Yeah desperation for consumer base plainly showing through. I would be surprised if it lasted indefinitely though, I'm sure Palm desires absolute control. Similar moves by Verizon today also, with them announcing they will have android phones now.
How much of that is download time? Microsoft has the fact going for it that if you are upgrading, you already have everything you need locally on the dvd. I would be interested to see what would happen performing an upgrade from a locally mirrored repository on a fast lan or from a cd (not sure if that is even possible with ubuntu).
We should expect owners of hybrids, electric cars and high efficiency vehicles to pay their fair share if they can't manage to pay their road tax through fuel purchases.
You laugh, but here in Texas I actually got a letter from the Governor's office justifying the need for more toll roads. And what was their reason - because hybrid vehicles were cutting into the the gas tax revenues and they said they needed more toll roads to pay for upkeep and expansion. Yeah seriously. This was a few years ago, probably 2005. I remember showing it to my coworkers, it was just unreal.
Before you even take a job, get clear on how often you'll be expected to work overtime and exactly how you're going to be compensated.
This reminds me of an interview I had back in '99 (right before the dot-com boom). As an EE, the interviews usually last all day, talking to about 8 or 9 people over the course of the day.
So who was the first person I talked to - the HR lady. Practically the first thing out of her mouth was "well here we pretty much work 6 days a week, and we expect people to do that". Well at that point I really didn't need to hear anything else she or anyone else there had to say. Mind you this was in San Jose in '99 when startups were forming everywhere and stock options were all the rage. In some places a 6 day work week was standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately for me, there is no amicable exit from those type interviews even when you know early on it's not going to work out. So I went the whole day, talked to everyone, and eventually even got an offer from them. For the cost of living there, their wage offer was lame, even for a 5day work week, nevermind 6day...
I took a different job in Austin (higher start salary, lower cost of living, and a 5day work week). Have never regretted skipping out on their 6day a week slave job (especially in 2001 when the market crashed and their stock options went to crap before they even vested).
You can of course still use something like wxWidgets with Express, but arguably it's still worse (too MFC'ish for my taste), and you don't get any integrated designers.
For wxWidgets, although not completely integrated but very well done IMO, installing wxPack on a VS install will give you wxFormBuilder (a GUI designer which is also usable/installable standalone). In practice I've found it to be as good as being integrated, and I've done several complex GUIs in a fraction of the time hand coding would have required (and it has a more consistent code style than I do when I manually code the GUI elements).
When it's done, I expect it to run equally well in any environment (that supports Perl & Tk, which is A LOT). Try that with Visual Studio. I bet you can't, because V$ was deliberately engineered to make it as difficult as possible to develop for any non-Imperial target.
Not true. VS is just an IDE, although it is of course strongly geared toward Windows apps, you can do cross platform development in it if you use the right kit. I used to do a lot of Perl/Tk, but now I've completely switched to using the cross platform wxWidgets for all my apps needing a GUI. For using VC with it I highly recommend using wxPack to install (it bundles in the very awesome wxFormBuilder). Now the only time I use Perl/Tk is for those 5-liner type perl programs where I want to throw something into a messagebox.
The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities.
That's right, for a short time Morgan Hill went silent. You could have called it Silent Hill. And then the fog rolled in and we started hearing ~noises~... you don't want to know what happened after that...
Everybody complains about how ISPs aren't being upfront about their usage caps. So now they're being upfront.
People aren't complaining about the tiered plan idea, they are complaining about the absurdly low bandwidth caps on the tiers. In a real competitive market I would laugh at TW and switch to a different competitor, and they would in time be forced to adjust their tiers to a more reasonable level. However they don't operate in a competitive market, in many parts of the country they operate as part of a duopoly, in which their DSL competitors are doing the exact same thing (uhh antitrust anyone?).
All of this is a complete scam however. The problem that TW and others have with bandwidth isn't infrastructure costs or other BS, it has to do with content control. On an unlimited bandwidth connection I can drop TW cable and get all my TV through the net. However if I do that it completely cuts TW out of the picture, so now they can't sell their advertising, PPV, or other crap. Remember all the network neutrality controversy, whereby ISPs wanted to charge for content? Now they have found a way to indirectly "tax" whatever content flows across their connections by setting the caps ridiculously low and charging overage fees.
A 40GB max tier is laughable, even 100GB is mediocre. On Steam alone the other day I probably moved 40GB (loading the HL2 and Total War sets onto a new install). Total war itself is 14GB+ (which as a data point - assuming all that is overage at $1/GB, that is $14+tax extra on the base cost of the game, roughly ~25%, so at that kind of premium I would probably skip Steam and go buy it at a store).
That's just for Steam, this kind of plan is just not compatible with streaming TV or video. I think what Time Warner has really discovered is the only way to get me to switch back to DSL...
NY tried something similar last year. Newegg started out complying with NY's sales tax, but then told them to shove it. Plenty of references here - Newegg Defies New York Sales Tax Law
I think a major hidden problem with MLC is not so much read or write speed, but data integrity. If an MLC chip is storing 4-bits per cell, that's 16 discrete VT levels that need to be detected to resolve the stored info. Couple that with increasingly smaller cell sizes and it would seem to me that even very low levels of gate leakage could lead to bit errors.
I cringe at the thought of using an MLC based SSD to store important data and then having it basically bit rot due to gate leakage (an effect which is worse at hot temp if the drive is cooking inside a case). I use USB thumb drives more than SSDs, but even those are most all MLC now. Nobody lists what the error correction capabilities are for these things (perhaps SSDs list them but I've never seen it for USB drives), which makes them kind of dodgy IMO. Anyone know the typical EC specs?
I usually run TrueCrypt on my USB drives also, and I kind of wonder what the effect of bit errors would be on that. Currently I've been using SLC, but I expect in the future that option will go away.
How about something like the ability to remove the "Create Folder/Create Launcher/Create Document" options out of the right-click menu.
I don't know what brain dead school of GUI design the idea came from that folders would be created with such regularity that a shortcut for them needed to be placed not only in the right-click menu, but in an unmovable position at the TOP of the right-click menu, but damn, what an annoying as hell "feature". I must have created dozens of folders by accidentally hitting that option instead of what I wanted which was to open a terminal (usually on other non-GNOME systems I worked with, I would have the terminal as the top option in the menu).
I jumped to KDE a while back to get configurability (it was before nautilus-actions existed), but as I understand it that right-click menu still can't be fully reconfigured.
There were other things at the time, such as not being able to resize a window without redrawing the contents, but I think gconf has an option for that buried somewhere.
Another one had to do with focus stealing prevention. KDE has options for that, but afaik GNOME doesn't. That would be stuff like if an app opens a window or a window takes focus on a desktop that isn't shown, GNOME would switch you over to that desktop, or worse the window would appear on the current desktop. At the time it was a circuit simulator that would update its results every 30 seconds or so (yeah imagine getting pulled to a different desktop every 30secs, not fun...)
I know that some things have changed in GNOME since I bailed, but if you think a blinking caret is the only option missing you are wrong.
DRM? Sorry, i think you're forgetting that the only DRM installed was Windows Media Player 11, the rest is insignificant
WMP is not the only DRM encumbered application. A simple google search can show that Vista's DRM trashed the network performance regardless of playback program. An effect which most people would not consider "insignificant".
Windows 7 isn't going to fix jack, it's Vista rebranded (probably with another layer of DRM cruft since Microsoft are complete sellouts to the entertainment industry).
But you can still use the config file to override, if needed.
Thanks for that info. All I remember is that when I tried it, the default xorg.conf file was nearly empty, with some ambiguous line that said "whatever you set here is ignored or set elsewhere via autodetect" (or something to that effect). On my config autodetect just doesn't cut it, and I really doubt that it would autodetect some things (such as the need to have backingstore turned on for some of my apps). I tried to find some documentation on Xorg 7.4, but I don't think the docs are updated yet (and at the same time I didn't have a previous xorg.conf to try so I didn't go down that rather obvious route).
I would definitely have stuck with an 8.04 LTS. I recently tried kubuntu 8.10, and the dual combination of the new Xorg ditching its config file (uh why?!? just to annoy the hell out of people, that's why), and KDE4 changing everything else just about drove me mad.
The KDE4 change reminded me of when Redhat dumped sawfish for that f-ing atrocity called Metacity (which in turn drove me to KDE). After the 8.10 nightmare, reinstalled 8.04, and now I'm hoping the LTS lasts long enough to make everything else settle out or go away.
To do this you need the TrueCrypt bootloader installed, which is a dead give-away that you probably have a hidden volume.
Plausible deniability can extend beyond just what truecrypt offers. Personally I would not encrypt the whole disk, just select container files. After all if they seize the computer they would expect it to boot and behave like a normal system, so give that to them.
For truecrypt use the "hide a tree in a forest" approach. Create some bogus aptly named containers - "MySecretStuffFile", and such with nothing but useless junk in it. When someone asks for the truecypt password give them the password to that.
Then create some actual containers masquerading as real files - "Big.zip" or "YourFavLinuxDistro.iso" or such. If they ask what that is, say its a zip or iso or whatever. If they ask why it doesn't work, say I guess its corrupted. If they can't prove its a truecrypt container there is not much they can do. Realistically unless your name pops up on some watch list I doubt that anyone would ever spend the time to sift through the files looking for that stuff.
Actually, isn't this move arguably their step back away from that edge? The developer backlash from the App-denial situation (and the NDA situation) was threatening to put them in a bad spot, and this is a decision in the developers' favor.
Yeah but how many times do you have to be bitten as a developer before you stop going back. I know if I had spent a bunch of time and effort making a complete phone app only to have it rejected at the last minute for some capricious reason, that would be the last time I developed on that platform.
When I read that Apple backed off on the NDA, to me that sounds like - "we are dropping the NDA because everyone got pissed off, yet we reserve the right to screw over developers in the future." They want to operate that way, fine - as a developer I'll spend my time elsewhere.
Mandating that everything is at least 50%, even when a student gets a 0%, is a terrible idea.
Well now lets see - no matter how bad you screw up the government will step in and bail you out... sounds like Pittsburgh is planning on teaching the next generation of CEOs, perhaps to, oh I don't know, run a major financial corporation.
We used to run all our devel software (IC design) on HPUX here, but AFAIK all the major software vendors are end-of-life'ing on HPUX. Cadence and Mentor have already dropped it and now we run on Redhat on top of HP hardware (definitely better and faster - of course now we have a whole storage closet crammed full of obsolete C3700s).
I don't know why HP would ever want to fork Linux other than to break stuff and annoy the software vendors. They hate supporting multiple derivatives, in fact we are stuck on RHEL4 because parts of the toolset aren't up to date on the existing distros (much less some wannabe HP variant). HP may try to push a custom Linux to common users, but I'm pretty certain Cadence would tell us to buy the machine, wipe the drive, and install Redhat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah desperation for consumer base plainly showing through. I would be surprised if it lasted indefinitely though, I'm sure Palm desires absolute control. Similar moves by Verizon today also, with them announcing they will have android phones now.
How much of that is download time? Microsoft has the fact going for it that if you are upgrading, you already have everything you need locally on the dvd. I would be interested to see what would happen performing an upgrade from a locally mirrored repository on a fast lan or from a cd (not sure if that is even possible with ubuntu).
Perhaps they should try upgrading via carrier pigeon.
We should expect owners of hybrids, electric cars and high efficiency vehicles to pay their fair share if they can't manage to pay their road tax through fuel purchases.
You laugh, but here in Texas I actually got a letter from the Governor's office justifying the need for more toll roads. And what was their reason - because hybrid vehicles were cutting into the the gas tax revenues and they said they needed more toll roads to pay for upkeep and expansion. Yeah seriously. This was a few years ago, probably 2005. I remember showing it to my coworkers, it was just unreal.
Before you even take a job, get clear on how often you'll be expected to work overtime and exactly how you're going to be compensated.
This reminds me of an interview I had back in '99 (right before the dot-com boom). As an EE, the interviews usually last all day, talking to about 8 or 9 people over the course of the day.
So who was the first person I talked to - the HR lady. Practically the first thing out of her mouth was "well here we pretty much work 6 days a week, and we expect people to do that". Well at that point I really didn't need to hear anything else she or anyone else there had to say. Mind you this was in San Jose in '99 when startups were forming everywhere and stock options were all the rage. In some places a 6 day work week was standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately for me, there is no amicable exit from those type interviews even when you know early on it's not going to work out. So I went the whole day, talked to everyone, and eventually even got an offer from them. For the cost of living there, their wage offer was lame, even for a 5day work week, nevermind 6day...
I took a different job in Austin (higher start salary, lower cost of living, and a 5day work week). Have never regretted skipping out on their 6day a week slave job (especially in 2001 when the market crashed and their stock options went to crap before they even vested).
You can of course still use something like wxWidgets with Express, but arguably it's still worse (too MFC'ish for my taste), and you don't get any integrated designers.
For wxWidgets, although not completely integrated but very well done IMO, installing wxPack on a VS install will give you wxFormBuilder (a GUI designer which is also usable/installable standalone). In practice I've found it to be as good as being integrated, and I've done several complex GUIs in a fraction of the time hand coding would have required (and it has a more consistent code style than I do when I manually code the GUI elements).
When it's done, I expect it to run equally well in any environment (that supports Perl & Tk, which is A LOT). Try that with Visual Studio. I bet you can't, because V$ was deliberately engineered to make it as difficult as possible to develop for any non-Imperial target.
Not true. VS is just an IDE, although it is of course strongly geared toward Windows apps, you can do cross platform development in it if you use the right kit. I used to do a lot of Perl/Tk, but now I've completely switched to using the cross platform wxWidgets for all my apps needing a GUI. For using VC with it I highly recommend using wxPack to install (it bundles in the very awesome wxFormBuilder). Now the only time I use Perl/Tk is for those 5-liner type perl programs where I want to throw something into a messagebox.
Well now you can join up and be an Army of One .. the IT guy.
Absolutely. From the TFA:
The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities.
That's right, for a short time Morgan Hill went silent. You could have called it Silent Hill. And then the fog rolled in and we started hearing ~noises~ ... you don't want to know what happened after that...
Everybody complains about how ISPs aren't being upfront about their usage caps. So now they're being upfront.
People aren't complaining about the tiered plan idea, they are complaining about the absurdly low bandwidth caps on the tiers. In a real competitive market I would laugh at TW and switch to a different competitor, and they would in time be forced to adjust their tiers to a more reasonable level. However they don't operate in a competitive market, in many parts of the country they operate as part of a duopoly, in which their DSL competitors are doing the exact same thing (uhh antitrust anyone?).
Bear in mind these are the same type of people who charge 10-20cents per SMS message (both ways send and receive, which by the way works out to $1310 per MB) when it costs absolutely nothing to transmit them.
All of this is a complete scam however. The problem that TW and others have with bandwidth isn't infrastructure costs or other BS, it has to do with content control. On an unlimited bandwidth connection I can drop TW cable and get all my TV through the net. However if I do that it completely cuts TW out of the picture, so now they can't sell their advertising, PPV, or other crap. Remember all the network neutrality controversy, whereby ISPs wanted to charge for content? Now they have found a way to indirectly "tax" whatever content flows across their connections by setting the caps ridiculously low and charging overage fees.
A 40GB max tier is laughable, even 100GB is mediocre. On Steam alone the other day I probably moved 40GB (loading the HL2 and Total War sets onto a new install). Total war itself is 14GB+ (which as a data point - assuming all that is overage at $1/GB, that is $14+tax extra on the base cost of the game, roughly ~25%, so at that kind of premium I would probably skip Steam and go buy it at a store).
That's just for Steam, this kind of plan is just not compatible with streaming TV or video. I think what Time Warner has really discovered is the only way to get me to switch back to DSL...
NY tried something similar last year. Newegg started out complying with NY's sales tax, but then told them to shove it. Plenty of references here - Newegg Defies New York Sales Tax Law
I think a major hidden problem with MLC is not so much read or write speed, but data integrity. If an MLC chip is storing 4-bits per cell, that's 16 discrete VT levels that need to be detected to resolve the stored info. Couple that with increasingly smaller cell sizes and it would seem to me that even very low levels of gate leakage could lead to bit errors.
I cringe at the thought of using an MLC based SSD to store important data and then having it basically bit rot due to gate leakage (an effect which is worse at hot temp if the drive is cooking inside a case). I use USB thumb drives more than SSDs, but even those are most all MLC now. Nobody lists what the error correction capabilities are for these things (perhaps SSDs list them but I've never seen it for USB drives), which makes them kind of dodgy IMO. Anyone know the typical EC specs?
I usually run TrueCrypt on my USB drives also, and I kind of wonder what the effect of bit errors would be on that. Currently I've been using SLC, but I expect in the future that option will go away.
If you make your own gasoline, the government will get pissed off, and at the very least stop you from doing that.
Where did you get that from? I doubt the gov't cares if you make your own fuel. A quick google search can yield plenty of results for a DIY'er:
http://www.google.com/search?q=creating+your+own+gasoline
That's not to say that your car will pass an emissions test using some homebrew, but I doubt anyone is going to stop you from doing it.
How about something like the ability to remove the "Create Folder/Create Launcher/Create Document" options out of the right-click menu.
I don't know what brain dead school of GUI design the idea came from that folders would be created with such regularity that a shortcut for them needed to be placed not only in the right-click menu, but in an unmovable position at the TOP of the right-click menu, but damn, what an annoying as hell "feature". I must have created dozens of folders by accidentally hitting that option instead of what I wanted which was to open a terminal (usually on other non-GNOME systems I worked with, I would have the terminal as the top option in the menu).
I jumped to KDE a while back to get configurability (it was before nautilus-actions existed), but as I understand it that right-click menu still can't be fully reconfigured.
There were other things at the time, such as not being able to resize a window without redrawing the contents, but I think gconf has an option for that buried somewhere.
Another one had to do with focus stealing prevention. KDE has options for that, but afaik GNOME doesn't. That would be stuff like if an app opens a window or a window takes focus on a desktop that isn't shown, GNOME would switch you over to that desktop, or worse the window would appear on the current desktop. At the time it was a circuit simulator that would update its results every 30 seconds or so (yeah imagine getting pulled to a different desktop every 30secs, not fun...)
I know that some things have changed in GNOME since I bailed, but if you think a blinking caret is the only option missing you are wrong.
For fans of the board game Settlers of Catan, there is a similar online version which is quite nice:
Sea3D (here are some screenshots)
That one is a bit old, but stable (it is similar to Settlers plus the seafarer expansion), and the S3D Connector website can match up players.
The newer version in devel is Cities Online (similar to cities and knights expansion).
Those are pretty good board games.
it's a Slashdot myth that Vista has some magical form of DRM that "slows down" everything on your computer
Not everything, just all network traffic:
Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?
There ya go, myth verified.
DRM? Sorry, i think you're forgetting that the only DRM installed was Windows Media Player 11, the rest is insignificant
WMP is not the only DRM encumbered application. A simple google search can show that Vista's DRM trashed the network performance regardless of playback program. An effect which most people would not consider "insignificant".
Google search
Slashdot article "Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?"
User's forum post
Windows 7 isn't going to fix jack, it's Vista rebranded (probably with another layer of DRM cruft since Microsoft are complete sellouts to the entertainment industry).
But you can still use the config file to override, if needed.
Thanks for that info. All I remember is that when I tried it, the default xorg.conf file was nearly empty, with some ambiguous line that said "whatever you set here is ignored or set elsewhere via autodetect" (or something to that effect). On my config autodetect just doesn't cut it, and I really doubt that it would autodetect some things (such as the need to have backingstore turned on for some of my apps). I tried to find some documentation on Xorg 7.4, but I don't think the docs are updated yet (and at the same time I didn't have a previous xorg.conf to try so I didn't go down that rather obvious route).
I'm sure Xorg and KDE4 are high on their priority list for their web servers.
The point being 8.10, not being an LTS, they shoveled a whole bunch of radically new stuff in. That's always great fun on a server, yes?
I would definitely have stuck with an 8.04 LTS. I recently tried kubuntu 8.10, and the dual combination of the new Xorg ditching its config file (uh why?!? just to annoy the hell out of people, that's why), and KDE4 changing everything else just about drove me mad.
The KDE4 change reminded me of when Redhat dumped sawfish for that f-ing atrocity called Metacity (which in turn drove me to KDE). After the 8.10 nightmare, reinstalled 8.04, and now I'm hoping the LTS lasts long enough to make everything else settle out or go away.
To do this you need the TrueCrypt bootloader installed, which is a dead give-away that you probably have a hidden volume.
Plausible deniability can extend beyond just what truecrypt offers. Personally I would not encrypt the whole disk, just select container files. After all if they seize the computer they would expect it to boot and behave like a normal system, so give that to them.
For truecrypt use the "hide a tree in a forest" approach. Create some bogus aptly named containers - "MySecretStuffFile", and such with nothing but useless junk in it. When someone asks for the truecypt password give them the password to that.
Then create some actual containers masquerading as real files - "Big.zip" or "YourFavLinuxDistro.iso" or such. If they ask what that is, say its a zip or iso or whatever. If they ask why it doesn't work, say I guess its corrupted. If they can't prove its a truecrypt container there is not much they can do. Realistically unless your name pops up on some watch list I doubt that anyone would ever spend the time to sift through the files looking for that stuff.
Actually, isn't this move arguably their step back away from that edge? The developer backlash from the App-denial situation (and the NDA situation) was threatening to put them in a bad spot, and this is a decision in the developers' favor.
Yeah but how many times do you have to be bitten as a developer before you stop going back. I know if I had spent a bunch of time and effort making a complete phone app only to have it rejected at the last minute for some capricious reason, that would be the last time I developed on that platform.
When I read that Apple backed off on the NDA, to me that sounds like - "we are dropping the NDA because everyone got pissed off, yet we reserve the right to screw over developers in the future." They want to operate that way, fine - as a developer I'll spend my time elsewhere.
Mandating that everything is at least 50%, even when a student gets a 0%, is a terrible idea.
Well now lets see - no matter how bad you screw up the government will step in and bail you out ... sounds like Pittsburgh is planning on teaching the next generation of CEOs, perhaps to, oh I don't know, run a major financial corporation.
They have one already (sortof) - HP-UX ...
We used to run all our devel software (IC design) on HPUX here, but AFAIK all the major software vendors are end-of-life'ing on HPUX. Cadence and Mentor have already dropped it and now we run on Redhat on top of HP hardware (definitely better and faster - of course now we have a whole storage closet crammed full of obsolete C3700s).
I don't know why HP would ever want to fork Linux other than to break stuff and annoy the software vendors. They hate supporting multiple derivatives, in fact we are stuck on RHEL4 because parts of the toolset aren't up to date on the existing distros (much less some wannabe HP variant). HP may try to push a custom Linux to common users, but I'm pretty certain Cadence would tell us to buy the machine, wipe the drive, and install Redhat.
Forget openoffice, what they are asking for is Adobe FrameMaker (but it costs money).