This phone is truly going to revolutionize how cell phones are made these days -- FINALLY!
No, it most certainly isn't.
It's $500 and requires a commitment to a two year contract just for that price. It's locked to one operator, who may or may not be any good where you live. Its capabilities are nice, but not so significant that for the vast majority of people a compelling reason can be found to purchase one over a more conventional unit from an experienced manufacturer. There are things we already know about and nobody in their right mind can be happy about. Sealed, un-replaceable batteries in a cellphone? A non-programmable smartphone (not even Java, apparently)? (Just what was the point of putting OS X on it?) Integration with Yahoo and Google Mail, but nothing else, not even corporate email clients like Exchange? (Mail.app can do it, so don't tell me it isn't possible.)
There are many aspects we simply don't know about it yet. For example: does it do voice recognition? That's pretty critical, and wasn't mentioned at all during the keynote. I'm guessing it doesn't. What do you think?
While it's quite possible Apple will come up with a "Revision B" that's clearly compelling, the high price, carrier exclusivity, and questions still to be raised over the over-all package will mean that this version, at least, will remain one of the more questionable business decisions Apple has made. The entire thing to me looks like the victory of ego over common sense.
Well done Jobs. You've just undermined the one serious success Apple has had in a couple of decades (the iPod and mobile music market) by producing a toy for the wealthy person who lives alone (no spouse to ask "You're spending WHAT on WHAT?"), is not currently in a mobile phone contract, lives in an area where Cingular has good coverage and capacity, has a small enough music collection that 4gigs will store it, and doesn't mind spending $500 on something that'll cease to have acceptable battery life in 18-30 months. If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be getting out right now.
The problem with modern version of Corporations is that nobody is willing to revoke a corporate charter for malfeasance by the corporation. I guarantee that if stock holders entire value was at risk for the ENRON type accounting fraud, they would enact much stricter guidelines for accounting than even the government requires. But since nobody is willing to revoke corporate charters and let the chips fall, we have an artificial barrier to self policing within the corporation.
I'm not sure I follow.
While the stock holder's "entire value" may, superficially, have not been at risk, in practice a large number of investors, particularly employees (who, one might argue, were those who could hold the corporation accountable the most), did, in practice, lose everything, or a close enough approximation that the difference doesn't matter.
The second part has little to do with the first. ENRON's corporate charter, in effect, was revoked, by bankruptsy. Yes, some kind of shell still exists, but it's a set of legal fictions that have nothing to do with reality. The company known as ENRON in 2001 no longer exists. No entity exists that resembles that organization in any sense, and only a handful of people, largely unrelated to the scandal, have benefited from its demise.
I agree corporations should be held more accountable, but ENRON is a poor poster child for that cause. The general culture of the corporation that lead it to creating artificial energy shortages in California were the same as the culture that lead to the explicitly illegal actions that lead to its downfull. It was caught in the net within a year or two of its bad faith becoming evident, the real problems are the companies that aren't.
I don't think it's the second coming at all, and I'm not seeing many people proposing it's a good price. FWIW, though, a games console is an absurd item to charge $600 for.
$500 on its own isn't too bad. Actually, I wouldn't have even thought $800 was a bad price sans contract. But, alas, you need to sign up to a contract. So to me, it's overpriced given it's sold with heavy strings attached.
FWIW, I've never recommended anyone buy a smartphone that's locked to any carrier. Any phone you spend more than $100 on should be unlocked. A phone is a very personal item, to have it tied to someone else's terms and conditions strikes me as a bad decision to make.
At one point, on the West Coast, Cingular and T-Mobile jointly ran a GSM network called "GSM Facilities", which both T-Mobile and Cingular phone SIMs treated as the "home" network. That agreement was dissolved when Cingular merged with AT&T Wireless over a year ago, but people are still convinced they're the same network, despite the fact this arrangement was only operational in a small part of the country, and no longer exists.
Hence the confusion. Well, that, and T-Mobile being the latest name for Voicestream, Omnipoint, etc, and thus a "new" network nobody's ever heard of.
Sorry, but this is just silly. What you are suggesting is that all computer users are identical and have identical needs, and that there is thus an "ideal" desktop that, once achieved, will simultaneously serve all users ideally, out of the box.
No, you're overstating that as a reason for allowing the KDE team to build a desktop that doesn't suit anyone. The vast majority of people have similar needs. Pretty much everyone benefits from certain decisions being made even if at first they don't like them. The fact is KDE starts out as crap. If it didn't, you wouldn't be spending the time and effort you are "customizing" it, because it would be usable out of the box.
You're putting the cart before the horse. You're assuming that KDE is good because it's customizable, not that it's customizable because it's terrible. You're assuming that your 30 minutes customizing leaves you with a desktop that's significantly better than the GNOME or Mac OS X desktop that you'd have spent five minutes customizing, without recognising the fact that GNOME and Mac OS X are pretty close to "right" already.
The "ideal" desktop is the most customized, not the least customized. An editor, a photographer, and a sysadmin all should have radically different computing desktops that look almost nothing alike one another and that behave in very different ways. If they don't they're not working at peak efficiency. Fine for some, but I want my desktop to match my workflow as closely as possible.
Again, stop overstating the case for customizability. GNOME and Mac OS X are customizable. You can choose which applications appear on your dock/launchbar/equivalent-there-of, windows are resizable, you can choose colour schemes and other things that seriously effect your distraction level.
KDE goes beyond that and allows components to be customized not because they need to be but because the developers have no idea what the right decision is. Why is there a choice of whether to have a fitts-law menu or not? There is a right answer, sometimes an answer that's affected by context - ie where is the user expecting it? Is there a better control object that the user would benefit more from being in the fitts-law area that's KDE specific? etc. But it's a right answer that's not user specific. It's either a good idea or it isn't. Why make it configurable?
Why make the buttons on the top of each window configurable? There are buttons that need to be there, and buttons that don't.
Why is Konqueror a mess? Why is a decision about toolbars going to affect both web browser and file management windows? Why is the "Open in a new window" option non-spacial?
These are customizable not because they're supposed to be but because the KDE developers have no idea what to do. They give you the option because they don't know what they're doing. KDE's weakness is inherent in that it needs customizability. And the best customized KDE desktop couldn't match, for me, slightly tweaked, no visit to the command line needed, GNOME or Mac OS X desktops. Why? Because the KDE developers do not know what they're doing. They're not building an integrated desktop, they're throwing features out there and hoping people will shut up when they say KDE is crap. "What's spacial file management? Oh, you mean like when a new window opens when you click on a folder. I hate that! Anyway, KDE does have it, click on "Folders open in a new window", you see, that's why KDE's so good. What, you don't want a huge toolbar to appear? You can turn that off, just... oh, you want it in your webbrowser? Dude, why would you want it in your web browser but not in your..." (continued ad-nausia. Yes, I said nausia.)
But it doesn't address the criticisms, because the developers don't know what they're doing. Your thirty minutes appear productive because you've turned a pigs ear into a canvas cloth, but most of us still don't want to blow our noses in it.
Spending 30 minutes configuring a desktop is 30 minutes wasting time.
If KDE came with a decent configuration out of the box, it wouldn't be necessary to reconfigure it. And as such, the ridiculous number of options wouldn't be touted as an "advantage" by KDE fans who see no irony in their advocating what amounts to the biggest sign KDE isn't usable by default.
It's like a promoter of cardboard houses who points out how each home comes with unlimited duct-tape, you don't get that with concrete block!
No, it's a success of the automobile manufacturers that when you enter your car, you don't have to move the steering wheel from the back of the car to the front (which is easy to do in CarDE, that's why it's so great!), replace the iron, spike lined, seat with a spongy one (just a simple click in CarDE's Seat Options, I mean, that's why GNOMetro sucks, they force you to use leather seats, you don't get any choice unless you go to the command line with a screw driver), select the see-through windows in favour of the wooden boards (hey, at least CarDE gives you the choice!), decide which order the pedals should go in and move them around (my wife prefers the gas pedal on the left, I prefer it on the right, if we used Car OS X we'd be forced to have the gas pedal on the right all the time, can you believe that?) and CarDE gives me the choice between five different reverse gears, whereas with GNOMetro it just has one! That's dumbing it down too far I think!
GNOME and Mac OS X allow you to customize the things that need customizing because they differ on a user-by-user basis. What neither does is go overboard, and both make intelligent decisions to begin with.
KDE doesn't. Any GUI you have to spend significant amounts of time customizing is, frankly, awful. KDE lacks a usability and design emphasis.
As KDE is so customizable, add whatever's left that's required to make it possible to work exactly the same way as Mac OS X or GNOME (I don't mind which. Personally, I prefer OS X, but I'm aware of the legal issues and such so GNOME is fine.)
Now, once you've done that, set it up by default with those settings and have a switch somewhere that "turns on" the configurability.
That way you'll have the best of both worlds. A desktop that was actually designed, rather than bodged together by people who don't really have any idea about usability issues and thus promote the use of checkboxes and radio buttons as opposed to "figuring things out" and "doing the right things" instead, plus some way to make it crap again for the "advanced" users who want to spend all day playing with Lego and Tonka cars. I mean, GUI options. Sorry.
It's an interesting irony that KDE's supporters really spend most of their time defending the system on the basis of its customizability.
The fact is, if KDE was any good, you wouldn't have to spend time customizing it.
It's not as if you can just arbitrarily go in and make it the perfect desktop unless it's what KDE developers think is reasonable to begin with. Want to remove toolbars from your file windows? Congrats: you no longer have them in the webbrowser either. Want to enable spacial browsing? Well, you can't, but you can have double clicking on a folder causing a new window to open, because the KDE team doesn't really know what spacial means, but they do hate Macs, and that was one of the things about the Mac they hated, so it's got to be the same thing, right?
KDE is a poor clone of Windows designed with the usual attitude that putting in lots of knobs and levers is a valid substitute for putting thought into a UI and making it work.
Is it worth spending 30 minutes trying to get KDE to look like Mac OS X or GNOME, then adding the extra fixes that supposedly cure all the problems you ever had with those two platforms? Well, no. (a) because you can't. And (b) because GNOME and Mac OS X are already good UIs. Why switch to KDE? To fix that slightly annoying problem you have with a file dialog while facing hundreds of new niggling problems?
You heavily customized your desktop not because KDE was superior but because it was inferior. Because it was bad. Because the decisions made by the people who put together KDE and configured it on your machine were so entirely antithetical to what you wanted, that it was worth your while hunting through GUI options to get the buttons you want, to get the single click/double click behaviour you needed, because the icons were stupid, because the... you get the picture. Had it been superior, you wouldn't have needed to customize anything beyond changing the wallpaper and selecting a colour scheme and/or theme.
BTW I really, really, wanted to like KDE when I switched back to GNU/Linux last year. I mean, I'm a "menus should follow Fitt's law" type guy. KDE allows that. But, for all of its faults, GNOME is a good system at last, while KDE just plain sucks, and KDE could do with a lot of examination of both it and Mac OS X, and some introspection of the "How can we apply to same decisions concerning usability to our own DE? Why are we failing at the moment, and how can we fix that and come up with a better system than the others?"
Far fetched? Not really. Difficult to pull off and thus unlikely due to not being the low hanging fruit? That's more like it.
This "technique" is already possible. A mass mailed email worm (or whatever) modifies the user's "hosts" file (C:\WINDOWS\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts) so that www.paypal.com gets pointed to his or her IP address. The usual precautions the victim would engage in wouldn't apply, as the victim would actually be going to the website directly (rather than clicking on a link in an email) and thus would be less likely to notice the lack of SSL as there'd be no reason to believe anything is amiss.
This, so far as I'm aware, hasn't been done yet. Too awkward. The timings have to be just right. The malware will be detected early on, before its achieved mass propagation. While virus hunters will not be able to stop the virus, they will be able to get the IP address shut down.
Though, I guess if you're really keen on getting this technique to work, you could have your malware install a deamon so you can provide the IP address at a later date, once the daemon has reached a sufficiently high installed base.
Easy? No. So, right now, it's not the low hanging fruit. Is it far fetched? I don't think so, all I've done is mix some common malware technologies with the HOSTS file. Installing daemons that receive key instructions at a later date is a common DDoS technique.
Some of them are, but remember, the artist gets an advance which is, in part, supposed to help the artist with those costs.
The advance is a source of controversy. It's frequently too small, because the artists are unaware of how much responsibility they have, and it's also often described as a "loan" because the artist will not receive any further royalties until enough have been collected to cover the advance.
On the other hand, it is a large sum of money paid by the publisher. And if not enough CDs are sold to cover the advance, then not only does the publisher take a hit on the production costs they are responsible for, but the publisher also doesn't get the entire advance paid back. It's not a loan in the sense of "The artist pays it back if there aren't enough royalties", the gap between royalties and the advance is soemthing the publisher eats.
Whatever way you look at it, the publisher does invest a lot in each album, and does end up paying the bulk of the costs, directly and indirectly. Like most businesses, they do what they can to minimize their exposure, often leaving the people who produce the music they found their businesses upon with far less than they deserve.
In all honesty, probably not. Once you're compiling for two such different architectures, PowerPC and Intel, which are entirely unalike, I suspect adding one of the other mainstream architectures is a little easier. Most of the big issues are already dealt with (namely endian and cache issues.)
I'm not saying it'd have been a quick flip of a compiler switch, but I suspect a small team could probably have gotten everything up and running in a week or two on a SPARC or ARM.
The bigger issue would have been support for legacy applications. Rosetta was a third party system, and I'm not sure how well that worked with other architectures.
It's been a while since I dealt with Windows DUN, but from memory the modem drivers are essentially chat scripts, and the message about what speed you connected at is generated from the chat script (eg, if it sees "CONNECT 2400/V22bis/V42bis" then it'll tell you it's made a compressed connection at 2400bps.)
So, yes, the modem reports the speed, but the script is what interprets that and gives the user information. I believe the GP is talking about giving the user some sort of script for their modem that basically works like:
SEND "AT+SETMODE=V23"
WAIT FOR "OK"
SEND "ATDT5551212"
IF RECEIVED "CONNECT 1200/75" THEN TELL USER "WOAH! You've managed to get a BROADBAND connection, 1.5mbps connection SUCCESSFULLY NEGOTIATED! WOW!"; START PPP SESSION
Given the sheer volume of drivers in Linux for the obscure and barely heard of, I suspect he wasn't, and I can't really fathom why you'd think he was.
The Linux kernel has an extremely diverse set of drivers. The difficulty is usually getting it all set up, not finding the driver (with some exceptions.) By comparison, Mac OS X only comes with drivers for a specific shortlist of devices, in some categories only devices Apple themselves sell.
I've been through the bizarre process of editing a device driver binary with "vi" under Jaguar in order to get my newly bought, generic, off-the-shelf, would-work-without-anything-special-under-Linux, CD burner to work under Mac OS X's CD burning regime. Very wierd. (I added the link after deciding most people would read that claim as so ridiculous, I must be trolling. No, seriously, that's what I had to do.)
Mac OS X "just works" because, as those opposed to Apple selling Mac OS X for generic PCs never tire of reminding everyone, Apple controls the hardware it runs on. They sell the widget, they provide drivers for the widgets they ship, and with a few honourable exceptions (most USB and Firewire devices fitting particular generic profiles, many phones, cameras, and printers), they don't support anything else.
The problem is that figure isn't sustainable. Apple got a major blip on the marketshare figures when they released the Intel MacBooks, which had been long awaited and an absolutely huge number of already-committed-to-the-Mac people had been holding off buying a laptop for.
I don't doubt their marketshare grew, even ignoring that group, but I really suspect the figures wouldn't have looked so out of place had the Intel MacBooks been released six months earlier.
I can see 10% as a reasonable long term figure for their laptop marketshare, as long as they keep up the excitement factor.
Well, actually all he said was that Mac OS X isn't more secure than Windows. You're jumping from that to "Mac OS X is less secure than Windows", which is not a legitimate jump.
Two doors can be equally open. One doesn't have to be more open than the other. One is not more unlocked than the other.
There are several holes in most operating systems. The biggest one sits between the keyboard and chair. The biggest problem with Mac security right now is that despite the glaring faults with many aspects of its security model, Mac users believe, genuinely and honestly, that there is no reason to be concerned about Mac security.
That, to me at least, is that this exercise is about. Those complaining that Apple should have been notified, that they're just pulling some kind of stunt, are not "getting it". And they never will, until some blackhat actually takes the time to put together something that will slap Mac users down hard and painfully, in a way the majority of Windows users would never fall for today.
The biggest security advantage the Mac has is that it's (still) an uncommon platform, one with a small enough market share that network effects work against the ability of a malware to propogate. That is not an advantage that can be relied upon indefinitely. Are you going to be rely upon it, or upon false assumptions that Mac OS X is in some way inherently more secure than Windows?
No, it's making an unimportant distinction. From the point of view of a copyright holder, a person who has, instead of purchasing a legal copy of their work, has instead made a copy of someone else's copy, is depriving them of the money they were owed for that copy. From their point of view, it's theft. This is why most people have no problems at all describing copyright infringement as theft, except for a minority of extreme Slashdotters. Most people understand the concept, even if we believe the world would be a better place with 100% GPL'd software, or whatever.
If you want your own copy of Windows, buy it. Those are the terms by which Windows is available.
And those people receiving the disk could have had to install it, thus ensuring a thousand blog entries along the lines of "Well, I kind of got Vista up and going, though I'm having to use the VESA driver because it doesn't appear to recognize my laptop's Trident 954KX Supercard, and I'm getting random crashes when I plug in my USB wireless mouse."
These days installing a recent version of Windows on a system is as hard as installing GNU/Linux, both because GNU/Linux has gotten better, and because the hardware has gone so far out of control not even Microsoft can rely upon having drivers for everything any more.
I thought understanding the English language was a pre-requesite for practicing the Bar in the US. But then, a good lawyer also doesn't consider anyone who disagrees with them on any issue automatically "impossible to reason with". I'm still having great difficulty understanding how the hell you've ended up being Slashdot's point lawyer for comment on RIAA cases, and I'm also amazed the case you're defending is going well for the defendent.
I have made no comment above on the level of evidence the RIAA has, but the fact remains that the RIAA's lawsuits (plural) concern the uploading of music. That is what they are alleging. Not, as Scott Lockwood appears to believe, listening to music.
Whether your client is guilty as sin or completely innocent and the RIAA is pulling allegations out of its arse because your client once flicked off Sting and Bono isn't remotely relevent here.
I have some great news for you. This'll probably relieve the other Slashdotters too who are suffering from the same misconception:
The lawsuits are about people uploading music on networks that are designed to pass the music onto (potentially) millions of anonymous strangers. They are NOT about listening to the music.
So you can breath easy. You will NOT be sued for listening to your Beegees collection. Your copy of The Birdie Song will not get you into trouble (unless you rip it and allow people on Kazaa to download it from your PC.) You can retrieve your REM CD from that little nook on the wall you also use to store the catnip someone told you was dope, and the Confederate money which, I'm delighted to tell you, isn't illegal to possess either (you just can't use it.)
If it's not you, then you should have some way of showing there's a strong chance it's not you. If you have a wireless router, and you don't secure it, you could use that as evidence.
Of course, under those circumstances, the routing issues become interesting. Most WAPs I've seen have their own NAT system. You'd have had to configure the router to send all incoming connections to the anonymous, uninvited, guest on your wireless network. Yes, BitTorrent has ways of ensuring even people behind NAT can do some contributing, but these aren't cases, generally, that involve BitTorrent.
If it's a technically smart court, I'd imagine most people trying to pull that defense would be slapped down. At the very least, if you're one of the 1% of people who actually has a WAP you've configured such that anonymous strangers can connect, get a real IP address, and start transferring data, you should be in a position to easily prove that. Our submitter still has to defend the other 99% though.
If you did that, then that would be your defense. You can't just go into court and say "Aha your honour! They've said I was sharing some songs whose copyright belongs to them, but how do they know? It could have just been a file with the same name. Know what I mean?"
This is not a murder trial. It's a civil copyright suit. The evidence is wieghed up on the basis of a balance of probabilities. Realistically, if you're sharing a file with that name, it's improbable that it's not what the file says it is. More-over, if it isn't what the filename says it is, it ought to be increadibly easy for you to prove it. The fact you're not doing so is your problem, not the plaintiff's. It would be perfectly right and proper for the judge to call you out on it, and rule against you.
A very good point. I've been trying to figure out why people are responding as if everything the content maker's team comes out with has to be absolutely air-tight to the point nobody could even consider questioning it.
The reality is that unless the defendent can come up with a good reason why the screenshot would have been forged, it's likely to be taken by the court as evidence, and go a long way towards a "balance of probabilities" in favour of the plaintiff. So these kinds of questions aren't really that useful. Yes, technically, someone could have forged the screen shot, but there's no earthly reason why the RIAA and the content makers would actually want to frame an innocent computer user at the beginning of the case.
You know, most of this is pretty open and shut. People are offering massive libraries of music to download that they're not authorized to do. The technicalities are not computer based, they are not the kinds of questions the average Slashdotter is qualified to answer, they're legal. Does having a copy of a song on your hard drive configured to be automatically transmitted to anyone who wants it constitute fair use, simply because having a copy of the same song on your hard drive for the purpose of listening to it probably is fair use?
It's that kind of thing. Not "OMG! This IP address and time and song name was represented by pixels on a computer screen! You can easily forge those! Do they know this? Someone should tell them!"
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No, it most certainly isn't.
It's $500 and requires a commitment to a two year contract just for that price. It's locked to one operator, who may or may not be any good where you live. Its capabilities are nice, but not so significant that for the vast majority of people a compelling reason can be found to purchase one over a more conventional unit from an experienced manufacturer. There are things we already know about and nobody in their right mind can be happy about. Sealed, un-replaceable batteries in a cellphone? A non-programmable smartphone (not even Java, apparently)? (Just what was the point of putting OS X on it?) Integration with Yahoo and Google Mail, but nothing else, not even corporate email clients like Exchange? (Mail.app can do it, so don't tell me it isn't possible.)
There are many aspects we simply don't know about it yet. For example: does it do voice recognition? That's pretty critical, and wasn't mentioned at all during the keynote. I'm guessing it doesn't. What do you think?
While it's quite possible Apple will come up with a "Revision B" that's clearly compelling, the high price, carrier exclusivity, and questions still to be raised over the over-all package will mean that this version, at least, will remain one of the more questionable business decisions Apple has made. The entire thing to me looks like the victory of ego over common sense.
Well done Jobs. You've just undermined the one serious success Apple has had in a couple of decades (the iPod and mobile music market) by producing a toy for the wealthy person who lives alone (no spouse to ask "You're spending WHAT on WHAT?"), is not currently in a mobile phone contract, lives in an area where Cingular has good coverage and capacity, has a small enough music collection that 4gigs will store it, and doesn't mind spending $500 on something that'll cease to have acceptable battery life in 18-30 months. If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be getting out right now.
I'm not sure I follow.
While the stock holder's "entire value" may, superficially, have not been at risk, in practice a large number of investors, particularly employees (who, one might argue, were those who could hold the corporation accountable the most), did, in practice, lose everything, or a close enough approximation that the difference doesn't matter.
The second part has little to do with the first. ENRON's corporate charter, in effect, was revoked, by bankruptsy. Yes, some kind of shell still exists, but it's a set of legal fictions that have nothing to do with reality. The company known as ENRON in 2001 no longer exists. No entity exists that resembles that organization in any sense, and only a handful of people, largely unrelated to the scandal, have benefited from its demise.
I agree corporations should be held more accountable, but ENRON is a poor poster child for that cause. The general culture of the corporation that lead it to creating artificial energy shortages in California were the same as the culture that lead to the explicitly illegal actions that lead to its downfull. It was caught in the net within a year or two of its bad faith becoming evident, the real problems are the companies that aren't.
I don't think it's the second coming at all, and I'm not seeing many people proposing it's a good price. FWIW, though, a games console is an absurd item to charge $600 for.
$500 on its own isn't too bad. Actually, I wouldn't have even thought $800 was a bad price sans contract. But, alas, you need to sign up to a contract. So to me, it's overpriced given it's sold with heavy strings attached.
FWIW, I've never recommended anyone buy a smartphone that's locked to any carrier. Any phone you spend more than $100 on should be unlocked. A phone is a very personal item, to have it tied to someone else's terms and conditions strikes me as a bad decision to make.
Hence the confusion. Well, that, and T-Mobile being the latest name for Voicestream, Omnipoint, etc, and thus a "new" network nobody's ever heard of.
No, you're overstating that as a reason for allowing the KDE team to build a desktop that doesn't suit anyone. The vast majority of people have similar needs. Pretty much everyone benefits from certain decisions being made even if at first they don't like them. The fact is KDE starts out as crap. If it didn't, you wouldn't be spending the time and effort you are "customizing" it, because it would be usable out of the box.
You're putting the cart before the horse. You're assuming that KDE is good because it's customizable, not that it's customizable because it's terrible. You're assuming that your 30 minutes customizing leaves you with a desktop that's significantly better than the GNOME or Mac OS X desktop that you'd have spent five minutes customizing, without recognising the fact that GNOME and Mac OS X are pretty close to "right" already.
Again, stop overstating the case for customizability. GNOME and Mac OS X are customizable. You can choose which applications appear on your dock/launchbar/equivalent-there-of, windows are resizable, you can choose colour schemes and other things that seriously effect your distraction level.
KDE goes beyond that and allows components to be customized not because they need to be but because the developers have no idea what the right decision is. Why is there a choice of whether to have a fitts-law menu or not? There is a right answer, sometimes an answer that's affected by context - ie where is the user expecting it? Is there a better control object that the user would benefit more from being in the fitts-law area that's KDE specific? etc. But it's a right answer that's not user specific. It's either a good idea or it isn't. Why make it configurable?
Why make the buttons on the top of each window configurable? There are buttons that need to be there, and buttons that don't.
Why is Konqueror a mess? Why is a decision about toolbars going to affect both web browser and file management windows? Why is the "Open in a new window" option non-spacial?
These are customizable not because they're supposed to be but because the KDE developers have no idea what to do. They give you the option because they don't know what they're doing. KDE's weakness is inherent in that it needs customizability. And the best customized KDE desktop couldn't match, for me, slightly tweaked, no visit to the command line needed, GNOME or Mac OS X desktops. Why? Because the KDE developers do not know what they're doing. They're not building an integrated desktop, they're throwing features out there and hoping people will shut up when they say KDE is crap. "What's spacial file management? Oh, you mean like when a new window opens when you click on a folder. I hate that! Anyway, KDE does have it, click on "Folders open in a new window", you see, that's why KDE's so good. What, you don't want a huge toolbar to appear? You can turn that off, just... oh, you want it in your webbrowser? Dude, why would you want it in your web browser but not in your..." (continued ad-nausia. Yes, I said nausia.)
But it doesn't address the criticisms, because the developers don't know what they're doing. Your thirty minutes appear productive because you've turned a pigs ear into a canvas cloth, but most of us still don't want to blow our noses in it.
It sounds like you've missed the point.
KDE is crap.
Spending 30 minutes configuring a desktop is 30 minutes wasting time.
If KDE came with a decent configuration out of the box, it wouldn't be necessary to reconfigure it. And as such, the ridiculous number of options wouldn't be touted as an "advantage" by KDE fans who see no irony in their advocating what amounts to the biggest sign KDE isn't usable by default.
It's like a promoter of cardboard houses who points out how each home comes with unlimited duct-tape, you don't get that with concrete block!
No, it's a success of the automobile manufacturers that when you enter your car, you don't have to move the steering wheel from the back of the car to the front (which is easy to do in CarDE, that's why it's so great!), replace the iron, spike lined, seat with a spongy one (just a simple click in CarDE's Seat Options, I mean, that's why GNOMetro sucks, they force you to use leather seats, you don't get any choice unless you go to the command line with a screw driver), select the see-through windows in favour of the wooden boards (hey, at least CarDE gives you the choice!), decide which order the pedals should go in and move them around (my wife prefers the gas pedal on the left, I prefer it on the right, if we used Car OS X we'd be forced to have the gas pedal on the right all the time, can you believe that?) and CarDE gives me the choice between five different reverse gears, whereas with GNOMetro it just has one! That's dumbing it down too far I think!
GNOME and Mac OS X allow you to customize the things that need customizing because they differ on a user-by-user basis. What neither does is go overboard, and both make intelligent decisions to begin with.
KDE doesn't. Any GUI you have to spend significant amounts of time customizing is, frankly, awful. KDE lacks a usability and design emphasis.
As KDE is so customizable, add whatever's left that's required to make it possible to work exactly the same way as Mac OS X or GNOME (I don't mind which. Personally, I prefer OS X, but I'm aware of the legal issues and such so GNOME is fine.)
Now, once you've done that, set it up by default with those settings and have a switch somewhere that "turns on" the configurability.
That way you'll have the best of both worlds. A desktop that was actually designed, rather than bodged together by people who don't really have any idea about usability issues and thus promote the use of checkboxes and radio buttons as opposed to "figuring things out" and "doing the right things" instead, plus some way to make it crap again for the "advanced" users who want to spend all day playing with Lego and Tonka cars. I mean, GUI options. Sorry.
It's an interesting irony that KDE's supporters really spend most of their time defending the system on the basis of its customizability.
The fact is, if KDE was any good, you wouldn't have to spend time customizing it.
It's not as if you can just arbitrarily go in and make it the perfect desktop unless it's what KDE developers think is reasonable to begin with. Want to remove toolbars from your file windows? Congrats: you no longer have them in the webbrowser either. Want to enable spacial browsing? Well, you can't, but you can have double clicking on a folder causing a new window to open, because the KDE team doesn't really know what spacial means, but they do hate Macs, and that was one of the things about the Mac they hated, so it's got to be the same thing, right?
KDE is a poor clone of Windows designed with the usual attitude that putting in lots of knobs and levers is a valid substitute for putting thought into a UI and making it work.
Is it worth spending 30 minutes trying to get KDE to look like Mac OS X or GNOME, then adding the extra fixes that supposedly cure all the problems you ever had with those two platforms? Well, no. (a) because you can't. And (b) because GNOME and Mac OS X are already good UIs. Why switch to KDE? To fix that slightly annoying problem you have with a file dialog while facing hundreds of new niggling problems?
You heavily customized your desktop not because KDE was superior but because it was inferior. Because it was bad. Because the decisions made by the people who put together KDE and configured it on your machine were so entirely antithetical to what you wanted, that it was worth your while hunting through GUI options to get the buttons you want, to get the single click/double click behaviour you needed, because the icons were stupid, because the... you get the picture. Had it been superior, you wouldn't have needed to customize anything beyond changing the wallpaper and selecting a colour scheme and/or theme.
BTW I really, really, wanted to like KDE when I switched back to GNU/Linux last year. I mean, I'm a "menus should follow Fitt's law" type guy. KDE allows that. But, for all of its faults, GNOME is a good system at last, while KDE just plain sucks, and KDE could do with a lot of examination of both it and Mac OS X, and some introspection of the "How can we apply to same decisions concerning usability to our own DE? Why are we failing at the moment, and how can we fix that and come up with a better system than the others?"
Far fetched? Not really. Difficult to pull off and thus unlikely due to not being the low hanging fruit? That's more like it.
This "technique" is already possible. A mass mailed email worm (or whatever) modifies the user's "hosts" file (C:\WINDOWS\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts) so that www.paypal.com gets pointed to his or her IP address. The usual precautions the victim would engage in wouldn't apply, as the victim would actually be going to the website directly (rather than clicking on a link in an email) and thus would be less likely to notice the lack of SSL as there'd be no reason to believe anything is amiss.
This, so far as I'm aware, hasn't been done yet. Too awkward. The timings have to be just right. The malware will be detected early on, before its achieved mass propagation. While virus hunters will not be able to stop the virus, they will be able to get the IP address shut down.
Though, I guess if you're really keen on getting this technique to work, you could have your malware install a deamon so you can provide the IP address at a later date, once the daemon has reached a sufficiently high installed base.
Easy? No. So, right now, it's not the low hanging fruit. Is it far fetched? I don't think so, all I've done is mix some common malware technologies with the HOSTS file. Installing daemons that receive key instructions at a later date is a common DDoS technique.
Some of them are, but remember, the artist gets an advance which is, in part, supposed to help the artist with those costs.
The advance is a source of controversy. It's frequently too small, because the artists are unaware of how much responsibility they have, and it's also often described as a "loan" because the artist will not receive any further royalties until enough have been collected to cover the advance.
On the other hand, it is a large sum of money paid by the publisher. And if not enough CDs are sold to cover the advance, then not only does the publisher take a hit on the production costs they are responsible for, but the publisher also doesn't get the entire advance paid back. It's not a loan in the sense of "The artist pays it back if there aren't enough royalties", the gap between royalties and the advance is soemthing the publisher eats.
Whatever way you look at it, the publisher does invest a lot in each album, and does end up paying the bulk of the costs, directly and indirectly. Like most businesses, they do what they can to minimize their exposure, often leaving the people who produce the music they found their businesses upon with far less than they deserve.
It might be he just doesn't like the RIAA and wants them to pay for everything.
In all honesty, probably not. Once you're compiling for two such different architectures, PowerPC and Intel, which are entirely unalike, I suspect adding one of the other mainstream architectures is a little easier. Most of the big issues are already dealt with (namely endian and cache issues.)
I'm not saying it'd have been a quick flip of a compiler switch, but I suspect a small team could probably have gotten everything up and running in a week or two on a SPARC or ARM.
The bigger issue would have been support for legacy applications. Rosetta was a third party system, and I'm not sure how well that worked with other architectures.
It's been a while since I dealt with Windows DUN, but from memory the modem drivers are essentially chat scripts, and the message about what speed you connected at is generated from the chat script (eg, if it sees "CONNECT 2400/V22bis/V42bis" then it'll tell you it's made a compressed connection at 2400bps.)
So, yes, the modem reports the speed, but the script is what interprets that and gives the user information. I believe the GP is talking about giving the user some sort of script for their modem that basically works like:
SEND "AT+SETMODE=V23" WAIT FOR "OK" SEND "ATDT5551212" IF RECEIVED "CONNECT 1200/75" THEN TELL USER "WOAH! You've managed to get a BROADBAND connection, 1.5mbps connection SUCCESSFULLY NEGOTIATED! WOW!"; START PPP SESSION
(Numbers exaggerated for emphasis.)
Given the sheer volume of drivers in Linux for the obscure and barely heard of, I suspect he wasn't, and I can't really fathom why you'd think he was.
The Linux kernel has an extremely diverse set of drivers. The difficulty is usually getting it all set up, not finding the driver (with some exceptions.) By comparison, Mac OS X only comes with drivers for a specific shortlist of devices, in some categories only devices Apple themselves sell.
I've been through the bizarre process of editing a device driver binary with "vi" under Jaguar in order to get my newly bought, generic, off-the-shelf, would-work-without-anything-special-under-Linux, CD burner to work under Mac OS X's CD burning regime. Very wierd. (I added the link after deciding most people would read that claim as so ridiculous, I must be trolling. No, seriously, that's what I had to do.)
Mac OS X "just works" because, as those opposed to Apple selling Mac OS X for generic PCs never tire of reminding everyone, Apple controls the hardware it runs on. They sell the widget, they provide drivers for the widgets they ship, and with a few honourable exceptions (most USB and Firewire devices fitting particular generic profiles, many phones, cameras, and printers), they don't support anything else.
The problem is that figure isn't sustainable. Apple got a major blip on the marketshare figures when they released the Intel MacBooks, which had been long awaited and an absolutely huge number of already-committed-to-the-Mac people had been holding off buying a laptop for.
I don't doubt their marketshare grew, even ignoring that group, but I really suspect the figures wouldn't have looked so out of place had the Intel MacBooks been released six months earlier.
I can see 10% as a reasonable long term figure for their laptop marketshare, as long as they keep up the excitement factor.
Well, actually all he said was that Mac OS X isn't more secure than Windows. You're jumping from that to "Mac OS X is less secure than Windows", which is not a legitimate jump.
Two doors can be equally open. One doesn't have to be more open than the other. One is not more unlocked than the other.
And so you fail the lesson.
There are several holes in most operating systems. The biggest one sits between the keyboard and chair. The biggest problem with Mac security right now is that despite the glaring faults with many aspects of its security model, Mac users believe, genuinely and honestly, that there is no reason to be concerned about Mac security.
That, to me at least, is that this exercise is about. Those complaining that Apple should have been notified, that they're just pulling some kind of stunt, are not "getting it". And they never will, until some blackhat actually takes the time to put together something that will slap Mac users down hard and painfully, in a way the majority of Windows users would never fall for today.
The biggest security advantage the Mac has is that it's (still) an uncommon platform, one with a small enough market share that network effects work against the ability of a malware to propogate. That is not an advantage that can be relied upon indefinitely. Are you going to be rely upon it, or upon false assumptions that Mac OS X is in some way inherently more secure than Windows?
No, it's making an unimportant distinction. From the point of view of a copyright holder, a person who has, instead of purchasing a legal copy of their work, has instead made a copy of someone else's copy, is depriving them of the money they were owed for that copy. From their point of view, it's theft. This is why most people have no problems at all describing copyright infringement as theft, except for a minority of extreme Slashdotters. Most people understand the concept, even if we believe the world would be a better place with 100% GPL'd software, or whatever.
If you want your own copy of Windows, buy it. Those are the terms by which Windows is available.
And those people receiving the disk could have had to install it, thus ensuring a thousand blog entries along the lines of "Well, I kind of got Vista up and going, though I'm having to use the VESA driver because it doesn't appear to recognize my laptop's Trident 954KX Supercard, and I'm getting random crashes when I plug in my USB wireless mouse."
These days installing a recent version of Windows on a system is as hard as installing GNU/Linux, both because GNU/Linux has gotten better, and because the hardware has gone so far out of control not even Microsoft can rely upon having drivers for everything any more.
I thought understanding the English language was a pre-requesite for practicing the Bar in the US. But then, a good lawyer also doesn't consider anyone who disagrees with them on any issue automatically "impossible to reason with". I'm still having great difficulty understanding how the hell you've ended up being Slashdot's point lawyer for comment on RIAA cases, and I'm also amazed the case you're defending is going well for the defendent.
I have made no comment above on the level of evidence the RIAA has, but the fact remains that the RIAA's lawsuits (plural) concern the uploading of music. That is what they are alleging. Not, as Scott Lockwood appears to believe, listening to music.
Whether your client is guilty as sin or completely innocent and the RIAA is pulling allegations out of its arse because your client once flicked off Sting and Bono isn't remotely relevent here.
Scott,
I have some great news for you. This'll probably relieve the other Slashdotters too who are suffering from the same misconception:
The lawsuits are about people uploading music on networks that are designed to pass the music onto (potentially) millions of anonymous strangers. They are NOT about listening to the music.
So you can breath easy. You will NOT be sued for listening to your Beegees collection. Your copy of The Birdie Song will not get you into trouble (unless you rip it and allow people on Kazaa to download it from your PC.) You can retrieve your REM CD from that little nook on the wall you also use to store the catnip someone told you was dope, and the Confederate money which, I'm delighted to tell you, isn't illegal to possess either (you just can't use it.)
I hope this helps.
Your pal,
S.
If it's not you, then you should have some way of showing there's a strong chance it's not you. If you have a wireless router, and you don't secure it, you could use that as evidence.
Of course, under those circumstances, the routing issues become interesting. Most WAPs I've seen have their own NAT system. You'd have had to configure the router to send all incoming connections to the anonymous, uninvited, guest on your wireless network. Yes, BitTorrent has ways of ensuring even people behind NAT can do some contributing, but these aren't cases, generally, that involve BitTorrent.
If it's a technically smart court, I'd imagine most people trying to pull that defense would be slapped down. At the very least, if you're one of the 1% of people who actually has a WAP you've configured such that anonymous strangers can connect, get a real IP address, and start transferring data, you should be in a position to easily prove that. Our submitter still has to defend the other 99% though.
If you did that, then that would be your defense. You can't just go into court and say "Aha your honour! They've said I was sharing some songs whose copyright belongs to them, but how do they know? It could have just been a file with the same name. Know what I mean?"
This is not a murder trial. It's a civil copyright suit. The evidence is wieghed up on the basis of a balance of probabilities. Realistically, if you're sharing a file with that name, it's improbable that it's not what the file says it is. More-over, if it isn't what the filename says it is, it ought to be increadibly easy for you to prove it. The fact you're not doing so is your problem, not the plaintiff's. It would be perfectly right and proper for the judge to call you out on it, and rule against you.
A very good point. I've been trying to figure out why people are responding as if everything the content maker's team comes out with has to be absolutely air-tight to the point nobody could even consider questioning it.
The reality is that unless the defendent can come up with a good reason why the screenshot would have been forged, it's likely to be taken by the court as evidence, and go a long way towards a "balance of probabilities" in favour of the plaintiff. So these kinds of questions aren't really that useful. Yes, technically, someone could have forged the screen shot, but there's no earthly reason why the RIAA and the content makers would actually want to frame an innocent computer user at the beginning of the case.
You know, most of this is pretty open and shut. People are offering massive libraries of music to download that they're not authorized to do. The technicalities are not computer based, they are not the kinds of questions the average Slashdotter is qualified to answer, they're legal. Does having a copy of a song on your hard drive configured to be automatically transmitted to anyone who wants it constitute fair use, simply because having a copy of the same song on your hard drive for the purpose of listening to it probably is fair use?
It's that kind of thing. Not "OMG! This IP address and time and song name was represented by pixels on a computer screen! You can easily forge those! Do they know this? Someone should tell them!"