There is no "lack of Linux adoption"; at this point, Linux is the most common OS after Windows, with OS X trailing a distant third on servers and a closer third on desktops. Linux supports far more hardware than OS X, and far more hardware out of the box than Windows.
I like using Linux as much as the next guy but:
I'm pretty sure that OS.X is beaten for market share on the server market by more than just Linux and Windows.
OS.X isn't meant to have broad hardware support beyond the Apple hardware line for obvious reasons so bringing it up as if that was a shortcoming of OS.X in comparison with Windows and Linux is pretty pointless.
My experience has not been that Linux supports 'far more hardware out of the box that Windows'. If anything they are equal at best; the hardware support is for Linux is impressive but the driver quality, feature support and ease of installation is usually better in Windows.
It's a shame Lenovo didn't take this opportunity to help address these issues, but it's ultimately their loss.
That I agree with 100%. The thinkpads used to be some of the best Linux laptops available that capability will be missed.
I hear that europe is more heavily tilted towards socialism - especially France.
Actually most of the European policital forces usually mislabeled as 'Socialists' or even 'Communists' by US right wingers are actually modern Social Democrats who have become moderate to the point where they generally do not see a conflict between a democratic society with a capitalist market economy and their own goals which in turn means they have very little in common with Marxism, Communism or classical Socialism. To call political parties like the British labor party or even the German PDS/Linkspartei Socialists would actually be considered an insult by a true die-hard Socialist.
Funny, but I am in the process of trying to figure out how to schedule the work I need to get done this summer around my european counterparts 8 weeks of vacation. Eight weeks, not including holidays! Funny, they never get labeled as lazy.
Eh?!?! Eight weeks!?! You are either trolling or your counterpart must be a guy who has been accumulating vacation time for years! Myself I get exactly a month for vacation and most people don't take all of it out at once. The typical holiday here is three weeks with a week left over to spend on treating your selft to the odd three day weekend or to bridge gaps between holidays and weekends during christmass or easter.
These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer, which will use it to make personalised adds along the road you drive every morning, or to have pharmacies sell your drug purchase history to your employer.
The political weasels would be more much likely to 'make the data available' to their bretheren the corporate weasels in exchange for campaign contributions than to sell it outright. They may have had their sense of morality surgically removed but they are not stupid. For Europeans ther is a bright side to this, at least the EU is finally growing a backbone vis-a-vis the USA. One of GWB's greatest legacies will probably be that with his 'Go it alone and damn what the rest of the world thinks!' policy he has burned through whatever credit the US had with the Europeans over the US saving their bacon durng WWII and he has done so in an amazingly short period of time.
..the fact that piracy hurts software creators is wholly unproven (and, if you understand the nature of such things, can never actually be proven 100%), and the wrongness of this particular act is far from an absolute law of nature.
That is a totally silly claim. You argue that: "...the fact that piracy hurts software creators is wholly unproven..." which does not hold water. It is true enough that alot of 'pirate' or 'shadow' consumers of software are people who would otherwise not be able to afford this software (the assumption that this applies to 100% of all people who pirate software is one of the favorite lines of the piracy-does-no-harm crowd) but alot of these pirate consumers are people who are very well able to afford a license but are just out to save a buck. I have been in the software business for well over a decade and have seen more examples than I care to count of businesses and private individuals using software without a license. These organizations and private individuals were firsty, fully capable fo purchasing a license, it was not beyond their financial means and secondly if they were to suddenly become unable to pirate software from one day to the other by some revolution in DRM they would miss the software they pirate enough to shell out moey for it. They would pay grudgingly but they would pay. In view of these two facts it is safe to conclude that people who use software without paying for a license are causing the manufacturer financial harm since at least a portion of pirate users do represent lost business for software manufacturers since they would buy a license if they had no other choice and they could afford to do so. Like I said if you want to use pirated software, if you want to use a serial generator to avoid paying $20 for some useful piece of shareware thus avoiding personal bankruptcy and escaping the dreadful torture of having to insulting your sense of morality by paying for a software license please go ahead at your own risk just don't try to convince me that you are not doing anybody any harm since I know better and see that knowledge reaffirmed every day.
I'm not quite sure why this is flamebait. The iPod has surpassed other MP3 players largely because Apple has been able to position it well, turning it into a status symbol.
I don't think it is a status symbol. I see everybody from snooty rich people and yuppies right down to scruffy students and blue collar workers (who are not known for having money to spare) using iPods so it's hardly a status symbol. I think the iPod has become more of a cultural phenominon... of sorts... Its sucess is due to clever marketing, the realization by Apple that music downloads are not a threat they are an opportunity to snatch market share from old and established media giants (i.e. a clever and modern business model) and lastly the iPod is also sucessful due to its simplicity of design, ease of use and lack of confusing features. I find the last part is very interesting and often overlooked. The iPods success is not solely due to ITMS and marketing as is often claimed although they do play a part. Most people I know fill their iPods either with pirated music or more usually by ripping their own legitimately purchased CD collection via iTunes. ITMS isn't even available where I live and yet everybody has an iPod and the fact that people here who don't use ITMS are not purchasign alternative players just goes to prove that ITMS isn't the iPod's only appeal. Another thing is that the iPod has outcompeted music players that are loaded with features and in some cases have more storage capacity and it is not alone in achieving this it has also happened in other markets. Several telecoms have for example had unexpected success selling pretty basic GSM phones that in some cases don't even have a color LCD and they are out-selling models loaded with features and fitted with high res LCD displays and this despite a marginal or even non existent price difference. A good example is Vodafone Simply. Personally I would like a little more from my phone than just GSM telephone functionality, I want e-mail, an organizer and a qwerty keyboard but other than that I could live without a color LCD and the ability to run games and stream TV onto my stamp sized mobile phone monitor.
Are you seriously suggesting that argumentation no longer holds any meaning? Because it sounds like you are saying that you know the absolute truth of the universe, and that nothing that can be said, even if it is correct, can ever trump that.
I didn't say 'arguments' I said 'complaints', there is a difference. People use all kinds of complaints to justify the fact that they download pirated software off the internet along with a crack or a serial generator and use that software without a license. These range from complaints about the pricing and licensing system structures used by the software industry to the good old fallback that they simply don't like Microsoft or some other software giant and it's business practices. All of these complaints are true, they have merit but how do they justify consumption of Software without paying for the privilege? Licensing structures where you can only buy licenses in increments of ten forcing you to buy ten more licenses when you hire your eleven'th employee suck ass, the pricing of software sucks ass and Microsofts business practices suck ass but that does still not change the fact that using software without a purchasing a license is wrong and that no amount of unrelated if meritous 'complaints' over the business pratices of software giants, basically pissing and moaning, will make using software without a license any less wrong. Another favorite is "Copying is not the same as stealing since I am not depriving the owner of an actual object so pirating software does no harm!" It is true enough that copying in it self isn't even necessarily illegal, in my own country a person acutally got off the hook in court after downloading Microsoft Office off the net. The reason is because he downloaded the software because he had lost his original CD and used a legitimate license code to activate the Software. The judge thought that the value lies not in the software it self but in the license to use that software and this person had a legitimate paid for license. If this person had used a pirated licensecode that wasn't legitimately paid for this person would have been convicted. It's not the copying that is necessarily wrong it is using what is copied without paying for a license so even this argument simply won't wash to justify using software withoug a license. You may be able to make the case that copying software off the internet is not wrong but are you seriously trying to tell me that using software either for personal purposes or for generatign revenue in your business and doing so without paying for a legitimate software license is not wrong? If you are going to download software, crack it wit a pirate patch or serial generator and then use it witout paying the manifacturer the required license please go ahead and do so at your own risk. Just stop trying to make the case that using software without paying a license does nobody andy harm and that there is nothing wrong with it.
How much does it cost you if I steal one of your chairs or desks? How much does it cost you if I copy one of your CDs? See the difference?
This is hairsplitting. Yes there is a difference but it isn't the difference between stealing and doing nothing wrong, those are just two different ways of doing somebody economic harm. If you are trying to argue that consuming pirated software does nobody any harm you are deluding your self. Software piracy causes software manufacturers very real losses of revenue. One can argue endlessly about how great this loss of revenue is but you are still doing somebody financial harm by using pirated software and you are also doing something that is plain wrong. Yes, everybody uses pirated software and yes, it is true enough that the pricing of software products is in many cases quite outrageously inflated and unfair but that still does not mean that there is nothing at all wrong with engaging in software piracy and using pirated software. No matter how many complaints you may come up with to justify your use of pirated software and how meritous those your complaints may be they still don't make using software without purchasing a license to do so from the software's manufacturer any less wrong.
...the vast majority of PCs (including Apple, dell, hp, gateway, etc) are manufactured (or at least part manufactured) in China?
True enough, the whole suggestion of PC bugging is almost funny. If the Chinese were to bug every single computer that gets assembled in China just on the off chance that it happens to end up in a secret US.Govt facitlity they would leave a footprint so large that the operation would be blown wide open pretty quickly. How many amateurs and computer engineers are there around the world picking their computers apart? One would expect such a scam to be discovered pretty quickly. Besides that how are the Chinese going tell which of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of computers the US.Govt buys end up in secret facilities. Do the computes phone home? Do they have self activating bugging devices that phone home (through how many layers of firewalling and network security?) when they some how automatically detect that they are in a US Govt facility? The whole suggestion of the Chinese bugging computers wholesale is ridiculous. That leaves us with the possibility of a sophisticated Chinese sting operation that uses the Lenovo distribution network to spike only those computers Lenovo and its distributors (distributors which would have to be staffed by the Chinese intelligence) know are likely to be destined for sensetive facilites. That would minimize the likelyhood of the scam being discovered unless US intel started randomly sampling computers and checking them for bugs but it still seems collossally impractical. If I were Chinese intelligence I would stick to working the most vulnerable part of any US.Govt operation. I would, for example, look for that inevitable disappointed, bored out of his skull, stuck in a dead end career pencil pusher and bribe him/her. It has worked in the past and it will work today. There have to be a thousand more practical ways of spying on the US than bugging computers.
you don't think for a second that france or germany protested against the invasion of Iraq for ethical reasons do you?
There were numerous reasons, one of them was possibly the fact that the Franco-German leaders (or more likely their intelligence staff) took a long hard look at the 'evidence' provided by the Bush adminstration and decided it was not worth the paper it was printed on. The politicians then concluded that they would be lynched by their own electorate the moment it came out that they had sent men to die in Iraq to save the world from their WMD's only to to discover afterwards that the Iraquis were not sitting on the mountain of Gas shells and Bio weapons cannisters as they put the finishing touches on their volumous collection of Atom bombs ready for launch against targets in Israel and even as far away as Europe inside of 45 minutes as the USA and UK claimed they were. In the US and UK people may forgive such fuckups and continue electing the people who made those mistakes but that doesn't mean that people elsewhere are that tolerant about their sons being sent to die for no apparent reason. Keep in mind that the tolerance threshold, in Germany in particular, for politicians who send men to die on the strength of lies and lousy evidence is very, very low and has been ever since the last world war. Other reasons probably included the fact that the French in particular had a very good relationship with Saddam dating back to the first Gulf war and they weren't likely to be popular with whoever the US handed over the country to with disastrous financial results for French businesses. Finally Schröder and Chirac probably realized that there is acutally political milage to be gained by telling the US to go stick it where the sun don't shine.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA? Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?
Felons? I suppose it depends on whow serious the crime is, if the person in question committed murder, rape, child rape or some equally serious crime I suppose that sample taking can be justified, but should we DNA record every person that breaks the law right down to a casual shoplifter? As for it being mandatory to hand over your DNA profile to the government that is to my mind a pretty awful thougth. As a somebody who has a common metabolic affliction that has little effect on my ability to function normally and can be easily regulated with medication I still have found that this affiliction has already made me practically uninsurable when it comes to private health and life insurance. I shudder to think what will happen to peoples insurance policies and how their payments will increase or even how they will become completely unensurable when some corrupt bunch of lying and cheating piece of sh!t politicians pass a law that gives the insurance industry unlimited access to such a global DNA database. The insurance companies will use every single possible genetic imperfection to fleece people and discriminate against them and they won't be the only ones doing this either. The potential for colossaly abusing such a central DNA information repository is just to great for me to be in favor of genetic samples being collected by the Govt. of the entire population.
when did the PC die? Netcraft never mentioned that!
Well... according to the Apple marketing team the PC died of boredom. This was probably the result of 20+ years of running Windows but that's just me reading between the lines of Apples commercials.
Is it just me, or are there more people that think that instead of getting busy automating the process of classifying new strains of computer viruses, Trojans and other malicious software programs, maybe they should address the cause of the problem first?
I'm not sure that training enough high class.NET certified MSCA ratified ninja commando teams to assasinate all those thousands of malware authors and spam kings would be a financially viable proposition for Microsoft. Using a fully automated self classifying system to build a proper threat library which can later be fed to mass manufactured hunter killer bots and android terminators sounds like a much more cost effective approach.
The parent was saying that the problem was not with the lack of encryption, it was a problem with the authentication. He's not saying that SSH wouldn't solve the problem, simply that the problem would not be solved by SSH's encryption like the original poster implied, but its extra layer of authentication which is not affected by this vulnerability.
Unless I am very much mistaken SSH would be a valid work around for the problem and it has nothing o do with SSH encryption although it makes VNC use safer, it has to do with SSH tunneling. Even if the computer you are connecting to with VNC only has port 22 exposed to the internet you can still connect to the VNC server on one of the usual ports in the 59xx range. Before you can do that, however, you first have to use SSH port forwarding by to create an SSH tunnel and physically log onto the target system with the 'ssh' command using the '-L' option. That basically means that you can only get at the VNC server by creating an SSH tunnel first. This makes any authentication vulnerability of the VNC server a non issue, not that a for this bug ASAP would be a bad thing. You should always force users to use SSH when connecting via VNC and not just rely on VNC's native authentication all on it's own.
Unions THRIVE on an antagonistic relationship between "boss" and "worker," and intentionally suppress competition between one worker and the next. If you shut up and slog along with everybody else and put in your time, you can't be fired and you get your raises with your "seniority." After you put in enough years, you get retirement. It's the same track, everyone's on it, and everybody's the same.
That's not a system that rewards creativity or superior ability, or any other types of individual differences. It's a system of artificially-enforced equality that has the effect of bringing everyone down to the same level.
That is very true and also a very right-wing/neo-capitalist point of view. Reality, however, is not quite that simple and the truth lies not to the extreme right and not to the extreme left either but somewhere in between. There are alot of things, rights, that we today regard as normal that were won through hard work, grit and fighting spirit both by unions and other organizations of what used to be called 'the lower classes'. Urinating on the things that these people achieved is all right I suppose, at least in a democracy where such freedom of expression is rightly regarded as the norm, but it is still unfair to label unions and union like organizations as the root of all evil. While the system you describe of each employee being his own man and standing alone against the corporation may be your utopia, and I admit it has some advantages that I am in favor of such as rewarding excellence, some of the rest of us would rather balance the best of that system with the best of the old union system where the might of workers numbers was often able to make right abuses by employers that no amount of individual excellence initiative and ability could have put right. Only the unity of workers can counterbalance what seems to me to have become a very sucessful strategy by employers of breaking up worker unity by employing the old Roman strategy of 'Divide and conquer' which has increased their latitude for commiting acts of abuse to the point that they now can treat people like items of equipment. This does not mean we should eliminate rewards for creativity and superior ability but we employees/workers would be damn bloody stupid to ignore the power worker unity gives us to kick the corporations in the crotch when they try to knock us about.
By virtue of its name the MacBook is a low-end version of the Pro. Fair enough, but the specs are pretty much going to be identical to the Pro version I guess, except with a lower end GFX card, less storage, smaller screen, slower CPU. I've suddenly stopped finding Apple hardware releases interesting.
... is a Hardware fetishist. The specs of the MacBook Pro vs the lower end MacBook will not be all that much different than those of the G4 PowerBook were when compared to the old iBook line. The MacBook [Pro] still holds it's own when compared to the vast majority of PC laptops available on the market today in terms of innovative design. With a handful of exceptions the competitors still look like bricks by comparison which was already true when they were compared to the G4 PowerBooks three years ago. Not that the Hardware is the most attractive part of Apple computers anyway it's the OS, it's ease of use and the various specialist applications that the Macintosh platform excels at... and lets not forget the complete absence (so far) of malware.
...The majority of Mac Users are morons. No, I am NOT saying all Mac users are morons, but trust me, they only buy Macs because they are scared and ignorant of what is out there. They like thier little Apple logo and thats all they know...
You could say more or less the same things about most PC/Windows users, they are IT morons. They like their little Windows logo and that is all they know. Basically, whether you are talking about Macs or Windows users, the majority of them are bound to be relatively computer illiterate. You may get a slightly higher percentage of Nerds using OS.X by choicle than Windows since most of the other Nerds that didn't flee Windows for Macintoshland will have defected to Linuxland but even so the Nerd/Geek crowd is not exactly the majority of Mac users.
Microsoft Corp will spend over $1bn on R&D just in its MSN unit, for the fiscal year starting in July...
That is an impressive figure to be sure but I still think it isn't enough to acheve world domination, why MS can't even develop a sealth fighter for that price let alone a whole fleet of Borg cubes fully armed, warp capable and sporting a giant Windows logo on each side.
Care to elaborate how Mac OS X "closes off its systems so normal users can't screw it up?"
...what he is probably talking about is the fact that OS.X restricts what you can do to critical parts of the OS outside of your home folder. His Windows programmer friends don't like that because in Windows a developer can have his software modify just about OS component or setting he likes on customers machines without the user noticing a thing since the 97% of the users installing/using their software on Windows will have Administrator rights. On Windows this solves alot of problems easily that would otherwise require you to exercise your brain. On OS.X, however, this security feature encourages a developer to seek alternative ways of solving a problem that don't involve mucking around with the OS and thus annoy the user with yet another password prompt. The extra effor that goes into that probably makes their heads hurt.
By the way, neither Apple nor Microsoft exist in a highly competitve market (as defined by those terms in economics).
There is still some competition between the two even if it isn't exclusively about market share. If nothing else OS.X gives Windows something to live up to in terms of design (and even Windows Vista has a looooong way to go in that department). Some of the coolest features in Vista, such as the search-as-you-type 'Quick Search' facility in the Start menu (finally a reason to use the Windows button?) and the Flip 3D Window Navigator are direct responses to features pioneered by OS.X. I wonder if Microsoft had been so adventurous in redesigning their Desktop UI for Vista if it hadn't been for OS.X upstaging Windows to the point where it is becoming severely embarrasing? Hitherto Microsoft has been very reluctant to change their Desktop UI. When they released Windows XP they didn't even credit their users with enough intelligence to be able figure out Virtual Desktops so this simple yet extremely useful feature was buried in the seperately downloadable 'Power Toys' pack along with some other very useful gems. Even today some long time Windows XP users are suprised when I point this feature out to them since they were not aware of it's availability.
I think Apple's last advertisment where they talk about "dull little PCs performing dull little tasks" (by dull little people?) was a lot worse, pretty much only appealing to the Smug Mac User crowd.
Eh? Smug!?! Half the Mac users I know are 30 and 40 something whitcollars doing dull little tasks on their macs. These ads are meant to appeal to the iPod addicted teens and 20 something's that are either just about to crawl into, or are just about to be released from, University.
You need to respect US patents if you intend to sell in the US. I suspect that this is going to start really hurting the US in the next few years. What do you think will happen when, for example, an EU or Asian software company gets hit with a software patent suit? If the US is not their principle market, then they will just pull out - sell their products everywhere except the US. Other companies might decide that selling in the US is too risky, and also ignore the US market.
One would expect that the USA and the EU would regulate such cases would at an inter governmental level. That is to say if this kind of thing became common enough to do some damage the US ministry of commerce would have a word with their counterparts in Brussel and they would kick some butt and vice versa if the offender was from the US. The alternative would be a big fata trade war and nobody wants that. Dunno about the Chinese though, it might probe more difficult to get them to behave.
You are almost there. You see, Microsoft makes slashdotters angry simply by existing, if it were ever to go bankrupt and disappear our brains would suffer a kernel panic requiring a reboot followed by a lengthy boot-time scan for another equally powerful source of anger energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Peter Misek, the new John Dvorak.
Hmmmm...... Nice guess but no cigar, I'm pretty sure mother nature broke the mold that Dvorak was cast in.
I like using Linux as much as the next guy but:
It's a shame Lenovo didn't take this opportunity to help address these issues, but it's ultimately their loss.
That I agree with 100%. The thinkpads used to be some of the best Linux laptops available that capability will be missed.
I hear that europe is more heavily tilted towards socialism - especially France.
Actually most of the European policital forces usually mislabeled as 'Socialists' or even 'Communists' by US right wingers are actually modern Social Democrats who have become moderate to the point where they generally do not see a conflict between a democratic society with a capitalist market economy and their own goals which in turn means they have very little in common with Marxism, Communism or classical Socialism. To call political parties like the British labor party or even the German PDS/Linkspartei Socialists would actually be considered an insult by a true die-hard Socialist.
Funny, but I am in the process of trying to figure out how to schedule the work I need to get done this summer around my european counterparts 8 weeks of vacation. Eight weeks, not including holidays! Funny, they never get labeled as lazy.
Eh?!?! Eight weeks!?! You are either trolling or your counterpart must be a guy who has been accumulating vacation time for years! Myself I get exactly a month for vacation and most people don't take all of it out at once. The typical holiday here is three weeks with a week left over to spend on treating your selft to the odd three day weekend or to bridge gaps between holidays and weekends during christmass or easter.
These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer, which will use it to make personalised adds along the road you drive every morning, or to have pharmacies sell your drug purchase history to your employer.
The political weasels would be more much likely to 'make the data available' to their bretheren the corporate weasels in exchange for campaign contributions than to sell it outright. They may have had their sense of morality surgically removed but they are not stupid. For Europeans ther is a bright side to this, at least the EU is finally growing a backbone vis-a-vis the USA. One of GWB's greatest legacies will probably be that with his 'Go it alone and damn what the rest of the world thinks!' policy he has burned through whatever credit the US had with the Europeans over the US saving their bacon durng WWII and he has done so in an amazingly short period of time.
..the fact that piracy hurts software creators is wholly unproven (and, if you understand the nature of such things, can never actually be proven 100%), and the wrongness of this particular act is far from an absolute law of nature.
That is a totally silly claim. You argue that: "...the fact that piracy hurts software creators is wholly unproven..." which does not hold water. It is true enough that alot of 'pirate' or 'shadow' consumers of software are people who would otherwise not be able to afford this software (the assumption that this applies to 100% of all people who pirate software is one of the favorite lines of the piracy-does-no-harm crowd) but alot of these pirate consumers are people who are very well able to afford a license but are just out to save a buck. I have been in the software business for well over a decade and have seen more examples than I care to count of businesses and private individuals using software without a license. These organizations and private individuals were firsty, fully capable fo purchasing a license, it was not beyond their financial means and secondly if they were to suddenly become unable to pirate software from one day to the other by some revolution in DRM they would miss the software they pirate enough to shell out moey for it. They would pay grudgingly but they would pay. In view of these two facts it is safe to conclude that people who use software without paying for a license are causing the manufacturer financial harm since at least a portion of pirate users do represent lost business for software manufacturers since they would buy a license if they had no other choice and they could afford to do so. Like I said if you want to use pirated software, if you want to use a serial generator to avoid paying $20 for some useful piece of shareware thus avoiding personal bankruptcy and escaping the dreadful torture of having to insulting your sense of morality by paying for a software license please go ahead at your own risk just don't try to convince me that you are not doing anybody any harm since I know better and see that knowledge reaffirmed every day.
I'm not quite sure why this is flamebait. The iPod has surpassed other MP3 players largely because Apple has been able to position it well, turning it into a status symbol.
I don't think it is a status symbol. I see everybody from snooty rich people and yuppies right down to scruffy students and blue collar workers (who are not known for having money to spare) using iPods so it's hardly a status symbol. I think the iPod has become more of a cultural phenominon... of sorts... Its sucess is due to clever marketing, the realization by Apple that music downloads are not a threat they are an opportunity to snatch market share from old and established media giants (i.e. a clever and modern business model) and lastly the iPod is also sucessful due to its simplicity of design, ease of use and lack of confusing features. I find the last part is very interesting and often overlooked. The iPods success is not solely due to ITMS and marketing as is often claimed although they do play a part. Most people I know fill their iPods either with pirated music or more usually by ripping their own legitimately purchased CD collection via iTunes. ITMS isn't even available where I live and yet everybody has an iPod and the fact that people here who don't use ITMS are not purchasign alternative players just goes to prove that ITMS isn't the iPod's only appeal. Another thing is that the iPod has outcompeted music players that are loaded with features and in some cases have more storage capacity and it is not alone in achieving this it has also happened in other markets. Several telecoms have for example had unexpected success selling pretty basic GSM phones that in some cases don't even have a color LCD and they are out-selling models loaded with features and fitted with high res LCD displays and this despite a marginal or even non existent price difference. A good example is Vodafone Simply. Personally I would like a little more from my phone than just GSM telephone functionality, I want e-mail, an organizer and a qwerty keyboard but other than that I could live without a color LCD and the ability to run games and stream TV onto my stamp sized mobile phone monitor.
Are you seriously suggesting that argumentation no longer holds any meaning? Because it sounds like you are saying that you know the absolute truth of the universe, and that nothing that can be said, even if it is correct, can ever trump that.
I didn't say 'arguments' I said 'complaints', there is a difference. People use all kinds of complaints to justify the fact that they download pirated software off the internet along with a crack or a serial generator and use that software without a license. These range from complaints about the pricing and licensing system structures used by the software industry to the good old fallback that they simply don't like Microsoft or some other software giant and it's business practices. All of these complaints are true, they have merit but how do they justify consumption of Software without paying for the privilege? Licensing structures where you can only buy licenses in increments of ten forcing you to buy ten more licenses when you hire your eleven'th employee suck ass, the pricing of software sucks ass and Microsofts business practices suck ass but that does still not change the fact that using software without a purchasing a license is wrong and that no amount of unrelated if meritous 'complaints' over the business pratices of software giants, basically pissing and moaning, will make using software without a license any less wrong. Another favorite is "Copying is not the same as stealing since I am not depriving the owner of an actual object so pirating software does no harm!" It is true enough that copying in it self isn't even necessarily illegal, in my own country a person acutally got off the hook in court after downloading Microsoft Office off the net. The reason is because he downloaded the software because he had lost his original CD and used a legitimate license code to activate the Software. The judge thought that the value lies not in the software it self but in the license to use that software and this person had a legitimate paid for license. If this person had used a pirated licensecode that wasn't legitimately paid for this person would have been convicted. It's not the copying that is necessarily wrong it is using what is copied without paying for a license so even this argument simply won't wash to justify using software withoug a license. You may be able to make the case that copying software off the internet is not wrong but are you seriously trying to tell me that using software either for personal purposes or for generatign revenue in your business and doing so without paying for a legitimate software license is not wrong? If you are going to download software, crack it wit a pirate patch or serial generator and then use it witout paying the manifacturer the required license please go ahead and do so at your own risk. Just stop trying to make the case that using software without paying a license does nobody andy harm and that there is nothing wrong with it.
How much does it cost you if I steal one of your chairs or desks?
How much does it cost you if I copy one of your CDs?
See the difference?
This is hairsplitting. Yes there is a difference but it isn't the difference between stealing and doing nothing wrong, those are just two different ways of doing somebody economic harm. If you are trying to argue that consuming pirated software does nobody any harm you are deluding your self. Software piracy causes software manufacturers very real losses of revenue. One can argue endlessly about how great this loss of revenue is but you are still doing somebody financial harm by using pirated software and you are also doing something that is plain wrong. Yes, everybody uses pirated software and yes, it is true enough that the pricing of software products is in many cases quite outrageously inflated and unfair but that still does not mean that there is nothing at all wrong with engaging in software piracy and using pirated software. No matter how many complaints you may come up with to justify your use of pirated software and how meritous those your complaints may be they still don't make using software without purchasing a license to do so from the software's manufacturer any less wrong.
The test for Vista is when hundreds of millions of people are using it, not a few reviewers on their desktop...
...and an odd laptop.
That and how Vista measures up when the malware designers go to work on it.
The way the market is evolving Vista will probably end up being installed on more laptops than desktops.
...the vast majority of PCs (including Apple, dell, hp, gateway, etc) are manufactured (or at least part manufactured) in China?
True enough, the whole suggestion of PC bugging is almost funny. If the Chinese were to bug every single computer that gets assembled in China just on the off chance that it happens to end up in a secret US.Govt facitlity they would leave a footprint so large that the operation would be blown wide open pretty quickly. How many amateurs and computer engineers are there around the world picking their computers apart? One would expect such a scam to be discovered pretty quickly. Besides that how are the Chinese going tell which of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of computers the US.Govt buys end up in secret facilities. Do the computes phone home? Do they have self activating bugging devices that phone home (through how many layers of firewalling and network security?) when they some how automatically detect that they are in a US Govt facility? The whole suggestion of the Chinese bugging computers wholesale is ridiculous. That leaves us with the possibility of a sophisticated Chinese sting operation that uses the Lenovo distribution network to spike only those computers Lenovo and its distributors (distributors which would have to be staffed by the Chinese intelligence) know are likely to be destined for sensetive facilites. That would minimize the likelyhood of the scam being discovered unless US intel started randomly sampling computers and checking them for bugs but it still seems collossally impractical. If I were Chinese intelligence I would stick to working the most vulnerable part of any US.Govt operation. I would, for example, look for that inevitable disappointed, bored out of his skull, stuck in a dead end career pencil pusher and bribe him/her. It has worked in the past and it will work today. There have to be a thousand more practical ways of spying on the US than bugging computers.
you don't think for a second that france or germany protested against the invasion of Iraq for ethical reasons do you?
There were numerous reasons, one of them was possibly the fact that the Franco-German leaders (or more likely their intelligence staff) took a long hard look at the 'evidence' provided by the Bush adminstration and decided it was not worth the paper it was printed on. The politicians then concluded that they would be lynched by their own electorate the moment it came out that they had sent men to die in Iraq to save the world from their WMD's only to to discover afterwards that the Iraquis were not sitting on the mountain of Gas shells and Bio weapons cannisters as they put the finishing touches on their volumous collection of Atom bombs ready for launch against targets in Israel and even as far away as Europe inside of 45 minutes as the USA and UK claimed they were. In the US and UK people may forgive such fuckups and continue electing the people who made those mistakes but that doesn't mean that people elsewhere are that tolerant about their sons being sent to die for no apparent reason. Keep in mind that the tolerance threshold, in Germany in particular, for politicians who send men to die on the strength of lies and lousy evidence is very, very low and has been ever since the last world war. Other reasons probably included the fact that the French in particular had a very good relationship with Saddam dating back to the first Gulf war and they weren't likely to be popular with whoever the US handed over the country to with disastrous financial results for French businesses. Finally Schröder and Chirac probably realized that there is acutally political milage to be gained by telling the US to go stick it where the sun don't shine.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA? Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?
Felons? I suppose it depends on whow serious the crime is, if the person in question committed murder, rape, child rape or some equally serious crime I suppose that sample taking can be justified, but should we DNA record every person that breaks the law right down to a casual shoplifter? As for it being mandatory to hand over your DNA profile to the government that is to my mind a pretty awful thougth. As a somebody who has a common metabolic affliction that has little effect on my ability to function normally and can be easily regulated with medication I still have found that this affiliction has already made me practically uninsurable when it comes to private health and life insurance. I shudder to think what will happen to peoples insurance policies and how their payments will increase or even how they will become completely unensurable when some corrupt bunch of lying and cheating piece of sh!t politicians pass a law that gives the insurance industry unlimited access to such a global DNA database. The insurance companies will use every single possible genetic imperfection to fleece people and discriminate against them and they won't be the only ones doing this either. The potential for colossaly abusing such a central DNA information repository is just to great for me to be in favor of genetic samples being collected by the Govt. of the entire population.
when did the PC die? Netcraft never mentioned that!
Well... according to the Apple marketing team the PC died of boredom. This was probably the result of 20+ years of running Windows but that's just me reading between the lines of Apples commercials.
Is it just me, or are there more people that think that instead of getting busy automating the process of classifying new strains of computer viruses, Trojans and other malicious software programs, maybe they should address the cause of the problem first?
.NET certified MSCA ratified ninja commando teams to assasinate all those thousands of malware authors and spam kings would be a financially viable proposition for Microsoft. Using a fully automated self classifying system to build a proper threat library which can later be fed to mass manufactured hunter killer bots and android terminators sounds like a much more cost effective approach.
I'm not sure that training enough high class
The parent was saying that the problem was not with the lack of encryption, it was a problem with the authentication. He's not saying that SSH wouldn't solve the problem, simply that the problem would not be solved by SSH's encryption like the original poster implied, but its extra layer of authentication which is not affected by this vulnerability.
Unless I am very much mistaken SSH would be a valid work around for the problem and it has nothing o do with SSH encryption although it makes VNC use safer, it has to do with SSH tunneling. Even if the computer you are connecting to with VNC only has port 22 exposed to the internet you can still connect to the VNC server on one of the usual ports in the 59xx range. Before you can do that, however, you first have to use SSH port forwarding by to create an SSH tunnel and physically log onto the target system with the 'ssh' command using the '-L' option. That basically means that you can only get at the VNC server by creating an SSH tunnel first. This makes any authentication vulnerability of the VNC server a non issue, not that a for this bug ASAP would be a bad thing. You should always force users to use SSH when connecting via VNC and not just rely on VNC's native authentication all on it's own.
Unions THRIVE on an antagonistic relationship between "boss" and "worker," and intentionally suppress competition between one worker and the next. If you shut up and slog along with everybody else and put in your time, you can't be fired and you get your raises with your "seniority." After you put in enough years, you get retirement. It's the same track, everyone's on it, and everybody's the same.
That's not a system that rewards creativity or superior ability, or any other types of individual differences. It's a system of artificially-enforced equality that has the effect of bringing everyone down to the same level.
That is very true and also a very right-wing/neo-capitalist point of view. Reality, however, is not quite that simple and the truth lies not to the extreme right and not to the extreme left either but somewhere in between. There are alot of things, rights, that we today regard as normal that were won through hard work, grit and fighting spirit both by unions and other organizations of what used to be called 'the lower classes'. Urinating on the things that these people achieved is all right I suppose, at least in a democracy where such freedom of expression is rightly regarded as the norm, but it is still unfair to label unions and union like organizations as the root of all evil. While the system you describe of each employee being his own man and standing alone against the corporation may be your utopia, and I admit it has some advantages that I am in favor of such as rewarding excellence, some of the rest of us would rather balance the best of that system with the best of the old union system where the might of workers numbers was often able to make right abuses by employers that no amount of individual excellence initiative and ability could have put right. Only the unity of workers can counterbalance what seems to me to have become a very sucessful strategy by employers of breaking up worker unity by employing the old Roman strategy of 'Divide and conquer' which has increased their latitude for commiting acts of abuse to the point that they now can treat people like items of equipment. This does not mean we should eliminate rewards for creativity and superior ability but we employees/workers would be damn bloody stupid to ignore the power worker unity gives us to kick the corporations in the crotch when they try to knock us about.
By virtue of its name the MacBook is a low-end version of the Pro. Fair enough, but the specs are pretty much going to be identical to the Pro version I guess, except with a lower end GFX card, less storage, smaller screen, slower CPU. I've suddenly stopped finding Apple hardware releases interesting.
... is a Hardware fetishist. The specs of the MacBook Pro vs the lower end MacBook will not be all that much different than those of the G4 PowerBook were when compared to the old iBook line. The MacBook [Pro] still holds it's own when compared to the vast majority of PC laptops available on the market today in terms of innovative design. With a handful of exceptions the competitors still look like bricks by comparison which was already true when they were compared to the G4 PowerBooks three years ago. Not that the Hardware is the most attractive part of Apple computers anyway it's the OS, it's ease of use and the various specialist applications that the Macintosh platform excels at... and lets not forget the complete absence (so far) of malware.
...The majority of Mac Users are morons. No, I am NOT saying all Mac users are morons, but trust me, they only buy Macs because they are scared and ignorant of what is out there. They like thier little Apple logo and thats all they know...
You could say more or less the same things about most PC/Windows users, they are IT morons. They like their little Windows logo and that is all they know. Basically, whether you are talking about Macs or Windows users, the majority of them are bound to be relatively computer illiterate. You may get a slightly higher percentage of Nerds using OS.X by choicle than Windows since most of the other Nerds that didn't flee Windows for Macintoshland will have defected to Linuxland but even so the Nerd/Geek crowd is not exactly the majority of Mac users.
Microsoft Corp will spend over $1bn on R&D just in its MSN unit, for the fiscal year starting in July...
That is an impressive figure to be sure but I still think it isn't enough to acheve world domination, why MS can't even develop a sealth fighter for that price let alone a whole fleet of Borg cubes fully armed, warp capable and sporting a giant Windows logo on each side.
Care to elaborate how Mac OS X "closes off its systems so normal users can't screw it up?"
...what he is probably talking about is the fact that OS.X restricts what you can do to critical parts of the OS outside of your home folder. His Windows programmer friends don't like that because in Windows a developer can have his software modify just about OS component or setting he likes on customers machines without the user noticing a thing since the 97% of the users installing/using their software on Windows will have Administrator rights. On Windows this solves alot of problems easily that would otherwise require you to exercise your brain. On OS.X, however, this security feature encourages a developer to seek alternative ways of solving a problem that don't involve mucking around with the OS and thus annoy the user with yet another password prompt. The extra effor that goes into that probably makes their heads hurt.
By the way, neither Apple nor Microsoft exist in a highly competitve market (as defined by those terms in economics).
There is still some competition between the two even if it isn't exclusively about market share. If nothing else OS.X gives Windows something to live up to in terms of design (and even Windows Vista has a looooong way to go in that department). Some of the coolest features in Vista, such as the search-as-you-type 'Quick Search' facility in the Start menu (finally a reason to use the Windows button?) and the Flip 3D Window Navigator are direct responses to features pioneered by OS.X. I wonder if Microsoft had been so adventurous in redesigning their Desktop UI for Vista if it hadn't been for OS.X upstaging Windows to the point where it is becoming severely embarrasing? Hitherto Microsoft has been very reluctant to change their Desktop UI. When they released Windows XP they didn't even credit their users with enough intelligence to be able figure out Virtual Desktops so this simple yet extremely useful feature was buried in the seperately downloadable 'Power Toys' pack along with some other very useful gems. Even today some long time Windows XP users are suprised when I point this feature out to them since they were not aware of it's availability.
I think Apple's last advertisment where they talk about "dull little PCs performing dull little tasks" (by dull little people?) was a lot worse, pretty much only appealing to the Smug Mac User crowd.
Eh? Smug!?! Half the Mac users I know are 30 and 40 something whitcollars doing dull little tasks on their macs. These ads are meant to appeal to the iPod addicted teens and 20 something's that are either just about to crawl into, or are just about to be released from, University.
You need to respect US patents if you intend to sell in the US. I suspect that this is going to start really hurting the US in the next few years. What do you think will happen when, for example, an EU or Asian software company gets hit with a software patent suit? If the US is not their principle market, then they will just pull out - sell their products everywhere except the US. Other companies might decide that selling in the US is too risky, and also ignore the US market.
One would expect that the USA and the EU would regulate such cases would at an inter governmental level. That is to say if this kind of thing became common enough to do some damage the US ministry of commerce would have a word with their counterparts in Brussel and they would kick some butt and vice versa if the offender was from the US. The alternative would be a big fata trade war and nobody wants that. Dunno about the Chinese though, it might probe more difficult to get them to behave.
I think that I'm starting to get this...
You are almost there. You see, Microsoft makes slashdotters angry simply by existing, if it were ever to go bankrupt and disappear our brains would suffer a kernel panic requiring a reboot followed by a lengthy boot-time scan for another equally powerful source of anger energy.