Chome OS is competition to Windows in the same way a bicycle is competition to an automobile.
And if what most people need is a bicycle, and a Chromebook covers their needs it's a competitor. If people buy these instead of something from Microsoft, it is definitely a competitor.
It may not be as general purpose as Windows, but it might show people they don't really need Windows. And that should at least worry Microsoft.
I think these are slightly worse, since they are designed to have pretty much constant connection with Google's services.
At least a netbook was just a small standalone laptop.
I've gotten the impression that a Chromebook without a pretty constant internet connection and fully buying into the Google ecosystem is going to be useless. I suspect it doesn't do much without being connected to those.
his is a case of Facebook choosing to shut down someone's business just because they want to, not because they were doing anything wrong.
Isn't one of the things Social Fixer is doing is trying to prevent Facebook et al from tracking you?
So, if you have a community page on Facebook detailing how to block some of Facebook's functionality... then maybe you chose the wrong platform to do this one?
Facebook doesn't owe you your business, but superficially (and possibly incorrectly) it seems like Facebook might be annoyed you're using their system to bypass/alter some of the elements of Facebook.
Facebook can't say a damned thing if you host this elsewhere -- but isn't this is kind of like expecting Microsoft to host articles detailing how to pirate Microsoft products?
Welcome to the world of Terms of Service and EULAs, where the people who own the service can and will make any changes they want and you don't get a vote.
Except that there're virtually always young Turks or gadflies or other types looking to make a name for themselves or upset the applecart when those in power show signs of weakness.
Sure there are, but since you'd be trying to prosecute the head of a federal agency (or near to it), you'd likely need the help of the Attorney General of the US.
And if he's decided (or been told) that it's not in the national interest to do this, it simply won't happen.
A junior prosecutor can't file charges his boss tells him he's not allowed to charge. He'd basically get fired or removed from the case.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you that someone should be charged -- I'm just of the opinion that as a practical matter it might be impossible for someone with the right jurisdiction to do anything about this to either have or exercise the will to prosecute.
And I vaguely recall that the feds retain the right to basically say "you have no standing to sue because we said so". I have no idea of what entity could undertake this and be in any way free of being shut down by the feds who cite national security.
The deck is unfortunately stacked against anybody who wants to prosecute this, since it could mean taking on the entire federal government.
In which case you're confusing 'expect' with 'hope for' -- I mean 'expect' as in a realistic chance it will happen.
Criminality and cover-up are not mutually exclusive.
Not by a long shot -- but when the people who determine criminality are part of the cover up, you more or less have to conclude nothing at all will happen.
Where're the prosecutors with the balls to hold the watchers accountable?
That of course assumes that the DoJ would have any interest in pursuing this, and that the politicians who should have damned well known this was happening want to do anything but sweep this under the rug.
It's hard not to believe this was done without anybody in authority knowing it was happening -- at which point the only people who could prosecute for this are part of the problem.
Is this 'rogue agency stepping outside of its mandate', or just part of a bigger problem where government has decided the laws don't really matter?
But there is one system that can't be broken and that is one time pads. You have to physically share the pad but that is not so onerous for most companies as they have trusted employees going from branch to branch all the time.
I just don't see that as being as useful here. Or at least, not solving the general problem in a usable way.
Take a multi-national with say, 20 offices, which seems small... don't you need a OTP for each pair of offices? That's going to turn into a rather large number of OTPs, plus the fun of trying to manage them all. And that assumes that each office only ever needs one set of crypto keys and doesn't have multiple different encrypted streams (routine stuff, secure stuff, really secure stuff for instance).
And assuming you are trying to run a VPN, you'd need an absolutely enormous OTP to handle all of the traffic you'd generate on a daily basis.
I can see a OTP being useful for stuff which has to be super secure, but I just don't see it being able to keep up with the sheer volume of data companies need to encrypt on a daily basis -- it seems like it would be an almost impossible task.
Of course, what I know about crypto probably fits on a single sheet of paper and comes from a single course 15+ years ago and what I've read in Tom Clancy novels -- so it's possible many of these are solved problems.
Besides if they are deaf and buying an iPhone, they are not only without hearing, they lack any kind of sense at all.
Well, they could be primarily using it for texting and as a web device.
The fraction of time that I use my cellphone for a voice call compared to what else I use it for is tiny.
But googling for "iphone deaf people" comes up with various apps and settings which are intended to make it easier for them -- so it's not like no deaf person has ever owned an iPhone (or a cell phone in general).
So you mean you actually check your phone during meetings, instead of keeping it in your pocket and not letting it steal your attention? Wow.
Don't take this wrong, but do you go to many meetings?
I've had the person running the meeting constantly checking their phone during the meeting.
I had one manager a several years ago that got so bad I basically said "I'm not having a meeting with you if you bring your damned phone" -- because he'd miss what you said, ask you a question, and then while you were giving the answer he'd check his phone again and miss what you said a second time.
One day I got up and walked out of the meeting and left him sitting there.
In my experience, an awful lot of people are checking their phones pretty much constantly, and to the detriment of everyone around them and what they're trying to do.
You might be amazed to see just how many phones are being checked during meetings, and often people are trying to respond to emails concurrent with trying to listen to you.
Why are so many things made from plastic and so few made from anything else?
Plastic is well... 'plastic', as in malleable and can be poured in a mold. It's cheap to buy, color, and make stuff with it.
So, if I want to make a plastic piece, I make a mold and put in exactly as much material as I need, and in all likelihood any left over stuff can just be re-melted and processed again.
Now, if I want to make an aluminum piece, I should think I'd either need to mill it (expensive, difficult, time consuming), or cast it -- and I don't think casting something like aluminum works well for smaller parts.
I couldn't even begin to give you costing figures, but plastic is cheap, light, abundant, made out of readily available petrochemicals, and easy to work with.
My guess, when companies are looking to squeeze costs, they're looking to save pennies per unit, not dollars.
It's better to have a feature available and choose not to use it, than it is to not have the feature and never be able to.
Unless you're the company making it.
For good or for ill, Apple has decided they're not going to spend time developing those features than only 5-10% of users will ever care about, and instead focusing on making the ones 90%+ of people will use.
You can waste a lot of money in trying to implement features most people will never use.
My HTC Desire C as well... and I'd like to be able to set it to alert every 15 minutes or so if I miss a call so I don't need to remember to go over and periodically check my phone.
The fingerprint is saved locally and encrypted on the individual phone's A7 chip. Never goes to iCloud. Never touches Apple servers.
Do we know this for fact?
Because if one's tin-foil hat was a little snug, you might conclude the NSA has informed Apple they require that to be uploaded to them so that people are providing their own fingerprints.
I have nothing to substantiate this, but I sure as hell wouldn't consider using fingerprint as an unlock mechanism.
The reality is, with the Patriot Act and all we've been hearing, you have no idea if that is being uploaded or not, and the people involved wouldn't tell you anyway.
Being an American controlled company these days means it's not possible to assume the NSA hasn't co-opted some of your stuff.
It's almost safer to assume (and with a fairly good chance of being correct) such things are compromised and treat them accordingly.
These are the same people that freaked out when War of the Worlds was first broadcast....
You know, in fairness to the people who went into panic with War of the Worlds... it was 1938, and people had no context for something like this.
Audiences weren't exactly sophisticated by our standards back then.
I've known people who were alive back then, and while I don't think any of them heard the original broadcast, they've mostly confirmed that most people simply didn't know enough to realize it wasn't true.
In 1938 in much of the world, broadcast radio was still something relatively new. And since it was presented as a series of news items, people believed it.
I believe essentially the same thing happend in the 80s with that Red Dawn movie -- since everyone was already in a state of fear we were going to get nuked by the Soviets, so people thought it was real.
Hell, given the chronic amber alert status, with a little planning you could probably whip up a lot of modern people into a panic. Because it has the effect of keeping people in a heightened state of fear.
Let's face it, if someone in NYC said a plane had crashed into a building, you would see some pretty widespread panic.
I know how to do an OS re-install and data restore
How do you do an OS reinstall on a tablet?
Because unless you're installing your own ROMs, from what I've been able to tell the "wipe device" only deletes the user stuff, but doesn't reset the OS to what it was when you got it.
I'm not being sarcastic, it's a real question... because I'm not convinced that if I wiped my Nexus 7 it would actually throw away any updates I've received, just clear off some of the stuff.
Slippery slope is an argument people resort to when they lack a real argument.
Fine, but one day when you can be detained anywhere based on arbitrary things, ask yourself if your willingness to pretend that nothing is happening was the problem.
It's a fact that they've been steadily cutting into Constitutionally protected things, and that it's getting worse. Just ask anybody in a state where these 'border' stops covers the whole state.
If you want to act like it isn't getting worse and isn't likely to continue to do so, then you haven't been paying attention.
Dismissing the argument on the basis that it's a slippery slope and therefore invalid is the height of willful ignorance.
For one thing, you are free to post on slashdot about it without serious concern that you'll be dragged away to a secret prison.
The problem with everything you say is it can be countered with "for now".
As your government gives itself more and more power to intrude on your lives, ignore your Constitution, or use one set of laws to skirt around another the abuses magnify.
Yes, all of this stuff about the NSA is disturbing, and it should be. But realistically, the mere fact that we are discussing it here is a good thing
So, you can say to yourself now "well, they haven't taken this away yet" and convince yourself everything is OK. But in a few years if they've taken that and even more away from you, it's too late.
Complacently thinking everything is fine when it's increasingly not just means that by the time you've got nothing left there's not a damned thing you can do about it.
Slowly expanding the scope of these things over time means you should be worried, because eventually that 100 mile 'border' zone can cover your entire country, and searching your digital devices or scanning through all of your information can be used for everything they feel like.
Nobody plans on ending up in a police state, but if you don't stop the steady march while you can, it's all too easy to wake up one day and realize just how badly screwed you are. Joseph McCarthy demonstrated how easily things can change.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke"
He gave the technically-inclined measurement, and then the Common Joe measurement. What's the problem?
The problem is he's given it as if they've achieved "7x the storage capacity of a 64GB device", which is quite disingenuous, because the two aren't the same.
It's kind of like saying this dump truck has 13x the storage capacity of your sedan -- which might be true, but you're talking about entirely different things. Of course, there are drawbacks to that dump truck and you can't use it for all of the same applications as your sedan.
A 64GB flash storage is an arbitrary thing -- so you're only 3.5x better than a 128GB iPad for instance, but it's 250 times better than a 2GB USB stick. Which pretty much makes the numbers meaningless to compare.
This entire article could be written as "HDDs getting smaller, could also be used in tablets".
Slashdot Mirror
And if what most people need is a bicycle, and a Chromebook covers their needs it's a competitor. If people buy these instead of something from Microsoft, it is definitely a competitor.
It may not be as general purpose as Windows, but it might show people they don't really need Windows. And that should at least worry Microsoft.
I think these are slightly worse, since they are designed to have pretty much constant connection with Google's services.
At least a netbook was just a small standalone laptop.
I've gotten the impression that a Chromebook without a pretty constant internet connection and fully buying into the Google ecosystem is going to be useless. I suspect it doesn't do much without being connected to those.
Isn't one of the things Social Fixer is doing is trying to prevent Facebook et al from tracking you?
So, if you have a community page on Facebook detailing how to block some of Facebook's functionality ... then maybe you chose the wrong platform to do this one?
Facebook doesn't owe you your business, but superficially (and possibly incorrectly) it seems like Facebook might be annoyed you're using their system to bypass/alter some of the elements of Facebook.
Facebook can't say a damned thing if you host this elsewhere -- but isn't this is kind of like expecting Microsoft to host articles detailing how to pirate Microsoft products?
Welcome to the world of Terms of Service and EULAs, where the people who own the service can and will make any changes they want and you don't get a vote.
Sure there are, but since you'd be trying to prosecute the head of a federal agency (or near to it), you'd likely need the help of the Attorney General of the US.
And if he's decided (or been told) that it's not in the national interest to do this, it simply won't happen.
A junior prosecutor can't file charges his boss tells him he's not allowed to charge. He'd basically get fired or removed from the case.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you that someone should be charged -- I'm just of the opinion that as a practical matter it might be impossible for someone with the right jurisdiction to do anything about this to either have or exercise the will to prosecute.
And I vaguely recall that the feds retain the right to basically say "you have no standing to sue because we said so". I have no idea of what entity could undertake this and be in any way free of being shut down by the feds who cite national security.
The deck is unfortunately stacked against anybody who wants to prosecute this, since it could mean taking on the entire federal government.
In which case you're confusing 'expect' with 'hope for' -- I mean 'expect' as in a realistic chance it will happen.
Not by a long shot -- but when the people who determine criminality are part of the cover up, you more or less have to conclude nothing at all will happen.
That of course assumes that the DoJ would have any interest in pursuing this, and that the politicians who should have damned well known this was happening want to do anything but sweep this under the rug.
It's hard not to believe this was done without anybody in authority knowing it was happening -- at which point the only people who could prosecute for this are part of the problem.
Is this 'rogue agency stepping outside of its mandate', or just part of a bigger problem where government has decided the laws don't really matter?
Should we expect criminal charges, or will we find out that since he lied to protect the politicians they'll go soft on this do nothing?
Because he's either committed a criminal act, or he's just a stooge covering up for someone else.
Cynically I'm forced to conclude Google is doing this to get access to the information on all of those students to make even more money from.
Optimistically, I think it's potentially a good idea, but we'll see what they actually do.
Except, in this case we're talking about how the algorithms themselves might be compromised.
At which point, is your key exchange and encryption all that secure?
From the sounds of it, if you can't trust the underlying crypto, you can't trust what you do with it.
I just don't see that as being as useful here. Or at least, not solving the general problem in a usable way.
Take a multi-national with say, 20 offices, which seems small ... don't you need a OTP for each pair of offices? That's going to turn into a rather large number of OTPs, plus the fun of trying to manage them all. And that assumes that each office only ever needs one set of crypto keys and doesn't have multiple different encrypted streams (routine stuff, secure stuff, really secure stuff for instance).
And assuming you are trying to run a VPN, you'd need an absolutely enormous OTP to handle all of the traffic you'd generate on a daily basis.
I can see a OTP being useful for stuff which has to be super secure, but I just don't see it being able to keep up with the sheer volume of data companies need to encrypt on a daily basis -- it seems like it would be an almost impossible task.
Of course, what I know about crypto probably fits on a single sheet of paper and comes from a single course 15+ years ago and what I've read in Tom Clancy novels -- so it's possible many of these are solved problems.
Does it work for non-Mac OSes?
I'd like to mirror my display onto my bigscreen TV -- that would be awesome.
Well, they could be primarily using it for texting and as a web device.
The fraction of time that I use my cellphone for a voice call compared to what else I use it for is tiny.
But googling for "iphone deaf people" comes up with various apps and settings which are intended to make it easier for them -- so it's not like no deaf person has ever owned an iPhone (or a cell phone in general).
Don't take this wrong, but do you go to many meetings?
I've had the person running the meeting constantly checking their phone during the meeting.
I had one manager a several years ago that got so bad I basically said "I'm not having a meeting with you if you bring your damned phone" -- because he'd miss what you said, ask you a question, and then while you were giving the answer he'd check his phone again and miss what you said a second time.
One day I got up and walked out of the meeting and left him sitting there.
In my experience, an awful lot of people are checking their phones pretty much constantly, and to the detriment of everyone around them and what they're trying to do.
You might be amazed to see just how many phones are being checked during meetings, and often people are trying to respond to emails concurrent with trying to listen to you.
Plastic is well ... 'plastic', as in malleable and can be poured in a mold. It's cheap to buy, color, and make stuff with it.
So, if I want to make a plastic piece, I make a mold and put in exactly as much material as I need, and in all likelihood any left over stuff can just be re-melted and processed again.
Now, if I want to make an aluminum piece, I should think I'd either need to mill it (expensive, difficult, time consuming), or cast it -- and I don't think casting something like aluminum works well for smaller parts.
I couldn't even begin to give you costing figures, but plastic is cheap, light, abundant, made out of readily available petrochemicals, and easy to work with.
My guess, when companies are looking to squeeze costs, they're looking to save pennies per unit, not dollars.
Unless you're the company making it.
For good or for ill, Apple has decided they're not going to spend time developing those features than only 5-10% of users will ever care about, and instead focusing on making the ones 90%+ of people will use.
You can waste a lot of money in trying to implement features most people will never use.
My HTC Desire C as well ... and I'd like to be able to set it to alert every 15 minutes or so if I miss a call so I don't need to remember to go over and periodically check my phone.
Do we know this for fact?
Because if one's tin-foil hat was a little snug, you might conclude the NSA has informed Apple they require that to be uploaded to them so that people are providing their own fingerprints.
I have nothing to substantiate this, but I sure as hell wouldn't consider using fingerprint as an unlock mechanism.
The reality is, with the Patriot Act and all we've been hearing, you have no idea if that is being uploaded or not, and the people involved wouldn't tell you anyway.
Being an American controlled company these days means it's not possible to assume the NSA hasn't co-opted some of your stuff.
It's almost safer to assume (and with a fairly good chance of being correct) such things are compromised and treat them accordingly.
From whom did you get that advice? ;-)
There's an infinite number of ways in which American English can be done wrong without the use of the word whom.
You know, in fairness to the people who went into panic with War of the Worlds ... it was 1938, and people had no context for something like this.
Audiences weren't exactly sophisticated by our standards back then.
I've known people who were alive back then, and while I don't think any of them heard the original broadcast, they've mostly confirmed that most people simply didn't know enough to realize it wasn't true.
In 1938 in much of the world, broadcast radio was still something relatively new. And since it was presented as a series of news items, people believed it.
I believe essentially the same thing happend in the 80s with that Red Dawn movie -- since everyone was already in a state of fear we were going to get nuked by the Soviets, so people thought it was real.
Hell, given the chronic amber alert status, with a little planning you could probably whip up a lot of modern people into a panic. Because it has the effect of keeping people in a heightened state of fear.
Let's face it, if someone in NYC said a plane had crashed into a building, you would see some pretty widespread panic.
How do you do an OS reinstall on a tablet?
Because unless you're installing your own ROMs, from what I've been able to tell the "wipe device" only deletes the user stuff, but doesn't reset the OS to what it was when you got it.
I'm not being sarcastic, it's a real question ... because I'm not convinced that if I wiped my Nexus 7 it would actually throw away any updates I've received, just clear off some of the stuff.
Fine, but one day when you can be detained anywhere based on arbitrary things, ask yourself if your willingness to pretend that nothing is happening was the problem.
It's a fact that they've been steadily cutting into Constitutionally protected things, and that it's getting worse. Just ask anybody in a state where these 'border' stops covers the whole state.
If you want to act like it isn't getting worse and isn't likely to continue to do so, then you haven't been paying attention.
Dismissing the argument on the basis that it's a slippery slope and therefore invalid is the height of willful ignorance.
The problem with everything you say is it can be countered with "for now".
As your government gives itself more and more power to intrude on your lives, ignore your Constitution, or use one set of laws to skirt around another the abuses magnify.
So, you can say to yourself now "well, they haven't taken this away yet" and convince yourself everything is OK. But in a few years if they've taken that and even more away from you, it's too late.
Complacently thinking everything is fine when it's increasingly not just means that by the time you've got nothing left there's not a damned thing you can do about it.
Slowly expanding the scope of these things over time means you should be worried, because eventually that 100 mile 'border' zone can cover your entire country, and searching your digital devices or scanning through all of your information can be used for everything they feel like.
Nobody plans on ending up in a police state, but if you don't stop the steady march while you can, it's all too easy to wake up one day and realize just how badly screwed you are. Joseph McCarthy demonstrated how easily things can change.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke"
Dell?
Do you get told to go fuck yourself often? Because you're the one acting like a douche at the moment.
The problem is he's given it as if they've achieved "7x the storage capacity of a 64GB device", which is quite disingenuous, because the two aren't the same.
It's kind of like saying this dump truck has 13x the storage capacity of your sedan -- which might be true, but you're talking about entirely different things. Of course, there are drawbacks to that dump truck and you can't use it for all of the same applications as your sedan.
A 64GB flash storage is an arbitrary thing -- so you're only 3.5x better than a 128GB iPad for instance, but it's 250 times better than a 2GB USB stick. Which pretty much makes the numbers meaningless to compare.
This entire article could be written as "HDDs getting smaller, could also be used in tablets".