I wonder when the last time Steve Jobs, Theo DeRaat, or Linus Torvalds had a problem with spyware was? *ducks*
I wonder when the last time Steve Jobs, Theo DeRaat, or Linus Torvalds were running the operating system that runs 95% of desktop PCs.
Do not assume that running as a "normal" user will protect you. You can do a lot with Firefox extensions/user prefs, keys in GConf, your.bashrc, and a hell of a lot more.
Hell, you could probably pop up a friendly "enter your root password" dialog and 60% of users wouldn't even think twice about doing it.
Even if you're smart in that regard, consider this - when you install packages in Linux, you almost always do it as root. Most spyware in Windows is bundled with legit (or at least semi-legit) software. Do you examine every file that the.debs or.rpms you install will put down? Do you examine the preinstall and postinstall scripts?
There is nothing about the architecture of Linux that offers any real protection against spyware. Limited user permissions do nothing against spyware when it is bundled with software that is installed as root. They do nothing for the 70% of users who are all too happy to follow whatever instructions are presented to them.
Mac OS X offers a greater degree of protection (because of the way that applications are installed), but even so, it's certainly possible for spyware to completely screw your account without root access.
Secure connection should not be tied to a verified domain. That is just stupid.
No, it's not. One of the most important aspects of SSL/TLS is that it makes man-in-the-middle attacks harder. Self-signed certificates provide little or no assurance that you are actually are visiting the domain that you think that you are visiting. CAs provide a minimum level of assurance that the page you are seeing is served by a server under the control of the entity that owns the domain you are visiting.
Telecommuting is good when the job is not emergent and requires a high amount of concentration (architecting, engineering, designing, given you have the tools at home).
The very sort of people HP is calling in from the home.
Not at all. While the IT field certainly requires a lot of experience, 80% of it is routine.
Another thing is surprising: how can you do privilege escalation without entering your password/authentification of any kind? How is it more secure if there is no user entry? It's just like a sudoers file with the "NOPASSWD" directive on your user; you can become root as you wish (without entering password), but then, malicious programs can, too.
The elevation dialog runs on a separate, "secure" desktop that doesn't respond to keyboard/mouse events generated by programs in userspace. The other programs can't dismiss the elevation dialog.
One "trick" they use is that in our area (Colorado, QWest), the DSL speed rates they quote are all the ATM frame rates. ATM has around 20% overhead, so this means that a 1.5mbps line will give you more around 1.25mbps throughput.
Indeed. The bastards at Qwest turn on interleve too, which apparently helps with bad lines, but adds additional latency. It used to be 16ms in each direction (32ms total), but according to what I've been reading on BroadbandReports, it's now a full 32ms in each direction (64ms total). My total latency to shortify.com on Comcast, for example, is around 30ms. That's pretty damned good latency, which, in my experience, makes far more difference than bandwidth (as long as you have plenty of bandwidth) when you are browing the web or (god forbid) trying to run SSH.
I have a difficult time lately hating Comcast. There service is overpriced, but, quite frankly, we're getting more for our money that we ever did (even the low-tier customers now get 5Mbps, which is a considerable improvement over the 1.5Mbps when we first got cable internet from AT&T), the latency is excellent, and I almost always see the rated bandwidth (in some cases, I have actually exceeded 5Mbps). Most of the time, our Comcast service is faster than the service I get on campus at the Univeristy of Colorado.
I have used services that are faster, but rarely have I seen a service that is more consistently fast than what I get through Comcast - excluding, of course, commercial services with SLAs and their associated high costs.
FYI, I understand that your post is (probably) meant to be saire, but I'm going to play along and act as if it were not.
The dryer *has* to be horizontal, but the washer doesn't. I choose a washer with a horizontal drum because I like to stoop uncomfortably
OMFG - you'll have to bend over to load clothes into your washer! What a huge burden, having to take an extra two seconds to load the washer.
Of course, it's easier to move the clothes to the dryer afterwards with a front loader (you don't have to lift them out of the drum), and you have the convenience of being able to stack stuff on top of the washer. But, hell, we can't afford to bend over to load chothes.
I don't understand freshman chemistry, where even the D- students can prove that it's the water, not the detergent or agitation, which dissolves the dirt. Hence, I'm stupid enough to believe that a "water efficient" washing machine will actually get my clothes cleaner than a real washing machine.
Well, first of all, our LG front loader cleans clothes way better than the Whirlpool top-loader we used to own. And, second of all, it's moving and extracting the water that cleans the clothes, combined with the soap and agitation. Front loaders move more water through the clothes and they extract it better (by spinning faster).
If your top loader works so well, then why does it take three times more soap than my front-loader to get clothes clean?
Being a graduate of an arts program, I believe the engineers are lying when they tell me that reliability is inversely proportional to the complexity of a mechanism.
My LG washer has no belt to break and no agitator to jam. It's a drum driven directly by a DC motor with a pump and a couple of valves. All of the complexity comes in the firmware.
And finally, I believe that cute little rubber seals are more reliable than gravity
Our Whirlpool top-loading washer failed when the drum rusted through. Rubber seals have proven to be effective even in long-term use.
I live in the UK, and I can't remember the last time I had a dropped mobile call that wasn't directly attributed to completely losing phone signal (which at least for me, only ever happens when going underground on the Tube.
Nor can I. I've found that most people who complain about dropped calls in the US either:
Have a crappy phone (e.g. one of the older Sony Erricson phones such as the T300m)
Have unrealistic expectations about their cellular service (like getting coverage underground)
No, you don't always get coverage in the backcountry in the US, but that's not surprising at all - it doesn't make sense to put up a tower that has few or no regular users.
Add to that some of the ridiculous pricing schemes that seem to be in effect
Go actually compare prices, and you'll find that cellular services are actually cheaper in the US. T-Mobile in the UK charges £35 (about $65) for 500 minutes. T-Mobile in the US charges $40 for 600 minutes, including free nights and weekends.
Yes, we pay for incoming calls. However, the caller only pays the same amount as calling a regular landline, which, considering that mobile phone plans almost always include long distance, means that I can call any number in the US (excluding those scam toll numbers) using the minutes on my plan.
Roaming fees are also now rare in the US, so I can go anywhere in the US (which is more than twice as large as the entire European Union, area wise) and use my phone without paying extra.
Consider this: my state, Colorado, is larger (in area) than the entire UK. The UK has 59 million people. Colorado has 4.3 million. That's not even the hardest area in the US to cover, though. Consider Wyoming - also bigger than the UK, but with less than 500,000 people. It just doesn't make sense to put 1000s of cell sites in a state with fewer than 500,000 people.
It gets worse, though. There are two reasons you need cell sites - coverage and capacity. In an area with high population density, you have to put in lots of cell sites anyway to meet the capacity demands. Once you have tower density, coverage becomes much less of an issue. There are areas like this in the US, and they have good coverage, but they represent a minority of the overall geographic area of the US.
The dynamics of the US cellular market are very different. We have 4 major national carriers (Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile), three of whom have more than 50 million customers. There are well over 150,000 cell sites, many being shared between carriers.
We do things a bit differently here. That doesn't make us "behind the times". I'll take my unlimited EDGE for $20 a month, thank you very much.
I assumed that the story was that Vista's intrusive DRM/Trusted computing "features" had been dropped
Stop spreading FUD. Vista's "DRM/Trusted Computing" features were never added to the OS, and they never will be a part of the OS. They were dropped over a year ago.
Vista will ship with a new audio stack that features "Protected User Mode Audio", a DRM feature to prevent capture of the digital bitstream before it hits the soundcard. But XP already has a similar feature - it's called "Secure Audio Path". No one uses it because there are too many people with non-WHQL audio drivers.
Vista also ships with a new DRM feature called "Protected Video Path". True to its name, it does exactly what PUMA/Secure Audio Path already does, but for video. Just like PUMA, no one will use it, because no one has HDCP on their monitors, no one has a graphics card that supports HDCP (particularly not the millions of Intel integrated chipsets shipping every year - most boards don't even support DVI), and many users don't use WHQL-signed drivers.
The other DRM feature in Vista is called "Rights Management Services", and it's similar to what's already in Office (bet you didn't know that Office even had DRM). Corporations might use it for internal documents, but it's probably not going to be used by RIAA/MPAA companies (because they are already using WM-DRM, FairPlay, or another DRM solution).
There's no scary "NGSCB" support (although there is TPM support, it's only used to store encryption keys for BitLocker). Vista won't stop you from ripping CDs (it rips to unencrypted MP3s or WMAs out of the box, in fact), it's not going to stop you from playing DIVX movies (K-Lite codec pack and friends work and install just fine), and it's not going to prevent you from running Linux. Moreover, Mac OS X will probably have the same DRM features (video and audio copy proteection) to support HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (although, again, this will probably change as content producers realize that few people have monitors or graphics cards with HDCP).
This has been a constant drumbeat from Slashdot, about how Vista is going to have "evil" DRM. It's simply not true. I have installed and used nearly every Vista build since 5048, and I can tell you flat out that Vista does not restrict what you do with your data any more than XP does. If you want to make an argument about the DRM features that are in Vista, so be it, but the ultra-scary NGSCB stuff just isn't there.
Not really. In pure processing power, the 360 claims 1 teraflop of power. The PS3 is claiming 2.1 teraflops of power.
And both figures are meaningless. The CPUs in both the 360 and the PS3 would be absolutely horrible in a desktop PC. Their processing power comes from doing very specific computations that have limited usefulness outside of certain specific applications. As it turns out, 3D graphics happen to be such an application.
You can always come up with synthetic numbers that indicate the "pure processing power" of a system. What matters, however, is how the platform performs in the real world. The 360 has a very strong GPU, a very strong CPU, and a very fast memory system. So does the PS3. Developers have indicated that there is little real difference in the capabilities of either system.
One thing that you have to realize, is that the XBox today can handle Half Life 2.
I recommend that you go and actually try the XBOX version of HL2. It's not the same graphically as the PC version, particularly considering that it runs at far lower resolutions without AA or AF.
Given that Oblivion is a launch title that barely utilizes the 360's capabilities, and comparing that to a PC, and then back to the PS3, I think it is a fair assessment to say the PS3 will be comparable to a $2,000 PC.
This is a rediculous statement from so many perspectives. Sure, in terms of its ability to crank out polygons, the PS3 is probably comparable to a PC with a 7900GT (which is similar to the graphics core in the PS3). But you can get a PC with a 7900GT for a lot less than $2000 (assuming that you are buying from someone other than Dellienware or VoodooPC). And a $2000 PC does a lot more than the PS3. You're not going to be developing software on the PS3, you're probably not going to use it to surf the net (even if it can), and you're almost certainly not going to be using it to run Apache. Comparing a console to a PC is like comparing a motorcycle to a pickup truck - sure, the motorcycle can outaccelerate the truck, but if you want a machine that can "do it all", you're much better off with the truck.
That's why I keep an old floppy drive (and floppy cable) around. It's stupid that XP doesn't let you load drivers from USB drives / CDs, but, thankfully, Vista does.
Or is this already possible with any OS? The ability to specify a list of allowed executables and the disability for a user application to change the list.
Windows has this as well - it's part of Group Policy ("Software Restriction Policies").
Transparency, finally. This has already been compared above. Welcome to the late 90s, Mr. Gates.
Windows 2000 & XP have full transparency support, and it's hardware accelerated if your GPU supports the feature (NVIDIA and ATI GPUs do)
a program menu with a search feature, old hat for KDE
Windows 95 had a search item in the Start Menu, years before KDE even existed.
a more integrated browser
Explorer has supported HTTP since 1997 (IE4's Active Desktop). Windows 98 and later support WebDAV and FTP in the browser. SMB/CIFS has been supported since Windows 95.
15 GB for the OS, 25 GB for Office
Vista is approx. 6.8GB on my system. Office 2003 is ~2-3GB. That's less than 10GB total.
I installed Vista build 5365 in VMware WS 5.5 and gave it a 16GB drive and 512MB of RAM. I turned off all the eye candy, nothing else was running on my machine. Opening a My Computer window in Vista Explorer takes roughly 7-15 seconds. Every. Single. Time
I wonder where you got 5365, because I seriously doubt that you're a Connect member (Microsoft's beta program).
I have run nearly every Longhorn / Vista build that was released on Connect for over a year, on both my desktop (Athlon 64 2800+ / 1GB DDR / GeForce 6600) and my laptop (Pentium-M 1.73GHz / 768MB DDR / GeForce Go 6400), and I can tell you - My Computer (which doesn't exist in Vista - it's now just "Computer") opens as fast as it does on XP, even with the eyecandy turned on.
You installed what I suspect is a pirated build of a beta-OS on a virtual machine, and you were surprised when something didn't work right. Hell, 5365 isn't even a CTP! Your comment is akin to complaining that a nightly Firefox build is full of bugs - of course it is!
Microsoft's Shared Source license is NOT an Open Source License. Its lacking several key parts, including the ability to modify the code and the ability to share it.
Oh, come on. Microsoft's "Shared Source" license is indeed quite restrictive, and it may not be "OSI Certified", nor is it be approved by the FSF. But "open source" is a generic term that has a broad meaning.
As much as I hate to quote Wikipedia:
"Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources."
Now, Microsoft's Shared Source license is not a Free Software license, but it certainly qualifies as "open source". You can't just make up requirements to disqualify a license you don't like from what is a very broad category of licenses.
And yet, most anime is better than most American TV shows.
That is a vague generalization that completely ignores the immense spectrum of programming offered by "American TV shows". You cannot simply compare a specific genre of programming to the collective works of a huge industry.
When you really think about it, it doesn't really matter what the "average quality" of US TV programs is. There is plenty of room for both rotten garbage and quality programming, and, more importantly, what appeals to one viewer does not necessarily appeal to other viewers. I personally am not a fan of anime, but I do not claim that it is not a valid genre. I also don't particularly like "reality TV", but I acknowledge that many individuals do.
Real command of a language is achieved when the desired statement is made with maximum clarity and precision.
One of the most humorous quotes about being terse comes from Fooled by Randomness:
"Aut taceaut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence)."
I find it highly ironic that the author used 11 words in two languages to make the statement, "Don't be wordy."
Your numbers are flawed for one serious reason: you're assuming that the 360 will still be $400 when the PS3 launches. It won't - it will probably be $300.
And what if I don't want an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive? What if I don't want online service? The 360 can be purchased today for $300, and with a memory card you can play any 360 game.
Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was.
Movie quality is as high as it has ever been, but we don't know that for one simple reason: bad movies are forgotten, good movies are treasured.
If you go and watch MST3K, you learn just how many awful movies were produced in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Many of the movies are so laughably bad that they wouldn't even be produced today.
It's easy to forget all of the crap that the last century put out. One-dimensional characters, bad plots, and bad acting are nothing new. What is new is the quality with which these horrible movies are made - even the crappiest low-budget direct-to-DVD movie has a clear picture and sound, and usually competent visual effects.
Another interesting fact is that to manufacturer soft drinks down to a price, they cheap out on the ingredients, so a "Coke Light" in the Philippines, while ostensibly the same product as a "Diet Coke" in the US, actually tastes quite a bit different, even a little strange.
Coke Light is made with Ace-K and Aspartame. If you like the taste, I've heard that Coke Zero (in the US) is very similar, if not the same.
Sadly the DRM functions in Vista is more about making the lives of intrusive spyware easier, not harder. This is because Vista has support for drivers untouchable by the users. Microsoft calls it security, i call it rootkits built into the OS. Blizzard and the rest of the pinheads will be using Microsofts DRM to make your computer a real VIP party for everyone byt yourself.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Palladium (NGSCB) was dropped from Vista - the TPM support that is currently in Vista is only there for the BitLocker drive encryption.
The new DRM features in Vista are horribly misunderstood. Here's what's new:
- Protected User Mode Audio. This is a new audio stack that enforces DRM at the driver level, similar to Secure Audio Path in Windows XP. PUMA won't work with unsigned drivers (audio will still work, but WMA-DRM/WMV-DRM files won't work), but this is already the case with Secure Audio Path in XP. You can still play MP3s, non-DRM WMAs, and other files with unsigned drivers - the same as in XP
- Protected Video Path. This works with HDCP to (potentially) prevent high-resolution playback of WMV-DRM, HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray titles on non-encumbered displays. DVDs, unprotected WMA/WMV, and other formats will continue to work as in XP.
- Rights Management Services. Similar to the current DRM features in Office, this allows you to "control" the distribution of content in a business environment.
That's it. No phantom "untouchable" drivers.
Of course, we shouldn't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.
The whole point of the UMPC devices (Origami) is that they run standard x86 software. You can install Office/Outlook, run Linux if you want (and get to choose your distro), use it as a development system - whatever.
The Pepper Pad has a 624MHz Intel PXA270. That's the same CPU as Dell's Axim x50v - powerful for a PDA, but underpowered for an internet-connected PC (PXA270 @ 624MHz is approx. equiv. to a Pentium-M at 300MHz).
The Pepper Pad is more along the lines of Nokia's internet tablet. It may be useful, but it's far more limited than the UMPC.
Office is clearly "good enough" for the vast majority of the 200+ million people who use it on a daily basis.
The fact is, there are massive systems built on top of Office - some companies use Excel with VBA macros to handle everything from expense tracking to payroll.
Yes, Office is a buggy product. But no more so than any other software product of its size. Hell, there were several releases of OOo where spellchecking was laughably broken.
Part of the problem is that Office is so powerful. Word is not a graphic design program, but it's used as one. Excel isn't a database, but you'd be amazed at how many political campaigns run on huge Excel 'call/walk lists'.
Office is the universal productivity software. It is a poor tool for many purposes, but it is so common that we can't help but take it where it wasn't designed to go.
A quote similar to your second quote is printed in the Integrated Teaching Laboratory (ITL) at the University of Colordo's Engineering Center:
"I hear, I forget I see, I remember I do, I understand"
(The ITL is a "hands-on" lab environment where students work on projects in small groups. There is a manufacturing center with CNC lathes and mill machines, a laser engraver/cutter, plastic manufacturing machine, and other tools. There is also an electronics center and a bunch of lab workstations with data acquisition equipment and other fun stuff.
With water cooling, leakage is always a concern - but these things are so well made that I've never even heard of someone's water cooling unit crapping out on them and frying their system.
I have - it happened to one of my friend's system. He was tweaking around with tubing, though, adding parts from the hardware store (for some reason).
Watercooling is not for the uninitiated. It can be done very, very well, but if you screw it up, it can really screw things up.
In my friend's case, it "didn't" fry a brand-new Radeon X850XT (this is a point of contention between us - he claims that it simply broke at the same time and was unrelated; I find that explaination highly suspect).
The next day, my friend purchased a Zalman heatsink. Same noise, 5C higher temps (who cares?), and a lot less expensive.
You've just explained how complicated Windows permissions are to use over Mac and *nix
I don't know how this got modded "insightful". The fact is that the vast majority of Mac and Linux users never actually touch file permissions.
Because, as you know, "chmod 0755" is so easy to understand.
The fact is that having ACLs with inheritence and other features makes setting permissions on Windows easier. Want to give two users (and only two users) read permissions on a file? You have to make a new group.
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I wonder when the last time Steve Jobs, Theo DeRaat, or Linus Torvalds had a problem with spyware was? *ducks*
.bashrc, and a hell of a lot more.
.debs or .rpms you install will put down? Do you examine the preinstall and postinstall scripts?
I wonder when the last time Steve Jobs, Theo DeRaat, or Linus Torvalds were running the operating system that runs 95% of desktop PCs.
Do not assume that running as a "normal" user will protect you. You can do a lot with Firefox extensions/user prefs, keys in GConf, your
Hell, you could probably pop up a friendly "enter your root password" dialog and 60% of users wouldn't even think twice about doing it.
Even if you're smart in that regard, consider this - when you install packages in Linux, you almost always do it as root. Most spyware in Windows is bundled with legit (or at least semi-legit) software. Do you examine every file that the
There is nothing about the architecture of Linux that offers any real protection against spyware. Limited user permissions do nothing against spyware when it is bundled with software that is installed as root. They do nothing for the 70% of users who are all too happy to follow whatever instructions are presented to them.
Mac OS X offers a greater degree of protection (because of the way that applications are installed), but even so, it's certainly possible for spyware to completely screw your account without root access.
Secure connection should not be tied to a verified domain. That is just stupid.
No, it's not. One of the most important aspects of SSL/TLS is that it makes man-in-the-middle attacks harder. Self-signed certificates provide little or no assurance that you are actually are visiting the domain that you think that you are visiting. CAs provide a minimum level of assurance that the page you are seeing is served by a server under the control of the entity that owns the domain you are visiting.
Telecommuting is good when the job is not emergent and requires a high amount of concentration (architecting, engineering, designing, given you have the tools at home).
The very sort of people HP is calling in from the home.
Not at all. While the IT field certainly requires a lot of experience, 80% of it is routine.
Another thing is surprising: how can you do privilege escalation without entering your password/authentification of any kind? How is it more secure if there is no user entry? It's just like a sudoers file with the "NOPASSWD" directive on your user; you can become root as you wish (without entering password), but then, malicious programs can, too.
The elevation dialog runs on a separate, "secure" desktop that doesn't respond to keyboard/mouse events generated by programs in userspace. The other programs can't dismiss the elevation dialog.
One "trick" they use is that in our area (Colorado, QWest), the DSL speed rates they quote are all the ATM frame rates. ATM has around 20% overhead, so this means that a 1.5mbps line will give you more around 1.25mbps throughput.
Indeed. The bastards at Qwest turn on interleve too, which apparently helps with bad lines, but adds additional latency. It used to be 16ms in each direction (32ms total), but according to what I've been reading on BroadbandReports, it's now a full 32ms in each direction (64ms total). My total latency to shortify.com on Comcast, for example, is around 30ms. That's pretty damned good latency, which, in my experience, makes far more difference than bandwidth (as long as you have plenty of bandwidth) when you are browing the web or (god forbid) trying to run SSH.
I have a difficult time lately hating Comcast. There service is overpriced, but, quite frankly, we're getting more for our money that we ever did (even the low-tier customers now get 5Mbps, which is a considerable improvement over the 1.5Mbps when we first got cable internet from AT&T), the latency is excellent, and I almost always see the rated bandwidth (in some cases, I have actually exceeded 5Mbps). Most of the time, our Comcast service is faster than the service I get on campus at the Univeristy of Colorado.
I have used services that are faster, but rarely have I seen a service that is more consistently fast than what I get through Comcast - excluding, of course, commercial services with SLAs and their associated high costs.
FYI, I understand that your post is (probably) meant to be saire, but I'm going to play along and act as if it were not.
The dryer *has* to be horizontal, but the washer doesn't. I choose a washer with a horizontal drum because I like to stoop uncomfortably
OMFG - you'll have to bend over to load clothes into your washer! What a huge burden, having to take an extra two seconds to load the washer.
Of course, it's easier to move the clothes to the dryer afterwards with a front loader (you don't have to lift them out of the drum), and you have the convenience of being able to stack stuff on top of the washer. But, hell, we can't afford to bend over to load chothes.
I don't understand freshman chemistry, where even the D- students can prove that it's the water, not the detergent or agitation, which dissolves the dirt. Hence, I'm stupid enough to believe that a "water efficient" washing machine will actually get my clothes cleaner than a real washing machine.
Well, first of all, our LG front loader cleans clothes way better than the Whirlpool top-loader we used to own. And, second of all, it's moving and extracting the water that cleans the clothes, combined with the soap and agitation. Front loaders move more water through the clothes and they extract it better (by spinning faster).
If your top loader works so well, then why does it take three times more soap than my front-loader to get clothes clean?
Being a graduate of an arts program, I believe the engineers are lying when they tell me that reliability is inversely proportional to the complexity of a mechanism.
My LG washer has no belt to break and no agitator to jam. It's a drum driven directly by a DC motor with a pump and a couple of valves. All of the complexity comes in the firmware.
And finally, I believe that cute little rubber seals are more reliable than gravity
Our Whirlpool top-loading washer failed when the drum rusted through. Rubber seals have proven to be effective even in long-term use.
DesktopX had them 6 years ago. Konfabulator had them in Mac OS X in 2003. The Windows Sidebar shipped in all of the early Longhorn betas.
Dashboard was very late to the game. Don't kid yourself into believing that Apple came up with desktop widgets in some fit of brilliance.
Nor can I. I've found that most people who complain about dropped calls in the US either:
No, you don't always get coverage in the backcountry in the US, but that's not surprising at all - it doesn't make sense to put up a tower that has few or no regular users.
Add to that some of the ridiculous pricing schemes that seem to be in effect
Go actually compare prices, and you'll find that cellular services are actually cheaper in the US. T-Mobile in the UK charges £35 (about $65) for 500 minutes. T-Mobile in the US charges $40 for 600 minutes, including free nights and weekends.
Yes, we pay for incoming calls. However, the caller only pays the same amount as calling a regular landline, which, considering that mobile phone plans almost always include long distance, means that I can call any number in the US (excluding those scam toll numbers) using the minutes on my plan.
Roaming fees are also now rare in the US, so I can go anywhere in the US (which is more than twice as large as the entire European Union, area wise) and use my phone without paying extra.
Consider this: my state, Colorado, is larger (in area) than the entire UK. The UK has 59 million people. Colorado has 4.3 million. That's not even the hardest area in the US to cover, though. Consider Wyoming - also bigger than the UK, but with less than 500,000 people. It just doesn't make sense to put 1000s of cell sites in a state with fewer than 500,000 people.
It gets worse, though. There are two reasons you need cell sites - coverage and capacity. In an area with high population density, you have to put in lots of cell sites anyway to meet the capacity demands. Once you have tower density, coverage becomes much less of an issue. There are areas like this in the US, and they have good coverage, but they represent a minority of the overall geographic area of the US.
The dynamics of the US cellular market are very different. We have 4 major national carriers (Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile), three of whom have more than 50 million customers. There are well over 150,000 cell sites, many being shared between carriers.
We do things a bit differently here. That doesn't make us "behind the times". I'll take my unlimited EDGE for $20 a month, thank you very much.
I assumed that the story was that Vista's intrusive DRM/Trusted computing "features" had been dropped
Stop spreading FUD. Vista's "DRM/Trusted Computing" features were never added to the OS, and they never will be a part of the OS. They were dropped over a year ago.
Vista will ship with a new audio stack that features "Protected User Mode Audio", a DRM feature to prevent capture of the digital bitstream before it hits the soundcard. But XP already has a similar feature - it's called "Secure Audio Path". No one uses it because there are too many people with non-WHQL audio drivers.
Vista also ships with a new DRM feature called "Protected Video Path". True to its name, it does exactly what PUMA/Secure Audio Path already does, but for video. Just like PUMA, no one will use it, because no one has HDCP on their monitors, no one has a graphics card that supports HDCP (particularly not the millions of Intel integrated chipsets shipping every year - most boards don't even support DVI), and many users don't use WHQL-signed drivers.
The other DRM feature in Vista is called "Rights Management Services", and it's similar to what's already in Office (bet you didn't know that Office even had DRM). Corporations might use it for internal documents, but it's probably not going to be used by RIAA/MPAA companies (because they are already using WM-DRM, FairPlay, or another DRM solution).
There's no scary "NGSCB" support (although there is TPM support, it's only used to store encryption keys for BitLocker). Vista won't stop you from ripping CDs (it rips to unencrypted MP3s or WMAs out of the box, in fact), it's not going to stop you from playing DIVX movies (K-Lite codec pack and friends work and install just fine), and it's not going to prevent you from running Linux. Moreover, Mac OS X will probably have the same DRM features (video and audio copy proteection) to support HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (although, again, this will probably change as content producers realize that few people have monitors or graphics cards with HDCP).
This has been a constant drumbeat from Slashdot, about how Vista is going to have "evil" DRM. It's simply not true. I have installed and used nearly every Vista build since 5048, and I can tell you flat out that Vista does not restrict what you do with your data any more than XP does. If you want to make an argument about the DRM features that are in Vista, so be it, but the ultra-scary NGSCB stuff just isn't there.
Not really. In pure processing power, the 360 claims 1 teraflop of power. The PS3 is claiming 2.1 teraflops of power.
And both figures are meaningless. The CPUs in both the 360 and the PS3 would be absolutely horrible in a desktop PC. Their processing power comes from doing very specific computations that have limited usefulness outside of certain specific applications. As it turns out, 3D graphics happen to be such an application.
You can always come up with synthetic numbers that indicate the "pure processing power" of a system. What matters, however, is how the platform performs in the real world. The 360 has a very strong GPU, a very strong CPU, and a very fast memory system. So does the PS3. Developers have indicated that there is little real difference in the capabilities of either system.
One thing that you have to realize, is that the XBox today can handle Half Life 2.
I recommend that you go and actually try the XBOX version of HL2. It's not the same graphically as the PC version, particularly considering that it runs at far lower resolutions without AA or AF.
Given that Oblivion is a launch title that barely utilizes the 360's capabilities, and comparing that to a PC, and then back to the PS3, I think it is a fair assessment to say the PS3 will be comparable to a $2,000 PC.
This is a rediculous statement from so many perspectives. Sure, in terms of its ability to crank out polygons, the PS3 is probably comparable to a PC with a 7900GT (which is similar to the graphics core in the PS3). But you can get a PC with a 7900GT for a lot less than $2000 (assuming that you are buying from someone other than Dellienware or VoodooPC). And a $2000 PC does a lot more than the PS3. You're not going to be developing software on the PS3, you're probably not going to use it to surf the net (even if it can), and you're almost certainly not going to be using it to run Apache. Comparing a console to a PC is like comparing a motorcycle to a pickup truck - sure, the motorcycle can outaccelerate the truck, but if you want a machine that can "do it all", you're much better off with the truck.
That's why I keep an old floppy drive (and floppy cable) around. It's stupid that XP doesn't let you load drivers from USB drives / CDs, but, thankfully, Vista does.
Or is this already possible with any OS? The ability to specify a list of allowed executables and the disability for a user application to change the list.
Windows has this as well - it's part of Group Policy ("Software Restriction Policies").
Transparency, finally. This has already been compared above. Welcome to the late 90s, Mr. Gates.
Windows 2000 & XP have full transparency support, and it's hardware accelerated if your GPU supports the feature (NVIDIA and ATI GPUs do)
a program menu with a search feature, old hat for KDE
Windows 95 had a search item in the Start Menu, years before KDE even existed.
a more integrated browser
Explorer has supported HTTP since 1997 (IE4's Active Desktop). Windows 98 and later support WebDAV and FTP in the browser. SMB/CIFS has been supported since Windows 95.
15 GB for the OS, 25 GB for Office
Vista is approx. 6.8GB on my system. Office 2003 is ~2-3GB. That's less than 10GB total.
Stop spreading bullshit FUD.
I installed Vista build 5365 in VMware WS 5.5 and gave it a 16GB drive and 512MB of RAM. I turned off all the eye candy, nothing else was running on my machine. Opening a My Computer window in Vista Explorer takes roughly 7-15 seconds. Every. Single. Time
I wonder where you got 5365, because I seriously doubt that you're a Connect member (Microsoft's beta program).
I have run nearly every Longhorn / Vista build that was released on Connect for over a year, on both my desktop (Athlon 64 2800+ / 1GB DDR / GeForce 6600) and my laptop (Pentium-M 1.73GHz / 768MB DDR / GeForce Go 6400), and I can tell you - My Computer (which doesn't exist in Vista - it's now just "Computer") opens as fast as it does on XP, even with the eyecandy turned on.
You installed what I suspect is a pirated build of a beta-OS on a virtual machine, and you were surprised when something didn't work right. Hell, 5365 isn't even a CTP! Your comment is akin to complaining that a nightly Firefox build is full of bugs - of course it is!
Microsoft's Shared Source license is NOT an Open Source License. Its lacking several key parts, including the ability to modify the code and the ability to share it.
Oh, come on. Microsoft's "Shared Source" license is indeed quite restrictive, and it may not be "OSI Certified", nor is it be approved by the FSF. But "open source" is a generic term that has a broad meaning.
As much as I hate to quote Wikipedia:
"Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources."
Now, Microsoft's Shared Source license is not a Free Software license, but it certainly qualifies as "open source". You can't just make up requirements to disqualify a license you don't like from what is a very broad category of licenses.
And yet, most anime is better than most American TV shows.
That is a vague generalization that completely ignores the immense spectrum of programming offered by "American TV shows". You cannot simply compare a specific genre of programming to the collective works of a huge industry.
When you really think about it, it doesn't really matter what the "average quality" of US TV programs is. There is plenty of room for both rotten garbage and quality programming, and, more importantly, what appeals to one viewer does not necessarily appeal to other viewers. I personally am not a fan of anime, but I do not claim that it is not a valid genre. I also don't particularly like "reality TV", but I acknowledge that many individuals do.
Real command of a language is achieved when the desired statement is made with maximum clarity and precision.
One of the most humorous quotes about being terse comes from Fooled by Randomness:
"Aut taceaut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence)."
I find it highly ironic that the author used 11 words in two languages to make the statement, "Don't be wordy."
Your numbers are flawed for one serious reason: you're assuming that the 360 will still be $400 when the PS3 launches. It won't - it will probably be $300.
And what if I don't want an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive? What if I don't want online service? The 360 can be purchased today for $300, and with a memory card you can play any 360 game.
Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was.
Movie quality is as high as it has ever been, but we don't know that for one simple reason: bad movies are forgotten, good movies are treasured.
If you go and watch MST3K, you learn just how many awful movies were produced in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Many of the movies are so laughably bad that they wouldn't even be produced today.
It's easy to forget all of the crap that the last century put out. One-dimensional characters, bad plots, and bad acting are nothing new. What is new is the quality with which these horrible movies are made - even the crappiest low-budget direct-to-DVD movie has a clear picture and sound, and usually competent visual effects.
Another interesting fact is that to manufacturer soft drinks down to a price, they cheap out on the ingredients, so a "Coke Light" in the Philippines, while ostensibly the same product as a "Diet Coke" in the US, actually tastes quite a bit different, even a little strange.
Coke Light is made with Ace-K and Aspartame. If you like the taste, I've heard that Coke Zero (in the US) is very similar, if not the same.
Sadly the DRM functions in Vista is more about making the lives of intrusive spyware easier, not harder. This is because Vista has support for drivers untouchable by the users. Microsoft calls it security, i call it rootkits built into the OS. Blizzard and the rest of the pinheads will be using Microsofts DRM to make your computer a real VIP party for everyone byt yourself.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Palladium (NGSCB) was dropped from Vista - the TPM support that is currently in Vista is only there for the BitLocker drive encryption.
The new DRM features in Vista are horribly misunderstood. Here's what's new:
- Protected User Mode Audio. This is a new audio stack that enforces DRM at the driver level, similar to Secure Audio Path in Windows XP. PUMA won't work with unsigned drivers (audio will still work, but WMA-DRM/WMV-DRM files won't work), but this is already the case with Secure Audio Path in XP. You can still play MP3s, non-DRM WMAs, and other files with unsigned drivers - the same as in XP
- Protected Video Path. This works with HDCP to (potentially) prevent high-resolution playback of WMV-DRM, HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray titles on non-encumbered displays. DVDs, unprotected WMA/WMV, and other formats will continue to work as in XP.
- Rights Management Services. Similar to the current DRM features in Office, this allows you to "control" the distribution of content in a business environment.
That's it. No phantom "untouchable" drivers.
Of course, we shouldn't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.
The whole point of the UMPC devices (Origami) is that they run standard x86 software. You can install Office/Outlook, run Linux if you want (and get to choose your distro), use it as a development system - whatever.
The Pepper Pad has a 624MHz Intel PXA270. That's the same CPU as Dell's Axim x50v - powerful for a PDA, but underpowered for an internet-connected PC (PXA270 @ 624MHz is approx. equiv. to a Pentium-M at 300MHz).
The Pepper Pad is more along the lines of Nokia's internet tablet. It may be useful, but it's far more limited than the UMPC.
Office is clearly "good enough" for the vast majority of the 200+ million people who use it on a daily basis.
The fact is, there are massive systems built on top of Office - some companies use Excel with VBA macros to handle everything from expense tracking to payroll.
Yes, Office is a buggy product. But no more so than any other software product of its size. Hell, there were several releases of OOo where spellchecking was laughably broken.
Part of the problem is that Office is so powerful. Word is not a graphic design program, but it's used as one. Excel isn't a database, but you'd be amazed at how many political campaigns run on huge Excel 'call/walk lists'.
Office is the universal productivity software. It is a poor tool for many purposes, but it is so common that we can't help but take it where it wasn't designed to go.
A quote similar to your second quote is printed in the Integrated Teaching Laboratory (ITL) at the University of Colordo's Engineering Center:
"I hear, I forget
I see, I remember
I do, I understand"
(The ITL is a "hands-on" lab environment where students work on projects in small groups. There is a manufacturing center with CNC lathes and mill machines, a laser engraver/cutter, plastic manufacturing machine, and other tools. There is also an electronics center and a bunch of lab workstations with data acquisition equipment and other fun stuff.
With water cooling, leakage is always a concern - but these things are so well made that I've never even heard of someone's water cooling unit crapping out on them and frying their system.
I have - it happened to one of my friend's system. He was tweaking around with tubing, though, adding parts from the hardware store (for some reason).
Watercooling is not for the uninitiated. It can be done very, very well, but if you screw it up, it can really screw things up.
In my friend's case, it "didn't" fry a brand-new Radeon X850XT (this is a point of contention between us - he claims that it simply broke at the same time and was unrelated; I find that explaination highly suspect).
The next day, my friend purchased a Zalman heatsink. Same noise, 5C higher temps (who cares?), and a lot less expensive.
You've just explained how complicated Windows permissions are to use over Mac and *nix
I don't know how this got modded "insightful". The fact is that the vast majority of Mac and Linux users never actually touch file permissions.
Because, as you know, "chmod 0755" is so easy to understand.
The fact is that having ACLs with inheritence and other features makes setting permissions on Windows easier. Want to give two users (and only two users) read permissions on a file? You have to make a new group.