergens to preservatives, most are included because of cost and shelf life - cutting a few cents here and there or making something shelf stable for 5 years instead of two. Patients should have the option to select for vaccines without these cost-cutting adulterants, but because of corporate greed and their vehement and unethical protest that these ingredients are safe, they don't even create alternate variants. Its important to note that because of patents that shouldn't exist in the first place, this also stops 3rd party labs from compounding safer versions.
There is nothing wrong with this ban - if it forces others to adapt and make safer vaccines then its a great benefit. Unfortunately, I'm worried that the usual bureaucratic nightmare will occur, the right palms will be greased, and exceptions will be made. Write your representatives supporting this ban and/or get involved with advocacy groups like the Organic Consumers Association. There is absolutely no threat by this ban save to the pockets of the greedy and unethical and its passage will go a long way toward less environmental toxins in many facets of industry.
I am and that makes my point even more valid. He spent his first big break's millions on the kind of stuff typical to entertainers, especially rappers for the need of street cred, wasn't smart with his money and ended up with very little. He found a way to make himself relevant again and pay his bills, so this time he's using surplus funds not just to buy something expensive for the hell of it or impress MTV, but to invest in something that will hopefully not just pay off for him, but provide a useful web service for many users. That's a positive conversion as I look at it. He could probably even make more money talking or writing about his experiences to provide a benefit to lots of other young aspiring hip hop moguls.
More power to him to use his money for a positive investment. While I'm a great fan of outright philanthropy, I think that investment in startups and/or local businesses is a great thing for those in the entertainment industry to get into. Especially with how most rappers invest most their money into their "crib", jewelery, guns, and perhaps the "gold plated item" industries, or at best creating their own line of "urban" attire, music labels that often propagate stereotypes and either embody or are involved in societal-damaging behaviors (If you're a hip hop mogul who sells expensive brand name clothes and then backs a music label who's "real" artists rap about gangsta life persuits giving the huge amounts of money necessary to outfit yourself in those particular clothes, it creates a culture where young kids think that gangbanging is the only "down" way to be able to afford that expensive track suit you're hawking). - this is a good move.
Its nice to see a hip-hop star investing in something that isn't directly tied to 'hood concepts of street cred. Perhaps eventually it will be cool for rappers who make it to invest in a locally made, affordable set of shoes for instance, instead of talking about thousand-dollar "kicks" and champagne as good ways to spend your money.
Lets not undervalue Ubuntu, nomatter their WM
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For what its worth, Ubuntu has probably been the biggest step forward for Linux on the desktop to date. Past advances like Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros and others made some headway towards making Linux something besides "You need either a CLI or what appears to be a DOS-era interface to install it", but they all had their drawbacks (ie RPM hell). Ubuntu was the first to come along and make desktop user experience a primary impetus while having means/money/marketing to help make it so - even if we don't necessarily agree with all their decisions.
To many/. readership sure some talk about it being too "hand-holdy", but that's what Linux truly needs. There are tons of distros out there for the "do it yourself" set, but few for those who don't have the know how or wish to make maintaining/building their OS a hobby in itself. It took the multitude of Debian resources and condensed them down into what could generally be useful to a variety of users; from "grandma" total newbies to Linux to inexperienced server admins, to those who want to build a Mythbuntu home automation setup. It has also given birth to tons of forks that really provide excellent experience and gives a whole different class of maintainers and easy to fork and administer base. LinuxMint, PCLinuxOS , and Pinguy all go out of their way to take Ubuntu one step further and provide even more specialized features and feel for the desktop user. A user can start up an Ubuntu variant or especially a derivative like Pinguy and say "Wow, that's cool" while actually being able to DO things from the start.
This is not to say that constructive criticism isn't warranted - for instance, I think that UbuntuOne needs to be greatly improved to be worthwhile; if it can't pretty much outdo Dropbox and SpiderOak (especially the latter with security) it may not be worthwhile. I would like them to spend the same care on the *buntu variants - Kubuntu's KDE is often behind and sometimes much different and less usable than say, Arch Linux's version - as they do on the main Gnome version. Xubuntu and Lubuntu especially could use some of that desktop magic. A long time ago for instance I was using XFCE as a relative Linux newbie and couldn't figure out why Thunar wasn't able to browse my SAMBA shared folders, only to eventually figure out "it wasn't supposed to". That kind of stuff isn't viable for desktop users especially those who want lightweight but full featured Ubuntu experiences, so go ahead and make sure there are the proper plugins to manage files on the local network. It wouldn't hurt to have updates for certain programs an easy to understand option - a tickbox to use WINE's repository instead of the official Ubuntu one which will almost always be an old version.
Unity is now the big discussion point but I worry that, especially advanced Linux users, are overreacting and not seeing the big picture. I've not used Unity, only seeing it in pictures. Is it possible that this is a good design for an AVERAGE user? Desktop Linux beginners and even some intermediate+ users feel that its a good UI? If you don't like it you have tons to choose from, but they need something they can use immediately. If its "like their phone", is it possible that this is a good thing in that they'll see some familiarity? From my understanding GNOME is basically driving towards a cliff. Gnome2, the variant that the most users like, is EOLed and Gnome3 is going to be the new wave. Sure, there's a fork of 2 and all that but I'm guessing that the standard Ubuntu interface isn't going to be it. Now personally, I'd like to have both Unity and GNOME3 installed (my understanding is that "Gnome3" is the Traditional Desktop option or whatever for Ubuntu 11.10?...or is it GNOME 2? ) to give the most compatibility with such things as advanced drivers and the like. While both GNOME3 and Unity are seen as being limited or dumbed down, one similar to OSX and the other to a cell phone UI, is it possible these are good paradigms for many users? OSX is seen as being "pretty
This is clearly not true. There are many variations in what a culture considers "greed" to begin with, much less "acceptable" amounts of greed, how it is focused, and where it can be directed in a society safely.
Dainsanefh is correct that, for the most part, Japan's current issues have come from emulation of Western, specifically American hyper-capitalist lassiez-faire, right wing business efforts. However, the Japanese people's values are not in line with this when it conflicts with the well being of society. This is one reason that for the first time the LDP was ousted in favor of the further-Left DPJ party. While in America we have a poisonous culture of "I'll get mine no matter how much it screws you - after all ", Japan's more collective focused culture and ethics staunchly rejected the post-Bubble emulation of American business methodology since the 80s - they started to say "enough is enough" far before we did.
Greed, much like capitalism or any sort of financial system or impetus cannot simply be allowed to roam free - it MUST be bent to the good of society lest you have the problems we have now where the many suffer because an unethical few have taken too much and altered the system to protect their theft. Implying that it is natural to let greed thrive as it will and that there haven't been societies that have worked diligently to limit the damage it can do is an insult.
As someone who bought and played FFXIV at launch, I'll give them a chance again but there needs to be universal improvement. Heck, even the sign-up/account management for Final Fantasy XI and XIV is the most convoluted thing possible - there are a handful of usernames, passwords, emails etc.. that, when I was there, was a world away from the easy sign-ups of any other MMORPG. I wanted to use my old FFXI account again, but between my "SquareEnix Online", "PlayOnline", "Square.com" etc... accounts I couldn't even find the right place to query for my forgotten login data. Convoluted and one hasn't even logged into the game.
However, I'm proud of Japanese developers. They've "gotten it" as evidenced by the "Free XIV until we fix it" plan, but what's more is unlike so many American developers these days, they didn't just say "Fuck you, its perfect, if you don't like it suck a dick and give me $15 for 3 more DLC maps right fucking now". This is where Japanese developers can shine and get back into the race.
Japanese honor and pride in their work is the perfect medicine for the way gaming is headed today driven by limitless greed. Tons of expensive DLC everwhere, foolish DRM, MMOs going "Free2Play" and ultimately costing you more than $15 subscription dollars to get less content than ever because of a combination of unmitigated greed-based business plans (Thanks a lot to Apple and all the other companies who proved "Rubes will buy anything" is a good business plan!), and younger generations of gamers who open their wallets for anything nomatter how egregious without thinking or questioning; the sort who actually defend selling single items (or worse, "renting" them) for $25 when those of us remember that used to buy you a complete Expansion Pack not that long ago.
For years Japanese developers and publishers didn't quite "get it", a problem both cultural and business-wise, but now that they do perhaps they can bring back selling a complete game product for a singular price, without having to pre-order, pay $90 for a downloadable "Digital Deluxe Edition" to get all the in-game items (Looking at you, Mass Effect 3), buy tiny little drops of content for $5-15 etc.
Perhaps Japan can bring back pride in one's product to AAA game development, rather than creating the most "effective revenue stream".
I think the Level 7 Escape comment says enough to either prove complete naivete or complete ignorance:
How to escape: Exiting the circle of company-on-company violence may only be possible via collective action, says O'Berry. "When you squeeze the ecosystem only to your advantage, not caring about the companies you've killed along the way, eventually people will say enough is enough," says O'Berry. "We need to balance our capitalistic nature with some form of societal responsibility."
In the last thirty years the only people saying "enough is enough" have have been everything from summarily ignored to blackballed for being an "Evil socialist who hates capitalism, job creators, and prosperity and wants to punish all the John Galts of the world who are smart enough to be granted their Austrian-school due; If they can't keep up with the invisible hand, then they should be content for the perfect theory of 'Trickle Down Economics' to provide for them".
The world is facing the global recession it is because these monstrosities have taken every opportunity to exploit more and more while convincing more than half the working poor that any regulations will keep them from being able to be rich "on their own merits" too, one day. Country-wide prosperity is at its highest (as it its HDI) when the political system shifts towards a parliamentary democracy and the economic system is mixed strongly dominated by modern socialist principles.
Unfortunately it seems that the high standards of living these systems evolve will undoubtedly create some myopic, avaricious individuals that have the intellect, skills, and stability (who conveniently forget that society directly and indirectly helped them attain these attributes) to work towards taking as much as they can, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else. To date, most modern developed nations are not fault tolerant against greed and it will take massive changes to implement systems that are, but it is of paramount importance that we do so immediately to stave off calamity.
There is a much larger percentage of the educated populace who feel that enough is never enough and their sophomoric narcissism ensures they feel entitled to make decisions that have immediate and direct negative consequences to their subordinates, the business, or the world at large, so long as it leads to their short term financial gain. The sooner we can, from the ground up, build our systems of business and governance to limit the amount of damage greed can do, the better.
I'm still happily a Firefox user. Mozilla has given me an open-source browser with nigh-limitless user customization and control, with seemingly the least amount of conflicts of interest embroiled in its development. The entire Chrome ecosystem seems to be part of Google's recent wave of bad decisions that seems to highlight they can no longer be trusted to act in the best interest of the user and privacy, when there is money to be made; contrary to the Google of five years ago who seemed to be able to resist the void.
Chrome as a browser seems to be better serving Google's needs than the user's needs. Be it the lack of comprehensive AdBlock,NoScript, and HTTPSEverywhere addons (and tons of others) and other user privacy settings, Chrome vs Chromium "conveniences" and other issues, its appearing more and more to me like a better version of IE - integrated and serving Google instead of Microsoft. That's not what I want in my web browser.
Especially amongst the educated, open-source and privacy knowledgeable community I'm surprised how many have switch to Chrome, typically citing resource or speed uses. I really don't think its acceptable to be the sort of person who runs 20 high-end addons including a ton of Stylish and Greasemonkey scripts and then says the browser is using a lot of memory with your sixteen tabs open.
Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla projects are more important now than ever - open source, standards compliant, privacy respecting, user focused and customizable. Everyone here would balk if I suggested we should all switch to Internet Explorer, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, and Skype because of convenience - Why kowtow to a monoculture just because its Google? This is not to say never use Google products, but we need to make it perfectly clear that we do so because they offer terms that serve our needs, including privacy, as users - not because we have so much invested we're now locked in. Google's gleaming facade has dulled considerably with some of their more recent decisions and spots of possible greed, arrogance, and apathy may be showing up - they need to know that we won't stand for it.
While Firefox isn't perfect, I urge everyone to be alert and make their usage decisions with the long-term ramifications in mind. In a world where most business interests would rather have you access their "cloud" services through a dumb client, completely on their terms, we need to stick up for some of the last bastions of user focused software that can be introduced to laypeople with ease and show them a real difference in the experience! How many of you introduced a friend or relative to open source software with a Mozilla product, which they found to give them better security, privacy, features, and customization? That's worth its weight in gold, so to speak. Sure, the geek community will always be able to roll up Midori or Lynx or some sort of other custom Gecko/WebKit browser from the bowels of a repository, but Firefox is relatively unique in that its features are nearly as accessible, secure, and powerful for the layman as they are for the guru. Trading that in for a product which is controlled by a corporation who's shortest distance to money infringes on user privacy and security is not a smart idea.
I'm going to pick up both Stephenson's book and the interesting looking Ready Player One. That said, I think most of the discussion here is linked to Stephenson's comment on the Metaverse and gaming/MMOs. It seems, as others have said that he didn't anticipate that gaming would begin to foster these virtual worlds in the way it did. I've seen many discussing over the past few years that basically "WoW is the Way Forward" and that is understandable if you realize those who chant such things are entities or hopeful corporate entities that will profit from such a narrow vision.
Since the beginning of persistent world gaming, there have been "Sandbox" MMOs - those of Ultima Online, and MUD/MOO heritage. Players have an integral ability to create and alter the world, or rules of the world. Later, came out of the idea to replicate a persistent world where one could play AD&D online, came the "Theme Parks", such as Meridian 59 and EverQuest. These focused less on player creation and more on players undertaking content created by the developer of the MMO, acting as sort of a Dungeon Master. World of Warcraft is the latest, and most populous incarnation of this gametype. By nature, Theme Park worlds are more accessible to a larger percentage of the public and that is part of the reason they're standing at the forefront today. The other reason of course, is technological - having users accessing ready-made content within certain parameters is MUCH easier than allowing them a much wider field of freedom. In something like a text-MUD its a lot easier to program in the ability for the user to do something complex and show it actually happening.
However, Sandbox MMOs have always been sitting on the sidelines. The best two examples of graphical Sandboxes in recent memory are Minecraft: where graphics are simple enough and there are some very basic literal "building block" rules, with all the content created by those on the server, and Second Life - the "hallmark" paradigm shift that was thought to be next step forward in Internet use and pretty much was the Metaverse-incarnation with the most comprehensive featureset.
Second Life gave the users the ability to create just about anything, given the Internet bandwidth and processing powers of the time. Any user could build, skin and even script functionality into the world, using textures and resources from anywhere, using built in 3d-modeling and scripting software. What's more is that the developer, Linden Labs set themselves up as a bank, transferring in-game dollars to real money and vice-versa. Charging real rent for plots of virtual land, around $250 monthly for a "zone", users set up their own economy. Anyone who took the time to make a chair could set up a virtual storefront to sell it for currency that could eventually be transferred into real money! Real estate owners leased space in their zones to those who wanted to run a virtual dance club, Kung-Fu fighting simulation, casino, or sex club, and those areas all had attractions or items for sale that cost money. Soon, many net-savvy businesses started to create Second Life presences; you could go to a virtual Nike shop and have your avatar try on a pair of the newest Nikes available, crafted in exacting quality. Blogs and even paper journalism started interviewing entrepreneurs that made their living in Second Life. Part of "Internet Cultural History" is of course the interview with the avatar named Anshe Chung, a SL real estate mogul who was one of the first real USD millionaires who made their fortune entirely in SL. Of course, what we all remember about that interview...were the cocks.
When the virtual-journalist and Ms. Chung sat down to discuss economics in a virtual world, thousands of flying, noise-making penises accosted the entire zone in one of the most infamous spam attacks in Second Life history. The interview had to be stopped and eventually proceeded in a properly secured area. Second Life had become a 3d microcosm of the Internet and as such... there were a lot of
A couple years back I built a Socket 1366 rig - Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.8ghz, 6gb tri-channel RAM that if I felt the need could head up to 12gb relatively cheap these days, and a nice X58 Asus RoG motherboard with great features. It has basically carried me through and surpassed the Intel mainstream 1156 and compares easily to the Sandy Bridge 1155 i7-2600 etc. However, its finally getting to the end of its life - after an unheard of 3 years - and I'm trying to decide what to do next.
My first idea was to wait for Socket 2011, which is to Socket 1366 as Socket 1155 is to 1156. Its the next generation of the "Intel Enthusiast/Workstation" platform. Unfortunately, it appears that Intel is determined to put a stop to the very thing that made them successful with 1366 last time by making moronic cuts in features while increasing price. The $300 part is a lowly Quad core, with less cache. Then you have the option of a $600-700 Hex, with a bit more cache, but a locked multiplier, and finally you have to buy the Extreme to get the full package not just in speed, but in everything else as well. For those of us with Core i7 920/930 rigs it isn't worth buying a $300 processor that's marginally better than one from 3 years ago! Where are the offerings that, aside from speed, have all the features of Extreme without the pricetag? I can't justify this, and it seems a poor decision to launch with this crap, especially requiring a new X79 board and Quad-Channel RAM kit, if Ivy Bridge is right around the corner. Thus, I worry that Ivy, which stands to be a real leap forward, is going to be pushed back even farther after Intel realizes that SB-E on 2011 isn't making them as wealthy as they wished. I'd much rather them have brought Ivy out and just waited to keep 2011 until then, and follow it with the mainstream Ivy, much like the first-gen i7 1366 release.
It would be perfect for AMD to push Bulldozer and Piledriver into this gap, especially if they can put forth reasonable real-world performance, to give those enthusiasts annoyed by Intel's pricing another option. Sadly, I worry that Bulldozer is not up to the task as they've been waffling on it save for the business-level releases; by the time its out it will be near obsolete. I'd much rather they just release immediately with the 900-series chipset and then bring Piledriver out for the holidays or January. I'd really like to be done with Intel, but if there's such a huge gap between an OC'ed SB-E or IB, and Dozer/Pile as there has been in the past, I'm not sure if it will meet my needs. I can't spend money to "upgrade" to a AM3+ chip that will be less powerful than my current 1366 setup.
Again Intel seems to be swinging their weight around as they always do when they basically remain uncontested at the mid-grade and higher, while we all suffer. I love what AMD has done with their platform - great integrated, nice high-end chipset features, great prices, excellent integration with high-end PCI-E AMD GPUs, which are pretty awesome in their own right (I have a 6970 on my current system. An excellent investment, and the drivers/experience is better than Nvidia in many cases), but if the power gap continues to be so large, I don't see how I can justify what may barely be called an "upgrade". Here's hoping that AMD pulls out the stops and forces Intel to understand they're not the only game in town.
I'm not sure that we should be focusing on the sub-200 spot at all. The greatest gains are in the 250-550 range; exponential power increases over something at the extreme low-end and newer tech too. I am assuming this is "building an inexpensive PC for anyone" focused more than "building for the extremely impoverished" which really shouldn't even be thought of in terms of retail - either donated/refurbished foundation hardware, and laptops at best, provide for that resource.
As others have shown, the article's box is really not that great and for the same or a little more you can do a lot better. Just buying bundles and sale items from Newegg, Microcenter/Fry's can do MUCH better. Also, its important to note that bargain basement is not always the best way to go, especially with components like PSUs. I also believe we need to start defining what "The Computer" requires. There's been more debate than ever on the nature of including an optical drive or not in this thread, and clearly including a modern LCD monitor (20", widescreen) is going to easily put a few hundred more dollars to the cost of the build. Finally, I think we need to start taking second-hand components into consideration. Here are my opinions on the "questionables"
1. Keyboard and Mouse - Depends. If a first-time buyer or intended as an "always on" PC (no switching existing inputs for maintenance) these are necessary. Thankfully, they're also inexpensive. A cheap optical mouse can be had for as little as $5-10 today. Likewise, keyboards. Spending a little more on each will provide powerful 5-7 button mice and ergonomic keyboards. This should probably be considered after the system is otherwise built and if necessary, equipped with the leftover money and to the user's specs (ie. if this is going to be a HTPC, then wireless may be a good option if available)
2. Optical and/or USB storage - One or the other is mandatory, but it really depends on again the user's situation. Where are they getting their OS? If this is their first PC they have no way to write a Linux distro to a USBkey, but they CAN get a free or ultra low cost disc from one of the linux burning programs. Internal are cheaper, but external are far more flexible - these days I have a single, external DVD SuperMulti DL (Which doesn't require an AC adapter) drive that I use whenever I need to install something from disc (save for the one that came in my laptop). There's also the consideration that typically discs "Just Work" even in Linux, but there can be some annoyances getting a USB drive or SD card flagged, formatted, and mounted properly to replicate a disc. Is there an equivalent of something as easy as "Linux Live USB Creator" on Linux itself? If you opt to go without optical, there needs to be a software way to ensure that USB or cards can replicate optical in every meaningful way. Of course, this may become impossible if you have a user that often buys media on disc, unless they wish to start getting said media from elsewhere.
3. Monitor - Its hard to justify that a monitor is absolutely required in this day and age, when most households have one or more "monitors" of their own - TVs I see monitors as separate component and for most users it works out this way. Sure, its nice to be able to give your desktop PC its own discrete monitor, and you can do it at a relatively affordable price, but it isn't necessary at time of build for MOST users. Some will already have another monitor from an older PC and many who are not technically inclined think you "have" to upgrade the monitor - that's how big box stores tend to sell PCs. Learning that they can use the perfectly fine on they already have usually makes many users happy. In the case of those that don't have a discrete PC monitor yet, but have relatively modern TVs in the house, this is an easy issue to solve. This group makes up a larger percentage of users than one would think - there are homes with 1990s PCs w/14" CRTs or no PC at all, but equipped with one or more 480p compli
I see many posts trying to distill Anonymous into a single paradigm that can be judged authoritatively from an outside point of view; this is in error. Anonymous, in their construction, goals, and skills, has grown into a complex multi-celled organism that, without having a predicable growth cycle or direction, acts - sometimes in what appears to be indirect opposition to itself.
Take for instance the "Doing it for the lulz" element. There are those within who basically seek to undermine the exploits of other members (while, totally adverse to outside influences doing the same. Something of a "I can beat up on my brother, but anyone else who tries gets his ass handed to him) in indirect ways. They appear to mock the "We Are Legion" elements that undergo targeted political actions and instead co-opt some of the group's resources for more chaotic endeavors. These can range from humorous forms of trolling (ie. creating a certain avatar at Habbo Hotel and blocking the pool, announcing it is "Closed due to AIDS") to more malicious attacks on individuals, usually through the release of embarrassing personal information. Now, within this subgroup there are those that only expose those that "deserve" it, be it some member of their own community who harmed the organization, and those that take a more random approach (Hey, I found this guy's credit card, lets order a dozen pizzas!). Making it even more complex, there are many who ridicule the "newfags" who have morally directed action to seem "cool, like an oldfag" harkening back to a mostly fictitious time when their actions were entirely chaotic and based exclusively upon a narrow definition of lulzy. However, these same individuals also take part in "moral" campaigns that interest them, and apply their skills towards various ends.
That's only one tiny sub-sub-sub categorization of Anonymous, so you can see how far-reaching and complex this societal-organism has grown. Add in things like "COINTELPRO" attempts by private and occasionally documented public interests to perform damaging "agent provocateur" attacks (for instance, one of their tiers of Sony CC hacking initially tried to represent themselves as Anonymous, but were rebuked by "proper" Anonymous (and how exactly that authority is gained is an entire post in itself) and shown to be linked to groups directed by various governments to take advantage of the breech to provide a fear-climate during to crack down on the internet, when so many bills were up to provide corporate control. There are of course, rogue elements that grow from, or use the mantle of Anonymous of its own as well, but tend to fall under a system of self-policing when they overstep certain bounds - for instance, when someone tried to rally Anonymous to hack, protest, and even bomb abortion clinics, they were not only turned down, but faced the wrath of the organization themselves! . This is to say nothing going into the various tiers of loose structure within Anonymous itself and all the tasks, skills, ideologies, and command structures working in parallel, often invisible to one-another save in certain occasions - going into that would make this long post even longer, but definitely warrants a level of respect.
Overall, "proper" Anonymous has likely done more good than ill in its years of operation. Besides being nearly totally responsible for exposing Scientology as a corrupt and dangerous cult and changing their perception in the media from "That weird thing celebrities do" to "Oh, that's the crazy H-Bomb volcano alien thing that costs millions of dollars to level up and makes you cut off ties to your family" (and the subsequent loss of CoS tax exempt status in many jurisdictions - Texas and Germany come to mind in specific), they've provided tons of evidence of the corruption of Western (and especially American) governments who act as nothing more than puppets for corporate interests. Take for instance the Bank of America leaks, plus the HBGary Federal exposure, and the work of many who unveiled acts of c
Activision's business strategy started out appalling and has only gotten worse. Unfortunately, the same is true of games published under their umbrella and with their financial interests in mind. Blizzard, as a quasi-autonomous entity spent a great deal of time making great games with long-term plans, such as making a Mac client back when the Mac gamer populace was abysmally small. This investment ensured that those Mac users who did want to game or play a MMORPG, would have their product as the premiere option. I'm confident if ActiBlizz was running the show back in those days, the typical hyper-capitalist corrupt short-term plunder mindset would have executives saying "Why waste all those man hours making sure the game works on Macs? Look at the small marketshare - its all worthless artsy kids who don't play games".
While they've been running down this horrible road for awhile, Diablo takes a BIG step forward or rather, two of them. First of course, is the "always online" DRM. Though not the first to try, it has always gone horribly with the userbase (See: Ubisoft). The sheer arrogance of telling me that I can't play a game that has no technical reason to be online, without kneeling mouth open at their UDP Port, is bloody insulting. Its indicative of typical Western (definitely American) business that sees the customer as the enemy and that they are simply owed any money they may ask for, nomatter the product or conditions thereof. When the game industry found out "Hey, if we ALL sell a single weapon for $5, 3 maps for $15, and charge a $60 starting base price then it becomes normative", things got even worse - not a SINGLE major AAA publisher took the other route and said "You know what, we're going to give people a fantastic fucking experience at reasonable prices and no cash grabs, all items included, even cosmetic. If its enough content to be like the expansion packs we remember from the 90s, then we'll sell one of those" (and no, do not start with me about Valve. TF2 Hats and Portal 2 7.99 Bot Hipster Glasses + $2.99 unlockable emotes squarely disqualify them).
As others have mentioned, there are many people who for whatever reason, would play Diablo 3 offline. Maybe they want to hack characters and give themselves unlimited stats? Maybe they want to dupe items for their LAN game and use other cheats? Maybe they just don't like playing with others due to maturity issues with the populace? Perhaps they travel a lot for work, or have insufficient connectivity for another reason? It shouldn't be up to Activision to dictate that all these people, for no technical reason, shouldn't be able to play the game they installed. Starcraft II started a backlash that at least allowed people to play offline modes as a "guest", but sadly lacks true LAN play as well. Diablo 3's dev team should have learned from this. People are still playing the original Starcraft and Diablo II, and they do so in a variety of ways that will be impossible under Diablo 3's connectivity requirements. This arrogance should not be rewarded, and I hope that there is enough pre-launch backlash to change the issue (see: Real ID full name display on forums). Sadly, I don't have the confidence that at launch enough people will abstain from buying to make a difference, but it would be a welcome sight.
The second issue is possibly far worse and exemplifies greed at some of its most blatant - the Real Money Transfer (RMT) Auction System in Diablo 3. While RMT has always been an issue with online games that require currency to acquire special items in amounts that are inconvenient for players who refuse to grind, it has always been relegated to a Chinese-controlled black market of sorts. Sometimes the currency and items were duped, came from hacked accounts, or were otherwise against the TOS. Even that acquired by electronic sweatshop workers was considered a breach of TOS to make in-game currency have real-world value. While in the East there are many "Item Shop" MMOs that lack any sort of subscription or client fee,
Much of it is "optional" the same way that Android's tracking is "optional". Sure, you can opt out of many things, but when convenience features require you to agree to user tracking and thus Google's retention policies which are often very different from Firefox's, its still not a good situation. Its much like disabling the air conditioning, GPS, heated seats, and power locks and stating that someone else gets to LoJack your vehicle if you turn any of these features on. Sure, the car "runs", but many people are going to want air conditioning and having someone else tracking you should not be a use condition of said feature. Browsers like SRWare Iron and other specialized Chromium builds are specifically designed to remedy these issues and typically have links about the differences and issues with Google's privacy policies, if you'd like to read up. For another perspective, go and search around for marketing and promotion sites in conjunction with Chrome - you'll find there are more than a few that are positively giddy over the prospects of Google's data mining tech through Chrome, how to best make use of it and offer it to customers, and why stingy-old-Firefox is so backwards and annoyingly protective of that user data.
There was a time when Google managed to do the impossible - balance the technological ability to do something profitable, with the ethics of implementation. They found a way to sell ads that were unobtrusive when the average where garish flash popups with sound. They made some really great software that, though it was ad supported, always was implemented in such a way that you never felt your privacy was in danger. Grepping a few words from an email for an ad is one thing, but saving every word I've ever written or received and selling the analysis of the above to the highest bidder? Not okay.
Lately, Google has been making choices lately that seem like the typical hyper-capitalist short-term-profit-at-any-cost sludge, especially relating to privacy. You end up having to give up more and more, letting more information be collected, stored, analyzed with less control over where it goes. The recent Google+ decision to mandate real meatspace names is the latest and more troubling. Despite the fact that people are gradually waking up to the "Fuck the stupid people for trusting me" privacy hole created by Zuckerberg in Facebook, Google didn't capitalize on differentiating Google+ by saying "Hey, you can use Google+ the way you want and with the privacy you're comfortable using. Hell, you can appear as different people to different other users or circles". No, they seemingly took the same road that having real names and, added to the multitude of info-tracking Google services, can log huge amounts of useful pertinent information to be available to those buying ad-space and mining data. Even in Android you have to capitulate to a lot of unnecessary data mining and recording to have access to relatively basic Google applications. Even Chrome, (and especially the feature gap between Chrome and Chromium) is unsettling - you're agreeing to far more tracking than its chief competitor, Firefox. Its disconcerting that so many geeks will take autotranslate and a little speed over the total control and web experience of Firefox. Even the crippled way "Ad blockers" work on Chrome illustrates the conflict of interest between Google, a company that sells advertising, and making a web browser where a user has control over what ads they wish to have loaded on their machine.
I just can't trust them any longer that "Don't be Evil" is winning out over the creeping greed that seems to have a controlling stranglehold on American business. Google may ride high on selling user data for the next few years, but as people increasingly awake to the fact they are no longer any different from the previous "Evil Empires", they'll be put to the wayside. This may take longer than "traditional" bad guys, especially with today's web populace, but it will happen. I'll be one of the first to leave if they don't get their act together - fewer and fewer entities on the web, especially private corps, have any respect for the concept of privacy and I'm willing to support those who do.
You know what would be an "ultra" book to me? A notebook using premium parts and the highest power/formfactor ratio around, that uses hardware compatible with Linux, ideally through documented firmware, open source firmware/drivers etc. The vast majority of laptops today, despite the upswing in laptop viability and explosion of the market (The idea of a moderately powered laptop under $3000 is easily attainable), seem to be designed extremely poorly, to "lowest common denominator" standards. Who are they designed for? Nearly all of the $1000+ and $2000+ niche offerings, clearly preferred by discriminating clientele with particular tastes, all seem to lack at least one "common sense" feature.
Take for instance "desktop replacements" and"gaming laptops". They're heavy, they're relatively powerful. Most of them are Clevo rebrands, or upjumped consumer crap like today's Alienware. However, they almost always have exactly zero "amenities". You've got an 8lb, 2inch thick monstrosity, but its only built out of of cheap plastic? You couldn't fit a backlit keyboard in there? You have the unmitigated gall to solder the processor in? You're using a low quality display? Unbelievable.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the "executoys", which are generally somewhere between ultralight MacBook Air and something like the Sony Z. Now, the Sony Z is actually one of the closest "Ultrabooks" I was looking at - awhile back it was the way to get a 1600x900 or 1920x1080 LED backlit high color gamut display, moderate graphics, and a Core i7-620 all crammed into 13" of aluminum and carbon fiber, with a backlit keyboard. Unfortunately, it was made so poorly and proprietary, keeping all the "Good options" for Japan only, you could easily spend $3000 for the "signature" edition and be stuck with some sort of crafty quad-SSD abomination that doesn't support TRIM (in Japan, you could include a normal HDD or secondary normal SSD if you didn't mind going without the BluRay burner). Even at all this, you have to use years old Sony NVIDIA drivers because even their binaries don't work...good luck if you don't use windows? Most other "Executoys" and ultralights are even worse, offering less power for exorbitant prices and narrow definitions under which their "power savings" are viable.
As much as I hate to admit it, the only two notebooks I see that even approach the "ultrabook" moniker at various times of their launching are the Mac Book Pro and HP Envy. They attempt to bring the most power into a reasonably small form factor, use high quality materials and add lots of little quality extras. Yes, you pay for it and I've no problem with that, save for the fact that I don't want to even give a cent to Apple idologically as I disagree with nearly every other item they sell on one level or another, and supporting HP, despite the very good fact that the Envy team is divorced from the typical crapfest, is still supporting HP and their spyware heavy, reliability light common notebooks. At the time, I found the Envy 14 the best compromise around ( Sadly, lacking USB3.0 for a reason I can't fathom, but the Radiance display is one of the best ever made on a notebook. That was the first thing they discontinued), but I would have liked a few more choices.
If Intel wants to bring people back onto purchasing powerful notebooks, then they ought to start with the high end who are willing to spend money on power and features. Start with the MacBook Pro, and do equal or better at a lower price. Yes, that means USB3, SATA6e,and Thunderbolt. Yes, that means highest end mobile i7 quads/hexes when available and AMD 6700-6900+ mobile graphics options (and get them ready sometime before the next gen of desktop cards is about to release for fuck's sake), backlit keyboards , metal chassis options, modular bays, and standard connectors. Use latest generation Li-Poly batteries, and systems like the HP Envy's "slice" battery to extend battery life without being unsightly or cumbersome. Use Apple's design weaknesses against them, put a damn
The problem is when someone else makes the choice to share your information instead of yourself. I have an unlisted number and have placed myself on many do-not-call/cold call lists, but that doesn't mean I can't personally hand my card to someone that I wish to have my number. People should be able to use G+ as they wish, including without including their real name. Perhaps you're comfortable with having your real name, but not your zip code displayed. Perhaps I'm the reverse. Perhaps I want a G+ identity that has nothing to do with my real world identity, which in turn I use to connect with others online without having to volunteer my meatspace information. What if we're friends in real life and want me to be in your circle, but knowing and respecting my online privacy belief, is it really a problem to have Guy McGuyerton in your circle instead of my real name? We still get the benefit of sending information back and forth, but without a 3rd party able to snoop in - you know that Guy is really Steve from down the street, and he's RSVPed to your party, while Steve takes comfort in knowing that (barring a breech of trust), though YOU know his ID, those on the outside don't.
Social networking can be done privately and with each person volunteering the amount of information they feel comfortable including. However, when a service doesn't give you a choice on certain options because it makes you a less valuable "product" for their business plan, that generates a conflict of interest. Social networks have the privacy holes they do because of greed, not because they are somehow inexorably linked to social networking as a concept. Users should have absolute control of what they wish to volunteer to a given social network.
Slashdot Mirror
So the Wii and Android versions of Netflix's client run on Silverlight? That can't be right.... since Netflix "instant" is already on many devices, maybe the time has come for the Linux and perhaps specifically the Myth community to seriously engage with Netflix on getting a version that's viable for Linux? After all, if they can make it work on Android its not too big a jump. I was given a new Samsung HDTV and it even has Netflix "built in" if one connects the ethernet jack on the TV to the network; I was to understand these embedded TV systems were mostly Linux-based. The 5 year ols Philips HDTV I'm using as a monitor is forthcoming about it - the manual and about/options screen on the TV itself has Linux kernel information and GPL stuff. The whole "it can't be financially viable" or "we don't have the capital to invest" arguments have gone out the window after all this time and development on other platforms; I don't think it is unreasonable for a full-featured Linux client.
On the contrary, overclocking is rising. On the standard PC front, it used to require highest-grade components alone, difficult-to-balance cooling (I got my "hardcore" overclocking start during the 486 era - there were some heatsinks that were so heavy that they could actually damage the motherboard), a deep knowledge of settings, and the will to do something that could very well limit your stability or cause your system damage if you fouled up.
Today many items come with a minor factory overclock, and many mid+ level components come with software (Asus is notably good here) that will allow you to overclock easily from within the OS with nearly no chance of damaging your system. Even if you go to the old-fashioned way for big gains, with most motherboards, especially OC-centric boards like Asus' Republic of Gamers (debatedly the best motherboards in existence for OCing and the enthusiast feature set) line and their Sabertooth (which comes in right under RoG boards) boards, have tons of settings to help you overclock. RoG boards have specially BIOS settings if you're going to be using LN2! AMD versions even come with tools to unlock a Phenom II or Athlon processor with limited cores - with the notable exception of Intel themselves, most hardware companies now encourage you to overclock safely and would rather provide value-added features to do so. Today if you foul up with your TIM contact and your temp raises higher, unless you've gone to a level of safety-removal that isn't necessary even for the highest "home" OCs, your board/chip will shut down way before any actual damage occurs.
There are fewer "You must buy new hardware or overclock significantly to even play X" titles out, which is a good thing, but that doesn't mean people aren't overclocking. Enthusiasts who do it for the fun of it will always do so; they like to see big numbers on benchmarks and distributed-computing apps. For those who game or want more performance, they'll continue to do so because its simply a good value. In today's economic climate especially, overclocking is favored over buying ultra-expensive computing parts which have minimal games. Intel's recent pricing and performance line up for the new Sandy Bridge-E Socket 2011 processors is very telling in this regard, and I believe proves that overclocking is quite popular.
3-4 years back, at the launch of the "Core iX series" Intel diverged with their socketing and created a two-tiered system on the desktop. Socket 1156 and the associated P55/H55 chipsets were the Mainstream platform, offering Core i3, i5 and the lowest i7-8xx series. This platform had dual channel RAM and a handful of PCI-E lanes etc... The Enthusiast platform however came on Socket 1366 and X58 chipset, holding an assortment of hyperthreaded Core i7 processors, the QuickPathInterconnect (QPI), TRI-channel RAM, more PCI-E 2.0 lanes, native support for both SLI and CrossFireX multiGPU solutions (which was a big deal as during the Core 2 era and prior, you typically had a board that could do one or the other, not necessarily both) and other great features. Power users gravitated towards 1366/X58 greatly because of overclocking potential and great value. At launch, the Core i7 920 basically had all the same cores/cache/HT as the $1000+ Extreme Edition 965/975; only the speed was different. The Core i7-920 overclocked phenomenally, reaching in excess of 3.6ghz for most enthusiasts with an after-market air cooler from their 2.6ghz start point; all without having to disable hyperthreading or any other processor features! I'm personally typing this on a i7-920 OCed to 4.0ghz on air - those with lucky chips or liquid-cooling systems could reach 4.3 stable with a minor voltage increase.
This OCing performance and value made Socket 1366 popular far beyond Intel's original predictions that it would be limited primarily to workstation use; especially as prices dropped for tri-channel RAM kits and high quality X58 motherboards. Its performance overclocked easily eclipsed the mainstream
I've always appreciated Corsair's products; in an industry where the typical MO is to push out the newest widget, sell before everyone forgets about it or gets upstaged, and never look back, they are one of the few companies that seem to understand that you're making an investment with their hardware. For instance, I wrote them a thank-you email after discovering that they offered two Upgrade Kits for their flagship 800D chassis. When the 800D first launched, SATA6 and USB3.0 weren't included. Had this been LianLi or Silverstone they would have released the "801D" and tell you to upgrade by buying a new $200+ chassis. Corsair on the other hand, offered a couple of $10 kits; one a new backplane for the hotswap SATA board, SATA 6.0 compatible and a new front port assembly with USB3.0 support. I have no second thoughts supporting them.
For years those of us trying to make significant overclocks on our PCs, but not wanting to commit to an additional $500 or so in homebuilt liquid cooling, were left to HUGE air coolers that required $80-120 investment, plus fans and cooling paste. These were huge monoliths that were heavy and difficult to install. The advent of the Corsair self-contained coolers is the first "ready for prime-time" solution that fixes this issue. You are given equal or better cooling than high end air at an equal or better price, with a much easier install process. With Sandy Bridge-E and AMD FX, we're just dipping a toe back into the days when serious cooling is necessary to attain a high overclock, so its great that this hardware is maturing now.
For anyone with a high-end air cooler or looking to build a new system and overclock it, these are probably the best off-the-shelf solutions you're going to find these days that don't have the learning curve of building and maintaining a custom-liquid setup and for most people who aren't trying to break records, they'll give you a ton of extra performance through the overclock.
If I was going to totally through ethics out the window for the pursuit of profit as an "App" developer, I'd easily choose the Apple monoculture. Lets face it, Apple users are used to being free with their money; these people were, in a year that wasn't prefixed by "199", paying $40-60 for a bloody unzipping program. Now, these same people have paid a bloody fortune for a locked down phone and again for a locked down tablet which are both predicated on an "it just works, so long as you make sure you always buy the new one" monoculture, and attached their credit card they use for impulse purchases to it That's PT Barnum-level temptation right there!
So long as one doesn't mind paying for dev access and isn't interested in making programs that strain social mores and/or step on Apple's toes, once you've made it past the gate the walled garden I'm sure appears glorious. You don't have to worry about multiple hardware/software platforms outside the well-documented and very limited iSphere, you are assured your userbase has someone's money to spend, and so long as you abide by The Apple Way For Developers (tm) and kowtow properly to cocoa and objective C, you'll probably watch the dollars roll in.
Honestly I have to say I'm a little disappointed. I know I'll probably be modded to oblivion by daring to question Google, but I really don't see the advantage to Chrome over Firefox. Five years ago Google seemed to be the type of company that actually managed to "Don't Be Evil", but in the past few years, everything from GPlus "Real Names only, thank you" to other questionable uses of personal information and privacy policy suggest that they're being cowed to the almighty dollar. Google as a company makes their money from search and ads; the latter certainly not conducive to a great browsing experience. Hence, Chrome's variant of AdBlock not truly blocking the ads and allowing them to be downloaded at one time, and nothing similar to the power of NoScript easily available. The divide between Chromium and Chrome may grow even greater, with certain features (translate etc..) only available on the proprietary tracked version.
Putting too much faith in any monoculture is a bad idea, especially if they have a vested interest in restricting or guiding your experience for their profit while having demonstrated they're not always forthcoming as to how. The Google of the "You get awesome email, we're only going to put an adwords bar up here that searches terms in your mail and not record all sorts of metrics about what you do, is great. The Google of "Real names only on our social network; anything that loses value for advertisers is a no go. We need to cross reference your want of viagra with your age and type of sexual partner to sell to our clients" is less so, despite the retractions and wobble back and forth. I still have faith that Google is nowhere near as horrid as say, Facebook but I want to let them know that their dominance isn't assured just by existing, lest they become complacent and begin "monetizing" in opposition to ethics; I want to support them providing excellent products, open communication with well understood terms that we can both agree serves our needs.
Firefox is in my experience, an excellent browser and it is one of the few examples of FOSS that fulfills both the layman and geek's needs. I have near limitless control over my browsing experience, great addons, and all without a conflict of interest with the developers. What's really amazing, is that everything from Sync to Personas and even many addon installations can easily be used by those relatively computer illiterate! When I hear geeky breathren say why they changed over to Chrome, they usually cite speed. Personally, I've not had any problems with Firefox's speed and the vast majority of those who I've spoken with who did, loaded it up with 20 addons that heavily tax the browser and RAM below it! Of COURSE bare Chrome is going to be faster if you're giving up Sync/Personas/NoScript/AdBlockPlus/Stylish+Themes/Scriptish+Scripts/Tor/FlashGot/DownloadStatusbar/HTTPSAnywhere and more! I've not met any laypeople who've switched to chrome save for a few who just "heard about it" and transitioned from IE due to advertisement. Is this the volume of switchers at hand? Normal users who just found it better than IE? Strangely, I figured most of them would already have heard about Firefox in years goneby from computer literate friends and family. I've not met one to date who switched from Firefox to Chromium so I can't list there.
Mozilla's products, including Firefox seem to be everything that the FOSS/geeky user metric wants; nearly a holy grail in that they can give limitless power to the powerusers without impeding the novice. They provide the best experience possible, customizable for any taste on any platform, without an ulterior motive contrary to the goals of the project. I don't see how Chrome even comes close, encumbered with Google's business model in mind.
If you eliminate many of the political and economic structures put in place that do not benefit doctors or patients but only enrich equipment manufacturers and big pharma, this would not be an issue. Look at the bidding a few years back on the contract for flu vaccine nasal mist that went exclusively to Med Immune, who created a couple of contaminated batches causing delay, went with the wrong strain despite being told otherwise which led to it being less effective than it could have been, and basically were allowed to be the sole manufacturer despite tons of fuckups - of course, they built a new building and showed record profits because of the contract awarded to them. We have a system now where the answer to "We need lots of influenza vaccine now!" is "create a drawn out bidding war amongst big companies for exclusive rights to manufacture it", in some cases. End that kind of thinking to save billions.
The WHO is making both correct and incorrect statements - things don't have to be completely black and white.
What was the incentive for Dr. Salk to create the polio vaccine without a patent that exclusively gave himself or a corporate backer the right to manufacture said vaccine? There are many solutions to the issue of R&D funding - I favor a bounty/reward system. It would save billions per year if we paid a "bounty" when private industry developed an otherwise patentable drug or device, which would then enter the public domain. Not unlike the telecoms, there's a huge amount of public money being funneled into private industry in the forms of grants and whatnot, but the results of said development are patented and owned by the private industry themselves. The system we have now is completely corrupt and serves to enrich the few at the cost of the many; its completely unnecessary and we can do much better.
Its so much cheaper to just let industrial runoff flow untreated into a nearby river and makes your "limited budget" go much farther, but does that make it a good idea? The whole reason that budgets are so expensive and money is so limited is due to the polices that allow the pharmaceutical industry to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else. Arguing about the additional cost of making vaccinations without toxic adulterants is like the Republicans yelling about NASA's budget being "Government Waste" while our defense spending for 2.5 wars is completely ignored.
You really can't see the benefits of eliminating not just mercury but a whole host of toxic substances? This is completely divorced from the issue of mercury in and of itself causing autism - I'm not saying that; I agree that it isn't accurate. Developing nations with poor restrictions have become dumping grounds for all sorts of hazardous substances because its cheaper. This ban isn't just about vaccines you understand, but also would keep it from being used in other forms for other uses as well. This is absolutely of paramount importance, forgetting vaccines. Vaccines are simply a wedge issue. I've seen patients who spent their childhood in developing nations and had exposure to heavy metals, organic and inorganic toxins way beyond the average American etc... all a factor in their chronic illness that when treated, gave them more of their life back than they'd ever thought possible. These are often people who have limited access to healthcare and greater exposure to risks of all sorts, so trying to regulate for the safe disposal of toxic materials and limiting both exposure and toxic burden can only benefit. Yes, its often more expensive to do things right than to halfass and harm them, but if you had a child with a compromised HLA-DR4 genotype that didn't allow them to process and excrete certain toxins nearly as well as someone with a different allele I think you'd feel differently.
America's information infrastructure has more roadblocks and half-built bridges-to-nowhere than many developed nations simply because of corporate greed. Where Asian and (some) European nations are looking towards gigabit fiber to the home and inexpensive 4G mobile plans, We in America (our Canadian, UK, and Australian friends too, if I am understanding correctly) are stuck with sky-high prices, caps and other restrictions.
Telecoms have basically bent the government to their will through extensive lobbying and backroom deals. AT&T has been broken up, reformed, broken up again and now they're set to do it again on the Mobile set by absorbing T-Mobile making them the only nationwide GSM provider in the country. Everyone else is piggybacking on Verizon's CDMA network, Sprint being the largest. Just like their landline divisions, the mobile telecoms receive large subsidies of our tax dollars every time they cry to Washington about their infrastructure - the very same infrastructure they advertise as being magically unlimited but make policies that completely oppose its perception, all the while raising direct to consumer prices. Like many other "too big to fail" businesses in the United States, all they care about is the continual dual-pronged infusion of cash from the American people direct to their quarterly statement. They maintain the absolute minimum they can justify to do this while through a combination of puppet-legislation and local business deals they lock out anyone else who might provide better service. From suing towns for implementing municipal, public fiber broadband in supposed violation of county or state wide exclusivity agreements, to not allowing any other companies to use "their" hardware be it fiber or copper in the ground, to airwaves and towers on the mobile set (Wonder why all the contract-less phones are CDMA for the most part instead of the much easier prepaid SIM GSM system that most nations have? Well, only Verizon decided it could make a profit by selling bandwidth to Sprint, Cricket, TrackFone etc.... AT&T decided they could do better by NOT allowing others to use "their" GSM towers etc...) they've created a little nest for themselves with our money.
Is it not time to take it back? The nations with the very best infrastructure, including information infrastructure have top-of-the-line hardware owned by the citizens of that nation. We already regulate information infrastructure and subsidize these telecoms to build it, but we allow them to retain private ownership of things built with public funds. Lets fix that. One of the best ways we could help to put an end to this recession would be a modern "New Deal 2: The Rooseveltening!". Lets put people to work repairing and modernizing our infrastructure, including that for information. If we truly believe that information work is one of the things that America is best at and that the Internet is of such importance, than we need to stop control of its access being in the hands of those that only care about profit.
With "We The People" owning and maintaining information infrastructure, it actually widens the gap for private business to have a role to play as well. The government could lease access to both private business and public organizations/co-ops to act as ISPs. Right now, I can't just start up a company to compete with Verizon or Comcast - they control the very lines in the ground and won't allow me to use them. Good luck getting 99% of newcomers to want to lay their own hardware and plant their own towers! Nationalized infrastructure would even the playing field completely to allow competition!
For both landline and mobile infrastructure, we have the equivalent of a patchwork system of heavily subsidized toll roads, filled with potholes. So the owners of said roads don't have the fix the potholes, they petition to set speed limits way below what they should be. With the People controlling the hardware, we'd have the same kind of success we did with the creation of Eisenhower's Inte
You're being more than a little melodramatic with your phrasing. The costs of making safer vaccines are in the range of pennies. In the particular instance of multi-use vials vs unit dosing, unit dosing is by far a more preferable way to deal with the extremely poor. Sure, per dose its more to have unit dose packaging, but if you think about the huge amounts of money that come from 'deferred" single vials its actually MUCH cheaper in the long run. There was actually a pretty decent WHO report on this not long ago that applies to ALL medicine. Basically, if someone swipes the one giant bottle/vial of vaccine or painkiller than you're out a ton of doses plus you have to deal with the not cost negative effects of black market sales (not just for abuseable substances either. In Africa for instance there's a black market of trading supposedly surplus medical supplies for other goods - of course, they're really stolen etc..).
The mildly increased cost can easily be handled by a variety of options from eliminating drug patents to making laws against these adulterants in medical equipments like some nations have done. You're not lamenting the "extra cost" of making medical supplies that don't include lead, because it has been mandated that keeping lead out of modern medical supplies is just part of manufacturing; the cost is negligible and we're all better for it. Making socially and medically viable regulations and cutting a lot of the red tape + loopholes that corps fulfilling these contracts use to save money at the cost of people's health will make sure that the most healthful drugs and supplies are produced at the lowest price.
There are multitudes of benefits that come from this kind of ban. A few cents difference on a healthful product is far from one of the major issues that organizations face getting the destitute vaccinated.
I've been involved in a lot of research regarding many persistent diseases and the poorly understood pathogens that cause them. I won't go deeply into the whole debate here but suffice it to say that no amount of mercury, regardless of form, is good for the body. While the whole "Vaccines just cause autism" thing isn't accurate either, realize that the vast majority of studies that try to say that the forms of mercury used in vaccines is safe, are paid for by industries that find it the cheapest thing to use as a stabilizer. I've personally cared for and turned around patients with many conditions from supposed "autism" and "MS", fibroymalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, by finding the real cause of their illness (these conditions are all real, but they are SYMPTOMS the same way "chest pain" is not a complete diagnosis) and sometimes that has involved vaccines, heavy metal exposure at amounts normally thought to be safe, and a variety of other facets that are dismissed by the powers that be due to hubris or financial graft.
Suffice it to say for a totally healthy individual vaccines themselves are not bad, but many of the impurities, stabilizers, and components that have little to do with the vaccine itself can cause reactions, including latent reactions or add to a cumulative issue. From mercury derivatives to allergens to preservatives, most are included because of cost and shelf life - cutting a few cents here and there or making something shelf stable for 5 years instead of two. Patients should have the option to select for vaccines without these cost-cutting adulterants, but because of corporate greed and their vehement and unethical protest that these ingredients are safe, they don't even create alternate variants. Its important to note that because of patents that shouldn't exist in the first place, this also stops 3rd party labs from compounding safer versions.
There is nothing wrong with this ban - if it forces others to adapt and make safer vaccines then its a great benefit. Unfortunately, I'm worried that the usual bureaucratic nightmare will occur, the right palms will be greased, and exceptions will be made. Write your representatives supporting this ban and/or get involved with advocacy groups like the Organic Consumers Association. There is absolutely no threat by this ban save to the pockets of the greedy and unethical and its passage will go a long way toward less environmental toxins in many facets of industry.
I am and that makes my point even more valid. He spent his first big break's millions on the kind of stuff typical to entertainers, especially rappers for the need of street cred, wasn't smart with his money and ended up with very little. He found a way to make himself relevant again and pay his bills, so this time he's using surplus funds not just to buy something expensive for the hell of it or impress MTV, but to invest in something that will hopefully not just pay off for him, but provide a useful web service for many users. That's a positive conversion as I look at it. He could probably even make more money talking or writing about his experiences to provide a benefit to lots of other young aspiring hip hop moguls.
More power to him to use his money for a positive investment. While I'm a great fan of outright philanthropy, I think that investment in startups and/or local businesses is a great thing for those in the entertainment industry to get into. Especially with how most rappers invest most their money into their "crib", jewelery, guns, and perhaps the "gold plated item" industries, or at best creating their own line of "urban" attire, music labels that often propagate stereotypes and either embody or are involved in societal-damaging behaviors (If you're a hip hop mogul who sells expensive brand name clothes and then backs a music label who's "real" artists rap about gangsta life persuits giving the huge amounts of money necessary to outfit yourself in those particular clothes, it creates a culture where young kids think that gangbanging is the only "down" way to be able to afford that expensive track suit you're hawking). - this is a good move.
Its nice to see a hip-hop star investing in something that isn't directly tied to 'hood concepts of street cred. Perhaps eventually it will be cool for rappers who make it to invest in a locally made, affordable set of shoes for instance, instead of talking about thousand-dollar "kicks" and champagne as good ways to spend your money.
For what its worth, Ubuntu has probably been the biggest step forward for Linux on the desktop to date. Past advances like Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros and others made some headway towards making Linux something besides "You need either a CLI or what appears to be a DOS-era interface to install it", but they all had their drawbacks (ie RPM hell). Ubuntu was the first to come along and make desktop user experience a primary impetus while having means/money/marketing to help make it so - even if we don't necessarily agree with all their decisions.
To many /. readership sure some talk about it being too "hand-holdy", but that's what Linux truly needs. There are tons of distros out there for the "do it yourself" set, but few for those who don't have the know how or wish to make maintaining/building their OS a hobby in itself. It took the multitude of Debian resources and condensed them down into what could generally be useful to a variety of users; from "grandma" total newbies to Linux to inexperienced server admins, to those who want to build a Mythbuntu home automation setup. It has also given birth to tons of forks that really provide excellent experience and gives a whole different class of maintainers and easy to fork and administer base. LinuxMint, PCLinuxOS , and Pinguy all go out of their way to take Ubuntu one step further and provide even more specialized features and feel for the desktop user. A user can start up an Ubuntu variant or especially a derivative like Pinguy and say "Wow, that's cool" while actually being able to DO things from the start.
This is not to say that constructive criticism isn't warranted - for instance, I think that UbuntuOne needs to be greatly improved to be worthwhile; if it can't pretty much outdo Dropbox and SpiderOak (especially the latter with security) it may not be worthwhile. I would like them to spend the same care on the *buntu variants - Kubuntu's KDE is often behind and sometimes much different and less usable than say, Arch Linux's version - as they do on the main Gnome version. Xubuntu and Lubuntu especially could use some of that desktop magic. A long time ago for instance I was using XFCE as a relative Linux newbie and couldn't figure out why Thunar wasn't able to browse my SAMBA shared folders, only to eventually figure out "it wasn't supposed to". That kind of stuff isn't viable for desktop users especially those who want lightweight but full featured Ubuntu experiences, so go ahead and make sure there are the proper plugins to manage files on the local network. It wouldn't hurt to have updates for certain programs an easy to understand option - a tickbox to use WINE's repository instead of the official Ubuntu one which will almost always be an old version.
Unity is now the big discussion point but I worry that, especially advanced Linux users, are overreacting and not seeing the big picture. I've not used Unity, only seeing it in pictures. Is it possible that this is a good design for an AVERAGE user? Desktop Linux beginners and even some intermediate+ users feel that its a good UI? If you don't like it you have tons to choose from, but they need something they can use immediately. If its "like their phone", is it possible that this is a good thing in that they'll see some familiarity? From my understanding GNOME is basically driving towards a cliff. Gnome2, the variant that the most users like, is EOLed and Gnome3 is going to be the new wave. Sure, there's a fork of 2 and all that but I'm guessing that the standard Ubuntu interface isn't going to be it. Now personally, I'd like to have both Unity and GNOME3 installed (my understanding is that "Gnome3" is the Traditional Desktop option or whatever for Ubuntu 11.10?...or is it GNOME 2? ) to give the most compatibility with such things as advanced drivers and the like. While both GNOME3 and Unity are seen as being limited or dumbed down, one similar to OSX and the other to a cell phone UI, is it possible these are good paradigms for many users? OSX is seen as being "pretty
This is clearly not true. There are many variations in what a culture considers "greed" to begin with, much less "acceptable" amounts of greed, how it is focused, and where it can be directed in a society safely.
Dainsanefh is correct that, for the most part, Japan's current issues have come from emulation of Western, specifically American hyper-capitalist lassiez-faire, right wing business efforts. However, the Japanese people's values are not in line with this when it conflicts with the well being of society. This is one reason that for the first time the LDP was ousted in favor of the further-Left DPJ party. While in America we have a poisonous culture of "I'll get mine no matter how much it screws you - after all ", Japan's more collective focused culture and ethics staunchly rejected the post-Bubble emulation of American business methodology since the 80s - they started to say "enough is enough" far before we did.
Greed, much like capitalism or any sort of financial system or impetus cannot simply be allowed to roam free - it MUST be bent to the good of society lest you have the problems we have now where the many suffer because an unethical few have taken too much and altered the system to protect their theft. Implying that it is natural to let greed thrive as it will and that there haven't been societies that have worked diligently to limit the damage it can do is an insult.
As someone who bought and played FFXIV at launch, I'll give them a chance again but there needs to be universal improvement. Heck, even the sign-up/account management for Final Fantasy XI and XIV is the most convoluted thing possible - there are a handful of usernames, passwords, emails etc.. that, when I was there, was a world away from the easy sign-ups of any other MMORPG. I wanted to use my old FFXI account again, but between my "SquareEnix Online", "PlayOnline", "Square.com" etc... accounts I couldn't even find the right place to query for my forgotten login data. Convoluted and one hasn't even logged into the game.
However, I'm proud of Japanese developers. They've "gotten it" as evidenced by the "Free XIV until we fix it" plan, but what's more is unlike so many American developers these days, they didn't just say "Fuck you, its perfect, if you don't like it suck a dick and give me $15 for 3 more DLC maps right fucking now". This is where Japanese developers can shine and get back into the race.
Japanese honor and pride in their work is the perfect medicine for the way gaming is headed today driven by limitless greed. Tons of expensive DLC everwhere, foolish DRM, MMOs going "Free2Play" and ultimately costing you more than $15 subscription dollars to get less content than ever because of a combination of unmitigated greed-based business plans (Thanks a lot to Apple and all the other companies who proved "Rubes will buy anything" is a good business plan!), and younger generations of gamers who open their wallets for anything nomatter how egregious without thinking or questioning; the sort who actually defend selling single items (or worse, "renting" them) for $25 when those of us remember that used to buy you a complete Expansion Pack not that long ago.
For years Japanese developers and publishers didn't quite "get it", a problem both cultural and business-wise, but now that they do perhaps they can bring back selling a complete game product for a singular price, without having to pre-order, pay $90 for a downloadable "Digital Deluxe Edition" to get all the in-game items (Looking at you, Mass Effect 3), buy tiny little drops of content for $5-15 etc.
Perhaps Japan can bring back pride in one's product to AAA game development, rather than creating the most "effective revenue stream".
I think the Level 7 Escape comment says enough to either prove complete naivete or complete ignorance:
How to escape: Exiting the circle of company-on-company violence may only be possible via collective action, says O'Berry. "When you squeeze the ecosystem only to your advantage, not caring about the companies you've killed along the way, eventually people will say enough is enough," says O'Berry. "We need to balance our capitalistic nature with some form of societal responsibility."
In the last thirty years the only people saying "enough is enough" have have been everything from summarily ignored to blackballed for being an "Evil socialist who hates capitalism, job creators, and prosperity and wants to punish all the John Galts of the world who are smart enough to be granted their Austrian-school due; If they can't keep up with the invisible hand, then they should be content for the perfect theory of 'Trickle Down Economics' to provide for them".
The world is facing the global recession it is because these monstrosities have taken every opportunity to exploit more and more while convincing more than half the working poor that any regulations will keep them from being able to be rich "on their own merits" too, one day. Country-wide prosperity is at its highest (as it its HDI) when the political system shifts towards a parliamentary democracy and the economic system is mixed strongly dominated by modern socialist principles.
Unfortunately it seems that the high standards of living these systems evolve will undoubtedly create some myopic, avaricious individuals that have the intellect, skills, and stability (who conveniently forget that society directly and indirectly helped them attain these attributes) to work towards taking as much as they can, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else. To date, most modern developed nations are not fault tolerant against greed and it will take massive changes to implement systems that are, but it is of paramount importance that we do so immediately to stave off calamity.
There is a much larger percentage of the educated populace who feel that enough is never enough and their sophomoric narcissism ensures they feel entitled to make decisions that have immediate and direct negative consequences to their subordinates, the business, or the world at large, so long as it leads to their short term financial gain. The sooner we can, from the ground up, build our systems of business and governance to limit the amount of damage greed can do, the better.
I'm still happily a Firefox user. Mozilla has given me an open-source browser with nigh-limitless user customization and control, with seemingly the least amount of conflicts of interest embroiled in its development. The entire Chrome ecosystem seems to be part of Google's recent wave of bad decisions that seems to highlight they can no longer be trusted to act in the best interest of the user and privacy, when there is money to be made; contrary to the Google of five years ago who seemed to be able to resist the void.
Chrome as a browser seems to be better serving Google's needs than the user's needs. Be it the lack of comprehensive AdBlock,NoScript, and HTTPSEverywhere addons (and tons of others) and other user privacy settings, Chrome vs Chromium "conveniences" and other issues, its appearing more and more to me like a better version of IE - integrated and serving Google instead of Microsoft. That's not what I want in my web browser.
Especially amongst the educated, open-source and privacy knowledgeable community I'm surprised how many have switch to Chrome, typically citing resource or speed uses. I really don't think its acceptable to be the sort of person who runs 20 high-end addons including a ton of Stylish and Greasemonkey scripts and then says the browser is using a lot of memory with your sixteen tabs open.
Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla projects are more important now than ever - open source, standards compliant, privacy respecting, user focused and customizable. Everyone here would balk if I suggested we should all switch to Internet Explorer, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, and Skype because of convenience - Why kowtow to a monoculture just because its Google? This is not to say never use Google products, but we need to make it perfectly clear that we do so because they offer terms that serve our needs, including privacy, as users - not because we have so much invested we're now locked in. Google's gleaming facade has dulled considerably with some of their more recent decisions and spots of possible greed, arrogance, and apathy may be showing up - they need to know that we won't stand for it.
While Firefox isn't perfect, I urge everyone to be alert and make their usage decisions with the long-term ramifications in mind. In a world where most business interests would rather have you access their "cloud" services through a dumb client, completely on their terms, we need to stick up for some of the last bastions of user focused software that can be introduced to laypeople with ease and show them a real difference in the experience! How many of you introduced a friend or relative to open source software with a Mozilla product, which they found to give them better security, privacy, features, and customization? That's worth its weight in gold, so to speak. Sure, the geek community will always be able to roll up Midori or Lynx or some sort of other custom Gecko/WebKit browser from the bowels of a repository, but Firefox is relatively unique in that its features are nearly as accessible, secure, and powerful for the layman as they are for the guru. Trading that in for a product which is controlled by a corporation who's shortest distance to money infringes on user privacy and security is not a smart idea.
I'm going to pick up both Stephenson's book and the interesting looking Ready Player One. That said, I think most of the discussion here is linked to Stephenson's comment on the Metaverse and gaming/MMOs. It seems, as others have said that he didn't anticipate that gaming would begin to foster these virtual worlds in the way it did. I've seen many discussing over the past few years that basically "WoW is the Way Forward" and that is understandable if you realize those who chant such things are entities or hopeful corporate entities that will profit from such a narrow vision.
Since the beginning of persistent world gaming, there have been "Sandbox" MMOs - those of Ultima Online, and MUD/MOO heritage. Players have an integral ability to create and alter the world, or rules of the world. Later, came out of the idea to replicate a persistent world where one could play AD&D online, came the "Theme Parks", such as Meridian 59 and EverQuest. These focused less on player creation and more on players undertaking content created by the developer of the MMO, acting as sort of a Dungeon Master. World of Warcraft is the latest, and most populous incarnation of this gametype. By nature, Theme Park worlds are more accessible to a larger percentage of the public and that is part of the reason they're standing at the forefront today. The other reason of course, is technological - having users accessing ready-made content within certain parameters is MUCH easier than allowing them a much wider field of freedom. In something like a text-MUD its a lot easier to program in the ability for the user to do something complex and show it actually happening.
However, Sandbox MMOs have always been sitting on the sidelines. The best two examples of graphical Sandboxes in recent memory are Minecraft: where graphics are simple enough and there are some very basic literal "building block" rules, with all the content created by those on the server, and Second Life - the "hallmark" paradigm shift that was thought to be next step forward in Internet use and pretty much was the Metaverse-incarnation with the most comprehensive featureset.
Second Life gave the users the ability to create just about anything, given the Internet bandwidth and processing powers of the time. Any user could build, skin and even script functionality into the world, using textures and resources from anywhere, using built in 3d-modeling and scripting software. What's more is that the developer, Linden Labs set themselves up as a bank, transferring in-game dollars to real money and vice-versa. Charging real rent for plots of virtual land, around $250 monthly for a "zone", users set up their own economy. Anyone who took the time to make a chair could set up a virtual storefront to sell it for currency that could eventually be transferred into real money! Real estate owners leased space in their zones to those who wanted to run a virtual dance club, Kung-Fu fighting simulation, casino, or sex club, and those areas all had attractions or items for sale that cost money. Soon, many net-savvy businesses started to create Second Life presences; you could go to a virtual Nike shop and have your avatar try on a pair of the newest Nikes available, crafted in exacting quality. Blogs and even paper journalism started interviewing entrepreneurs that made their living in Second Life. Part of "Internet Cultural History" is of course the interview with the avatar named Anshe Chung, a SL real estate mogul who was one of the first real USD millionaires who made their fortune entirely in SL. Of course, what we all remember about that interview...were the cocks.
When the virtual-journalist and Ms. Chung sat down to discuss economics in a virtual world, thousands of flying, noise-making penises accosted the entire zone in one of the most infamous spam attacks in Second Life history. The interview had to be stopped and eventually proceeded in a properly secured area. Second Life had become a 3d microcosm of the Internet and as such... there were a lot of
A couple years back I built a Socket 1366 rig - Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.8ghz, 6gb tri-channel RAM that if I felt the need could head up to 12gb relatively cheap these days, and a nice X58 Asus RoG motherboard with great features. It has basically carried me through and surpassed the Intel mainstream 1156 and compares easily to the Sandy Bridge 1155 i7-2600 etc. However, its finally getting to the end of its life - after an unheard of 3 years - and I'm trying to decide what to do next.
My first idea was to wait for Socket 2011, which is to Socket 1366 as Socket 1155 is to 1156. Its the next generation of the "Intel Enthusiast/Workstation" platform. Unfortunately, it appears that Intel is determined to put a stop to the very thing that made them successful with 1366 last time by making moronic cuts in features while increasing price. The $300 part is a lowly Quad core, with less cache. Then you have the option of a $600-700 Hex, with a bit more cache, but a locked multiplier, and finally you have to buy the Extreme to get the full package not just in speed, but in everything else as well. For those of us with Core i7 920/930 rigs it isn't worth buying a $300 processor that's marginally better than one from 3 years ago! Where are the offerings that, aside from speed, have all the features of Extreme without the pricetag? I can't justify this, and it seems a poor decision to launch with this crap, especially requiring a new X79 board and Quad-Channel RAM kit, if Ivy Bridge is right around the corner. Thus, I worry that Ivy, which stands to be a real leap forward, is going to be pushed back even farther after Intel realizes that SB-E on 2011 isn't making them as wealthy as they wished. I'd much rather them have brought Ivy out and just waited to keep 2011 until then, and follow it with the mainstream Ivy, much like the first-gen i7 1366 release.
It would be perfect for AMD to push Bulldozer and Piledriver into this gap, especially if they can put forth reasonable real-world performance, to give those enthusiasts annoyed by Intel's pricing another option. Sadly, I worry that Bulldozer is not up to the task as they've been waffling on it save for the business-level releases; by the time its out it will be near obsolete. I'd much rather they just release immediately with the 900-series chipset and then bring Piledriver out for the holidays or January. I'd really like to be done with Intel, but if there's such a huge gap between an OC'ed SB-E or IB, and Dozer/Pile as there has been in the past, I'm not sure if it will meet my needs. I can't spend money to "upgrade" to a AM3+ chip that will be less powerful than my current 1366 setup.
Again Intel seems to be swinging their weight around as they always do when they basically remain uncontested at the mid-grade and higher, while we all suffer. I love what AMD has done with their platform - great integrated, nice high-end chipset features, great prices, excellent integration with high-end PCI-E AMD GPUs, which are pretty awesome in their own right (I have a 6970 on my current system. An excellent investment, and the drivers/experience is better than Nvidia in many cases), but if the power gap continues to be so large, I don't see how I can justify what may barely be called an "upgrade". Here's hoping that AMD pulls out the stops and forces Intel to understand they're not the only game in town.
I'm not sure that we should be focusing on the sub-200 spot at all. The greatest gains are in the 250-550 range; exponential power increases over something at the extreme low-end and newer tech too. I am assuming this is "building an inexpensive PC for anyone" focused more than "building for the extremely impoverished" which really shouldn't even be thought of in terms of retail - either donated/refurbished foundation hardware, and laptops at best, provide for that resource.
As others have shown, the article's box is really not that great and for the same or a little more you can do a lot better. Just buying bundles and sale items from Newegg, Microcenter/Fry's can do MUCH better. Also, its important to note that bargain basement is not always the best way to go, especially with components like PSUs. I also believe we need to start defining what "The Computer" requires. There's been more debate than ever on the nature of including an optical drive or not in this thread, and clearly including a modern LCD monitor (20", widescreen) is going to easily put a few hundred more dollars to the cost of the build. Finally, I think we need to start taking second-hand components into consideration. Here are my opinions on the "questionables"
1. Keyboard and Mouse - Depends. If a first-time buyer or intended as an "always on" PC (no switching existing inputs for maintenance) these are necessary. Thankfully, they're also inexpensive. A cheap optical mouse can be had for as little as $5-10 today. Likewise, keyboards. Spending a little more on each will provide powerful 5-7 button mice and ergonomic keyboards. This should probably be considered after the system is otherwise built and if necessary, equipped with the leftover money and to the user's specs (ie. if this is going to be a HTPC, then wireless may be a good option if available)
2. Optical and/or USB storage - One or the other is mandatory, but it really depends on again the user's situation. Where are they getting their OS? If this is their first PC they have no way to write a Linux distro to a USBkey, but they CAN get a free or ultra low cost disc from one of the linux burning programs. Internal are cheaper, but external are far more flexible - these days I have a single, external DVD SuperMulti DL (Which doesn't require an AC adapter) drive that I use whenever I need to install something from disc (save for the one that came in my laptop). There's also the consideration that typically discs "Just Work" even in Linux, but there can be some annoyances getting a USB drive or SD card flagged, formatted, and mounted properly to replicate a disc. Is there an equivalent of something as easy as "Linux Live USB Creator" on Linux itself? If you opt to go without optical, there needs to be a software way to ensure that USB or cards can replicate optical in every meaningful way. Of course, this may become impossible if you have a user that often buys media on disc, unless they wish to start getting said media from elsewhere.
3. Monitor - Its hard to justify that a monitor is absolutely required in this day and age, when most households have one or more "monitors" of their own - TVs I see monitors as separate component and for most users it works out this way. Sure, its nice to be able to give your desktop PC its own discrete monitor, and you can do it at a relatively affordable price, but it isn't necessary at time of build for MOST users. Some will already have another monitor from an older PC and many who are not technically inclined think you "have" to upgrade the monitor - that's how big box stores tend to sell PCs. Learning that they can use the perfectly fine on they already have usually makes many users happy. In the case of those that don't have a discrete PC monitor yet, but have relatively modern TVs in the house, this is an easy issue to solve. This group makes up a larger percentage of users than one would think - there are homes with 1990s PCs w/14" CRTs or no PC at all, but equipped with one or more 480p compli
I see many posts trying to distill Anonymous into a single paradigm that can be judged authoritatively from an outside point of view; this is in error. Anonymous, in their construction, goals, and skills, has grown into a complex multi-celled organism that, without having a predicable growth cycle or direction, acts - sometimes in what appears to be indirect opposition to itself.
Take for instance the "Doing it for the lulz" element. There are those within who basically seek to undermine the exploits of other members (while, totally adverse to outside influences doing the same. Something of a "I can beat up on my brother, but anyone else who tries gets his ass handed to him) in indirect ways. They appear to mock the "We Are Legion" elements that undergo targeted political actions and instead co-opt some of the group's resources for more chaotic endeavors. These can range from humorous forms of trolling (ie. creating a certain avatar at Habbo Hotel and blocking the pool, announcing it is "Closed due to AIDS") to more malicious attacks on individuals, usually through the release of embarrassing personal information. Now, within this subgroup there are those that only expose those that "deserve" it, be it some member of their own community who harmed the organization, and those that take a more random approach (Hey, I found this guy's credit card, lets order a dozen pizzas!). Making it even more complex, there are many who ridicule the "newfags" who have morally directed action to seem "cool, like an oldfag" harkening back to a mostly fictitious time when their actions were entirely chaotic and based exclusively upon a narrow definition of lulzy. However, these same individuals also take part in "moral" campaigns that interest them, and apply their skills towards various ends.
That's only one tiny sub-sub-sub categorization of Anonymous, so you can see how far-reaching and complex this societal-organism has grown. Add in things like "COINTELPRO" attempts by private and occasionally documented public interests to perform damaging "agent provocateur" attacks (for instance, one of their tiers of Sony CC hacking initially tried to represent themselves as Anonymous, but were rebuked by "proper" Anonymous (and how exactly that authority is gained is an entire post in itself) and shown to be linked to groups directed by various governments to take advantage of the breech to provide a fear-climate during to crack down on the internet, when so many bills were up to provide corporate control. There are of course, rogue elements that grow from, or use the mantle of Anonymous of its own as well, but tend to fall under a system of self-policing when they overstep certain bounds - for instance, when someone tried to rally Anonymous to hack, protest, and even bomb abortion clinics, they were not only turned down, but faced the wrath of the organization themselves! . This is to say nothing going into the various tiers of loose structure within Anonymous itself and all the tasks, skills, ideologies, and command structures working in parallel, often invisible to one-another save in certain occasions - going into that would make this long post even longer, but definitely warrants a level of respect.
Overall, "proper" Anonymous has likely done more good than ill in its years of operation. Besides being nearly totally responsible for exposing Scientology as a corrupt and dangerous cult and changing their perception in the media from "That weird thing celebrities do" to "Oh, that's the crazy H-Bomb volcano alien thing that costs millions of dollars to level up and makes you cut off ties to your family" (and the subsequent loss of CoS tax exempt status in many jurisdictions - Texas and Germany come to mind in specific), they've provided tons of evidence of the corruption of Western (and especially American) governments who act as nothing more than puppets for corporate interests. Take for instance the Bank of America leaks, plus the HBGary Federal exposure, and the work of many who unveiled acts of c
Activision's business strategy started out appalling and has only gotten worse. Unfortunately, the same is true of games published under their umbrella and with their financial interests in mind. Blizzard, as a quasi-autonomous entity spent a great deal of time making great games with long-term plans, such as making a Mac client back when the Mac gamer populace was abysmally small. This investment ensured that those Mac users who did want to game or play a MMORPG, would have their product as the premiere option. I'm confident if ActiBlizz was running the show back in those days, the typical hyper-capitalist corrupt short-term plunder mindset would have executives saying "Why waste all those man hours making sure the game works on Macs? Look at the small marketshare - its all worthless artsy kids who don't play games".
While they've been running down this horrible road for awhile, Diablo takes a BIG step forward or rather, two of them. First of course, is the "always online" DRM. Though not the first to try, it has always gone horribly with the userbase (See: Ubisoft). The sheer arrogance of telling me that I can't play a game that has no technical reason to be online, without kneeling mouth open at their UDP Port, is bloody insulting. Its indicative of typical Western (definitely American) business that sees the customer as the enemy and that they are simply owed any money they may ask for, nomatter the product or conditions thereof. When the game industry found out "Hey, if we ALL sell a single weapon for $5, 3 maps for $15, and charge a $60 starting base price then it becomes normative", things got even worse - not a SINGLE major AAA publisher took the other route and said "You know what, we're going to give people a fantastic fucking experience at reasonable prices and no cash grabs, all items included, even cosmetic. If its enough content to be like the expansion packs we remember from the 90s, then we'll sell one of those" (and no, do not start with me about Valve. TF2 Hats and Portal 2 7.99 Bot Hipster Glasses + $2.99 unlockable emotes squarely disqualify them).
As others have mentioned, there are many people who for whatever reason, would play Diablo 3 offline. Maybe they want to hack characters and give themselves unlimited stats? Maybe they want to dupe items for their LAN game and use other cheats? Maybe they just don't like playing with others due to maturity issues with the populace? Perhaps they travel a lot for work, or have insufficient connectivity for another reason? It shouldn't be up to Activision to dictate that all these people, for no technical reason, shouldn't be able to play the game they installed. Starcraft II started a backlash that at least allowed people to play offline modes as a "guest", but sadly lacks true LAN play as well. Diablo 3's dev team should have learned from this. People are still playing the original Starcraft and Diablo II, and they do so in a variety of ways that will be impossible under Diablo 3's connectivity requirements. This arrogance should not be rewarded, and I hope that there is enough pre-launch backlash to change the issue (see: Real ID full name display on forums). Sadly, I don't have the confidence that at launch enough people will abstain from buying to make a difference, but it would be a welcome sight.
The second issue is possibly far worse and exemplifies greed at some of its most blatant - the Real Money Transfer (RMT) Auction System in Diablo 3. While RMT has always been an issue with online games that require currency to acquire special items in amounts that are inconvenient for players who refuse to grind, it has always been relegated to a Chinese-controlled black market of sorts. Sometimes the currency and items were duped, came from hacked accounts, or were otherwise against the TOS. Even that acquired by electronic sweatshop workers was considered a breach of TOS to make in-game currency have real-world value. While in the East there are many "Item Shop" MMOs that lack any sort of subscription or client fee,
Much of it is "optional" the same way that Android's tracking is "optional". Sure, you can opt out of many things, but when convenience features require you to agree to user tracking and thus Google's retention policies which are often very different from Firefox's, its still not a good situation. Its much like disabling the air conditioning, GPS, heated seats, and power locks and stating that someone else gets to LoJack your vehicle if you turn any of these features on. Sure, the car "runs", but many people are going to want air conditioning and having someone else tracking you should not be a use condition of said feature. Browsers like SRWare Iron and other specialized Chromium builds are specifically designed to remedy these issues and typically have links about the differences and issues with Google's privacy policies, if you'd like to read up. For another perspective, go and search around for marketing and promotion sites in conjunction with Chrome - you'll find there are more than a few that are positively giddy over the prospects of Google's data mining tech through Chrome, how to best make use of it and offer it to customers, and why stingy-old-Firefox is so backwards and annoyingly protective of that user data.
There was a time when Google managed to do the impossible - balance the technological ability to do something profitable, with the ethics of implementation. They found a way to sell ads that were unobtrusive when the average where garish flash popups with sound. They made some really great software that, though it was ad supported, always was implemented in such a way that you never felt your privacy was in danger. Grepping a few words from an email for an ad is one thing, but saving every word I've ever written or received and selling the analysis of the above to the highest bidder? Not okay.
Lately, Google has been making choices lately that seem like the typical hyper-capitalist short-term-profit-at-any-cost sludge, especially relating to privacy. You end up having to give up more and more, letting more information be collected, stored, analyzed with less control over where it goes. The recent Google+ decision to mandate real meatspace names is the latest and more troubling. Despite the fact that people are gradually waking up to the "Fuck the stupid people for trusting me" privacy hole created by Zuckerberg in Facebook, Google didn't capitalize on differentiating Google+ by saying "Hey, you can use Google+ the way you want and with the privacy you're comfortable using. Hell, you can appear as different people to different other users or circles". No, they seemingly took the same road that having real names and, added to the multitude of info-tracking Google services, can log huge amounts of useful pertinent information to be available to those buying ad-space and mining data. Even in Android you have to capitulate to a lot of unnecessary data mining and recording to have access to relatively basic Google applications. Even Chrome, (and especially the feature gap between Chrome and Chromium) is unsettling - you're agreeing to far more tracking than its chief competitor, Firefox. Its disconcerting that so many geeks will take autotranslate and a little speed over the total control and web experience of Firefox. Even the crippled way "Ad blockers" work on Chrome illustrates the conflict of interest between Google, a company that sells advertising, and making a web browser where a user has control over what ads they wish to have loaded on their machine.
I just can't trust them any longer that "Don't be Evil" is winning out over the creeping greed that seems to have a controlling stranglehold on American business. Google may ride high on selling user data for the next few years, but as people increasingly awake to the fact they are no longer any different from the previous "Evil Empires", they'll be put to the wayside. This may take longer than "traditional" bad guys, especially with today's web populace, but it will happen. I'll be one of the first to leave if they don't get their act together - fewer and fewer entities on the web, especially private corps, have any respect for the concept of privacy and I'm willing to support those who do.
You know what would be an "ultra" book to me? A notebook using premium parts and the highest power/formfactor ratio around, that uses hardware compatible with Linux, ideally through documented firmware, open source firmware/drivers etc. The vast majority of laptops today, despite the upswing in laptop viability and explosion of the market (The idea of a moderately powered laptop under $3000 is easily attainable), seem to be designed extremely poorly, to "lowest common denominator" standards. Who are they designed for? Nearly all of the $1000+ and $2000+ niche offerings, clearly preferred by discriminating clientele with particular tastes, all seem to lack at least one "common sense" feature.
Take for instance "desktop replacements" and"gaming laptops". They're heavy, they're relatively powerful. Most of them are Clevo rebrands, or upjumped consumer crap like today's Alienware. However, they almost always have exactly zero "amenities". You've got an 8lb, 2inch thick monstrosity, but its only built out of of cheap plastic? You couldn't fit a backlit keyboard in there? You have the unmitigated gall to solder the processor in? You're using a low quality display? Unbelievable.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the "executoys", which are generally somewhere between ultralight MacBook Air and something like the Sony Z. Now, the Sony Z is actually one of the closest "Ultrabooks" I was looking at - awhile back it was the way to get a 1600x900 or 1920x1080 LED backlit high color gamut display, moderate graphics, and a Core i7-620 all crammed into 13" of aluminum and carbon fiber, with a backlit keyboard. Unfortunately, it was made so poorly and proprietary, keeping all the "Good options" for Japan only, you could easily spend $3000 for the "signature" edition and be stuck with some sort of crafty quad-SSD abomination that doesn't support TRIM (in Japan, you could include a normal HDD or secondary normal SSD if you didn't mind going without the BluRay burner). Even at all this, you have to use years old Sony NVIDIA drivers because even their binaries don't work...good luck if you don't use windows? Most other "Executoys" and ultralights are even worse, offering less power for exorbitant prices and narrow definitions under which their "power savings" are viable.
As much as I hate to admit it, the only two notebooks I see that even approach the "ultrabook" moniker at various times of their launching are the Mac Book Pro and HP Envy. They attempt to bring the most power into a reasonably small form factor, use high quality materials and add lots of little quality extras. Yes, you pay for it and I've no problem with that, save for the fact that I don't want to even give a cent to Apple idologically as I disagree with nearly every other item they sell on one level or another, and supporting HP, despite the very good fact that the Envy team is divorced from the typical crapfest, is still supporting HP and their spyware heavy, reliability light common notebooks. At the time, I found the Envy 14 the best compromise around ( Sadly, lacking USB3.0 for a reason I can't fathom, but the Radiance display is one of the best ever made on a notebook. That was the first thing they discontinued), but I would have liked a few more choices.
If Intel wants to bring people back onto purchasing powerful notebooks, then they ought to start with the high end who are willing to spend money on power and features. Start with the MacBook Pro, and do equal or better at a lower price. Yes, that means USB3, SATA6e,and Thunderbolt. Yes, that means highest end mobile i7 quads/hexes when available and AMD 6700-6900+ mobile graphics options (and get them ready sometime before the next gen of desktop cards is about to release for fuck's sake), backlit keyboards , metal chassis options, modular bays, and standard connectors. Use latest generation Li-Poly batteries, and systems like the HP Envy's "slice" battery to extend battery life without being unsightly or cumbersome. Use Apple's design weaknesses against them, put a damn
The problem is when someone else makes the choice to share your information instead of yourself. I have an unlisted number and have placed myself on many do-not-call/cold call lists, but that doesn't mean I can't personally hand my card to someone that I wish to have my number. People should be able to use G+ as they wish, including without including their real name. Perhaps you're comfortable with having your real name, but not your zip code displayed. Perhaps I'm the reverse. Perhaps I want a G+ identity that has nothing to do with my real world identity, which in turn I use to connect with others online without having to volunteer my meatspace information. What if we're friends in real life and want me to be in your circle, but knowing and respecting my online privacy belief, is it really a problem to have Guy McGuyerton in your circle instead of my real name? We still get the benefit of sending information back and forth, but without a 3rd party able to snoop in - you know that Guy is really Steve from down the street, and he's RSVPed to your party, while Steve takes comfort in knowing that (barring a breech of trust), though YOU know his ID, those on the outside don't.
Social networking can be done privately and with each person volunteering the amount of information they feel comfortable including. However, when a service doesn't give you a choice on certain options because it makes you a less valuable "product" for their business plan, that generates a conflict of interest. Social networks have the privacy holes they do because of greed, not because they are somehow inexorably linked to social networking as a concept. Users should have absolute control of what they wish to volunteer to a given social network.