I have to say while it has a familiar ring of other articles I've read about "crackers", it was IMHO well done for a mainstream press article. I only hope that more "average" users will read it and then do a better job of updating and securing their computer.
You'd hope that but right now we have Decss, DRM, Macrovision, etc. Most consumers are not copying their dvds or breaking the encryption on their music downloads. For most people its honestly not a real bother.
The only people that will get royaly screwed by this are technically advanced users. "Normal" consumers will just pony up like they always do. Its just same shit different day.
OMG will people stop posting about the Mac Mini whenever HTPCs come up? Its a terrible base for a HTPC as you have to spend a ton and buy half a dozen external devices just to make it useable. Then your stuck with a small base with a bunch big devices hanging outside it. And your still severly limited software-wise. There goes your reason for starting with something small in the first place.
Beyond its form factor it's hasn't got anything going for it. You spend $500 and you still need to spend $500+ minimum on External tuners(really you want 2), external HD, external sound card, etc to make it a real HTPC. You spend $500 on PC parts and you literally have everything you need besides a case. A64 2800, mobo, 512MB, Dual tuner, 250GB HD, Vid all included. Plus you have a half a dozen HTPC software solutions to pick from.
Nobody wants to develop HTPC software for the Mac because its probably only a matter of time before Apple starts including everything you need right up front. Someday Apple will probably make great HTPC hardware but that hasn't happened yet and IMHO the Mac Mini remains a poor choice for diy HTPC builders.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend. Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards? Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse? Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas! Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
It's not the price. Even though Apple now sells some computers which can honestly be called rebadged PCs, people buy Apple for the OS and the support. If Apple did really Free OSX x86 and let you diy than you'd have a great point, but having to use a "hacked" version of OSX x86 is good for just trying out OSX and not real long term use. For people who can afford both options your point won't even register.
I'd like to try it out. No way I'm going to spend $500 on a Mac just to try out OS X. This way I can use it for a few months and see if it really does offer any advantages over XP. Plus from what I understand OSX x86 running on a $250 of PC parts will give you a faster experience than running on a $500 Mac mini.
IMHO Apple will gain from this if anything. How do you think Windows and Office got installed on so many PCs? It wasn't just by strong arming OEMs.
I gotta say nothing out there for linux even remotely compares to Picasa. I tried F-spot the other day and man is it still very alpha compared to Picasa. Digikam is the closest but if Picasa runs smoothly and keeps its online photo service access then I see it becoming very popular. It's just a pleasure to use and you can get very good results with little effort. I've been using it since before Google bought the previous owner out and it's worked out well for anyone I've showed it to.
People complaining should be happy that anyone at all these day is bothering with porting over desktop apps to linux.
Google has no date retention policies and keeps a permanent record of everything you have ever search for along with your IP address for every search.
If Google even Remotely valued its users privacy they would not be keeping that information for all time.
Long term Google is a danger to us all. I'm not saying AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo is any better, but Google is just as big if not more a threat then all of them combined. Like I keep saying you need to consider what google is going to look like 10 years from now.
I'm starting to think people who avoid computers aren't so foolish afterall.
5 years from now something like MythTV won't even be possible because A) hardware required to receive signals won't be available on linux B) patents C) it will be outright illegal and you will face jailtime for unauthorized recording of your cable feed.
I think Mythtv and the rest of these HTPC packages will eventually hit a brick wall due to greedy broadcasters. Oh free htpc software market, we hardly knew ye...
Going "digital" and the promise of HDTV is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on US consumers in all History.
For once MS did something right. If only it removed Norton and installed AVG...
Norton AV 200$ continues to be total crap, may every rep from Symantec who bitchs about this have to spend a month only working on systems that have been hosed by their very own horrible AV package.
Face it, XP works well for what most people want to do on their computer. Leave Auto updates on, run a free AV, Firefox, and don't download warez and your golden.
It works well for gaming, business use, and even AV. And in many cases it's pretty stable. Oh and it runs very well on 4 year old hardware.
What possible reason is there for businesses or consumers to incur the expense of moving to Vista? Everything I've seen so far could easily be added as SP3 for XP. Ooooh a calendar and a new version of WMP...Yawn. I realize MS has to make a buck, but IMHO if they have to resort to crap like making games only work on Vista in order to sell it, then it sounds like Vista is gonna have an awefully hard time standing on its own merits.
"I find the DRM that iTunes uses is not very restricting, and fair."
I hear what your saying but to play devils advocate...Can you resell the music you bought in a few years? Can you legally loan it out to your friend to listen to? Can your local library with public money switch away from CDs to Itunes and then loan the music out to patrons?
My biggest fear has already been realized when seemingly inteligent people like yourself consider locked down untransferable music "fair". This fly's in the face of what we have been able to do for 20 years with CDs and yet now people are just accepting DRM as "normal". It's sad.
In reality your probably right, it isn't very restricting, and it's easy to work around DRM in Itunes. But it sure as hell isn't fair to consumers, not by a long shot.
I used to work for a company in Santa Monica and did work for one of the stars of the NBC show ER. It was a bit surreal but the star and her husband were very cool. Her publicist was a bit annoying though, I don't think he ever was off the phone the few times I was there. Too bad last time I went there something went really wrong and I had to take the PC back to the shop to fix it. Ooops, dam HP all-in-ones. Before I left LA I did always used to think how cool it would be to get linked into the celeb network and be a "tech to the stars".
I won't argue with that. But then again what great leaders and titans of industry aren't arrogant and megalomanicacal? Oh sure I'm sure everyone starts out with good intentions. But you know the saying....
IMHO Google only has one way to go. The original core group of people won't be there forever and once they are gone all of that data they have been collecting for years and years on all of us is going right be converted directly into money. I bet Google will even be out of the search engine business within 10 years and will become the world's largest data broker. Watch for them to buy Choicepoint, LexisNexis, or Acxiom. That whole do no evil slogan is just PR bullshit.
By selling WAY overpriced accessories that should be standard with the unit in the first place. $30 for an Ipod shuffle armbad which consists of.50 of materials? Gimme a farking break.
Vendors just have to love the Ipod market. Where else outside of BOSE stores can you rape consumers without a care in the world knowing that they won't ever complain about how overpriced your junk is? Every time I see an official Ipod sock being sold for $29 I want to pull if out of the box and light it on fire. Then I'd give the store manager a dollar and say "Here, go buy a case of Ipod socks with this dollar". That would only be fair.
Problem is who do you trust? Like I heard it was up to 3%-4%. 5% would be nice and realistically 10% would be something to crow about. Anything that forces MS hand to actually do something besides force useless upgrades on us all is welcome.
It's finally in the open that Shrub says he has UNLIMITED power to do what he wants and is above all other branches and beyond review. He literally thinks that he can A) do anything he wants including torture anyone for any reason B) he can pass any secret law he wants and C) we have not right to know about A) or B). Oh and D) he feels insulated enough to say "That's right I can do what I want, don't like it? Go fuck yourself."
20 years ago any of this would have been grounds for immediate removal from office. Now everyone is just content to let that fly. WTF? What bizzaro world am I living in?
Great more language barriers. Thanks Dell!
on
Dell Expands In India
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I just love not being able to understand the person on the other end of the phone when I need to get a hard drive replaced.
Saturday I was at someone's house and the hard drive was dying. It got a failure code via Dell's built in utility and was going bad. "Steve" was a total PITA and having to try to figure out what the hell he was saying only made things worse. If I had to hear him repeat that dam script one more time I was going to lose it. I then got to fight with his supervisor "Shawn" who finally relented.
This client while a small fish has bought 6 Dells within the past 1.5 years. So far 2 of the POS Maxtor SATA drives Dell uses have failed. Next time a drive starts going South I told my client we won't be calling Dell anymore. We will just go out and buy a drive and skip the whole fight with the person in India bit. It will end up costing much less.
Oh and he probably won't be buying Dell's anymore, not as long as Dell keeps putting calls to India or anywhere else you have to strain to understand the tech on the other end. FU Dell for making people have to deal with this kind of crap.
How about when next year the Bush administration asks Google to remove all negative references on Bush to be not displayed? Is that OK as well? Especially when it is an Executive Order?
That would afterall be "just a case of them following the law". Is that OK as well?
By going public Google gave up the right to use its lame "do no evil" clause. The fact that they still acknowledge that they "try not to be evil" is pathetic and insulting to our intelligence.
The shine has DEFINITELY worn off on Google. They are just another corporation out to make their sharholders rich and will eventually screw consumers in every way possible. If you think in the end Google won't end up selling every last drop of information they have gathered on us in order to make profit not matter what the privacy implications your a fucking idiot.
Use the UPNP plugins. Also tell your friends to turn on UPNP in their routers.
Also I know variety is the spice of life and all that, but why does anyone on Windows use anything other than Utorrent? When I hear about people using XXXX client like Azerus etc, they sound like users who think IE is best but haven't ever heard about Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say while it has a familiar ring of other articles I've read about "crackers", it was IMHO well done for a mainstream press article. I only hope that more "average" users will read it and then do a better job of updating and securing their computer.
You'd hope that but right now we have Decss, DRM, Macrovision, etc. Most consumers are not copying their dvds or breaking the encryption on their music downloads. For most people its honestly not a real bother.
The only people that will get royaly screwed by this are technically advanced users. "Normal" consumers will just pony up like they always do. Its just same shit different day.
"the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove."
Yes but just think how good a job you could do picking out the right oven glove if you slept on it? The mind boggles.
OMG will people stop posting about the Mac Mini whenever HTPCs come up? Its a terrible base for a HTPC as you have to spend a ton and buy half a dozen external devices just to make it useable. Then your stuck with a small base with a bunch big devices hanging outside it. And your still severly limited software-wise. There goes your reason for starting with something small in the first place.
Beyond its form factor it's hasn't got anything going for it. You spend $500 and you still need to spend $500+ minimum on External tuners(really you want 2), external HD, external sound card, etc to make it a real HTPC. You spend $500 on PC parts and you literally have everything you need besides a case. A64 2800, mobo, 512MB, Dual tuner, 250GB HD, Vid all included. Plus you have a half a dozen HTPC software solutions to pick from.
Nobody wants to develop HTPC software for the Mac because its probably only a matter of time before Apple starts including everything you need right up front. Someday Apple will probably make great HTPC hardware but that hasn't happened yet and IMHO the Mac Mini remains a poor choice for diy HTPC builders.
Didnt' I see this on the Simpsons? Dam Bart.
From another epi but still funny
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
It's not the price. Even though Apple now sells some computers which can honestly be called rebadged PCs, people buy Apple for the OS and the support. If Apple did really Free OSX x86 and let you diy than you'd have a great point, but having to use a "hacked" version of OSX x86 is good for just trying out OSX and not real long term use. For people who can afford both options your point won't even register.
I'd like to try it out. No way I'm going to spend $500 on a Mac just to try out OS X. This way I can use it for a few months and see if it really does offer any advantages over XP. Plus from what I understand OSX x86 running on a $250 of PC parts will give you a faster experience than running on a $500 Mac mini.
IMHO Apple will gain from this if anything. How do you think Windows and Office got installed on so many PCs? It wasn't just by strong arming OEMs.
If only my laptop wasn't so old.
I gotta say nothing out there for linux even remotely compares to Picasa. I tried F-spot the other day and man is it still very alpha compared to Picasa. Digikam is the closest but if Picasa runs smoothly and keeps its online photo service access then I see it becoming very popular. It's just a pleasure to use and you can get very good results with little effort. I've been using it since before Google bought the previous owner out and it's worked out well for anyone I've showed it to.
People complaining should be happy that anyone at all these day is bothering with porting over desktop apps to linux.
Haven't booted it in ages but it was my first.
Trebor sux
Google has no date retention policies and keeps a permanent record of everything you have ever search for along with your IP address for every search.
If Google even Remotely valued its users privacy they would not be keeping that information for all time.
Long term Google is a danger to us all. I'm not saying AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo is any better, but Google is just as big if not more a threat then all of them combined. Like I keep saying you need to consider what google is going to look like 10 years from now.
I'm starting to think people who avoid computers aren't so foolish afterall.
5 years from now something like MythTV won't even be possible because A) hardware required to receive signals won't be available on linux B) patents C) it will be outright illegal and you will face jailtime for unauthorized recording of your cable feed.
I think Mythtv and the rest of these HTPC packages will eventually hit a brick wall due to greedy broadcasters. Oh free htpc software market, we hardly knew ye...
Going "digital" and the promise of HDTV is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on US consumers in all History.
For once MS did something right. If only it removed Norton and installed AVG...
Norton AV 200$ continues to be total crap, may every rep from Symantec who bitchs about this have to spend a month only working on systems that have been hosed by their very own horrible AV package.
Face it, XP works well for what most people want to do on their computer. Leave Auto updates on, run a free AV, Firefox, and don't download warez and your golden.
It works well for gaming, business use, and even AV. And in many cases it's pretty stable. Oh and it runs very well on 4 year old hardware.
What possible reason is there for businesses or consumers to incur the expense of moving to Vista? Everything I've seen so far could easily be added as SP3 for XP. Ooooh a calendar and a new version of WMP...Yawn. I realize MS has to make a buck, but IMHO if they have to resort to crap like making games only work on Vista in order to sell it, then it sounds like Vista is gonna have an awefully hard time standing on its own merits.
"I find the DRM that iTunes uses is not very restricting, and fair."
I hear what your saying but to play devils advocate...Can you resell the music you bought in a few years? Can you legally loan it out to your friend to listen to? Can your local library with public money switch away from CDs to Itunes and then loan the music out to patrons?
My biggest fear has already been realized when seemingly inteligent people like yourself consider locked down untransferable music "fair". This fly's in the face of what we have been able to do for 20 years with CDs and yet now people are just accepting DRM as "normal". It's sad.
In reality your probably right, it isn't very restricting, and it's easy to work around DRM in Itunes. But it sure as hell isn't fair to consumers, not by a long shot.
I used to work for a company in Santa Monica and did work for one of the stars of the NBC show ER. It was a bit surreal but the star and her husband were very cool. Her publicist was a bit annoying though, I don't think he ever was off the phone the few times I was there. Too bad last time I went there something went really wrong and I had to take the PC back to the shop to fix it. Ooops, dam HP all-in-ones. Before I left LA I did always used to think how cool it would be to get linked into the celeb network and be a "tech to the stars".
Sound like just the kind of thing Joe-sixpack can relate to.
I won't argue with that. But then again what great leaders and titans of industry aren't arrogant and megalomanicacal? Oh sure I'm sure everyone starts out with good intentions. But you know the saying....
IMHO Google only has one way to go. The original core group of people won't be there forever and once they are gone all of that data they have been collecting for years and years on all of us is going right be converted directly into money. I bet Google will even be out of the search engine business within 10 years and will become the world's largest data broker. Watch for them to buy Choicepoint, LexisNexis, or Acxiom. That whole do no evil slogan is just PR bullshit.
By selling WAY overpriced accessories that should be standard with the unit in the first place. $30 for an Ipod shuffle armbad which consists of .50 of materials? Gimme a farking break.
Vendors just have to love the Ipod market. Where else outside of BOSE stores can you rape consumers without a care in the world knowing that they won't ever complain about how overpriced your junk is? Every time I see an official Ipod sock being sold for $29 I want to pull if out of the box and light it on fire. Then I'd give the store manager a dollar and say "Here, go buy a case of Ipod socks with this dollar". That would only be fair.
Problem is who do you trust? Like I heard it was up to 3%-4%. 5% would be nice and realistically 10% would be something to crow about. Anything that forces MS hand to actually do something besides force useless upgrades on us all is welcome.
Yep, gotta watch out for those minorities. Jackass.
It's finally in the open that Shrub says he has UNLIMITED power to do what he wants and is above all other branches and beyond review. He literally thinks that he can A) do anything he wants including torture anyone for any reason B) he can pass any secret law he wants and C) we have not right to know about A) or B). Oh and D) he feels insulated enough to say "That's right I can do what I want, don't like it? Go fuck yourself."
20 years ago any of this would have been grounds for immediate removal from office. Now everyone is just content to let that fly. WTF? What bizzaro world am I living in?
I just love not being able to understand the person on the other end of the phone when I need to get a hard drive replaced.
Saturday I was at someone's house and the hard drive was dying. It got a failure code via Dell's built in utility and was going bad. "Steve" was a total PITA and having to try to figure out what the hell he was saying only made things worse. If I had to hear him repeat that dam script one more time I was going to lose it. I then got to fight with his supervisor "Shawn" who finally relented.
This client while a small fish has bought 6 Dells within the past 1.5 years. So far 2 of the POS Maxtor SATA drives Dell uses have failed. Next time a drive starts going South I told my client we won't be calling Dell anymore. We will just go out and buy a drive and skip the whole fight with the person in India bit. It will end up costing much less.
Oh and he probably won't be buying Dell's anymore, not as long as Dell keeps putting calls to India or anywhere else you have to strain to understand the tech on the other end. FU Dell for making people have to deal with this kind of crap.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Either obey your "motto" or stop freaking talking about it.
Google giving its blessing to China's censorship is SUPPORTING the government. Its NOT helping the people just a little like people keep saying.
How about when next year the Bush administration asks Google to remove all negative references on Bush to be not displayed? Is that OK as well? Especially when it is an Executive Order?
That would afterall be "just a case of them following the law". Is that OK as well?
By going public Google gave up the right to use its lame "do no evil" clause. The fact that they still acknowledge that they "try not to be evil" is pathetic and insulting to our intelligence.
The shine has DEFINITELY worn off on Google. They are just another corporation out to make their sharholders rich and will eventually screw consumers in every way possible. If you think in the end Google won't end up selling every last drop of information they have gathered on us in order to make profit not matter what the privacy implications your a fucking idiot.
Use the UPNP plugins. Also tell your friends to turn on UPNP in their routers.
Also I know variety is the spice of life and all that, but why does anyone on Windows use anything other than Utorrent? When I hear about people using XXXX client like Azerus etc, they sound like users who think IE is best but haven't ever heard about Firefox.