If you're on Comcast's lowest tier TV-included package - "Internet Plus" - HBO is a free add-on. Right now we're paying ~ $70/month total for internet plus Cable TV (The TV channels include HD and are basically a throw-in, it's how Comcast tries to hide how many of its customers don't want cable TV anymore). I can't imagine paying $15 for any single channel.
The way I see it (as an Australian that moved the US ~18 months ago and is agog at the variety of entertainment options), Netflix is awesome because it's a nice cheap catalogue of mostly older content that I either haven't seen or am happy to watch again.
HBO for $15/mo seems reasonable to me because they have a (much smaller) amount of really amazing content (The Wire, Rome, Sopranos, Deadwood, etc) which I'll happily watch again and again, but they're almost always running the New Hotness (Game of Thrones at the moment, which I actually don't really care about that much).
The one channel of HBO for me is more value than many, many of the other available channels here put together. I have little or no interest in most of the other channels - almost everything I want to watch is on Netflix or HBO.
But, of course, YMMV depending on taste. I've been looking forward to getting HBO on a non-Apple device to try the trial and see how much of it I watch. I might end up deciding $15/mo is too much 12 months of the year but I'll definitely roll it out a couple of times and binge.
So how about some copyright reform! Fuck, give the $250m directly to the MPAA/RIAA. Do something about the ludicrous copyright period. Imagine how many more great books would enter the public domain?!
The Australian video game industry has always been a bit boom or bust. We had some great stuff going on in the late 90s and some great titles coming out, then a bit of a downturn during the dotcom bubble burst.
But when that happened, one USD started buying two AUD, and a lot of US companies started setting up studios in Australia. They had a few good years, taking advantage of the cheap cost of labour thanks to both leveraging the exchange rate and the enthusiastic and excellent Australian staff, but once the AUD starting doing well the benefits started fading. Studios shut up shop and vanished with barely any notice.
There's a lot of awesome Australian talent scattered over the globe now; most of the people I know who were serious about the industry decided that if they wanted to make a reliable career out of it they needed to head stateside.
Now the AUD is waning again it's possible we'll see some more American dollars going into it, but it's easier than ever for US companies to bring Australians to the US, so I suspect that's more likely.
I'm genuinely embarrassed to be part of a community where people use 'socialism' like a scare word to try to argue against state-provided healthcare. What you had before Obamacare was way closer to a free market, and it's directly responsible for why more dollars are spent per capita on health care in the US than anywhere else in the world. Still there are many people not actually being properly covered, people driven to bankruptcy because of insane medical bills, not even health economists understand health care plans... the list goes on.
I, like most other people who live in countries with state-provided healthcare, find the resistance to providing healthcare to its citizens utterly confusing. Using 'socialism' as a scare word to try to convince your fellow citizens that it's some weird Soviet-era affliction that everyone will suffer under is a cheap trick.
I know everyone wants "freedom", but you'll live with much more genuine freedom if you have a healthcare system is/just there/, rather than it being something that you're constantly fighting against.
(FWIW, I moved from Australia to the US a couple years ago; my father, sister and grandfather are doctors in Australia and my uncle is a doctor and works in IT healthcare in the US - so I have accessed a fairly wide set of viewpoints before forming my own.)
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but I found your comment pretty funny given the general groupthink on Slashdot about the typical quality of software engineers and how most of them shouldn't be trusted to do anything more complicated than "hello world".
The air of superiority on here (which may or may not be misplaced, thanks Dunning-Kruger) when it comes to programming is such that I'm amazed to find people supporting the concept that people should be hacking on their own cars from a pure quality-control point of view.
I firmly support the EFF's perspective that users should own their own devices and be able to do whatever they want with them. If it's hacking on their entertainment systems or the seat warmers, who cares? But there are parts of the automotive system that are designed by actual engineers and go through serious testing to ensure they perform to certain parameters, presumably in some cases according to state-provided regulations. So there's a case to be made on that side.
In my country, you can actually drive while not in physical possession of your license - if pulled over by the police, you have a period of time in which to go to a police station to show them the license.
This allows citizens and police to gracefully deal with a wide range of legit issues like people forgetting their wallets, people losing their licenses, etc. I'm sure this could be extended easily to phones.
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has
[author of the article]
Completely agree, and it's what I dislike most about Firefox today (you can look at my history for several +5 comments about FF UI/UX).
I think Thunderbird is in that pre-awesome Firefox stage. It's feature complete but not polished or awesome enough to drive adoption and force other players to respond.
I also do not like random UI/UX spasms that lead to Australis-esque results. I just want a solid client that people can/rely/ on, like Firefox was.
I've used Thunderbird as my sole email client for a few years. It's OK. There are bugs - not crippling bugs, but enough that make it not a solid enough product for me to recommend to the kind of people that like battling beta software to get their shit done.
But it could be so much more. Like Firefox was, when I recommended it for years to people that wanted to browse the web safely using the magic juice that their nerd friends commended.
There are many other battlegrounds. "Social" is part of what Mozilla want to compete in, but until email has been conquered...
I normally avoid hardware review posts but I'm on my 2nd Dell XPS 13" laptop so wanted to check this out.
I have been super happy with these devices. The first one was the XPS M1210, which in all seriousness was one of the best computers I've ever owned. It's a bit dated now - it was pre-Macbook Air, so by comparison looks huge and chunky, but compared to previous lappys it was a joy to travel with.
The first battery piked after a couple years but this is back in the Good Old Days when buying replacement parts was easy.
The screen crapped out after about 4 years - still usable but had weird patterns all over it. I could have replaced it but by then the newer model was out, and the change in weight profile was significant enough to justify the change.
I've had the new one for over two years and have been really happy with it. I basically only use it when I travel, and it's slimline form is great.
The model I have (2012 I think) only has 4GB of RAM, which has been a bit of a hassle, and the CPU is a bit on the slow side compared to my desktop - but this new one with 8GB looks like it would be great.
It has a nice keyboard with broad, easy to press keys, making it as not-terrible as possible to type on for extended periods (if I'm using it for ages I still plug in a real keyboard though).
If you're looking at a slimline laptop and don't want a Mac, then I seriously recommend checking the XPS series out.
The positive side is that hopefully it provides further incentives for companies like Microsoft to work harder to try to mitigate DDoS problems at the source.
Microsoft are in a unique position as their operating system is - it seems - in many cases the base platform for launching these attacks. It'd be great to see a concerted effort along with a company like Google to start actively trying to massively reduce the number of systems that are regularly involved in DDoS attacks.
I was at a bar in Columbus OH earlier this year and got handed a flyer for a service exactly you describe. Forgot the name but thought it was a cool idea, although Uber and Lyft I think make it tough competition.
And now is probably the BEST time to be doing it. Threat of physical retaliation is extremely low for most major powers, but the intelligence that can be gained - both in terms of identifying potential weak points in infrastructure and systems, and ways to improve defence against attacks - must be priceless.
Just a quick note to say thanks for your comments in this thread. Fascinating to learn some more about the chocolate industry and what the hell chocolate is. As an Australian that recently moved to the US I have been surprised about the weird tasting chocolate that is commonly available (e.g., Hershey bars) and now have a better idea what to look for.
Would love to know what you make so I can look out for it in the stores (... if there's anywhere in Ohio that stocks them!)
More OSS video editors is great. I backed openshot a while ago, not because I have any interest in video editing (or watching videos - would much prefer to read) but because I think it'd be great to wrest some of the power away from the commercial options.
With the Republicans scoring big in the election, the US dollar hit a high (apparently because they're pro business) against the Aussie dollar, which is now the lowest it's been for 4 years after a gradual slide over the last few months.
This would have been fantastic 2 years ago but now we're just facing the original Australia tax - a poor exchange rate. Might still be a few things that you can get a good deal on though.
What you might want is a Windows VM (or more than one) inside your Windows that you use for Internet downloads.
At the moment I just run separate VMs, but it's a bit heavyweight.
Remember Docker isn't secure. Process that want to escape can escape.
Hmm, that seems counter to the Docker security model - the processes are not supposed to be able to get out of their container... or so it claims. How do Docker processes escape?
... I'd actually rather see Docker in the user space for Windows. There are zillions of Windows applications that would benefit from Docker-isation - being able to download things off the Internet and more safely run them is something I've wanted for ages.
There are various application sandbox things for Windows (e.g., Sandboxie) but I haven't seen anything open source that is as reliable and commonly used as Docker seems to be.
I think it'd be OK on the server side as well, but I'd love to be able to download nice jailed Docker versions of most Windows apps so I can run them without having to worry too much about what they're doing in my userspace.
"I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying."
If this had been a story about a Windows exploit it's unlikely it would have been reported in the mainstream in a similar manner. Even if it had it's unlikely anyone would have paid attention; even the non-technical public is massively desensitised to stories about Windows security issues.
If anything, I'm now/more/ confident about open source security. This demonstrates that when people find problems, they fix them quickly and efficiently. Who knows what is happening in closed source software?
Just curious, what has been breaking for you? What UI features have changed in some significant way since Australis?
SINCE Australis? Nothing major. In a recent version they changed the right click context menu to include icons for reload/back/forward, which irritated me - change for the sake of change. (Also the keyboard shortcut for Private Browsing no longer works - might be a plugin? Not sure.)
Things like that seem little but when you've been using Firefox for years - which I have, every day, for work - little changes like that mean the platform loses a lot of stability, which is one of the things that is most important when you're trying to get things done.
I'm not at all opposed to new features. I don't even care about feature bloat that much. But they should be opt-in. And at the very least, you should be able to opt-out without having to install some third party plugin. Having a new UI/UX forced on me just feels... rude.
Australis prompted me to install Classic Theme Restorer so I could restore the browser to the way I'd been using it for/years/. (Here's my +5 post about why I disliked Australis.) Enough has been written about Australis so I won't whine about that any more.
Just upgraded then with that grim sense of foreboding that I now get with Firefox upgrades ("what's going to stop working this time? how is the UI I've been using for many years changed now?")
I lost all my cookies - upon reload after the upgrade, I noticed I was logged out of a bunch of websites (including anything using Google Accounts and Slashdot). YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Please check out GiveWell, a charity research organisation: http://www.givewell.org/
They evaluate a wide range of categories over a bunch of different criteria.
If you're on Comcast's lowest tier TV-included package - "Internet Plus" - HBO is a free add-on. Right now we're paying ~ $70/month total for internet plus Cable TV (The TV channels include HD and are basically a throw-in, it's how Comcast tries to hide how many of its customers don't want cable TV anymore). I can't imagine paying $15 for any single channel.
The way I see it (as an Australian that moved the US ~18 months ago and is agog at the variety of entertainment options), Netflix is awesome because it's a nice cheap catalogue of mostly older content that I either haven't seen or am happy to watch again.
HBO for $15/mo seems reasonable to me because they have a (much smaller) amount of really amazing content (The Wire, Rome, Sopranos, Deadwood, etc) which I'll happily watch again and again, but they're almost always running the New Hotness (Game of Thrones at the moment, which I actually don't really care about that much).
The one channel of HBO for me is more value than many, many of the other available channels here put together. I have little or no interest in most of the other channels - almost everything I want to watch is on Netflix or HBO.
But, of course, YMMV depending on taste. I've been looking forward to getting HBO on a non-Apple device to try the trial and see how much of it I watch. I might end up deciding $15/mo is too much 12 months of the year but I'll definitely roll it out a couple of times and binge.
I suspect availability of good things to read isn't really the big problem here. You know, because, libraries.
And let's not forget Project Gutenberg, over 46,000 free ebooks.
So how about some copyright reform! Fuck, give the $250m directly to the MPAA/RIAA. Do something about the ludicrous copyright period. Imagine how many more great books would enter the public domain?!
The Australian video game industry has always been a bit boom or bust. We had some great stuff going on in the late 90s and some great titles coming out, then a bit of a downturn during the dotcom bubble burst.
But when that happened, one USD started buying two AUD, and a lot of US companies started setting up studios in Australia. They had a few good years, taking advantage of the cheap cost of labour thanks to both leveraging the exchange rate and the enthusiastic and excellent Australian staff, but once the AUD starting doing well the benefits started fading. Studios shut up shop and vanished with barely any notice.
There's a lot of awesome Australian talent scattered over the globe now; most of the people I know who were serious about the industry decided that if they wanted to make a reliable career out of it they needed to head stateside.
Now the AUD is waning again it's possible we'll see some more American dollars going into it, but it's easier than ever for US companies to bring Australians to the US, so I suspect that's more likely.
I'm genuinely embarrassed to be part of a community where people use 'socialism' like a scare word to try to argue against state-provided healthcare. What you had before Obamacare was way closer to a free market, and it's directly responsible for why more dollars are spent per capita on health care in the US than anywhere else in the world. Still there are many people not actually being properly covered, people driven to bankruptcy because of insane medical bills, not even health economists understand health care plans... the list goes on.
I, like most other people who live in countries with state-provided healthcare, find the resistance to providing healthcare to its citizens utterly confusing. Using 'socialism' as a scare word to try to convince your fellow citizens that it's some weird Soviet-era affliction that everyone will suffer under is a cheap trick.
I know everyone wants "freedom", but you'll live with much more genuine freedom if you have a healthcare system is /just there/, rather than it being something that you're constantly fighting against.
(FWIW, I moved from Australia to the US a couple years ago; my father, sister and grandfather are doctors in Australia and my uncle is a doctor and works in IT healthcare in the US - so I have accessed a fairly wide set of viewpoints before forming my own.)
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but I found your comment pretty funny given the general groupthink on Slashdot about the typical quality of software engineers and how most of them shouldn't be trusted to do anything more complicated than "hello world".
The air of superiority on here (which may or may not be misplaced, thanks Dunning-Kruger) when it comes to programming is such that I'm amazed to find people supporting the concept that people should be hacking on their own cars from a pure quality-control point of view.
I firmly support the EFF's perspective that users should own their own devices and be able to do whatever they want with them. If it's hacking on their entertainment systems or the seat warmers, who cares? But there are parts of the automotive system that are designed by actual engineers and go through serious testing to ensure they perform to certain parameters, presumably in some cases according to state-provided regulations. So there's a case to be made on that side.
I have to wonder at this post if it's actually fibre, or if 'Fibre' is a brand name for their copper service. I'd put nothing past them at this point.
If only there was a way to not buy these games!
In my country, you can actually drive while not in physical possession of your license - if pulled over by the police, you have a period of time in which to go to a police station to show them the license.
This allows citizens and police to gracefully deal with a wide range of legit issues like people forgetting their wallets, people losing their licenses, etc. I'm sure this could be extended easily to phones.
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has
[author of the article]
Completely agree, and it's what I dislike most about Firefox today (you can look at my history for several +5 comments about FF UI/UX).
I think Thunderbird is in that pre-awesome Firefox stage. It's feature complete but not polished or awesome enough to drive adoption and force other players to respond.
I also do not like random UI/UX spasms that lead to Australis-esque results. I just want a solid client that people can /rely/ on, like Firefox was.
I've used Thunderbird as my sole email client for a few years. It's OK. There are bugs - not crippling bugs, but enough that make it not a solid enough product for me to recommend to the kind of people that like battling beta software to get their shit done.
But it could be so much more. Like Firefox was, when I recommended it for years to people that wanted to browse the web safely using the magic juice that their nerd friends commended.
There are many other battlegrounds. "Social" is part of what Mozilla want to compete in, but until email has been conquered...
Huh? Congressmen aren't getting paid to fuck. They're getting paid to let other people fuck YOU.
I normally avoid hardware review posts but I'm on my 2nd Dell XPS 13" laptop so wanted to check this out.
I have been super happy with these devices. The first one was the XPS M1210, which in all seriousness was one of the best computers I've ever owned. It's a bit dated now - it was pre-Macbook Air, so by comparison looks huge and chunky, but compared to previous lappys it was a joy to travel with.
The first battery piked after a couple years but this is back in the Good Old Days when buying replacement parts was easy.
The screen crapped out after about 4 years - still usable but had weird patterns all over it. I could have replaced it but by then the newer model was out, and the change in weight profile was significant enough to justify the change.
I've had the new one for over two years and have been really happy with it. I basically only use it when I travel, and it's slimline form is great.
The model I have (2012 I think) only has 4GB of RAM, which has been a bit of a hassle, and the CPU is a bit on the slow side compared to my desktop - but this new one with 8GB looks like it would be great.
It has a nice keyboard with broad, easy to press keys, making it as not-terrible as possible to type on for extended periods (if I'm using it for ages I still plug in a real keyboard though).
If you're looking at a slimline laptop and don't want a Mac, then I seriously recommend checking the XPS series out.
The positive side is that hopefully it provides further incentives for companies like Microsoft to work harder to try to mitigate DDoS problems at the source.
Microsoft are in a unique position as their operating system is - it seems - in many cases the base platform for launching these attacks. It'd be great to see a concerted effort along with a company like Google to start actively trying to massively reduce the number of systems that are regularly involved in DDoS attacks.
I was at a bar in Columbus OH earlier this year and got handed a flyer for a service exactly you describe. Forgot the name but thought it was a cool idea, although Uber and Lyft I think make it tough competition.
Yeh! Except isn't Sony a Japanese company? Who am I being patriotic for by seeing it?
I know what you mean. Really gave me a new appreciation for home.
And now is probably the BEST time to be doing it. Threat of physical retaliation is extremely low for most major powers, but the intelligence that can be gained - both in terms of identifying potential weak points in infrastructure and systems, and ways to improve defence against attacks - must be priceless.
Just a quick note to say thanks for your comments in this thread. Fascinating to learn some more about the chocolate industry and what the hell chocolate is. As an Australian that recently moved to the US I have been surprised about the weird tasting chocolate that is commonly available (e.g., Hershey bars) and now have a better idea what to look for.
Would love to know what you make so I can look out for it in the stores (... if there's anywhere in Ohio that stocks them!)
More OSS video editors is great. I backed openshot a while ago, not because I have any interest in video editing (or watching videos - would much prefer to read) but because I think it'd be great to wrest some of the power away from the commercial options.
With the Republicans scoring big in the election, the US dollar hit a high (apparently because they're pro business) against the Aussie dollar, which is now the lowest it's been for 4 years after a gradual slide over the last few months.
This would have been fantastic 2 years ago but now we're just facing the original Australia tax - a poor exchange rate. Might still be a few things that you can get a good deal on though.
What you might want is a Windows VM (or more than one) inside your Windows that you use for Internet downloads.
At the moment I just run separate VMs, but it's a bit heavyweight.
Remember Docker isn't secure. Process that want to escape can escape.
Hmm, that seems counter to the Docker security model - the processes are not supposed to be able to get out of their container ... or so it claims. How do Docker processes escape?
... I'd actually rather see Docker in the user space for Windows. There are zillions of Windows applications that would benefit from Docker-isation - being able to download things off the Internet and more safely run them is something I've wanted for ages.
There are various application sandbox things for Windows (e.g., Sandboxie) but I haven't seen anything open source that is as reliable and commonly used as Docker seems to be.
I think it'd be OK on the server side as well, but I'd love to be able to download nice jailed Docker versions of most Windows apps so I can run them without having to worry too much about what they're doing in my userspace.
I think some of Schneier's words apply here:
"I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying."
If this had been a story about a Windows exploit it's unlikely it would have been reported in the mainstream in a similar manner. Even if it had it's unlikely anyone would have paid attention; even the non-technical public is massively desensitised to stories about Windows security issues.
If anything, I'm now /more/ confident about open source security. This demonstrates that when people find problems, they fix them quickly and efficiently. Who knows what is happening in closed source software?
Just curious, what has been breaking for you? What UI features have changed in some significant way since Australis?
SINCE Australis? Nothing major. In a recent version they changed the right click context menu to include icons for reload/back/forward, which irritated me - change for the sake of change. (Also the keyboard shortcut for Private Browsing no longer works - might be a plugin? Not sure.)
Things like that seem little but when you've been using Firefox for years - which I have, every day, for work - little changes like that mean the platform loses a lot of stability, which is one of the things that is most important when you're trying to get things done.
I'm not at all opposed to new features. I don't even care about feature bloat that much. But they should be opt-in. And at the very least, you should be able to opt-out without having to install some third party plugin. Having a new UI/UX forced on me just feels ... rude.
Australis prompted me to install Classic Theme Restorer so I could restore the browser to the way I'd been using it for /years/. (Here's my +5 post about why I disliked Australis.) Enough has been written about Australis so I won't whine about that any more.
Just upgraded then with that grim sense of foreboding that I now get with Firefox upgrades ("what's going to stop working this time? how is the UI I've been using for many years changed now?")
I lost all my cookies - upon reload after the upgrade, I noticed I was logged out of a bunch of websites (including anything using Google Accounts and Slashdot). YMMV.