Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck.;-) You seem to value skills only if they result in a pay rise, this is a major mistake. You see... while snake charming might not get you an increase in pay it will significantly increase your chances of survival when it comes to dealing with management. This is true in any industry, not just IT and has been true for many millennia, which actually makes snake charming a most valuable skill.
And say what, exactly? Terrorists also use cars, do we ask carmakers to explain? Google earth is just a very nice fancy map, do we ask cartographers to explain?
What a pointless article. In Lebanon and the occupied territories Hamas and Hizbolla used Google Maps among other things to plan their rocket attacks. During their incursions into S-Lebanon the Israelis captured Hizbollah command centers with entire walls covered in poster sized Google generated maps. Any number of other insurgent organizations world wide have been using Google's services for operational planning almost as long as it has been covering areas of interest to them so this is not exactly news, it's regurgitated **old news**. Insurgents are not stupid they will make use of any civilian service that gives them a tactical advantage. As always are two sides to this issue. On the one hand blaming Google for facilitating insurgent attacks is like blaming, say... Toyota for their cars being used in car bombings. On the other hand people can yell as loudly as they want about censorship but it's hard to blame the military for wanting to make it hard for people to drop mortar bombs into their fire-bases and zap their picket posts with RPG's.
The iPod is pretty neat straight out of Apple, but the true possibilities of the device aren't really reached. Take a look at the Rockbox firmware for iPods -- it adds tons of features that Apple said were "technically impossible" or that "nobody wants". Right now I'm listening to a gapless FLAC album with a bit of crossfeed, and it's wonderful. Fuck you, Jobs. You don't know what I want. Stop telling me what to do!
With respect to phones, I think the iPhone is going to be a flop. I would tend to agree with that. I use my phone for all sorts of stuff other than just making calls. For example I use it to keep track of my expenses and if this iPhone doesn't have that functionality I can't add it by going to a 3rd party software vendor like I did with my Nokia phone. I'm pretty sure that later on Apple will back down on this point. Third party software is simply to useful to customers so eventually the iPhone will either be a flop or Apple will allow third party software but require it to be certified for quality/stability to keep the Telcos from peeing in their pants. A smart-phone in this price bracket is simply to expensive for the kind of people who spend $5-600 on a smart phone to be willing to put up with it being castrated like this.
When it's all said and done, it's a $3000 phone (can't get one without 2 years of Cingular's worthless service) that plays mp3s and has a calendar with pixmaps borrowed from OS X. What I find interesting is what will Apple do when they finally ship the iPhone to customers outside the USA? Cingular isn't a huge player on the global telco market, at least the have no presence in this country (while Vodafone and T-Mobile do), so will Apple simply negotiate locking the iPhone into the service of one of the big local carriers? Or will the iPhone only be sold in the select number of countries where Apple's Telco buddies have a presence?
MS isn't claiming that the OS will be unstable. They're saying poorly written apps will crash and the users will blame that on Vista, not the poorly written apps. Precisely.... Microsoft wants to increase consumer's perception of the 'out-of-the-box' stability of Windows by ensuring that OEM's don't ship their machines with badly written apps pre-installed on them. Basically MS wants to guarantee that Vista will enjoy the stability that many consumers associate with OS'es like OS.X that only run on a limited selection of hardware for which they are thoroughly tested but MS wants to guarantee this stability over a much broader selection of hardware. If MS decides to enforce this it probably means that OEM's will have to get any apps they pre-install on their PC's certified for stability and possibly also security by Microsoft. From the consumer's point of view this is a good thing since it means a more stable product. However, it won't be popular with the OEM's because of the loss of control over product features and extra costs nor will it be popular with the Software manufacturers who have grown careless in their software development efforts after decades of Microsoft not giving a sh*t about stability and security and they will all resent having to certify any cool software they want to pre-install on PCs with MS and possibly have it rejected unless it undergoes a major rewrite. Of course the OEM's can always turn to another OS vendor.... oh, wait... never mind.
I'm not sure about Russia anymore but at least the US has stated that they want to go back to the moon and put some dude up in Mars sometime on this half of the century if memory serves. Russia is and will remain competitive where it really counts (at the moment at least) which is the business of getting big loads into orbit as cheaply and reliably as possible. That's where the money is at the moment. Just because Russia can't afford to indulge in high profile prestige projects doesn't mean they aren't advancing their space program. Doing well with cargo rockets may not be glamorous but it is valuable work. The Mir space station for example was less glamorous than the American Moon missions but the research work done on Mir concerning for example the effects that spending long periods of time in weightlessness has on the human body was no less valuable. In the long term Russia will probably benefit more from pouring the majority of it's resources into it's commercial cargo-rocket operations than India, China and the USA will benefit from diverting their space program resources into sending more manned missions to the moon or being the first to have one of their citizens leave a footprint on the surface of Mars.
Wouldn't it be nice to be a company so large and dominant in it's industry yet so inept in delivering a code-complete product it gets help (I'm assuming for free) from government agencies to try and get it right? To be fair to the NSA (and leaving aside for the moment any tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories about backdoors) they also gave Linux some security overhauls. So it's not as if they are picking sides here. The NSA also publishes Operating Systems Guides that any administrator or user can download and use to harden his/her OS. These are also available for multiple OS'es. I'm no fan of the NSA but sometimes they actually do good work.
Why is herding cats so hard? Running an OSS project is a lot like herding cats. It makes one wonder why the Linux mascot is a Penguin? After all penguins are reportedly fairly easy to herd.... kind of like Windows users....
I think it was a weird project in the first place, and quite a waste. Trying to make something better than Google would be like trying to catch up with Michael Schumacher while he's got 9 laps of advance on you. That's what analysts and experts said about Boeing, Airbus would never work out. It is also what they said about Microsoft in the mid 90's: Microsoft Windows NT would eventually kill off *nix and and dominate the Server OS market. As it turned out Linux appeared out of a dark corner of the Usenet and ate up most of the market share NT would have done and Unix turned out to be thougher that most people thought. Sometimes state sponsored competitors work out and sometimes a hobby project somebody posted a link to on the Usenet turns into a fiercely competitive product. I don't think the intention with this program was to push Google out of the market. I'd say the EU's intention with this project was more akin to what was done with the Airbus consortium, an attempt to inject some competition by force into a very important market that is more or less monopolized by a single company. Google is becoming dangerously dominant in the search engine budsiness. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft own this market with the latter two losing ground to Google and they are all US based companies. How much do you think it is worth to own the company that controls the search engine that 45-50% of web surfers (and that percentage is steadily climbing) use to find content online? I can see why the EU would think it's worth while to snatch a portion of that action away from the US.
Wikipedia says you're wrong. Gee... assuming that article is up-to-date GWB has got exactly one veto to his name so far. I'm not a GWB fan by any stretch of the imagination but this is hairsplitting. GWB may not be everybody's idea of a good president but he has a looooooong way to go before he tops Franklin D. Roosevelt's grand total of 635 vetoes. GWB will have to veto at the rate of almost one bill per day if he want's to beat good old FDR before the 4-11-2008 presidential election and god help the USA and for that matter the whole western world if GWB and the US Congress have them selves a veto war. The last six years of ideological feuding between Europe and the USA have been bad enough.
From where I sit, it looks like a blatant lie to cover up for laziness.
<complete_nonsense> You don't know the EU very well do you? You see this has nothing to do with laziness. If the EU replaces it's WMV streaming systems with a competing product it will result in 68 shirt and tie wearing MCSEs with nice conservative Bill Gates haircuts being replaced by a couple of hairy bucktoothed nerds with a nasty armpit malodor problem and the fashions sense of a Portuguese donkey wrangler. So this whole mess is really all about French objections because of the effect such a change would have on the already low fashion standards of EU employees and all the other EU member countries fears that it might make the unemployment situation in the European MCSE community any worse since the job security of the European MCSE community is already badly threatened by the way Linux looks set to exterminate Windows from the EU's desktop computer market. </complete_nonsense>
6. Apple will reveal it has been recording phone calls made on the iPhone and that they're available for sale on iTunes for 99 cents. Let's not forget an old classic:
7. Apple will license OS.X to generic PC manufacturers starting with Dull^W Dell.
This answer shows why the question is nonsensical on its face. No one can tell you what distro is best for you. Everyone has a different personality. For me, Slackware is the ideal distro for a newbie. But then, I like to read up on any product before I use it. So I thought it was easy to install and now it is very easy to administrate. It has lower overhead from all of the bells and whistles that some of the other distros have included. There is no dependency hell that can be so frustrating to a newbie. If you stay away from the auto updaters and read the changelogs, you will never have a broken system. If you are like a lot of the Windows users that come over to Linux, however, you will probably be better served by one of the other distros. The majority of them want to run the installer CD and then just have everything be set up and work. Of course some of them become so frustrated the first time they run into a problem and have no idea on how to fix it, they run back to Windows. But good luck to you.
Which distro to adopt if you are a newbie really depends on what you want to achieve or learn by installing Linux. If you want an alternate desktop system you could go for Ubuntu, Linspire, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop distro where you get lots of user friendly GUI tools to solve your configuration problems. If your ambition is to become a corporate Linux admin or a developer and you want to build a server system to cut your teeth on I would recommend something like Centos because it is a free-of-charge binary 'clone' of Red Hat ES/AS which along with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the standard for anybody who runs enterprise quality software including the ubiquitous Oracle Databases. Slackware on the other hand is only for you if you are a for true nerd, developer, comp-sci/engineering student or some such eccentric who want to find out the old fashioned way how a modern *NIX system is put together. Basically I'd say that if you are a complete Linux newbie, say... an experienced Windows XP user, you should definitely start with one of the ultra user friendly Linux desktop distributions and proceed from there. If you want to become a professional Linux admin you should also get over any fear you may have of command-line interfaces and doubly so if you have any ambition to do any serious development on a Linux system.
So when is/. going to replace the SuSE icon with a stylised thirty pieces of silver?
Never, we are way to scientifically mindied here to resort to Biblical symbolism. However we are quite mean enough to, say.... superimpose a portrait of Vidkun Quisling over the Novell logo.... Mwuhahahahahahahahaha!
Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.
I spoke to the/. community's resident Windows user and he is refusing to come out his closet unless you will personally guarantee that the hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins outside won't tar and fether him.
... what can adequately be explained by idiocy. In this case, SCO's idiocy, and utter lack of any kind of sane case. What might look like Novell slowly but surely bleeding SCO dry could just be SCO's braindead stubbornness in pursuing their case, or lack thereof. ~ ~ ~ ~ :%s/incompetence/idiocy/g
am not a Linux user, but I am a software developer, and it seems to me, that ALL the distros could benefit from a universal package manager, that was compatible with all the major package types?
Or do I completely mis-understand how things work under linux ?
Yes, you misunderstood one thing we consider very important. It's called "competition" or "choice". You know, like in "competing products". What you are asking is called "one Microsoft way", as in one and only one way to do things. As long as there are multiple alternatives, they will be competing to build the best product, while at the same time trying different strategies for what IS the best product. The last thing is important, because one thing cannot generally be the best for everyone. People have different requirements.
Ok, First turn off your flame thrower.... Now let's examine his argument rationally. It does have some merit even if he was a bit off center with his suggested solution. Like somebody else here suggested we don't need a universal package manager as much as we need a standard package format for Linux. I don't see a standard package format for Linux as being some sort of 'one true Microsoft way' any more than other computing standards like, say, the POSIX or the Unicode standards. Creating a single Linux software package standard would allow package manager developers/manufacturers to compete for creating the best product while assuring complete interoperability. Of course it would restrict competition somewhat because no individual package manager producer has control over the format but that's the price you pay for the standardization needed to eliminate the current state of affairs in Linux software package management which can best be described as a form of 'organized chaos'.
Wind won't work outside of a very few areas that have the kinds of sustained winds to make it workable. In general, it just takes up too much physical space for the energy it generates.
Solar is potential workable, but not with single-crystal silicon wafers. Those actually require quite a bit of energy to create, and take (I believe) over a year to "pay back" that energy. Recent research into nanocrystalline materials has more potential there, as they require less energy to create.
Actually both are space hogs, especially if you are talking about actual wind or solar 'powerplants'. However each has the potential to produce say... very rough guess here... up to 10% of the energy needs. In Europe wind is extensively used, farmers often set up wind generators on their fields and sell the electricity they don't need to the energy companies for extra income. If you drive through Denmark, Holland, or N-Germany you will see wind generators by the dozen in the wheat fields you drive through. I don't think either wind nor solar will replace coal and oil for all sorts of reasons of which the physical space they take up is only one reason, they will remain important supplementary energy sources. Large solar power plants are not all that common here in Europe but people have begun to combine improved insulation of their houses/apartments with measures like mounting solar cells on the roof to reduce the amount of energy they have to draw off the electric network for heating/cooling or lighting in their houses. Basically I think we can get far by encouraging the use of wind and solar and combining those with measures aimed at increasing the efficient use of energy but even all those measures together will never enable us to replace oil and coal. Unless somebody finds miraculous new energy source and invents room temperature super-conductors in the near future, conventional Nuclear power may prove the only viable way to phase out fossil fuel use in power plants. Nuclear leaves nasty waste products that will be hard to deal with but at least it doesn't cause a rise in sea levels and climate change. The choice we have at the moment is:
Nuclear power plants, which if they fail render the portion of the planet where they are located and any territory down wind them un-inhabitable for several thousand years.
Coal and oil plants who have the potential to render even larger portions of the planet un-inhabitable than Nuclear accidents will because of sea-level rise and the rest of it ill-inhabitable because of climate change.
I would like to see a mac mini with TiVo-killer hardware and software, but I doubt it will exist as long as Apple is selling TV shows in their store.
The movies and TV shows are in crappy quality aimed at the iPod screen size too, so they're a gross ripoff given that they're priced like DVDs.
I can't comment on the accuracy of your description since iTunes isn't available where I am living at the moment so I haven't been able to take a look at these services and I am to lazy to go to the trouble of making use of the loopholes. However, if that's really true and iTunes movies and TV shows are aimed at the iPod then Apple is barking up the wrong tree. Selling Movies and TV shows through iTunes is a good idea but they should tie it into Front Row and aim the sales at the desktop/mediacenter user not the iPod user. The iPod is a music player... period. I don't understand why Apple hasn't done more with Front Row and Mac-Mini combo. Perhaps they are so busy trying to wring the most out of the iPod they have forgotten about their other media products. I use a Mac-Mini as a media center along with an Elgato tuner and it works brilliantly but only because Elgato tacked a home made extension onto Front Row for their TV tuner which is a good thing since the remote Elgato ships with their tuners is (in my experience at least) complete crap. How hard can it be for Apple to create an API for TV tuner manufacturers like Elgato to use to integrate their products into Front Row? Still, it's cool to be able to control a DVD player, music jukebox, photo slideshow viewer, movie player and a TV tuner complete with recorder using a 6 button Front Row remote.
write more code of your own write more code read more code read LOTS of other people's code (DL a smallish OSS project at first, then larger ones).
rinse, lather, repeat.
If you're concerned that you're not learning "cool new things" on the job, learn them off the job. Your destiny is your own, as hokey as that sounds...
love your work.
That's pretty sound advice.
Personally I'd say that for the first few years you'd be better off picking jobs with companies where you are likely to pick up disciplined, professional development practices, marketable skills and knowledge than you will be chasing solely after the money. Also don't allow your self to become too specialized, you want a broad skill-set. Excessive specialization is leads to trouble.
Learn things you don't learn at work by setting up your own OSS project, joining one or if you absolutely can't stand doing something for no profit set up a shareware product of some sort to keep your self in practice. Half the jobs I have gotten I got because of knowledge I gained on my own time.
Another thing to keep in mind is that whether you are writing code at work or privately one of the best ways of learning about software design, as the parent post suggested, is to look at other people's code (think: sourceforge). Doing that also allows you to compare different approaches to solving design problems. For example writing a daemon in C vs. C++ vs. Java vs. Perl. Some approaches will be awful others more sensible but you can learn something from all of them. Even comparing the different approaches people take to solving the same problem in two projects that both use C++ can be interesting.
... and yeah it helps a lot if you love what you do for a living. In my experience some employers will actually consider hiring applicants with less experience if they are enthusiastic about their occupation.
In view of the way humanity's moral compass has been recalibrated since the middle ages I think the need for the creation of a "Here be porn!" annotation is more urgent.
Slashdot Mirror
It does indeed.... behold ye unbelievers.
What a pointless article. In Lebanon and the occupied territories Hamas and Hizbolla used Google Maps among other things to plan their rocket attacks. During their incursions into S-Lebanon the Israelis captured Hizbollah command centers with entire walls covered in poster sized Google generated maps. Any number of other insurgent organizations world wide have been using Google's services for operational planning almost as long as it has been covering areas of interest to them so this is not exactly news, it's regurgitated **old news**. Insurgents are not stupid they will make use of any civilian service that gives them a tactical advantage. As always are two sides to this issue. On the one hand blaming Google for facilitating insurgent attacks is like blaming, say... Toyota for their cars being used in car bombings. On the other hand people can yell as loudly as they want about censorship but it's hard to blame the military for wanting to make it hard for people to drop mortar bombs into their fire-bases and zap their picket posts with RPG's.
With respect to phones, I think the iPhone is going to be a flop. I would tend to agree with that. I use my phone for all sorts of stuff other than just making calls. For example I use it to keep track of my expenses and if this iPhone doesn't have that functionality I can't add it by going to a 3rd party software vendor like I did with my Nokia phone. I'm pretty sure that later on Apple will back down on this point. Third party software is simply to useful to customers so eventually the iPhone will either be a flop or Apple will allow third party software but require it to be certified for quality/stability to keep the Telcos from peeing in their pants. A smart-phone in this price bracket is simply to expensive for the kind of people who spend $5-600 on a smart phone to be willing to put up with it being castrated like this. When it's all said and done, it's a $3000 phone (can't get one without 2 years of Cingular's worthless service) that plays mp3s and has a calendar with pixmaps borrowed from OS X. What I find interesting is what will Apple do when they finally ship the iPhone to customers outside the USA? Cingular isn't a huge player on the global telco market, at least the have no presence in this country (while Vodafone and T-Mobile do), so will Apple simply negotiate locking the iPhone into the service of one of the big local carriers? Or will the iPhone only be sold in the select number of countries where Apple's Telco buddies have a presence?
From where I sit, it looks like a blatant lie to cover up for laziness.
<complete_nonsense>
You don't know the EU very well do you? You see this has nothing to do with laziness. If the EU replaces it's WMV streaming systems with a competing product it will result in 68 shirt and tie wearing MCSEs with nice conservative Bill Gates haircuts being replaced by a couple of hairy bucktoothed nerds with a nasty armpit malodor problem and the fashions sense of a Portuguese donkey wrangler. So this whole mess is really all about French objections because of the effect such a change would have on the already low fashion standards of EU employees and all the other EU member countries fears that it might make the unemployment situation in the European MCSE community any worse since the job security of the European MCSE community is already badly threatened by the way Linux looks set to exterminate Windows from the EU's desktop computer market.
</complete_nonsense>
7. Apple will license OS.X to generic PC manufacturers starting with Dull^W Dell.
...most people just don't have a clue how to drive?
YES! But that's not news, we have known this for over a century now...
This answer shows why the question is nonsensical on its face. No one can tell you what distro is best for you. Everyone has a different personality. For me, Slackware is the ideal distro for a newbie. But then, I like to read up on any product before I use it. So I thought it was easy to install and now it is very easy to administrate. It has lower overhead from all of the bells and whistles that some of the other distros have included. There is no dependency hell that can be so frustrating to a newbie. If you stay away from the auto updaters and read the changelogs, you will never have a broken system. If you are like a lot of the Windows users that come over to Linux, however, you will probably be better served by one of the other distros. The majority of them want to run the installer CD and then just have everything be set up and work. Of course some of them become so frustrated the first time they run into a problem and have no idea on how to fix it, they run back to Windows. But good luck to you.
Which distro to adopt if you are a newbie really depends on what you want to achieve or learn by installing Linux. If you want an alternate desktop system you could go for Ubuntu, Linspire, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop distro where you get lots of user friendly GUI tools to solve your configuration problems. If your ambition is to become a corporate Linux admin or a developer and you want to build a server system to cut your teeth on I would recommend something like Centos because it is a free-of-charge binary 'clone' of Red Hat ES/AS which along with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the standard for anybody who runs enterprise quality software including the ubiquitous Oracle Databases. Slackware on the other hand is only for you if you are a for true nerd, developer, comp-sci/engineering student or some such eccentric who want to find out the old fashioned way how a modern *NIX system is put together. Basically I'd say that if you are a complete Linux newbie, say... an experienced Windows XP user, you should definitely start with one of the ultra user friendly Linux desktop distributions and proceed from there. If you want to become a professional Linux admin you should also get over any fear you may have of command-line interfaces and doubly so if you have any ambition to do any serious development on a Linux system.
Does this mean I can get a copy of Mein Kamft, hardbound and set in Comin Sans... with a bunny rabbit cover... in seven minutes?
Why would you want a Ford owner's repair manual in a bunny rabbit cover?
So when is /. going to replace the SuSE icon with a stylised thirty pieces of silver?
Never, we are way to scientifically mindied here to resort to Biblical symbolism. However we are quite mean enough to, say.... superimpose a portrait of Vidkun Quisling over the Novell logo.... Mwuhahahahahahahahaha!
Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.
/. community's resident Windows user and he is refusing to come out his closet unless you will personally guarantee that the hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins outside won't tar and fether him.
I spoke to the
... what can adequately be explained by idiocy. In this case, SCO's idiocy, and utter lack of any kind of sane case. What might look like Novell slowly but surely bleeding SCO dry could just be SCO's braindead stubbornness in pursuing their case, or lack thereof.
:%s/incompetence/idiocy/g
~
~
~
~
There, now we agree completely...
Ok, First turn off your flame thrower.... Now let's examine his argument rationally. It does have some merit even if he was a bit off center with his suggested solution. Like somebody else here suggested we don't need a universal package manager as much as we need a standard package format for Linux. I don't see a standard package format for Linux as being some sort of 'one true Microsoft way' any more than other computing standards like, say, the POSIX or the Unicode standards. Creating a single Linux software package standard would allow package manager developers/manufacturers to compete for creating the best product while assuring complete interoperability. Of course it would restrict competition somewhat because no individual package manager producer has control over the format but that's the price you pay for the standardization needed to eliminate the current state of affairs in Linux software package management which can best be described as a form of 'organized chaos'.
Actually both are space hogs, especially if you are talking about actual wind or solar 'powerplants'. However each has the potential to produce say... very rough guess here... up to 10% of the energy needs. In Europe wind is extensively used, farmers often set up wind generators on their fields and sell the electricity they don't need to the energy companies for extra income. If you drive through Denmark, Holland, or N-Germany you will see wind generators by the dozen in the wheat fields you drive through. I don't think either wind nor solar will replace coal and oil for all sorts of reasons of which the physical space they take up is only one reason, they will remain important supplementary energy sources. Large solar power plants are not all that common here in Europe but people have begun to combine improved insulation of their houses/apartments with measures like mounting solar cells on the roof to reduce the amount of energy they have to draw off the electric network for heating/cooling or lighting in their houses. Basically I think we can get far by encouraging the use of wind and solar and combining those with measures aimed at increasing the efficient use of energy but even all those measures together will never enable us to replace oil and coal. Unless somebody finds miraculous new energy source and invents room temperature super-conductors in the near future, conventional Nuclear power may prove the only viable way to phase out fossil fuel use in power plants. Nuclear leaves nasty waste products that will be hard to deal with but at least it doesn't cause a rise in sea levels and climate change. The choice we have at the moment is:
It's a choice between bad and worse.
HELLO? CAN ANYONE SEE THIS?
nope... I'm afraid we can't... perhaps you can try using a larger font size in your next post?
I would like to see a mac mini with TiVo-killer hardware and software, but I doubt it will exist as long as Apple is selling TV shows in their store.
The movies and TV shows are in crappy quality aimed at the iPod screen size too, so they're a gross ripoff given that they're priced like DVDs.
I can't comment on the accuracy of your description since iTunes isn't available where I am living at the moment so I haven't been able to take a look at these services and I am to lazy to go to the trouble of making use of the loopholes. However, if that's really true and iTunes movies and TV shows are aimed at the iPod then Apple is barking up the wrong tree. Selling Movies and TV shows through iTunes is a good idea but they should tie it into Front Row and aim the sales at the desktop/mediacenter user not the iPod user. The iPod is a music player... period. I don't understand why Apple hasn't done more with Front Row and Mac-Mini combo. Perhaps they are so busy trying to wring the most out of the iPod they have forgotten about their other media products. I use a Mac-Mini as a media center along with an Elgato tuner and it works brilliantly but only because Elgato tacked a home made extension onto Front Row for their TV tuner which is a good thing since the remote Elgato ships with their tuners is (in my experience at least) complete crap. How hard can it be for Apple to create an API for TV tuner manufacturers like Elgato to use to integrate their products into Front Row? Still, it's cool to be able to control a DVD player, music jukebox, photo slideshow viewer, movie player and a TV tuner complete with recorder using a 6 button Front Row remote.
That's pretty sound advice.
But where's the "Here there be dragons" part?
In view of the way humanity's moral compass has been recalibrated since the middle ages I think the need for the creation of a "Here be porn!" annotation is more urgent.