I develop a medical database that requires a server to be installed locally, for security reasons. I try to convince the hospitals to let me use Ubuntu instead of MS Windows for obvious reasons, but so far have been unsuccessful. My latest attempt was thwarted, at least in part, when the IT staff had a good laugh at the "Feisty Fawn" name.
I really have to wonder a bit why you were recommending Ubuntu for a server, especially since you sound so dubious about their naming conventions. Regular Debian would perform at least as well as Ubuntu...RedHat/CentOS/Fedora are also popular choices for business...and there's always SuSE...
What if I want to play a game here and there? Im screwed.
The Macintosh has always had a very healthy shareware market. Tons of software available for download online, and purchasable for $10 - $20 if you like it. The quality is frequently astounding.
Ambrosia Software has been turning out very high quality stuff for the Mac for years, including some very good games. Good enough, in fact, that I kept a Mac around for a very long time just so I could play Escape Velocity. Now there's a Windows version of Escape Velocity, so I got rid of my 7+ year old Mac. But they're still turning out new stuff.
Blizzard has also always turned out Macintosh versions of their games. Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft, WarCraft, WarCraft II, WarCraft III, World of WarCraft...some very popular titles available Macintosh native.
Plus, let's not forget that these Apple machines are basically PC's running a different OS. Intel processors, nVidia GPUs, PCI expansion cards... The same hardware you're getting from ASUS or any other manufacturer. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from running Windows on that hardware - native, not through emulation. So all the assorted Windows-only games should run just fine.
These days gaming is the last thing preventing you from buying a Mac.
I'm not sure that's entirely true anymore. Sure, there are plenty of things you can do on the Internet that qualify as luxuries... But there's also an awful lot that's damn-near essential these days. I'd say the Internet is almost as necessary as a telephone these days...and as useful for information gathering as the television or radio are.
Plus, this article isn't talking about some guy who wants broadband so he can surf porn at his cabin out in the woods. It's talking about the availability of broadband for businesses in rural areas, and how it is affecting them.
Many retailers are going to broadband as their POS systems become more complex and transfer more data. Businesses rely on email and web access more and more. If you can't get anything better than dial-up or a satellite, it's going to be harder for a business that relies on the Internet to get things done. Try sharing a 56k modem between 20+ employees sending email and looking up pricing on the web all day...
Unless the business has a strict need for high upload speed, why not satellite? My house and my studio are outside the reach of cable and DSL and I've been using Wild Blue's service [wildblue.com] at both locations for about 2 years. My brother's business uses it as well. Granted, costs aren't competitive with DSL or cable at a given bandwidth, but it is a lot less expensive than a $450/month T1.
The issue isn't so much with high upload speed, as it is with reliability.
Satellite suffers from the weather. If the weather is bad enough you start dropping packets, your connection speed goes down, and you can even lose your bandwidth entirely. If you rely on the Internet for your business, satellite is not for you.
Latency can also be an issue. At our clients with satellite bandwidth pings of 1000+ ms are not unheard-of. This may not matter much, depending on what you do, but good luck getting a VPN to function properly. And anything realtime like gaming of VOIP is just not going to happen.
Then you've got some fairly aggressive bandwidth capping from at least some of the satellite providers. Hughes, for example, will throttle you down to a trickle if you exceed your limit. Again, may not matter depending on what you're doing.
The biggest reason a T1 costs so much is not the bandwidth provided, but the reliability. T1's usually come with some kind of SLA that ensures you will be able to transfer every bit that you're entitled to. No strange cutouts, no port blocking, no traffic shaping, no throttling - full 1.5 Mbps all the time.
If your business genuinely relies on the Internet it's hard to beat the reliability of a T1.
I was always amazed that so few people knew about or considered satellite broadband despite the millions of bucks a year that HughesNet throws at advertising, especially on DirecTV. WildBlue now also has big co-marketing programs with DirecTV, DISH Network and AT&T. So I'm curious - do people not know about satellite or do they know and just don't want it?
Sure, satellite is generally available as a last resort... But I certainly don't consider it anywhere in the same class as cable/DSL/T1.
We've got a few clients that are on satellite bandwidth...a couple through Hughes and a couple with Wild Blue. With all of them there is a very noticeable delay in any kind of transmission. There's a noticeable latency when loading web pages or trying to send email. Your bandwidth is also affected by weather. One of our clients is a mountain resort...and in the winter they're lucky to have Internet at all. Snow, rain, heavy winds...all can affect your signal. And there's also some fairly ruthless bandwidth capping through Hughes at least.
At this very moment we've got a client switching from satellite over to a couple of T1's because the performance has been so horrible. The T1's are going to cost more per month, but the sporadic nature of the satellite link is costing them even more right now in downtime.
If there's absolutely nothing available I guess it's better than dial-up, but that's about it. I'd recommend just about anything else before satellite.
Ok so it creates tensions, however if seems all of you fear your country and your fellow citizens so much that if someone knew how you voted you would immediately be forced to vote otherwise. I have to say that you guys/girl are somewhat fearful in that democracy you call the USA. As a student of American Studies I already knew that Americans have a healthy distrust of the government (that's why it is usually called administration instead of the Bush(or other) government) however I did not know it went this far.
Actually I don't fear my fellow citizens all that much... And at the moment, I'm really not all the worried about the government despite what Bush has done to it. One of the reasons is because of this anonymity.
With anonymous votes, nobody can coerce you into voting any specific way. I don't have to fear my fellow citizens because even if they actually did threaten to harm me if I didn't vote for a specific person, they have no way to verify whether I did or not.
This system actually helps to strengthen the democratic process, by eliminating one way in which elections can be manipulated. There have been plenty of times in history when it was not safe to speak out against the current government - and an anonymous vote protects your ability to dissent.
obviously I do understand the tensions it can create if everybody in your line of work votes republican, or in your family
No you don't. If you have to ask this question then you really don't understand the "tensions" it can create.
Say "candidate X" wants to raise minimum wage...and I, as a minimum wage worker, choose to vote for him. Maybe my boss doesn't like that so much. Maybe my boss thinks he'd rather have someone working for him who didn't vote for "candidate X." Now I'm unemployed.
Elections determine a crapton of things... Tax rates, laws, minimum wage, who's eligible for government benefits, who the mayor/governor/district attorney/sheriff/judge is... Plenty of opportunities for someone to take offense at the way you voted, and if they are so inclined, to penalize you for it in some way.
And that's all assuming a relatively incorrupt system. Imagine some tyrannical local official who flat-out threatens to injure people who don't vote for him.
Sure, I guess this might be useful for some folks. Might dramatically improve the sound of some games of DVD playback. But I really don't think my OS needs to put so much effort into processing sound. Seems like this kind of "feature" belongs in the game or DVD playback software...not the OS itself. I mean, who cares how good that "boing" sounds when a program crashes?
Yes...I know...by incorporating it into the OS it makes the feature available to any and all software without those developers having to work harder... Yay! And it also increases the overhead to play simple "boing" sounds when things crash too. And for all those machines that are installed in businesses where you'll never run a single game or play a single DVD movie, that's completely wasted overhead.
Please tell me there's at least an option to disable this "feature."
The issue here is that Vista's sound subsystem does a lot more audio processing that previous generations do. For example it will delay the streams to your multichannel system so that the sound from each speaker reaches your head at exactly the same time.
I'm not going to call you a liar, or say that you're wrong... But this just sounds silly.
How does Vista know how far away each of my speakers is from my head? How can Vista tell the difference between a pair of headphones and some basic stereo desktop speakers? How can it tell my 7.1 satellites are on my desk, or hanging on my wall, or sitting on a shelf behind me? Speaker cables are pretty much output only, aren't they? It isn't like the speaker sends a signal back to the PC to ACK the sound, is it? Does the PC listen on the microphone to figure out when each sound arrived?
Anyway... Even if Vista is doing all this weird audio processing, why should that affect my network performance? Seems to me that the weird audio processing would be happening between the CPU/RAM, not on the PCI bus...even if the data does eventually get dumped into a PCI sound card. The only good reason for sound playback to affect your NIC would be if the PC was absolutely overloaded...PCI bus flooded with data, RAM stuffed full, or CPU pegged at 100%.
I used to game extensively on a Windows 2000 machine with a PCI GB NIC, PCI video card, and PCI sound card... Things would bog down a bit in something like Unreal, but Windows Media Player never caused me to drop packets.
At the end of the day, Bit-torrent is mostly used for piracy
I'm not so sure this is true...
Sure, there's a lot of piracy involving BitTorrent...but there's an awful lot of legal traffic as well...
Blizzard uses some derivative of the BitTorrent protocol for all their major downloads. All the assorted patches to WoW, on-line distribution of the Burning Crusade expansion, larger promotional videos... That's tons of data right there.
All of the Linux distributions that I've downloaded in the last year or so have used BitTorrent as well... At 2-4 GB an image that adds up pretty quickly too.
The Bush/Cheney Administration has spent the last 6+ years building an organizational, legal, and technical infrastructure for Executive Branch power, including anything from wiretap infrastructures to the Patriot Act to stuffing the courts and Justice Department with pro-executive-power people, and getting states, banks, credit companies, airlines, etc. to do massive data collection.
Granted, the US Government has been moving in this direction for quite some time now. Each administration seeks additional power and information - supposedly to help them better govern and protect us. But with the Bush/Cheney administration everything seems to have come to a head. It seems like they're operating without any supervision at all.
It's going to take a *long* time to tear down that stuff and turn this back into America again, and most of that won't happen unless we replace the current Executive Branch with one that's actually committed to doing it
One of my major fears at the moment is that irreparable harm has been done to the US Government. It's very unlikely that we'll get any kind of visionary elected who actually wants to change things for the better...actually wants to go back to a restricted and accountable government... But even if we do, the infrastructure is all in place to make such a transition back to the old values difficult if not impossible. I suspect that, regardless of who we elect next time around, it's all going to be downhill from here.
IMHO people are getting pretty fed up with pervasive advertising. Part of Tivo's initial popularity came from the ability to skip advertisements. The people quite obviously want less ads, not more. As all of google's money now seems to come from advertising, and they seem to only be innovating new ways to push ads, I'd say that they're going down the wrong path.
I'm not sure the problem is with pervasive advertising so much as it is with invasive advertising.
Television advertising is generally fairly disruptive. You're sitting there enjoying your program, wondering what's going to happen next...and suddenly everything stops, you go to commercial, and someone tries to sell you some dog food...then, a few minutes later, you get to resume your program. That's invasive. It disrupts the program you're watching. It intrudes on your enjoyment.
Google's advertising is largely non-invasive. I really don't mind the advertising they put on their search page or on Gmail. It doesn't get in the way. It doesn't disrupt what I'm doing.
Imagine, instead of the television advertising that we have today, a small advertising ticker across the bottom of the screen. Just one line of text slowly scrolling by. Now it isn't disrupting your program, now it isn't interrupting what you're doing, now it is easily ignored.
The trick is in serving up relevant advertising without it being disruptive. So far, I'd say Google has done quite well with this.
The list could go on and on. Where there is a consumer, any type of consumer, there is an advertiser just waiting to get their attention.
Cute list. In my case (because I cannot afford to pay for a cell phone) you could add:
7. Electrician 8. Roofer 9. Glazier 10. Home Insurance 11. Auto Insurance 12. Plumber 13. Tutor
You get the idea. Life is expensive. I have a house with all the assorted bills. I have a wife and kid to support. I don't have $100+ to spend on phones every month.
I can't imagine ANYONE using a phone as their main phone if they had to listen to ads before every call-- unless they couldn't afford a cell phone in the first place, inwhich case I doubt those ads would attract many buyers.:)
I can't afford a personal cell phone. Hell, I can barely afford the 500 minutes-a-month Vonage bill. Between the mortgage, food expenses, health insurance, car insurance, gas, assorted utility bills... You get the idea. I'm interested in anything that'll save me some money.
I'd love to be able to drop Vonage entirely and just pick up three cell phones... One for myself, one for my wife, and one for our son. But the last time I priced out anything like that it was around $100 a month for a very limited plan. No way we can afford that.
If this phone is anything like Google's other offerings, I'd be absolutely thrilled with it. I would love to be able to get my email on a mobile phone (and I'm already using Gmail)...a web browser would be handy, but not essential...but simply having a free cell phone would be incredible - even if it was ad-supported.
Google has a history of making their version of "ad-supported" as painless as possible. The adds they show in Gmail are easily ignorable...but usually actually useful or interesting. I really wouldn't mind seeing Google's advertising alongside my address book, or across the top of the web browser. I'm not sure how I'd feel about having to listen to an ad every time I tried to dial the thing...but I guess that would depend entirely on how annoying/intrusive the advertising is.
Not that it isn't a decent package in its own right... it's that it doesn't automatically save things in Microsoft Office formats.
I like the versions of Microsoft Works that actually install an older version of Word to do their word processing, and then use some kind of plug-in to do the translation. That plug-in invariably breaks, and suddenly you've got folks who can't open their own documents anymore. Hours of fun for the whole family!
It isn't 1997 anymore. We don't need to meet up in shopping malls to trade 1.44M discs. LUG over the net makes sense as having a community to rely on for troubleshooting is what makes or breaks a distro.
Exactly.
LUGs don't fill the same role they used to. I remember, back in the day, the only way I could get my hands on install disks was from the local LUG. Someone there worked someplace with a fat (for the time) pipe and was able to download the software off the 'net. I'd give him a box of blank disks, and he'd throw the software on them.
At the time, I was able to dial up a local BBS...but it was mostly social stuff, some really bad porn, a few Windows programs...certainly nothing about Linux. The only place I could talk with others about Linux was at the LUG. The only place I could get guidance on installing or troubleshooting Linux was at the LUG. There were precious few HOW-TO's and I couldn't very well RTFM when the FM was either on some Gopher site I couldn't access or hadn't even been written yet.
LUGs these days are still great if you've got a tricky problem or need some help troubleshooting. They're great to actually meet other human beings and learn from their experiences/mistakes. It's a good way to network, meet other people running Linux in the area. They're still useful...
But your average person doesn't need to go to the LUG to get installation media. You can generally download it from the web, and many distributions will mail you media for little or no charge. Installation is generally easy these days, especially with something like Ubuntu. And there's plenty of documentation available on the web for just about anything you can run in to.
Personally, I see a robotic army as just another step down the long road to minimize civilian casualties.
In the short-term you may very well be right. If we were to replace our soldiers in Iraq with remote-controlled robots you may very well see a decrease in civilian casualties for exactly the reason you state - since their lives are not at risk the controllers can respond in a more calm and rational manner.
But one of the reasons that we avoid conflict in general is the risk of injury. That's the whole idea behind legal deterrents (regardless of whether they actually work) - I better not do that or I'll go to jail. I don't punch my boss in the face because I don't want to go to jail and I don't want to lose my job - there are repercussions for my actions. But if there weren't... If I had some kind of remote-controlled punching robot that nobody could trace back to me... Why wouldn't I use it to punch my boss in the face? Maybe I'm a nice guy and wouldn't do that even if I could...but not everyone is a nice guy...
One of the reasons that nations avoid warfare is because their own citizens will die. Yeah...civilian casualties look bad on TV and all...but nothing ruin's a government's day faster than a nation full of screaming widows/widowers/orphans/parents. You don't go to war at the drop of a hat because it is going to cost you your own people...
But if you eliminate that cost of warfare... If you can go to war and defeat your enemies with complete assurance that none of your citizens will die... Then you remove one of the major deterrents to warfare. If being a soldier becomes a 9-5 job...show up at the office, log in to your remote session, blast some bad guys, clock out at 5:00 and get home in time for dinner... Then you run the risk of completely de-personalizing the conflict. You run the risk of making it too easy to go to war. And then you get a situation where your nation can go to war with anyone at any time, blow up as many civilians as they want, and your citizens won't be inconvenienced in the slightest.
I'm not claiming this is some kind of horrible plot to take over the world, but...
Why *wouldn't* you want pilots to be able to fly warplanes from a safe place?
Well, for one, you've got the psychological impact (or lack there-of). Personally, I'm of the opinion that we'd all be much better off if we still had to kill eachother with our bare hands. The further you distance someone from the act of killing...the more effortless you make it...the less real it seems. Now we've got remote-controlled killer UAVs...how different is that from a game of Descent? Do we really want to make killing human beings as easy and emotionally uninvolved as playing a video game?
Then we've got the fact that there's some kind of command & control channel...radio, I would assume. It's much harder to intercept a pilot's commands when he's sitting right in the cockpit. Imagine someone intercepting the C&C transmissions and turning the UAV around. Unlikely, sure...but it's another thing to worry about that isn't really much of an issue with a pilot actually in the cockpit.
And then you've got the possibility of combining the first two in some way... If everything is done from a remote monitor, how can you tell the difference between a training simulation and the real thing? How would you like to show up to training, blow up some target dummies, and then find out that they were real people? Or have someone intercept the C&C transmissions and make you think you're out there killing the bad guys while your UAV is actually sitting on the runway.
Sure, reducing casualties is good...and anything that keeps our troops out of harm's way is probably a good thing...but I worry about making it too easy to kill people. If there's no risk to anyone...if you can launch attacks without repercussions...if all your troops make it home in time for dinner every night...what's to stop us from simply obliterating any and all opposition?
Is it just me or is anyone else hoping Microsoft drags Novell down into the muck? This would be a good lesson to anyone else considering getting in bed with them.
Honestly...no, I don't hope anything bad happens to Novell or Microsoft.
Yeah, I pretty much hate Microsoft's OS...and their business practices really suck...but their stranglehold on the industry is finally weakening.
What I'd really like to see happen is that Microsoft actually starts legitimately competing to hold onto its market share... Starts turning out a quality product... Makes Windows less of a headache to deal with... Makes Office appealing for reasons other than "we have to buy it because everything is in Word format."
Unlikely, I know... But anyone who can help point them towards the light deserves credit.
Aside from the Windows machines I have to administer at work, I care because I'm a gamer. Like it or not, Linux does not have terrific support for modern gaming. Yes, I know - WINE and Cedega - I've tried them and they just don't do a good enough job. I run Linux at home as my primary machine, but I also have several gaming PCs running Windows.
"the typical setup of X machines being shoehorned into 1 IP doesn't have a single benefit"
If that were true then it wouldn't be done. If it weren't being done then everyone in an office would need their own public IP to connect to the net? It's a benefit to be able to firewall traffic at one point rather than doing the same checks on every machine as well.
The benefit is that it allows us to continue using IPv4 with relatively few problems. It allows ISPs to keep from running out of static IP addresses. And that is only a 'benefit' because IPv4 is more-or-less broken at this point.
Just because a PC has a public IP doesn't mean you don't need a firewall or router. It doesn't mean you'd be doing all your firewalling on the individual PCs. You'd still route your traffic through a central box and do your checks there instead of on every machine.
I'm not going to say NAT is completely bad all the time. It's a handy little hack. But that's exactly what it is - a hack to keep IPv4 alive. And doing away with NAT would eliminate a lot of headaches that cramming dozens of PCs into one public IP address has created. Of course...we'd get other headaches in exchange... But nothing is perfect.
Secretly? No... But my job forces me to deal with Windows far more than I like. And then there's three Windows gaming systems at home...
I mean, Christ, it's almost like everyone here hates Microsoft or something!
See my above statement. By the time I get home from dealing with buggy Windows machines all day long the last thing I want to do is deal with more Windows issues at home...which is why I'm running Linux for my primary machine. But we're a family of gamers - two WoW junkies and a CoH/V addict - which means we've got Windows machines at home. And I just spent the 4th of July, which I had off from work, reloading my son's PC.
So, yeah, there's a bit of animosity towards Microsoft around here...
The film filters in both directions simultaneously. This isn't a one-way mirror, it's more like a lead wall. You can't see out or in. And I doubt if coating the windows on your car would do much to speed detection... You've still got the whole rest of the car to point the laser at.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
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Vista is Watching You
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HP drivers are pathetic.
I guess it depends on which hardware you're talking about...
I hate their consumer-grade stuff. Their home market scanners, printers, all-in-one devices, and cameras are all pretty crappy. The devices themselves aren't anything amazing, and the drivers are horrible. Like you said - 500+ MB just for a printer. And their all-in-one USB monstrosities never play nicely with terminal services.
Their business-grade stuff is actually pretty decent though. Their network ready laser printers are all very solid machines - reliable and relatively easy to service. They've also got a nice universal print driver that supports most of their business-grade printers, which is handy if you've got a variety of printers.
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I really have to wonder a bit why you were recommending Ubuntu for a server, especially since you sound so dubious about their naming conventions. Regular Debian would perform at least as well as Ubuntu...RedHat/CentOS/Fedora are also popular choices for business...and there's always SuSE...
Ambrosia Software has been turning out very high quality stuff for the Mac for years, including some very good games. Good enough, in fact, that I kept a Mac around for a very long time just so I could play Escape Velocity. Now there's a Windows version of Escape Velocity, so I got rid of my 7+ year old Mac. But they're still turning out new stuff.
Blizzard has also always turned out Macintosh versions of their games. Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft, WarCraft, WarCraft II, WarCraft III, World of WarCraft...some very popular titles available Macintosh native.
Plus, let's not forget that these Apple machines are basically PC's running a different OS. Intel processors, nVidia GPUs, PCI expansion cards... The same hardware you're getting from ASUS or any other manufacturer. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from running Windows on that hardware - native, not through emulation. So all the assorted Windows-only games should run just fine.
These days gaming is the last thing preventing you from buying a Mac.
Plus, this article isn't talking about some guy who wants broadband so he can surf porn at his cabin out in the woods. It's talking about the availability of broadband for businesses in rural areas, and how it is affecting them.
Many retailers are going to broadband as their POS systems become more complex and transfer more data. Businesses rely on email and web access more and more. If you can't get anything better than dial-up or a satellite, it's going to be harder for a business that relies on the Internet to get things done. Try sharing a 56k modem between 20+ employees sending email and looking up pricing on the web all day...
Satellite suffers from the weather. If the weather is bad enough you start dropping packets, your connection speed goes down, and you can even lose your bandwidth entirely. If you rely on the Internet for your business, satellite is not for you.
Latency can also be an issue. At our clients with satellite bandwidth pings of 1000+ ms are not unheard-of. This may not matter much, depending on what you do, but good luck getting a VPN to function properly. And anything realtime like gaming of VOIP is just not going to happen.
Then you've got some fairly aggressive bandwidth capping from at least some of the satellite providers. Hughes, for example, will throttle you down to a trickle if you exceed your limit. Again, may not matter depending on what you're doing.
The biggest reason a T1 costs so much is not the bandwidth provided, but the reliability. T1's usually come with some kind of SLA that ensures you will be able to transfer every bit that you're entitled to. No strange cutouts, no port blocking, no traffic shaping, no throttling - full 1.5 Mbps all the time.
If your business genuinely relies on the Internet it's hard to beat the reliability of a T1.
We've got a few clients that are on satellite bandwidth...a couple through Hughes and a couple with Wild Blue. With all of them there is a very noticeable delay in any kind of transmission. There's a noticeable latency when loading web pages or trying to send email. Your bandwidth is also affected by weather. One of our clients is a mountain resort...and in the winter they're lucky to have Internet at all. Snow, rain, heavy winds...all can affect your signal. And there's also some fairly ruthless bandwidth capping through Hughes at least.
At this very moment we've got a client switching from satellite over to a couple of T1's because the performance has been so horrible. The T1's are going to cost more per month, but the sporadic nature of the satellite link is costing them even more right now in downtime.
If there's absolutely nothing available I guess it's better than dial-up, but that's about it. I'd recommend just about anything else before satellite.
With anonymous votes, nobody can coerce you into voting any specific way. I don't have to fear my fellow citizens because even if they actually did threaten to harm me if I didn't vote for a specific person, they have no way to verify whether I did or not.
This system actually helps to strengthen the democratic process, by eliminating one way in which elections can be manipulated. There have been plenty of times in history when it was not safe to speak out against the current government - and an anonymous vote protects your ability to dissent.
Say "candidate X" wants to raise minimum wage...and I, as a minimum wage worker, choose to vote for him. Maybe my boss doesn't like that so much. Maybe my boss thinks he'd rather have someone working for him who didn't vote for "candidate X." Now I'm unemployed.
Elections determine a crapton of things... Tax rates, laws, minimum wage, who's eligible for government benefits, who the mayor/governor/district attorney/sheriff/judge is... Plenty of opportunities for someone to take offense at the way you voted, and if they are so inclined, to penalize you for it in some way.
And that's all assuming a relatively incorrupt system. Imagine some tyrannical local official who flat-out threatens to injure people who don't vote for him.
Sure, I guess this might be useful for some folks. Might dramatically improve the sound of some games of DVD playback. But I really don't think my OS needs to put so much effort into processing sound. Seems like this kind of "feature" belongs in the game or DVD playback software...not the OS itself. I mean, who cares how good that "boing" sounds when a program crashes?
Yes...I know...by incorporating it into the OS it makes the feature available to any and all software without those developers having to work harder... Yay! And it also increases the overhead to play simple "boing" sounds when things crash too. And for all those machines that are installed in businesses where you'll never run a single game or play a single DVD movie, that's completely wasted overhead.
Please tell me there's at least an option to disable this "feature."
How does Vista know how far away each of my speakers is from my head? How can Vista tell the difference between a pair of headphones and some basic stereo desktop speakers? How can it tell my 7.1 satellites are on my desk, or hanging on my wall, or sitting on a shelf behind me? Speaker cables are pretty much output only, aren't they? It isn't like the speaker sends a signal back to the PC to ACK the sound, is it? Does the PC listen on the microphone to figure out when each sound arrived?
Anyway... Even if Vista is doing all this weird audio processing, why should that affect my network performance? Seems to me that the weird audio processing would be happening between the CPU/RAM, not on the PCI bus...even if the data does eventually get dumped into a PCI sound card. The only good reason for sound playback to affect your NIC would be if the PC was absolutely overloaded...PCI bus flooded with data, RAM stuffed full, or CPU pegged at 100%.
I used to game extensively on a Windows 2000 machine with a PCI GB NIC, PCI video card, and PCI sound card... Things would bog down a bit in something like Unreal, but Windows Media Player never caused me to drop packets.
Sure, there's a lot of piracy involving BitTorrent...but there's an awful lot of legal traffic as well...
Blizzard uses some derivative of the BitTorrent protocol for all their major downloads. All the assorted patches to WoW, on-line distribution of the Burning Crusade expansion, larger promotional videos... That's tons of data right there.
All of the Linux distributions that I've downloaded in the last year or so have used BitTorrent as well... At 2-4 GB an image that adds up pretty quickly too.
Television advertising is generally fairly disruptive. You're sitting there enjoying your program, wondering what's going to happen next...and suddenly everything stops, you go to commercial, and someone tries to sell you some dog food...then, a few minutes later, you get to resume your program. That's invasive. It disrupts the program you're watching. It intrudes on your enjoyment.
Google's advertising is largely non-invasive. I really don't mind the advertising they put on their search page or on Gmail. It doesn't get in the way. It doesn't disrupt what I'm doing.
Imagine, instead of the television advertising that we have today, a small advertising ticker across the bottom of the screen. Just one line of text slowly scrolling by. Now it isn't disrupting your program, now it isn't interrupting what you're doing, now it is easily ignored.
The trick is in serving up relevant advertising without it being disruptive. So far, I'd say Google has done quite well with this.
7. Electrician
8. Roofer
9. Glazier
10. Home Insurance
11. Auto Insurance
12. Plumber
13. Tutor
You get the idea. Life is expensive. I have a house with all the assorted bills. I have a wife and kid to support. I don't have $100+ to spend on phones every month.
I'd love to be able to drop Vonage entirely and just pick up three cell phones... One for myself, one for my wife, and one for our son. But the last time I priced out anything like that it was around $100 a month for a very limited plan. No way we can afford that.
If this phone is anything like Google's other offerings, I'd be absolutely thrilled with it. I would love to be able to get my email on a mobile phone (and I'm already using Gmail)...a web browser would be handy, but not essential...but simply having a free cell phone would be incredible - even if it was ad-supported.
Google has a history of making their version of "ad-supported" as painless as possible. The adds they show in Gmail are easily ignorable...but usually actually useful or interesting. I really wouldn't mind seeing Google's advertising alongside my address book, or across the top of the web browser. I'm not sure how I'd feel about having to listen to an ad every time I tried to dial the thing...but I guess that would depend entirely on how annoying/intrusive the advertising is.
LUGs don't fill the same role they used to. I remember, back in the day, the only way I could get my hands on install disks was from the local LUG. Someone there worked someplace with a fat (for the time) pipe and was able to download the software off the 'net. I'd give him a box of blank disks, and he'd throw the software on them.
At the time, I was able to dial up a local BBS...but it was mostly social stuff, some really bad porn, a few Windows programs...certainly nothing about Linux. The only place I could talk with others about Linux was at the LUG. The only place I could get guidance on installing or troubleshooting Linux was at the LUG. There were precious few HOW-TO's and I couldn't very well RTFM when the FM was either on some Gopher site I couldn't access or hadn't even been written yet.
LUGs these days are still great if you've got a tricky problem or need some help troubleshooting. They're great to actually meet other human beings and learn from their experiences/mistakes. It's a good way to network, meet other people running Linux in the area. They're still useful...
But your average person doesn't need to go to the LUG to get installation media. You can generally download it from the web, and many distributions will mail you media for little or no charge. Installation is generally easy these days, especially with something like Ubuntu. And there's plenty of documentation available on the web for just about anything you can run in to.
But one of the reasons that we avoid conflict in general is the risk of injury. That's the whole idea behind legal deterrents (regardless of whether they actually work) - I better not do that or I'll go to jail. I don't punch my boss in the face because I don't want to go to jail and I don't want to lose my job - there are repercussions for my actions. But if there weren't... If I had some kind of remote-controlled punching robot that nobody could trace back to me... Why wouldn't I use it to punch my boss in the face? Maybe I'm a nice guy and wouldn't do that even if I could...but not everyone is a nice guy...
One of the reasons that nations avoid warfare is because their own citizens will die. Yeah...civilian casualties look bad on TV and all...but nothing ruin's a government's day faster than a nation full of screaming widows/widowers/orphans/parents. You don't go to war at the drop of a hat because it is going to cost you your own people...
But if you eliminate that cost of warfare... If you can go to war and defeat your enemies with complete assurance that none of your citizens will die... Then you remove one of the major deterrents to warfare. If being a soldier becomes a 9-5 job...show up at the office, log in to your remote session, blast some bad guys, clock out at 5:00 and get home in time for dinner... Then you run the risk of completely de-personalizing the conflict. You run the risk of making it too easy to go to war. And then you get a situation where your nation can go to war with anyone at any time, blow up as many civilians as they want, and your citizens won't be inconvenienced in the slightest.
All you have to do then is control some bad PR...
Then we've got the fact that there's some kind of command & control channel...radio, I would assume. It's much harder to intercept a pilot's commands when he's sitting right in the cockpit. Imagine someone intercepting the C&C transmissions and turning the UAV around. Unlikely, sure...but it's another thing to worry about that isn't really much of an issue with a pilot actually in the cockpit.
And then you've got the possibility of combining the first two in some way... If everything is done from a remote monitor, how can you tell the difference between a training simulation and the real thing? How would you like to show up to training, blow up some target dummies, and then find out that they were real people? Or have someone intercept the C&C transmissions and make you think you're out there killing the bad guys while your UAV is actually sitting on the runway.
Sure, reducing casualties is good...and anything that keeps our troops out of harm's way is probably a good thing...but I worry about making it too easy to kill people. If there's no risk to anyone...if you can launch attacks without repercussions...if all your troops make it home in time for dinner every night...what's to stop us from simply obliterating any and all opposition?
Yeah, I pretty much hate Microsoft's OS...and their business practices really suck...but their stranglehold on the industry is finally weakening.
What I'd really like to see happen is that Microsoft actually starts legitimately competing to hold onto its market share... Starts turning out a quality product... Makes Windows less of a headache to deal with... Makes Office appealing for reasons other than "we have to buy it because everything is in Word format."
Unlikely, I know... But anyone who can help point them towards the light deserves credit.
Aside from the Windows machines I have to administer at work, I care because I'm a gamer. Like it or not, Linux does not have terrific support for modern gaming. Yes, I know - WINE and Cedega - I've tried them and they just don't do a good enough job. I run Linux at home as my primary machine, but I also have several gaming PCs running Windows.
Just because a PC has a public IP doesn't mean you don't need a firewall or router. It doesn't mean you'd be doing all your firewalling on the individual PCs. You'd still route your traffic through a central box and do your checks there instead of on every machine.
I'm not going to say NAT is completely bad all the time. It's a handy little hack. But that's exactly what it is - a hack to keep IPv4 alive. And doing away with NAT would eliminate a lot of headaches that cramming dozens of PCs into one public IP address has created. Of course...we'd get other headaches in exchange... But nothing is perfect.
So, yeah, there's a bit of animosity towards Microsoft around here...
The film filters in both directions simultaneously. This isn't a one-way mirror, it's more like a lead wall. You can't see out or in. And I doubt if coating the windows on your car would do much to speed detection... You've still got the whole rest of the car to point the laser at.
I hate their consumer-grade stuff. Their home market scanners, printers, all-in-one devices, and cameras are all pretty crappy. The devices themselves aren't anything amazing, and the drivers are horrible. Like you said - 500+ MB just for a printer. And their all-in-one USB monstrosities never play nicely with terminal services.
Their business-grade stuff is actually pretty decent though. Their network ready laser printers are all very solid machines - reliable and relatively easy to service. They've also got a nice universal print driver that supports most of their business-grade printers, which is handy if you've got a variety of printers.