One thing I like about my iPhone is that tapping my finger on the screen to get to my hotmail is a patented hand gesture. Now if I could figure out some other way to send a message other than to throw the stinkin thing at the wall.
I would say 10% of just about any corporation on earth is fluff anyway. I love my Phenom II x2 which allowed both disabled cores to unlock and now runs as a Phenom II x4 955... and so I bought an Althon II x3 which also allowed for the 4th core to unlock and it now runs as a Phenom II x 4 940. In total I spent about $200 for 8 stable cores. Well done AMD!
The problem with all of the various distros shipping with default gnome is that marketing them is like selling bananas. Bananas are all genetically identical, so it makes no difference if you are buying a Dole Banana or a Chiquita Banana. It's the same banana. Since you can use yum or apt to install basically any package you want regardless of the linux distro, what really differentiates Ubuntu and Fedora... Mark Shuttleworth solved the product differentiation problem by adding a couple of things to compiz and shipping it as NEW... its still just gnome really. It just LOOKS different. And in Ubuntu 11.10 you can install gnome shell anyway. This is really no different than how banana companies try to differentiate their bananas by putting a sticker on the banana with a brand name. Give me a kernel, a terminal and a package manager and within a few hours I can pretty much make any linux distro into in any other linux distro. yawn.
In terms of just backing it up... you can use AMAZON s3... and you can just mail them hard drives instead of uploading over the internetorium. Of course, they mail your hard drive back just as soon as they have sucked all of the data off them and put it in your S3 account. Then you can start EC2 instances and do all of the supercomputing you want.
I can't image what you would have AT HOME that takes up 5 TB of space though. I suppose you could be running your own version of pirate Netflix or something, but even so, a few hundred movies would, if ripped at the full 8 GB per film, take up only about 3 TB of space... so you might consider cramming all of those movies down to.avi files of 1 GB or so and thereby freeing up 4 TB of disk space, which will of course save you a lot of money when you upload it all to your S3 account.
So, once they have ubuntu for smartphones half the posts on the Ubuntu forums will be "My wifi don't work" and the other half will be "My phone's battery only lasts 29 minutes."
Am I alone in my appreciation for the efficiency of our corporate overlords? Imagine what it would cost to buy a pair of shoes if the people who actually made shoes lived in decent housing and got paid a fair wage by Western Standards. Or what if a banana plantation had to pay people real wages? Things would cost more. Things that merely make my life slightly more convenient would cost more. I really don't see how anyone could NOT want vast corporate conspiracies to dominate the globe in exchange for inexpensive convenience. That just makes sense to me.
Because there is no way you are going to get a job in a retro industry like Engineering anywhere in the US... space is a metaphor that we conquered decades ago here.
Of course, in the wilderness, where there is no Human Authority prevailing, you can do whatever you want. Unfortunately, Nature is not the same thing as wilderness. It would be unfortunate if people were allowed to sully Nature with wild activities like walking around in bigfoot costumes. Had he and his friends chosen to walk around new york city dressed up in big foot costumes, no one would have even noted it.
I bought an HTC Inspire 4G through ATT about 5 months ago only to learn after the fact that ATT hadn't even launched a 4G service. So now I have a 100 dollar a month contract with a 2GB cap. Yikes. I could buy a new Macbook Air every year for what this phone is costing me.
It seems like there isn't any regulation of the sales tactics the cell phone companies use. Their TOS say that they can change the terms of the contract in their favor anytime they want and they always change the terms to give users less service for more money. It's a swindle... a seemingly totally unregulated swindle using bait and switch tricks
Well if they are going to make you drive all over just to go past stores that have paid a fee to jack around with your GPS then why not do the same thing to the remote control for your TV... you push the button on your remote control on your TV to go to NBC or HBO and instead you are immediately redirected to a brief ad from whatever giant conglomerate paid to hijack your remote control after which you go directly to the tv station you requested by pushing the button in the first place. Moreover, they can sell an ad free version of the remote control for an additional $40. I MEAN WHY THE HECK NOT... it would be a goldmine.
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One thing I like about my iPhone is that tapping my finger on the screen to get to my hotmail is a patented hand gesture. Now if I could figure out some other way to send a message other than to throw the stinkin thing at the wall.
I would say 10% of just about any corporation on earth is fluff anyway. I love my Phenom II x2 which allowed both disabled cores to unlock and now runs as a Phenom II x4 955... and so I bought an Althon II x3 which also allowed for the 4th core to unlock and it now runs as a Phenom II x 4 940. In total I spent about $200 for 8 stable cores. Well done AMD!
The problem with all of the various distros shipping with default gnome is that marketing them is like selling bananas. Bananas are all genetically identical, so it makes no difference if you are buying a Dole Banana or a Chiquita Banana. It's the same banana. Since you can use yum or apt to install basically any package you want regardless of the linux distro, what really differentiates Ubuntu and Fedora... Mark Shuttleworth solved the product differentiation problem by adding a couple of things to compiz and shipping it as NEW... its still just gnome really. It just LOOKS different. And in Ubuntu 11.10 you can install gnome shell anyway. This is really no different than how banana companies try to differentiate their bananas by putting a sticker on the banana with a brand name. Give me a kernel, a terminal and a package manager and within a few hours I can pretty much make any linux distro into in any other linux distro. yawn.
In terms of just backing it up... you can use AMAZON s3... and you can just mail them hard drives instead of uploading over the internetorium. Of course, they mail your hard drive back just as soon as they have sucked all of the data off them and put it in your S3 account. Then you can start EC2 instances and do all of the supercomputing you want. I can't image what you would have AT HOME that takes up 5 TB of space though. I suppose you could be running your own version of pirate Netflix or something, but even so, a few hundred movies would, if ripped at the full 8 GB per film, take up only about 3 TB of space... so you might consider cramming all of those movies down to .avi files of 1 GB or so and thereby freeing up 4 TB of disk space, which will of course save you a lot of money when you upload it all to your S3 account.
So, once they have ubuntu for smartphones half the posts on the Ubuntu forums will be "My wifi don't work" and the other half will be "My phone's battery only lasts 29 minutes."
Am I alone in my appreciation for the efficiency of our corporate overlords? Imagine what it would cost to buy a pair of shoes if the people who actually made shoes lived in decent housing and got paid a fair wage by Western Standards. Or what if a banana plantation had to pay people real wages? Things would cost more. Things that merely make my life slightly more convenient would cost more. I really don't see how anyone could NOT want vast corporate conspiracies to dominate the globe in exchange for inexpensive convenience. That just makes sense to me.
Because there is no way you are going to get a job in a retro industry like Engineering anywhere in the US... space is a metaphor that we conquered decades ago here.
Of course, in the wilderness, where there is no Human Authority prevailing, you can do whatever you want. Unfortunately, Nature is not the same thing as wilderness. It would be unfortunate if people were allowed to sully Nature with wild activities like walking around in bigfoot costumes. Had he and his friends chosen to walk around new york city dressed up in big foot costumes, no one would have even noted it.
I bought an HTC Inspire 4G through ATT about 5 months ago only to learn after the fact that ATT hadn't even launched a 4G service. So now I have a 100 dollar a month contract with a 2GB cap. Yikes. I could buy a new Macbook Air every year for what this phone is costing me. It seems like there isn't any regulation of the sales tactics the cell phone companies use. Their TOS say that they can change the terms of the contract in their favor anytime they want and they always change the terms to give users less service for more money. It's a swindle... a seemingly totally unregulated swindle using bait and switch tricks
Why patent it? Some troll would just sue the pants off me and I don't have the money for legal fees so I would lose it anyway.
Well if they are going to make you drive all over just to go past stores that have paid a fee to jack around with your GPS then why not do the same thing to the remote control for your TV... you push the button on your remote control on your TV to go to NBC or HBO and instead you are immediately redirected to a brief ad from whatever giant conglomerate paid to hijack your remote control after which you go directly to the tv station you requested by pushing the button in the first place. Moreover, they can sell an ad free version of the remote control for an additional $40. I MEAN WHY THE HECK NOT... it would be a goldmine.