If this is the case, then yes I have a huge problem with it. But thats not the way facebook works (yet)
Well, given all of the news coverage from Facebook over the last few years... I simply don't trust them to not suddenly make this information public in another few months. Not a little. They have a repeated pattern of deciding all of your information should be public... the solution is to give them nothing.
And, really, it would be naive to think they haven't done it in the background and even if they haven't (yet) decided to show information to un-linked persons... when the DHS shows up to them with a subpoena and a picture of someone and says "give us everything you have on this and if you tell anybody you go to jail".
Even the governments who claim to be bastions of freedom and democracy (I think we all know who I mean) have been shady about this kind of stuff. So, you'll forgive me if I have no trust whatsoever for Facebook in this regard.
Hell, didn't Google just decide not to roll out facial recognition because it opened up too many privacy issues?
Regardless of what it looks like to a given user, there's likely far more information sitting on Facebook's servers than they'll admit to. I think someone should start stalking Zuckerburg and his family and friends to be sure as much of their private information is made public.. that's more or less what they're doing to everyone else.
I get that once again Facebook has opted people into a new feature, but I'm not sure I get what all the anger is about.
So, let me give you a thought experiment.
Say I don't have a Facebook account now (which I don't). But, say, Facebook has turned on facial recognition for all of the existing users (which they have).
So, this weekend if I go downtown to where all of the bars and nightlife are, and I start snapping pictures of people doing various things. Quietly, and unobtrusively mind you.
Now, say I create a facebook account with false profile information, solely so I can upload pictures of people I don't know doing various (and possibly stupid) things. You're no longer some random, mostly anonymous guy in a picture which could have been anywhere... you're Bob from Detroit. And that guy with the crack pipe is your friend Dave and he's got an outstanding warrant.
By Facebook opting you in to having facial recognition done on you... how many random people I have never met would be covered by them doing facial recognition on my pictures and associating them with you?
They opted you into something which potentially has fairly broad privacy implications. And, since they have it, the governments might subpoena them for the underlying data so they can feed it into their own system that keep track of citizens (and, they'll make sure Facebook doesn't tell anyone).
Is my example somewhat contrived and a little extreme? Absolutely. Do I think it's a plausible scenario? Sadly, yes.
The point is, they enable a lot of information gathering about people that can happen without any knowledge or consent. Which is what Facebook does every time they add a new feature. And, which is why I won't use Facebook.
I wouldn't say his idea of the government collecting and distributing money to authors based on popularity is particularly extreme.
No, but it's still stupid in that all you do is pay people according to their popularity, and give no consideration to what works are actually being read by specific people.
That is basically what the music industry bodies who collect royalties do, only they make it so you have to join their little club to be eligible to receive. In Canada the government taxes blank CDs and pays the money to the artists via the industry body, so all RMS is saying is that we should cut out the corrupt middle man and just pay people for their work directly.
Again, they're paying that out based on 'popularity' and what essentially amounts to record sales reports... so, all of the money goes to Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber.
If I'm not listening to either of them, the levy amounts to a subsidy of successful artists in proportion to their success... to me, that makes no sense. I explicitly don't listen to those artists who are going to benefit from this formula.
Hell, the formula provided by the corrupt middle-men, so why should I trust them?
That seems like the only reasonable solution to me. Make all electronic mediums free and compensate from taxes. People can still sell physical copies, and trying to sell pirate material would still be illegal, but copying for private use would no longer be copyright infringement. Using any sane estimation of "lost" sales per pirate copy the tax would be pretty low.
How is this reasonable? You tax me on the assumption I'm ripping you off, and then compensate random people based on a formula of how successful they have been and assume that they are being 'ripped off' in proportion to all of the moneys collected.
In the case of the 'tax' on blank media... what if I'm not using the blank media for anything but backing up my own legal, digital information? WTF am I doing paying a tax to support artists if the media isn't being used to copy their stuff?
I support the artists I like by buying their fucking albums... why should my money go to support some band I can't stand? Because some stupid formula says that that artist deserves 3% of the net revenues of all music because they accounted for 3% of sales in stores? And if you're taking it out of any other tax pool... why should my parents, who don't buy music, be subsidizing artists?
I just don't get the logic behind this "compensate the most popular ones"... it's stupid when the music industry proposes it, and it's stupid to do it for books.
I don't know why security gets so much airtime in here. It's as if a generation of MS haters have been bred on this diet purely because it was the only argument they could use against one of the most successful companies of all time, and now they can't get off it.
Dude, if you think the only complaint we ever had against Microsoft was security... you weren't there despite saying you were.
Windows was crappy, unstable, highly limited and barely capable of either using the resources you had in a machine... or desperately needing boatloads more than you could be expected to have.
Blue Screens of death, Clippy, and any number of Steaming Heaps of Innovative Technology which never worked as expected or got completely abandoned over the years. All of the whiny kids who thought Windows '95 was the first time anyone invented real multi-tasking were delusional... and believe me, I've met a lot of them.
When I switched away from Windows, the same box running Linux could give me true multi-tasking, the ability to run a bunch of programs at the same time on screen, free C compilers, loads of applications and speedy performance, actual networking, LaTeX, games... contrasted with a bloated, slow, crashy piece of crap which didn't come with anything besides notepad and minesweeper (and if you wanted TCP/IP it was an add-on).
Microsoft has come a long way, and it is now my primary desktop and hosts my vmware workstation... but in the early 90's into about 2000 or so (*cough* WinME *cough*), Windows was a complete turd (at least on desktop machines). Security and viruses was only one of the complaints at the time. But if you think they were the only ones that were causing some of us to move to Linux or FreeBSD (or anything else)... you're sadly mistaken.
Have you used it, or are you just parroting what everyone else says?
It's different... it's not trying to be a general computer in which you can compile and execute arbitrary code, or get a root shell and install Apache.
However, as someone who actually owns an iPad, I find it to be a useful device. I use it entirely differently than I use the computers that I use for my professional life... and I find that to be actually quite nice. I'm not installing software with it, I'm not writing docs... it's an entertainment device mostly.
I've boat-loads of apps including a lot of goofy little games, I've got music, I've got movies, I've got a couple of hundred books. It may not be the kind of device you want... but I don't regret the purchase in any way, and it does everything I'd ever hoped for it.
You'd be amazed at just how much free, and very useful, stuff there is available for it. My days of compiling kernels are long since past... so what you decry as limitations, I laud as a well designed and usable device.
Once size doesn't fit all... you may need to learn to cope with the fact that people who aren't you want different things in a device than you do.
My son recently bridged into Boy Scouts, so I have been looking at devices like this. How good is your experience with these? How quickly does it recharge in good sunlight? Do you find it works pretty well even with high draw items such as cell phones (Droid X, standard battery)?
I put it in the "pretty good" range.
To fully recharge from depleted, it can take a couple of days (according to the web, depending on light etc) to recharge with modest sunlight (which is why I have two). It will recharge from a wall pretty quickly as a second option. It comes with a micro-usb cable for that purpose.
I don't have a direct comparison to your droid... but I've charged my Motorola Krzr and then my iPod with it, and it showed as still mostly full. I don't consider either of these to be really heavy draw items.
Conversely, when I charge my Tom Tom with it, it's fully depleted and needs to recharge for a fair bit. This, I consider to be pretty heavy draw and is pushing the limit.
To give you a reference... when I first bought it, I thought I'd be a clever guy and run my USB speakers from it. Well, it simply can't keep up with a sustained level like that... but, I have another set of rechargeable USB speakers that have LiOn batteries... and it charges them without difficulty and then they run for hours. (I recommend the speakers highly... they rock and run a good 8 hours on a charge. 158 grams each, 1 will do, two rocks.)
It's really marketed as something you can keep in your car or on your backpack to recharge your phone on the go. It probably couldn't give you enough juice to run it.
So, it's really good at handing over its charge to something that isn't making a continuous draw. I've not used it extensively enough to have really good data points on just how long the recharge cycle really is... but the case it's in is fairly rugged, and it comes with a carabiner to attach to packs as well as a plastic mounting thing you could put inside your windshield.
Don't look to run your gameboy or GPS from it... I think it's really only 650 ma or something. I'd definitely say it's worth having one, even though it's not going to cover every situation.
For the price I spent for it at Wal Mart, I was very happy with it. I've definitely used it to charge my phone and iPod several times. It charges decently enough, and if it's pre-charged before you need it is when it's most handy.
I'm not sure how you make a half hour flight take 4 hours, in my experience it takes half that.
Unless you're only flying from tiny little airports, I'm surprised by that. Even a medium-sized airport is crazy.
Depending on how big your city is, getting to the airport is likely a 30 minute or so affair. They suggest you arrive at the airport at least 90 minutes before your flight... that's two hours right there. then your 30 minute flight. Figure 20 minutes easily to get your bags, and then assume another 30 minutes to your destination.
I figure that's 3.5 hrs right there, give or take.
Hell, when I fly a longer haul flight... the trip time to the airport, the recommended arrival time, and the time on the back end don't change. My usual flight is about 4h15 minutes... and the trip takes me about 7.5 hrs door to door.
In all but the most tiny of regional airports, I can't see how you are getting away with only 2 hours including flight time. In my experience, there's pretty much 2 hrs minimum on the front end of the flight, and 1 hr on the backend... regardless of the actual flight time.
Willing participants in a travel system that could just drive if they weren't so full of themselves that they thought they had to be somewhere in 90 minutes instead of 10 hours.
Right now, a 2 hour flight gets me to visit my parents... a 15 hour drive otherwise (assuming you actually follow the speed limits). Since I can't drive that long, I'd also need to stay in a hotel. Oh, and I'd need to eat and buy gas.
When I travel for business, I'm typically traveling much further than that. (More like a 4-5 hour flight).
If one places any value whatsoever on ones time... spending 10 hours in a car isn't viable in a lot of contexts. Leaving the "don't go" option, or air travel.
I'm not entirely keen on this new big brother airport of the future... but there's a lot of contexts where traveling by car simply isn't a viable option. I can fly to visit my parents for a weekend... if I drove there... well, there would be no point if I only had a weekend since it couldn't happen.
Would you shell out the $3500 to get Mac OS X? The way I see it, that is the choice you will have in the near future: iOS for a "consumer" level computer, and Mac OS X for high end "professional" level computers.
And, really, I don't see this as being any different from the Google Chrome notebooks which will basically do their upgrades from the servers and free users from the pain of maintaining them.
The goal is a really simple device, with really limited config, and less things to go wrong with it.... since many people really do just want to treat their computer as a device like their microwave or TV, I suspect people will buy them.
This idea isn't unique to Apple... and pretty much every vendor would love to get people buying things like this. The RIAA et al would also like to lock down functionality at the hardware/OS level as well.
I see this becoming a general trend towards less functional/flexible, but more 'usable' devices... of course, for people who insist on taking their device and doing whatever they like with it, they won't be happy. Certainly a subset of Slashdot will decry this as evil. But, I can think of a lot of people for whom this would actually be a better choice.
It seems to work in Europe where all the carriers are on GSM and switching providers is as simple as a sim card swap.
*phbtbtbtb* Europe, who goes there?;-)
But, seriously, did they all choose to use that infrastructure (ie because of Nokia or something), or were they told they had to?
Lord knows I like my GSM cell phone... when I want a new phone, I swap my SIM card and it works great. I can see being able to change carriers that easily would be great if you needed to.
It just seems like the carriers in the US have deliberately chosen not to use the same technology as everyone else... but, that could just be perception. They certainly have no interest in actually making things work any better for the consumer.
Europe might have more actual competition, whereas the US seems to have a bunch of regional monopolies who don't want to play well with other children.
I'm not really sure I like that idea. My uses for flashlights tend to be a) camping, and b) when the power goes out. Unfortunately with USB charging I would get one charge's worth of use in those situations.
Well, I bought a solar USB charger at Wal Mart for thirty bucks. Good enough to charge cell phones and iPods and still have juice left... not quite up to the task of charging my Tom Tom without being completely depleted. (In fact, I've got two of them, and they're fairly rugged and come with carabiners so you can attach them to packs or what have you. They can also be charged with a micro USB cable.)
I think portable USB power is actually becoming fairly easy to get nowadays, and I've even seen things you can put together relatively cheaply to give you USB powered by batteries.
As much as possible, I won't buy devices which don't charge from standard USB... there's craploads of ways to make that work out for you if everything uses the same cables. I've got a four port Kensington USB wall-socket thing... it'll handle 110/220V and 50Hz/60Hz so pretty much power in any country give or take the adapter for the physical plug.
Between the Kensington and the two solar things... I can actually cover a fair bit of my power needs --- I think charging the flashlight from USB is a brilliant idea.
Which carrier allows this? This is a market failure, no option for this exists.
In an environment where the carriers tell the FCC what the rules should be, or where companies buy legislation... the 'market' has already failed.
Why does everyone continue to believe that the 'market' is this self-regulating entity which comes up with optimal solutions and gets corrected by competition and other factors? It simply doesn't work that way, and it never has.
The 'market' isn't there to serve you or me, it's been set up so the major players hold all of the cards. It sure as hell isn't 'fair'.
We need regulations forcing all carriers onto the same types of networks and that they all sell each other transport. This way competition can exist.
*laugh* So, you think regulating the market into uniformity and proscribing what they can do will lead to competition and fairness?
Your beloved market doesn't work that way, and the carriers would balk and say they're not willing to spend the money or not be differentiated by being incompatible. Seriously, if someone on the FCC can rule there's no problem with a merger... and then take employment with the beneficiary of that merger... do you expect any regulation to not be stacked in favor of the big players?
It's an idealized economic model... it doesn't operate the way people think of it, and it never has... it doesn't have these wonderful self correcting measures, and regulation/legislation only distort things... and, really, even if it *did* work that way, the big players would game the system to get an advantage.
Years of watching this kind of stuff have convinced me that this 'market' and 'competition' of which you speak is a myth. Start out with a fair one, and you'll get cartels and price fixing within a short period of time... and competition won't naturally create better solutions, it will create better solutions at exploiting you.
People don't have perfect information, they don't make rational informed choices, and everybody is out to fuck everybody else over. All subsequent assumptions are distorted... and, occasionally when we see the markets tank, we get to see how badly the underlying system has been manipulated so that someone gets rich at everyone else's expense. Selling off bad debt as if it was AAA rated investments, for instance... one big shell game. A Ponzi scheme on a massive scale. And, yet, its proponents continue to claim that it will fix everything.
and we eventually worked out that someone from within the software company was trying to do a man-in-the-middle attack to snoop on the CEO's calls, he/she clearly hadn't got it working right and was interrupting one of the transmission paths, hence the problem.
We emailed the analysis to the customer and showed it was someone in their company causing the problem. From that point on, it went completely quiet - no daily secreaming from the customer, not even an acknowledgement of our emailed analysis.
Why does this make me think of the HP fiasco where they were illegal spying on their own people.
Somehow, I suspect that you stumbled on a similar bit of shadiness from within the company... and there was no way they were going to acknowledge that.
I'm am not going to sign up to some service which monitors my email load for me... I don't trust it, and I don't trust that it won't become a security risk.
And, really, I've more or less decided I don't trust any URL ending in.ly -- between not having any idea of what's on the other end of most of those link shorteners (goatse anyone), and not really trusting Lybia in any way, I don't trust that some shenanigans aren't happening or couldn't be made to happen.
I'm sure as hell not trusting some third party with access to my email. Do they really think a whole lot of people are going to do that? Or is everyone ready to do such things and trust this site?
I realize I'm probably on the paranoid end of such things, but I just can't fathom signing up for something like this. You can't have my banking password, either.
What's the matter? You've been telling us for years that if we didn't do anything wrong, there's no need for privacy. Welcome to our world.
Which, according to their logic is still true.
If they're taking the position that the members of Anonymous have crossed the line to doing something wrong... then there's still no need for privacy.
Expect them to say now that the only way to prove you're not a terrorist is to relinquish any form of anonymity. Oh, and don't expect them to see the difference to people protesting against oppressive regimes they don't like and this -- they might have to arrest you for pointing out their logical failure.
Of course, their own usage of the word persecution is interesting in this context.
I assure you that it does not. You're against painless tattoos because they would shatter the fragile illusion that having them makes you a badass.
LOL... I have no such illusion that I'm a badass. I'm a pasty white geek in my 40's, and at no point in time have I considered myself that. I was a geek before it was popular.
But, in the end, a "short cut" to getting a tattoo kinda circumvents the whole process, and it just means that everyone will run out for them -- though, admittedly, that re-programmable e-ink thing actually needs to be put in by a plastic surgeon.
Still, I will stick with the way tattoos are usually done -- I put a lot more meaning on something I had to sit through for several hours than I would something I can change to a fresh bitmap when I was bored.
I really wish Apple would divorce Itunes media player, Itunes store, and iDevice sync from each other.
Again, it's all about perception and what you want out of it.
To me, iTunes is what I use to manage my media, and is a convenient way to manage my iPod and my iPad -- it all works the same, and it's all in one place. I've also been using it for around 10 years now.
When I bought my iPad, I'd owned iPods for a long time... plug it in, select which movies and music to sync, ready to go in 20 minutes. Nothing new to install, just another device. I can manage as many devices from iTunes as I want to.
Just out of curiosity, what do you perceive has changed or is deficient? To me, the interface has mostly remained the same for as long as I've been using it. I actually like the fact that it's all integrated... but maybe because that's the way I expected it to be. Right now I've got four iPods and an iPad, all sync'd to the same library... adding a new one takes precisely zero work.
Painless and self-renewing (or maybe reprogrammable!) nano-tattoos coming soon to flesh near you?
As someone who has been tattooed multiple times... I'm against giving people a pain-free way to get one.
If they were painless, every whiny 16 year old would have full sleeves and back pieces like they were something easy to get.
They're supposed to hurt, dammit. The pain keeps out the wannabes.;-)
(And, believe me, I've heard 18 year old girls getting *tiny* tattoos screeching like they're being mauled by a bear -- apparently, they didn't realize it would hurt and almost stopped after the outline.)
in 2015, our monthly cap would have increased from 50GB/month to maybe 100GB/month, with $7 per additionnal GB, all of this for only $99/month!
Actually, by 2015 I see our monthly cap getting smaller as they continue to not invest in upgrading their networks.
The last decade has more or less been comprised of Bell and Rogers charging us more for less, and telling us it's an improvement.
If I tried to buy the same cell-phone plan I have now from the same company, it would cost $10/month more -- for less minutes, and the "evenings and weekends" starting after 9pm instead of 6pm.
From what I can tell, the major telcos are using their 10 year old infrastructure, charging is more for it, and telling us that it's new and improved.
Yeah, the market has completely flipped on that aspect. Style and marketing are what dominate now, and Microsoft will always be behind on fashion.
Depending on how long you've been around, what you call "style and marketing", some people call "usability and good design".
I remember DOS from the mid 80s, and have used the earliest versions of Windows, Linux, old Macs, and a bunch of different flavors of UNIX.
My personal perception is that my iPad and my iPod are easy to use, do exactly what I want them to, and don't suffer from some of the frustrations I've come to associate to Microsoft products over the years. (I like iTunes, and I've hated Windows Media Player for just as long.)
I've got Vista, XP, FreeBSD, and Linux machines at home. I'd still like to have a Mac.
IMO, there's substance behind Apple's style... and sometimes, Microsoft's style lacks substance. At the end of the day, it's what people are happy with -- and I have enough painful memories of Microsoft stuff to still be leery of them.
Hell, my retail copy of Vista Home Ultimate still makes me run into something where Microsoft deliberately crippled it so that I'd buy the more expensive version -- so, it is less capable for networking, and the built in back up manager lets me have exactly one scheduled backup set. There's no reason for this, other than Microsoft trying to carve up the market and get as much money from me as they can -- especially since all that was in there, but they took the time to cripple it.
Microsoft's operating systems have gotten vastly better over the years... but that doesn't mean I don't occasionally run into something and wonder WTF they were thinking.
They've tried to mirror Apple's ease of use with frustrating wizards and dialog boxes that don't always help. Anything but the most basic error, and their wizards fall apart (because, really, I know my network cable is plugged in... if that's the best help you have, it's useless). Once you exceed the most basic stuff, their attempts to make an easy user experience degrade to "something bad happened, contact your admin".
the PC won because you could buy cheap clones from any number of manufacturers, and they'd all run DOS and Windows, whereas anything from Apple would have exactly one choice of hardware manufacturer and OS provider: Apple.
That had more to do with IBM using an architecture they opened up than Microsoft in a lot of ways... the way the arrangement was set up, Microsoft was selling a copy with every piece of hardware up until about 2000 or whenever it was, because it was required to be sold with the PC. (And, since everyone else was using it, that's what people needed.)
Some might argue that Microsoft got where they are today because everyone who bought a PC also was forced to buy MS-DOS -- it wasn't necessarily a superior product at the time. In fact, there were better things that ran on the same hardware at the time. It took a court ruling to say that Microsoft wasn't legally entitled to a sale every time someone bought a PC -- but many of us remember buying a PC for Linux and knowing that Microsoft was getting paid anyway.
For years, the biggest selling point for Microsoft was that an Apple computer cost more than a white-box clone of an IBM PC, and that business primarily used IBM compatible.
Microsoft have never been advocates of open platforms... they just grew to prominence because of one. If Microsoft could have locked everything down earlier, they would have.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, given all of the news coverage from Facebook over the last few years ... I simply don't trust them to not suddenly make this information public in another few months. Not a little. They have a repeated pattern of deciding all of your information should be public ... the solution is to give them nothing.
And, really, it would be naive to think they haven't done it in the background and even if they haven't (yet) decided to show information to un-linked persons ... when the DHS shows up to them with a subpoena and a picture of someone and says "give us everything you have on this and if you tell anybody you go to jail".
Even the governments who claim to be bastions of freedom and democracy (I think we all know who I mean) have been shady about this kind of stuff. So, you'll forgive me if I have no trust whatsoever for Facebook in this regard.
Hell, didn't Google just decide not to roll out facial recognition because it opened up too many privacy issues?
Regardless of what it looks like to a given user, there's likely far more information sitting on Facebook's servers than they'll admit to. I think someone should start stalking Zuckerburg and his family and friends to be sure as much of their private information is made public .. that's more or less what they're doing to everyone else.
So, let me give you a thought experiment.
Say I don't have a Facebook account now (which I don't). But, say, Facebook has turned on facial recognition for all of the existing users (which they have).
So, this weekend if I go downtown to where all of the bars and nightlife are, and I start snapping pictures of people doing various things. Quietly, and unobtrusively mind you.
Now, say I create a facebook account with false profile information, solely so I can upload pictures of people I don't know doing various (and possibly stupid) things. You're no longer some random, mostly anonymous guy in a picture which could have been anywhere ... you're Bob from Detroit. And that guy with the crack pipe is your friend Dave and he's got an outstanding warrant.
By Facebook opting you in to having facial recognition done on you ... how many random people I have never met would be covered by them doing facial recognition on my pictures and associating them with you?
They opted you into something which potentially has fairly broad privacy implications. And, since they have it, the governments might subpoena them for the underlying data so they can feed it into their own system that keep track of citizens (and, they'll make sure Facebook doesn't tell anyone).
Is my example somewhat contrived and a little extreme? Absolutely. Do I think it's a plausible scenario? Sadly, yes.
The point is, they enable a lot of information gathering about people that can happen without any knowledge or consent. Which is what Facebook does every time they add a new feature. And, which is why I won't use Facebook.
I don't personally have an FB account ... but I do personally know literally dozens of professionals in the IT/consulting industry with FB accounts.
I fear we may be increasingly in the minority for this.
Hell, I know people who use their FB account to ask peers technical questions ... just throw out a general "anybody know this?".
No, but it's still stupid in that all you do is pay people according to their popularity, and give no consideration to what works are actually being read by specific people.
Again, they're paying that out based on 'popularity' and what essentially amounts to record sales reports ... so, all of the money goes to Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber.
If I'm not listening to either of them, the levy amounts to a subsidy of successful artists in proportion to their success ... to me, that makes no sense. I explicitly don't listen to those artists who are going to benefit from this formula.
Hell, the formula provided by the corrupt middle-men, so why should I trust them?
How is this reasonable? You tax me on the assumption I'm ripping you off, and then compensate random people based on a formula of how successful they have been and assume that they are being 'ripped off' in proportion to all of the moneys collected.
In the case of the 'tax' on blank media ... what if I'm not using the blank media for anything but backing up my own legal, digital information? WTF am I doing paying a tax to support artists if the media isn't being used to copy their stuff?
I support the artists I like by buying their fucking albums ... why should my money go to support some band I can't stand? Because some stupid formula says that that artist deserves 3% of the net revenues of all music because they accounted for 3% of sales in stores? And if you're taking it out of any other tax pool ... why should my parents, who don't buy music, be subsidizing artists?
I just don't get the logic behind this "compensate the most popular ones" ... it's stupid when the music industry proposes it, and it's stupid to do it for books.
Dude, if you think the only complaint we ever had against Microsoft was security ... you weren't there despite saying you were.
Windows was crappy, unstable, highly limited and barely capable of either using the resources you had in a machine ... or desperately needing boatloads more than you could be expected to have.
Blue Screens of death, Clippy, and any number of Steaming Heaps of Innovative Technology which never worked as expected or got completely abandoned over the years. All of the whiny kids who thought Windows '95 was the first time anyone invented real multi-tasking were delusional ... and believe me, I've met a lot of them.
When I switched away from Windows, the same box running Linux could give me true multi-tasking, the ability to run a bunch of programs at the same time on screen, free C compilers, loads of applications and speedy performance, actual networking, LaTeX, games ... contrasted with a bloated, slow, crashy piece of crap which didn't come with anything besides notepad and minesweeper (and if you wanted TCP/IP it was an add-on).
Microsoft has come a long way, and it is now my primary desktop and hosts my vmware workstation ... but in the early 90's into about 2000 or so (*cough* WinME *cough*), Windows was a complete turd (at least on desktop machines). Security and viruses was only one of the complaints at the time. But if you think they were the only ones that were causing some of us to move to Linux or FreeBSD (or anything else) ... you're sadly mistaken.
Have you used it, or are you just parroting what everyone else says?
It's different ... it's not trying to be a general computer in which you can compile and execute arbitrary code, or get a root shell and install Apache.
However, as someone who actually owns an iPad, I find it to be a useful device. I use it entirely differently than I use the computers that I use for my professional life ... and I find that to be actually quite nice. I'm not installing software with it, I'm not writing docs ... it's an entertainment device mostly.
I've boat-loads of apps including a lot of goofy little games, I've got music, I've got movies, I've got a couple of hundred books. It may not be the kind of device you want ... but I don't regret the purchase in any way, and it does everything I'd ever hoped for it.
You'd be amazed at just how much free, and very useful, stuff there is available for it. My days of compiling kernels are long since past ... so what you decry as limitations, I laud as a well designed and usable device.
Once size doesn't fit all ... you may need to learn to cope with the fact that people who aren't you want different things in a device than you do.
I put it in the "pretty good" range.
To fully recharge from depleted, it can take a couple of days (according to the web, depending on light etc) to recharge with modest sunlight (which is why I have two). It will recharge from a wall pretty quickly as a second option. It comes with a micro-usb cable for that purpose.
I don't have a direct comparison to your droid ... but I've charged my Motorola Krzr and then my iPod with it, and it showed as still mostly full. I don't consider either of these to be really heavy draw items.
Conversely, when I charge my Tom Tom with it, it's fully depleted and needs to recharge for a fair bit. This, I consider to be pretty heavy draw and is pushing the limit.
To give you a reference ... when I first bought it, I thought I'd be a clever guy and run my USB speakers from it. Well, it simply can't keep up with a sustained level like that ... but, I have another set of rechargeable USB speakers that have LiOn batteries ... and it charges them without difficulty and then they run for hours. (I recommend the speakers highly ... they rock and run a good 8 hours on a charge. 158 grams each, 1 will do, two rocks.)
It's really marketed as something you can keep in your car or on your backpack to recharge your phone on the go. It probably couldn't give you enough juice to run it.
So, it's really good at handing over its charge to something that isn't making a continuous draw. I've not used it extensively enough to have really good data points on just how long the recharge cycle really is ... but the case it's in is fairly rugged, and it comes with a carabiner to attach to packs as well as a plastic mounting thing you could put inside your windshield.
Don't look to run your gameboy or GPS from it ... I think it's really only 650 ma or something. I'd definitely say it's worth having one, even though it's not going to cover every situation.
For the price I spent for it at Wal Mart, I was very happy with it. I've definitely used it to charge my phone and iPod several times. It charges decently enough, and if it's pre-charged before you need it is when it's most handy.
Unless you're only flying from tiny little airports, I'm surprised by that. Even a medium-sized airport is crazy.
Depending on how big your city is, getting to the airport is likely a 30 minute or so affair. They suggest you arrive at the airport at least 90 minutes before your flight ... that's two hours right there. then your 30 minute flight. Figure 20 minutes easily to get your bags, and then assume another 30 minutes to your destination.
I figure that's 3.5 hrs right there, give or take.
Hell, when I fly a longer haul flight ... the trip time to the airport, the recommended arrival time, and the time on the back end don't change. My usual flight is about 4h15 minutes ... and the trip takes me about 7.5 hrs door to door.
In all but the most tiny of regional airports, I can't see how you are getting away with only 2 hours including flight time. In my experience, there's pretty much 2 hrs minimum on the front end of the flight, and 1 hr on the backend ... regardless of the actual flight time.
Right now, a 2 hour flight gets me to visit my parents ... a 15 hour drive otherwise (assuming you actually follow the speed limits). Since I can't drive that long, I'd also need to stay in a hotel. Oh, and I'd need to eat and buy gas.
When I travel for business, I'm typically traveling much further than that. (More like a 4-5 hour flight).
If one places any value whatsoever on ones time ... spending 10 hours in a car isn't viable in a lot of contexts. Leaving the "don't go" option, or air travel.
I'm not entirely keen on this new big brother airport of the future ... but there's a lot of contexts where traveling by car simply isn't a viable option. I can fly to visit my parents for a weekend ... if I drove there ... well, there would be no point if I only had a weekend since it couldn't happen.
And, really, I don't see this as being any different from the Google Chrome notebooks which will basically do their upgrades from the servers and free users from the pain of maintaining them.
The goal is a really simple device, with really limited config, and less things to go wrong with it .... since many people really do just want to treat their computer as a device like their microwave or TV, I suspect people will buy them.
This idea isn't unique to Apple ... and pretty much every vendor would love to get people buying things like this. The RIAA et al would also like to lock down functionality at the hardware/OS level as well.
I see this becoming a general trend towards less functional/flexible, but more 'usable' devices ... of course, for people who insist on taking their device and doing whatever they like with it, they won't be happy. Certainly a subset of Slashdot will decry this as evil. But, I can think of a lot of people for whom this would actually be a better choice.
*phbtbtbtb* Europe, who goes there? ;-)
But, seriously, did they all choose to use that infrastructure (ie because of Nokia or something), or were they told they had to?
Lord knows I like my GSM cell phone ... when I want a new phone, I swap my SIM card and it works great. I can see being able to change carriers that easily would be great if you needed to.
It just seems like the carriers in the US have deliberately chosen not to use the same technology as everyone else ... but, that could just be perception. They certainly have no interest in actually making things work any better for the consumer.
Europe might have more actual competition, whereas the US seems to have a bunch of regional monopolies who don't want to play well with other children.
Well, I bought a solar USB charger at Wal Mart for thirty bucks. Good enough to charge cell phones and iPods and still have juice left ... not quite up to the task of charging my Tom Tom without being completely depleted. (In fact, I've got two of them, and they're fairly rugged and come with carabiners so you can attach them to packs or what have you. They can also be charged with a micro USB cable.)
I think portable USB power is actually becoming fairly easy to get nowadays, and I've even seen things you can put together relatively cheaply to give you USB powered by batteries.
As much as possible, I won't buy devices which don't charge from standard USB ... there's craploads of ways to make that work out for you if everything uses the same cables. I've got a four port Kensington USB wall-socket thing ... it'll handle 110/220V and 50Hz/60Hz so pretty much power in any country give or take the adapter for the physical plug.
Between the Kensington and the two solar things ... I can actually cover a fair bit of my power needs --- I think charging the flashlight from USB is a brilliant idea.
LOL ... he's not joking.
That's the funniest thing I've heard in weeks. :-P
In an environment where the carriers tell the FCC what the rules should be, or where companies buy legislation ... the 'market' has already failed.
Why does everyone continue to believe that the 'market' is this self-regulating entity which comes up with optimal solutions and gets corrected by competition and other factors? It simply doesn't work that way, and it never has.
The 'market' isn't there to serve you or me, it's been set up so the major players hold all of the cards. It sure as hell isn't 'fair'.
*laugh* So, you think regulating the market into uniformity and proscribing what they can do will lead to competition and fairness?
Your beloved market doesn't work that way, and the carriers would balk and say they're not willing to spend the money or not be differentiated by being incompatible. Seriously, if someone on the FCC can rule there's no problem with a merger ... and then take employment with the beneficiary of that merger ... do you expect any regulation to not be stacked in favor of the big players?
It's an idealized economic model ... it doesn't operate the way people think of it, and it never has ... it doesn't have these wonderful self correcting measures, and regulation/legislation only distort things ... and, really, even if it *did* work that way, the big players would game the system to get an advantage.
Years of watching this kind of stuff have convinced me that this 'market' and 'competition' of which you speak is a myth. Start out with a fair one, and you'll get cartels and price fixing within a short period of time ... and competition won't naturally create better solutions, it will create better solutions at exploiting you.
People don't have perfect information, they don't make rational informed choices, and everybody is out to fuck everybody else over. All subsequent assumptions are distorted ... and, occasionally when we see the markets tank, we get to see how badly the underlying system has been manipulated so that someone gets rich at everyone else's expense. Selling off bad debt as if it was AAA rated investments, for instance ... one big shell game. A Ponzi scheme on a massive scale. And, yet, its proponents continue to claim that it will fix everything.
Why does this make me think of the HP fiasco where they were illegal spying on their own people.
Somehow, I suspect that you stumbled on a similar bit of shadiness from within the company ... and there was no way they were going to acknowledge that.
I'm am not going to sign up to some service which monitors my email load for me ... I don't trust it, and I don't trust that it won't become a security risk.
And, really, I've more or less decided I don't trust any URL ending in .ly -- between not having any idea of what's on the other end of most of those link shorteners (goatse anyone), and not really trusting Lybia in any way, I don't trust that some shenanigans aren't happening or couldn't be made to happen.
I'm sure as hell not trusting some third party with access to my email. Do they really think a whole lot of people are going to do that? Or is everyone ready to do such things and trust this site?
I realize I'm probably on the paranoid end of such things, but I just can't fathom signing up for something like this. You can't have my banking password, either.
Oh, well then ... carry on ... I agree completely. :-P
Oh ... you evil (yet funny) bastard. ;-)
Which, according to their logic is still true.
If they're taking the position that the members of Anonymous have crossed the line to doing something wrong ... then there's still no need for privacy.
Expect them to say now that the only way to prove you're not a terrorist is to relinquish any form of anonymity. Oh, and don't expect them to see the difference to people protesting against oppressive regimes they don't like and this -- they might have to arrest you for pointing out their logical failure.
Of course, their own usage of the word persecution is interesting in this context.
LOL ... I have no such illusion that I'm a badass. I'm a pasty white geek in my 40's, and at no point in time have I considered myself that. I was a geek before it was popular.
But, in the end, a "short cut" to getting a tattoo kinda circumvents the whole process, and it just means that everyone will run out for them -- though, admittedly, that re-programmable e-ink thing actually needs to be put in by a plastic surgeon.
Still, I will stick with the way tattoos are usually done -- I put a lot more meaning on something I had to sit through for several hours than I would something I can change to a fresh bitmap when I was bored.
Again, it's all about perception and what you want out of it.
To me, iTunes is what I use to manage my media, and is a convenient way to manage my iPod and my iPad -- it all works the same, and it's all in one place. I've also been using it for around 10 years now.
When I bought my iPad, I'd owned iPods for a long time ... plug it in, select which movies and music to sync, ready to go in 20 minutes. Nothing new to install, just another device. I can manage as many devices from iTunes as I want to.
Just out of curiosity, what do you perceive has changed or is deficient? To me, the interface has mostly remained the same for as long as I've been using it. I actually like the fact that it's all integrated ... but maybe because that's the way I expected it to be. Right now I've got four iPods and an iPad, all sync'd to the same library ... adding a new one takes precisely zero work.
As someone who has been tattooed multiple times ... I'm against giving people a pain-free way to get one.
If they were painless, every whiny 16 year old would have full sleeves and back pieces like they were something easy to get.
They're supposed to hurt, dammit. The pain keeps out the wannabes. ;-)
(And, believe me, I've heard 18 year old girls getting *tiny* tattoos screeching like they're being mauled by a bear -- apparently, they didn't realize it would hurt and almost stopped after the outline.)
Actually, by 2015 I see our monthly cap getting smaller as they continue to not invest in upgrading their networks.
The last decade has more or less been comprised of Bell and Rogers charging us more for less, and telling us it's an improvement.
If I tried to buy the same cell-phone plan I have now from the same company, it would cost $10/month more -- for less minutes, and the "evenings and weekends" starting after 9pm instead of 6pm.
From what I can tell, the major telcos are using their 10 year old infrastructure, charging is more for it, and telling us that it's new and improved.
Depending on how long you've been around, what you call "style and marketing", some people call "usability and good design".
I remember DOS from the mid 80s, and have used the earliest versions of Windows, Linux, old Macs, and a bunch of different flavors of UNIX.
My personal perception is that my iPad and my iPod are easy to use, do exactly what I want them to, and don't suffer from some of the frustrations I've come to associate to Microsoft products over the years. (I like iTunes, and I've hated Windows Media Player for just as long.)
I've got Vista, XP, FreeBSD, and Linux machines at home. I'd still like to have a Mac.
IMO, there's substance behind Apple's style ... and sometimes, Microsoft's style lacks substance. At the end of the day, it's what people are happy with -- and I have enough painful memories of Microsoft stuff to still be leery of them.
Hell, my retail copy of Vista Home Ultimate still makes me run into something where Microsoft deliberately crippled it so that I'd buy the more expensive version -- so, it is less capable for networking, and the built in back up manager lets me have exactly one scheduled backup set. There's no reason for this, other than Microsoft trying to carve up the market and get as much money from me as they can -- especially since all that was in there, but they took the time to cripple it.
Microsoft's operating systems have gotten vastly better over the years ... but that doesn't mean I don't occasionally run into something and wonder WTF they were thinking.
They've tried to mirror Apple's ease of use with frustrating wizards and dialog boxes that don't always help. Anything but the most basic error, and their wizards fall apart (because, really, I know my network cable is plugged in ... if that's the best help you have, it's useless). Once you exceed the most basic stuff, their attempts to make an easy user experience degrade to "something bad happened, contact your admin".
That had more to do with IBM using an architecture they opened up than Microsoft in a lot of ways ... the way the arrangement was set up, Microsoft was selling a copy with every piece of hardware up until about 2000 or whenever it was, because it was required to be sold with the PC. (And, since everyone else was using it, that's what people needed.)
Some might argue that Microsoft got where they are today because everyone who bought a PC also was forced to buy MS-DOS -- it wasn't necessarily a superior product at the time. In fact, there were better things that ran on the same hardware at the time. It took a court ruling to say that Microsoft wasn't legally entitled to a sale every time someone bought a PC -- but many of us remember buying a PC for Linux and knowing that Microsoft was getting paid anyway.
For years, the biggest selling point for Microsoft was that an Apple computer cost more than a white-box clone of an IBM PC, and that business primarily used IBM compatible.
Microsoft have never been advocates of open platforms ... they just grew to prominence because of one. If Microsoft could have locked everything down earlier, they would have.