That's what bothers me too. I know that if I wanted to install solar panels on the roof of my home I'd have to go through a ton of bureaucracy, which would be based largely on the personal opinions of a largely unaccountable group of people who were interested in their jobs to begin with on the basis of "making the neighborhood look nice" rather than "making things better for residents." Chances of me getting approval? Close to nil.
The irony is that these agencies push down the values of the homes they govern, while they constantly claim the opposite. We're only in association-controlled land because we couldn't afford to live somewhere more free for the house space we needed. And governments are reluctant to regulate HOAs because they assume that everyone governed by an HOA is there because they wanted a bunch of arbitrary appearance-obsessed nuts to fine them over the most minor details.
For this kind of thing, it'd be nice to see an agency, like the FCC did with antennas, step in and say "This is our jurisdiction, not yours." It'd also be nice to see the FCC (and whatever agency ends up regularing solar panels) make high profile "busts" of HOAs that go overboard, so HOA officials don't feign ignorance whenever they break the rules and make life hell for homeowners until long after the lawyers are called in.
The merits of the ITU being involved in Internet protocol discussions aside, the notion that the Internet is some kind of anarchic, ungoverned, network that's not "owned" by any group, groups, or governments, is a ludicrous meme that has no basis in reality.
Every user of the Internet is governed by, at the very least, their local laws, and frequently affected, if not bound by, the laws of governments they would otherwise not normally be associated with. Content on the Internet is frequently censored, and people have suffered penalties from enormous fines to actual imprisonment, due exclusively to things they did online. ISPs are, actually, required to abide by local laws, and frequently are compelled to take a role in law enforcement, be that simply giving up names, or in some countries, filtering content and identifying people who attempt to get hold of content legislated as illegal.
Given that, the uproar about the notion that the ITU - which is hardly a political body and thus far has never made any decision you could reasonably suggest is content based - might be involved in provisioning the Internet because somehow it means the UN now governs the Internet - is faintly ridiculous. Nobody is going to deported to a dictatorship from their home country thanks to any rules imposed by the UN or ITU. And Kony (or whoever the Godwin-violation of the week is) isn't going to be able to take down criticisms of him hosted on US websites thanks to decisions by the UN.
There may be legitimate reasons to oppose the ITU's involvement in the Internet. The "If the ITU is involved, the Internet will be governed by POL POT!!!" one really isn't.
Spammers have no problems whatsoever with this spamless utopia you espouse where legitimate emailers can't send email because they're running their own mail server. My mailbox is full of this crap all the time, and I've met people who work for companies that send spam and do everything they can to stretch the rules as far as possible, resulting in their largely unsolicited "Wait, I don't remember signing up for this" crap getting through.
You are the problem. You are the problem because you accept any idiotic solution to spam control no matter who it inconviences, and no matter how ineffective it actually is. Objectively, nothing this article is about concerns any legitimate means of blocking spam. Yet you're in favor of it, because that's the justification.
What you espouse, your support and your willingness to give full throated apologia for this crap, is undermining the email system. You reduce its effectiveness as more and more legitimate applications become impossible, while spammers continue to find ways around it.
If they're owned by companies that actually make products, then presumably they're more of a consortium (like the MPEG LA) than a patent troll, per-se.
I don't know, I hate software patents, but I like seeing companies that trying to destroy competitors products by abusing the patent system being themselves a victim of it.
There are times to use painful, potentially fatal, means of coercion. This isn't one of them.
Unfortunately, we're going to get a lot of people posting here claiming that simply because the police demanded she do something, and she didn't, that they were justified. The simple truth is, no, they weren't. You don't get to do anything you like to someone simply because you have a badge and they didn't do what you told them to.
Maybe I'm confused by your question, but 802.11 is indeed a DSSS technology. The problem is that spread spectrum does not mean "unlimited bandwidth" - the more traffic, the more interference, the "weaker" (the harder to distinguish from background noise) the signal becomes. That's why 802.11 has a set of channels it can run on, and why, for example, Sprint and Verizon (or the operators of 3G UMTS networks like T-Mobile and AT&T) aren't going to come to a spectrum sharing agreement any time soon.
(The other way to read your question I guess would be why isn't there some way to say "I'm going to reserve spectrum for this time in this area built into 802.11 like the FCC is proposing with this new spectrum, in which case... because it would be a royal PITA to maintain such a database, and wouldn't be enforceable.)
GSM already standardizes on 112 (even in North America - obviously you can also dial your local emergency number too, so 911 works here), and I don't believe the fat fingering issue you raise has been a problem at all.
It's a matter of spin. NYCL emphasizes "illegal downloading" because then he can pretend that the total damage done to the copyright holders was 99c multiplied by the number of song titles Thomas downloaded.
The copyright holders (and I'm in agreement with them, FWIW) would point out that the problem was "making available to millions of anonymous strangers", which causes greater damage, both directly (number of times each title was uploaded from Thomas's PC multipled by 99c) and indirectly (more people, thanks to Thomas's action, avoiding legit vendors because they know that there's a wide variety of music available "for free" on whatever P2P systems Thomas was using, wider thanks to Thomas's actions.)
If Thomas was a leech, obviously a leech, and merely downloaded the tracks, without also resharing them, I don't think anything would have gone to court.
Given SCOTUS is unlikely to be made up of people who want to "stick it to the man", or who believe copyright is morally wrong, or any of the other stuff that gets argued here, I suspect they'll be more inclined to sympathise with the copyright holder's view than NYCL's. So Thomas is going to waste more time and money, and probably set a legal precedent at the same time that will do nothing to loosen the screws.
The drug I'm refering to is "bath salts". These have been in the news lately because of some bizarre violent side effects, such as one victim literally eating another person's face off. McAfee has made it clear on countless occasions that he takes that drug.
McAfee may be completely innocent, but quite honestly, this "Belize is the most corrupt country on Earth and McAfee has never done anything at all that would suggest he's capable of killing people" thing is ridiculous on the face of it. Most people making the former assertion aren't willing to make a coherent argument either that it is, or that it's pertenant to this case (is Belize infamous for the police murdering people and then fitting up their neighbors? No? But you heard of a guy who needed to bribe an official there to get a business license therefore it must be so corrupt the former is possible? Really?), nor recognize that McAfee does, at least on the surface, appear to be batshit insane.
I'm not saying McAfee's guilty, but there's no good reason to assume it's impossible that he committed murder. The whole thing is reminding me of the Reiser case, where it was just assumed by most of Slashdot that an open source nerd would never do such a thing.
I suspect his point was that if your logic held, there wouldn't be many extradition treaties as they'd be pretty one sided if they relied upon a system of law not present in the vast majority of bound parties. So there has to be more to it than you suggest.
From the 31st March 2015, all TVs that need to connect to Blu-ray players will need to support BDL+2, a two way video system allowing the player access to a video feed of the people watching the TV. BDL+2 allows discs to be sold that are licensed by maximum number of simultaneous viewers, so the camera can be used to count the number of viewers (using the same technology that cameras use to identify and focus in on faces) and ensure the licensing conditions are being met.
Naaah. I'm just kidding.
Actually, no I'm not, it's totally true. Go to Sony.com, go to the Blu-ray licensing section, and check BD2011.Amendment.BDL+2.20110612.
.... OK, I'm making it up.
No, actually, it's genuine. Seriously. Engadget did a whole article on it last year.
...or would have done, if it were real! Haha, gotcha! Sounded real didn't it though, it's exactly what you'd expect Sony to do?
...which is probably why it's actually true and I'm not making it up at all. Sony are evil bastards.
This is "+5 Interesting"? You're comparing apples and oranges.
Microsoft isn't complaining about being required to pay a high up-front fee for each software update. It's complaining about having to charge Apple customers 50% more than it'd like.
And the per-patch fee had a justification to it: Microsoft wanted to improve quality and reasoned forcing developers to reduce the number of patches would force them to test their products before releasing them. Whether it was a good idea is open to question, but the logic had nothing to do with trying to screw anyone over.
This isn't even about fixing software, so the car analogy kinda over-exaggerates it.
It's fairly easy to side load something on Android. You're at the website, you hit the download link, and then... well, if third party applications are disabled you're told and sent to your preferences. If they're enabled, then you get the standard dialog telling you what permissions the app needs and asked to confirm you want it installed.
It's not hard. Frankly, it makes pumping gas (to get back to car analogies) look advanced and technical by comparison. The only complication is that "You have to enable third party apps in Settings" thing.
Google can take a 90% cut for all I care. They can ban all apps that aren't racist. They can require people consent to their email app spamming Steve Job's grieving family with "How'd you like that thermonuclear bullshit now, asswipes?" as a condition of buying software. And it still wouldn't be comparable to the iOS situation.
Why would you build something on open, well documented, standards (even with a compatible proprietary extension or two) if your intent wasn't interoperability?
Microsoft could have produced a much easier to use system if they'd gone their own way with a proprietary directory system and associated secure identification system. It wouldn't have been hard to match Kerberos and LDAP feature for feature while making something friendlier (wo=and,wo=if,wo=you,wo=think,wo=ldap,wo=can't,wo=be,wo=friendlier,wo=you,wo=haven't,wo=used,es=it)
They didn't. Microsoft chose publically available standards and built a system upon those standards. They made some minor changes that didn't actually prevent interoperability with existing servers and clients, but documented them - albeit initially only making the documentation available to people who were willing to pay for it.
I know people keep pointing at the EU ruling, but my instinct tells me that the EU merely pushed Microsoft to do what it had originally not realized it had to do, not that the EU forced Microsoft to be open about something it had intended to keep secret.
Yeah, I used to write "runs the same way" Javascript for all available JS supporting browsers back in 2001. It was possible. I mean, without doing browser checks and writing big long if(MSIE) {} else {} crap. The same code would "work" on both Netscape 4 and IE4.
Was it a good idea? Did the website look decent under either? Do I need to answer that question?
By limiting yourself to a strict subset of SQL you can, kinda, sorta, if you know every pitfall, avoid something breaking on one or two of the implementations out there. It's hard. The reality is you're trying to speak the same language when actually there are multiple dialects out there, and you end up, inevitably, limiting what you're capable of doing.
SQL is not one language. It is not, in any real sense, standardized. DBMS programs are not actually interchangable in the real world.
Yes, but then you end up with KDE or XFCE. And in any case it's not Ubuntu in that sense any more.
There really wasn't a lot wrong with GNOME 2, I wish they'd have taken a more evolutionary approach to improving that. As it is, I take a similar route to yours, I use the GNOME fall-back mode with a few extensions loaded to improve Ubuntu integration. It's not proper Ubuntu, but it's at least a hell of a lot better than XFCE or KDE. And it's closer to what Ubuntu should be than Unity.
Not even that, it's a straightforward "We've changed everything and you have to relearn everything, but there's not really a substantial advantage to the replacement" thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think there are some good ideas in Unity, but I really am far from convinced that it was necessary to throw everything out and start again when building it. The only "justification" I can see is that they saw GNOME doing the same thing and thought this was the only way to move forward.
I'm not a Unity hater, but it's taken me a long time to be willing to use it anywhere (it's now my default UI at work), and I'm still relieved when I get home and can use my hybrid GNOME Classic desktop on my personal machine. I was extremely relieved by GNOME's recent decision to at least acknowledge that there are people out there who prefer a more ordinary desktop, and I hope we see those improvements in Ubuntu soon.
Companies don't just sue people for no reason. For Apple to sue Darling, there'd have to be some kind of motivation for them to do so. Otherwise it would:
1. Waste a lot of money.
2. Cause a lot of ill-feeling
3. Possibly set precedents that bind it in future in a way damaging to Apple in the long term.
It's hard to see what kind of threat this product would be to Apple, and in theory it might even be a benefit.
Apple's market is based upon people liking the way Apple's devices work. With a small number of famous exceptions, few people buy Apple because of the exclusive availability of a particular piece of software. By and large, the vast majority of people interested in Apple's products aren't going to be interested in Ubuntu with a software compatibility layer. Of the few left who need a Mac for a particular piece of professional software, few are going to risk running that software on an unsupported compatibility layer.
I find it very improbable Apple will sue. I think they'll ignore it.
Kinda. AT&T has had the iPhone for ages so if that were the only problem...
The issue is the 3G version of GSM, UMTS, which T-Mobile, until now, has run on the AWS spectrum. (AT&T was running it on 800MHz Cellular and 1900Mhz PCS) iPhones don't support AWS.
T-Mobile is doing "spectrum refarming", adding 3G to its PCS frequencies. The interesting part of this is that this means an influx of iPhones shouldn't significantly affect users of better smartphones, as we'll still be able to use the AWS 3G (and in some cases, both AWS and PCS.)
It's hardly lying. You might just about get away with calling it spinning, but even so.
It would have been lying if Google had said "To better serve you, we're removing the following features of the free Google Apps", or "To better serve you, we're now restricting free apps accounts to three users". But saying "To better serve you, we're eliminating a free service so that we can get the revenues necessary to support the product properly", that's entirely fair.
Disclaimer: I'm sortadisappointed by this, I'm a free GA user myself and planned to use it for other projects/domains. Glad I get to keep what I have, but still.
But we're not going to find it useful because you assume it's not your job to convince us.
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but the problem with posting a "I tried it and it worked" testimonial about some concept that seems shakey, when there's a documented phenomenon called "the placebo effect", is that, well, we'll assume it's the placebo effect that caused you to write "I tried it and it worked" to begin with, assuming we don't doubt your sincerity.
There is no onus on you to prove your case, unless you want to convince others of your position. As long as there are more rational explanations for your testimonial than the conclusions you draw, we're more apt to believe those explanations over your own. That's human nature, and it means you possibly need to drop the "I have no need to explain myself if I'm trying to make a point" position.
I don't expect everyone to be convinced by my view of the world, but when my opinions veer away from the provable, I rarely mention them, and if I do, it's merely so that others can understand me, not so that others can share my opinion.
I know what he said, he said specifically this was a group he'd never be able to get to vote for him.
Here's what he said. Even in the context of questions about tax cuts, it's about as much about cutting taxes as the answer "Personally, I'd like a cheeseburger right now" would be about foreign relations with Israel.
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.... These are people who pay no income tax.... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
The following groups are included in the 47%, in pseudo-order of sympathy:
1. Rich people with good accountants.
2. Poor people too lazy to work.
3. Long term unemployed, probably made up mostly of people who have paid income taxes most of their lives and will do so again in future.
4. Short term unemployed, most of whom have paid taxes most of their lives and will continue to do so after they regain work.
5. Seniors. Who, by the way, paid plenty of taxes for their working lives.
6. People who work crappy jobs to make ends meet.
7. Blue-collar workers in low wage states, such as most of the south. Ironically, this is a Republican "base".
8. Most of the military. True fact: starting salary for a grunt is less (as in way south of) $20,000 a year. It doesn't get much higher either if you're not an officer.
Putting the military at the end there because of the current Troop fetish in this country.
The interesting point to me is that between 1, 5, 7, and 8, it doesn't seem improbable to me that Romney was completely off-base when he suggested the 47% would never vote for him, no matter what. I think it's quite possible the majority (if only a slight majority) of the 47% voted for him - at least, those who didn't realize he was talking about them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what bothers me too. I know that if I wanted to install solar panels on the roof of my home I'd have to go through a ton of bureaucracy, which would be based largely on the personal opinions of a largely unaccountable group of people who were interested in their jobs to begin with on the basis of "making the neighborhood look nice" rather than "making things better for residents." Chances of me getting approval? Close to nil.
The irony is that these agencies push down the values of the homes they govern, while they constantly claim the opposite. We're only in association-controlled land because we couldn't afford to live somewhere more free for the house space we needed. And governments are reluctant to regulate HOAs because they assume that everyone governed by an HOA is there because they wanted a bunch of arbitrary appearance-obsessed nuts to fine them over the most minor details.
For this kind of thing, it'd be nice to see an agency, like the FCC did with antennas, step in and say "This is our jurisdiction, not yours." It'd also be nice to see the FCC (and whatever agency ends up regularing solar panels) make high profile "busts" of HOAs that go overboard, so HOA officials don't feign ignorance whenever they break the rules and make life hell for homeowners until long after the lawyers are called in.
The merits of the ITU being involved in Internet protocol discussions aside, the notion that the Internet is some kind of anarchic, ungoverned, network that's not "owned" by any group, groups, or governments, is a ludicrous meme that has no basis in reality.
Every user of the Internet is governed by, at the very least, their local laws, and frequently affected, if not bound by, the laws of governments they would otherwise not normally be associated with. Content on the Internet is frequently censored, and people have suffered penalties from enormous fines to actual imprisonment, due exclusively to things they did online. ISPs are, actually, required to abide by local laws, and frequently are compelled to take a role in law enforcement, be that simply giving up names, or in some countries, filtering content and identifying people who attempt to get hold of content legislated as illegal.
Given that, the uproar about the notion that the ITU - which is hardly a political body and thus far has never made any decision you could reasonably suggest is content based - might be involved in provisioning the Internet because somehow it means the UN now governs the Internet - is faintly ridiculous. Nobody is going to deported to a dictatorship from their home country thanks to any rules imposed by the UN or ITU. And Kony (or whoever the Godwin-violation of the week is) isn't going to be able to take down criticisms of him hosted on US websites thanks to decisions by the UN.
There may be legitimate reasons to oppose the ITU's involvement in the Internet. The "If the ITU is involved, the Internet will be governed by POL POT!!!" one really isn't.
Oh bollocks.
Spammers have no problems whatsoever with this spamless utopia you espouse where legitimate emailers can't send email because they're running their own mail server. My mailbox is full of this crap all the time, and I've met people who work for companies that send spam and do everything they can to stretch the rules as far as possible, resulting in their largely unsolicited "Wait, I don't remember signing up for this" crap getting through.
You are the problem. You are the problem because you accept any idiotic solution to spam control no matter who it inconviences, and no matter how ineffective it actually is. Objectively, nothing this article is about concerns any legitimate means of blocking spam. Yet you're in favor of it, because that's the justification.
What you espouse, your support and your willingness to give full throated apologia for this crap, is undermining the email system. You reduce its effectiveness as more and more legitimate applications become impossible, while spammers continue to find ways around it.
Go away.
If they're owned by companies that actually make products, then presumably they're more of a consortium (like the MPEG LA) than a patent troll, per-se.
I don't know, I hate software patents, but I like seeing companies that trying to destroy competitors products by abusing the patent system being themselves a victim of it.
There are times to use painful, potentially fatal, means of coercion. This isn't one of them.
Unfortunately, we're going to get a lot of people posting here claiming that simply because the police demanded she do something, and she didn't, that they were justified. The simple truth is, no, they weren't. You don't get to do anything you like to someone simply because you have a badge and they didn't do what you told them to.
We do not live in a police state.
Maybe I'm confused by your question, but 802.11 is indeed a DSSS technology. The problem is that spread spectrum does not mean "unlimited bandwidth" - the more traffic, the more interference, the "weaker" (the harder to distinguish from background noise) the signal becomes. That's why 802.11 has a set of channels it can run on, and why, for example, Sprint and Verizon (or the operators of 3G UMTS networks like T-Mobile and AT&T) aren't going to come to a spectrum sharing agreement any time soon.
(The other way to read your question I guess would be why isn't there some way to say "I'm going to reserve spectrum for this time in this area built into 802.11 like the FCC is proposing with this new spectrum, in which case... because it would be a royal PITA to maintain such a database, and wouldn't be enforceable.)
GSM already standardizes on 112 (even in North America - obviously you can also dial your local emergency number too, so 911 works here), and I don't believe the fat fingering issue you raise has been a problem at all.
It's a matter of spin. NYCL emphasizes "illegal downloading" because then he can pretend that the total damage done to the copyright holders was 99c multiplied by the number of song titles Thomas downloaded.
The copyright holders (and I'm in agreement with them, FWIW) would point out that the problem was "making available to millions of anonymous strangers", which causes greater damage, both directly (number of times each title was uploaded from Thomas's PC multipled by 99c) and indirectly (more people, thanks to Thomas's action, avoiding legit vendors because they know that there's a wide variety of music available "for free" on whatever P2P systems Thomas was using, wider thanks to Thomas's actions.)
If Thomas was a leech, obviously a leech, and merely downloaded the tracks, without also resharing them, I don't think anything would have gone to court.
Given SCOTUS is unlikely to be made up of people who want to "stick it to the man", or who believe copyright is morally wrong, or any of the other stuff that gets argued here, I suspect they'll be more inclined to sympathise with the copyright holder's view than NYCL's. So Thomas is going to waste more time and money, and probably set a legal precedent at the same time that will do nothing to loosen the screws.
Oh for the love of @!$&. Overrated? WTF?
The drug I'm refering to is "bath salts". These have been in the news lately because of some bizarre violent side effects, such as one victim literally eating another person's face off. McAfee has made it clear on countless occasions that he takes that drug.
McAfee may be completely innocent, but quite honestly, this "Belize is the most corrupt country on Earth and McAfee has never done anything at all that would suggest he's capable of killing people" thing is ridiculous on the face of it. Most people making the former assertion aren't willing to make a coherent argument either that it is, or that it's pertenant to this case (is Belize infamous for the police murdering people and then fitting up their neighbors? No? But you heard of a guy who needed to bribe an official there to get a business license therefore it must be so corrupt the former is possible? Really?), nor recognize that McAfee does, at least on the surface, appear to be batshit insane.
I'm not saying McAfee's guilty, but there's no good reason to assume it's impossible that he committed murder. The whole thing is reminding me of the Reiser case, where it was just assumed by most of Slashdot that an open source nerd would never do such a thing.
He does, however, have a history of using drugs that cause strange, frequently violent, behavior in those who take it.
I suspect his point was that if your logic held, there wouldn't be many extradition treaties as they'd be pretty one sided if they relied upon a system of law not present in the vast majority of bound parties. So there has to be more to it than you suggest.
From the 31st March 2015, all TVs that need to connect to Blu-ray players will need to support BDL+2, a two way video system allowing the player access to a video feed of the people watching the TV. BDL+2 allows discs to be sold that are licensed by maximum number of simultaneous viewers, so the camera can be used to count the number of viewers (using the same technology that cameras use to identify and focus in on faces) and ensure the licensing conditions are being met.
Naaah. I'm just kidding.
Actually, no I'm not, it's totally true. Go to Sony.com, go to the Blu-ray licensing section, and check BD2011.Amendment.BDL+2.20110612.
No, actually, it's genuine. Seriously. Engadget did a whole article on it last year.
This is "+5 Interesting"? You're comparing apples and oranges.
Microsoft isn't complaining about being required to pay a high up-front fee for each software update. It's complaining about having to charge Apple customers 50% more than it'd like.
And the per-patch fee had a justification to it: Microsoft wanted to improve quality and reasoned forcing developers to reduce the number of patches would force them to test their products before releasing them. Whether it was a good idea is open to question, but the logic had nothing to do with trying to screw anyone over.
This isn't even about fixing software, so the car analogy kinda over-exaggerates it.
It's fairly easy to side load something on Android. You're at the website, you hit the download link, and then... well, if third party applications are disabled you're told and sent to your preferences. If they're enabled, then you get the standard dialog telling you what permissions the app needs and asked to confirm you want it installed.
It's not hard. Frankly, it makes pumping gas (to get back to car analogies) look advanced and technical by comparison. The only complication is that "You have to enable third party apps in Settings" thing.
Google can take a 90% cut for all I care. They can ban all apps that aren't racist. They can require people consent to their email app spamming Steve Job's grieving family with "How'd you like that thermonuclear bullshit now, asswipes?" as a condition of buying software. And it still wouldn't be comparable to the iOS situation.
Why would you build something on open, well documented, standards (even with a compatible proprietary extension or two) if your intent wasn't interoperability?
Microsoft could have produced a much easier to use system if they'd gone their own way with a proprietary directory system and associated secure identification system. It wouldn't have been hard to match Kerberos and LDAP feature for feature while making something friendlier (wo=and,wo=if,wo=you,wo=think,wo=ldap,wo=can't,wo=be,wo=friendlier,wo=you,wo=haven't,wo=used,es=it)
They didn't. Microsoft chose publically available standards and built a system upon those standards. They made some minor changes that didn't actually prevent interoperability with existing servers and clients, but documented them - albeit initially only making the documentation available to people who were willing to pay for it.
I know people keep pointing at the EU ruling, but my instinct tells me that the EU merely pushed Microsoft to do what it had originally not realized it had to do, not that the EU forced Microsoft to be open about something it had intended to keep secret.
Yeah, I used to write "runs the same way" Javascript for all available JS supporting browsers back in 2001. It was possible. I mean, without doing browser checks and writing big long if(MSIE) {} else {} crap. The same code would "work" on both Netscape 4 and IE4.
Was it a good idea? Did the website look decent under either? Do I need to answer that question?
By limiting yourself to a strict subset of SQL you can, kinda, sorta, if you know every pitfall, avoid something breaking on one or two of the implementations out there. It's hard. The reality is you're trying to speak the same language when actually there are multiple dialects out there, and you end up, inevitably, limiting what you're capable of doing.
SQL is not one language. It is not, in any real sense, standardized. DBMS programs are not actually interchangable in the real world.
Yes, but then you end up with KDE or XFCE. And in any case it's not Ubuntu in that sense any more.
There really wasn't a lot wrong with GNOME 2, I wish they'd have taken a more evolutionary approach to improving that. As it is, I take a similar route to yours, I use the GNOME fall-back mode with a few extensions loaded to improve Ubuntu integration. It's not proper Ubuntu, but it's at least a hell of a lot better than XFCE or KDE. And it's closer to what Ubuntu should be than Unity.
Not even that, it's a straightforward "We've changed everything and you have to relearn everything, but there's not really a substantial advantage to the replacement" thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think there are some good ideas in Unity, but I really am far from convinced that it was necessary to throw everything out and start again when building it. The only "justification" I can see is that they saw GNOME doing the same thing and thought this was the only way to move forward.
I'm not a Unity hater, but it's taken me a long time to be willing to use it anywhere (it's now my default UI at work), and I'm still relieved when I get home and can use my hybrid GNOME Classic desktop on my personal machine. I was extremely relieved by GNOME's recent decision to at least acknowledge that there are people out there who prefer a more ordinary desktop, and I hope we see those improvements in Ubuntu soon.
Mark appears to be saying that Ubuntu will work in about a year and a half (all the references to 14.04LTS.)
As a Ubuntu user myself, I can't say I'm overly happy with the direction it's been in lately. I hope he's right.
Companies don't just sue people for no reason. For Apple to sue Darling, there'd have to be some kind of motivation for them to do so. Otherwise it would:
1. Waste a lot of money.
2. Cause a lot of ill-feeling
3. Possibly set precedents that bind it in future in a way damaging to Apple in the long term.
It's hard to see what kind of threat this product would be to Apple, and in theory it might even be a benefit.
Apple's market is based upon people liking the way Apple's devices work. With a small number of famous exceptions, few people buy Apple because of the exclusive availability of a particular piece of software. By and large, the vast majority of people interested in Apple's products aren't going to be interested in Ubuntu with a software compatibility layer. Of the few left who need a Mac for a particular piece of professional software, few are going to risk running that software on an unsupported compatibility layer.
I find it very improbable Apple will sue. I think they'll ignore it.
Kinda. AT&T has had the iPhone for ages so if that were the only problem...
The issue is the 3G version of GSM, UMTS, which T-Mobile, until now, has run on the AWS spectrum. (AT&T was running it on 800MHz Cellular and 1900Mhz PCS) iPhones don't support AWS.
T-Mobile is doing "spectrum refarming", adding 3G to its PCS frequencies. The interesting part of this is that this means an influx of iPhones shouldn't significantly affect users of better smartphones, as we'll still be able to use the AWS 3G (and in some cases, both AWS and PCS.)
It's hardly lying. You might just about get away with calling it spinning, but even so.
It would have been lying if Google had said "To better serve you, we're removing the following features of the free Google Apps", or "To better serve you, we're now restricting free apps accounts to three users". But saying "To better serve you, we're eliminating a free service so that we can get the revenues necessary to support the product properly", that's entirely fair.
Disclaimer: I'm sortadisappointed by this, I'm a free GA user myself and planned to use it for other projects/domains. Glad I get to keep what I have, but still.
But we're not going to find it useful because you assume it's not your job to convince us.
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but the problem with posting a "I tried it and it worked" testimonial about some concept that seems shakey, when there's a documented phenomenon called "the placebo effect", is that, well, we'll assume it's the placebo effect that caused you to write "I tried it and it worked" to begin with, assuming we don't doubt your sincerity.
There is no onus on you to prove your case, unless you want to convince others of your position. As long as there are more rational explanations for your testimonial than the conclusions you draw, we're more apt to believe those explanations over your own. That's human nature, and it means you possibly need to drop the "I have no need to explain myself if I'm trying to make a point" position.
I don't expect everyone to be convinced by my view of the world, but when my opinions veer away from the provable, I rarely mention them, and if I do, it's merely so that others can understand me, not so that others can share my opinion.
Here's what he said. Even in the context of questions about tax cuts, it's about as much about cutting taxes as the answer "Personally, I'd like a cheeseburger right now" would be about foreign relations with Israel.
Seniors, yes. Children, no.
The following groups are included in the 47%, in pseudo-order of sympathy:
1. Rich people with good accountants.
2. Poor people too lazy to work.
3. Long term unemployed, probably made up mostly of people who have paid income taxes most of their lives and will do so again in future.
4. Short term unemployed, most of whom have paid taxes most of their lives and will continue to do so after they regain work.
5. Seniors. Who, by the way, paid plenty of taxes for their working lives.
6. People who work crappy jobs to make ends meet.
7. Blue-collar workers in low wage states, such as most of the south. Ironically, this is a Republican "base".
8. Most of the military. True fact: starting salary for a grunt is less (as in way south of) $20,000 a year. It doesn't get much higher either if you're not an officer.
Putting the military at the end there because of the current Troop fetish in this country.
The interesting point to me is that between 1, 5, 7, and 8, it doesn't seem improbable to me that Romney was completely off-base when he suggested the 47% would never vote for him, no matter what. I think it's quite possible the majority (if only a slight majority) of the 47% voted for him - at least, those who didn't realize he was talking about them.