I doubt it, as the company was willing to sell a 'naked' laptop, which MS hates about as much as a Linux sale, if not more so. MS has posted articles urging companies not to ship 'naked' pcs as they are only catering to pirates. as there is no way a naked pc could get an OS legitimately, right? MS has been shown to force OEMs through illegal pricing schemes to only ship a PC if a license for Windows is sold with it, even if shipped naked or with Linux instead.
The reason the desktop market is so open in the x86 world is because there is no way to go back once the path is taken. True, overcoming barrier to entry into the market might be a temptation for a fledgling company to try for a standard.However, market inertia in this case means the standard is useless. If only a small handful of no-name manufacturers stand behind a 'standard', the market used to big names would be too dubious of inexperienced newcomers. The fledgling company also knows that if by luck beyond luck the standard catches on and is widely adopted, the traditional manufacturers can start following the standards and drive the newcomer into the ground with their more efficient processes. Fledgling companies can see this and would rather play it safe and hope for big-name contracts rather than mass-market acceptance. That is my hypothesis, but IANABP.
How many laptop users change their wireless card once installed? Not many relative to hard drives, *especially* in a business environment. If a business uses drive imaging for set up, this is critical. With a PC, unscrew a few things, get the hard drive, plug it into a desktop (with 9 dollar adapter) and install the image. HDDs also are much much much more likely to fail than an airport card, and once out of warranty, who would want to pay apple the extortion fees of their repair service when it can be done much more cheaply yourself, so you are digging through the case to save money. The likelihood that a non-tech person trying to save money will do serious damage is much higher when they have to disassemble the whole thing as opposed to just getting at the hard drive. Same goes for memory, although easier to access than the drive, it is not a replacement/upgrade that is as likely as soon.
The ultimate question is, what is gained by making it harder to access this stuff? A few extra lines in the case. What is lost? A great deal of flexibility. I like Mac laptops because they are quiet, cool (except the fire hazard that is the 12" powerbook), and have long battery life. Laptops are significantly harder to service in general than desktops, but apple laptops really raise the bar in difficult to service laptops.
There are a lot more factors, even admitted by you.
You said you were in a special school, and advanced math, while your son is not. You say it is one of the finest education systems, but that reputation could be misformulated.
Different public school systems in the same state can have drastically different programs that proceed at really different paces. Look at Freshman at any college (where a lot of people from really different systems have to pick up wherever they can). When I was a college freshman just 5 years ago, I didn't need to take Calculus I, II, or III, and I came from a public school. Meanwhile, a few still needed precalculus, and some even algebra. Some school systems are complete crap, some are quite capable, it truly is a pot luck sort of thing. Also, in the case of the C in Math, that is one class, one teacher. When you start talking about individual teachers, you get a *lot* of difference. Even the best schools occasionally have a really bad teacher or a good teacher goes off the deep end for a year.
I started off in a really rural school district. It was decent, not great, but pretty good with traditional education. Now computers start entering into the system big time as the school system can finally afford them. The faculty lacks experience and thus many of the students knew more about electronics and computers than they did. Teachers with little experience beyond typewriters and basic word processors had to deal with computers that weren't the friendlist things to start with. By the time I left that system, I had been punished a lot for correcting mistakes made by them, including poorly configured printers that printed at about 3 minutes per page, when 5 ppm was possible. They thought I broke it because 'printers don't work that fast, they'll burn up', and reset it to the old mode. A system BSODed and I rebooted it to get research done. They banned me from computers in the school. I left the system and went elsewhere. I became an administrator of a network at another public school, and they encouraged students to become accustomed to the technology, not to be afraid of it.
I think what will cause it is the same thing that caused manufacturing to go oversees. As long as the majority of the US can maintain their standard of living, the lost jobs are 'somebody else's problems'. The money required to live caters to the majority, and thus cheap labor in the US just won't work. Maybe if this tips the scales so that a majority of the US suddenly are faced with these problems, then we will see some correction.
My iBook... I can change the battery easily..... and I can lift the keyboard and access the airport card with little difficulty... Go through a pain in the ass and I can get to the memory slot... Getting to the hard drive requires pretty much disassembling the entire thing with a jeweler's screwdriver and a teeny-tiny allen wrench...
Typical PC laptop: I am within 2 or three screws of accessing mini-PCI,memory, and hard drive. This laptop allows you to get to much much more than an Apple product will let you get at. The PowerMac towers are relatively well designed with respect to upgrading, but ultimately, Apple products are a systems approach without easy path to maintenance and upgrade.
I couldn't care less about how the bottom of my laptop that I never look at anyway *looks*, I care about the utility. The bottom is a good place to make ass-ugly for the sake of upgrading, you aren't stuck looking at it while using it.
On the other hand, the Dell laptops I have used weigh a ton and suck battery like crazy when compared to Apple laptops. Some PC laptops I've seen weigh appropriate amounts (not by Dell), but none come close to an Apple laptop's battery life.. So it isn't exactly perfect on the PC side of laptops either...
The answer is that there is nothing in it for them. Manufacturing for OEMs means they have more control over the market and can get more cash per unit. The hard drives, optical drives, memory, CardBus, and mini-PCI all all standardized ways of manufacturers getting cash off the commodity laptop market. Meanwhile, the motherboards, case, power supply, battery, and display manufacturers make a killing by charging so much. Same reason Apple doesn't want clones, letting the market get too open and the prices start running down and eliminating profit margins very quickly. That is why PC laptops are almost as pricy as Apple laptops, and manufacturers recognize a good thing when they see it.
There have been. I've dealt with some of them in supporting employees at CAD places. They complain "everything is so squished" when they try to run a 4:3 resolution on them.... Sigh...
I can't remember the brands, but they weren't SGI displays. A lot of companies catering to engineers running CAD have wide displays out there..
I can't see corporations seeing a benefit from anything beyond the current form of AIM (or MSN, or whatever). Those that would embrace it see nothing wrong with using the central servers. That is what enables it to work. If the servers go down, *everyone* knows and understands. Reliability is important, but accountability is more important. If it is obvious to people that it isn't the company's fault, it isn't so bad for the company as it would be if they perceived that the company is too incompetent to maintain their mail server, or else not realize the server is down and assume an important communication goes through that didn't. If companies *really* wanted IM on that level, Jabber would see more widespread deployment.
On the other hand, a great number of companies don't take IM seriously. The market perception, especially by those in suits, is that IM is seen as a toy technology, for personal use only. At the previous two companies I worked at, any kind of IM client was banned by company policy, it was seen as too much of a distraction. Didn't stop people. The network administrator was forced to 'block' traffic. He then proceeded to block it only to the point where the suits could test and think it was effectively blocked, yet provided people circumvention tips when asked. This is a boneheaded strategy, it is another viable communication form. Even now, when dealing with companies with a problematic mail server who need to communicate with me and I ask if they have an IM service and they seem to find it funny to even think of using IM in such a way. The attitude reflects 'this is a place of business, why would we be on an IM service while working, that is preposterous!'. Phones are for 'instant communication', email is for electronic correspondence, and many suits see that as that, with no middleground to fill.
Personally, I think IM services are a great thing for business and personal use. It is a great way to communicate without being obtrusive into work. While doing IM, I can do other things while waiting for responses. If on the phone, it is really hard to do anything else but focus on the phone. I've always been fond of Jabber, and wish that it would catch on. I know better though. Suits that have stereotyped IM as a toy are going to be a really hard sell on this I think.
As if slashdot didn't mistake IIS and ISS enough as it is, now another ISS for slashdot...
All that aside, I have but one thing to say, I'm glad I use postfix.
Is it inherently more secure? Maybe, who knows. Is it more obscure and presents a smaller profile to attackers? Is it less used so a worm would targetted at postfix would have a poor propogation environment?
This is the good thing about having a good size set of nearly equivalent applications to perform the same function. If systems made use of a more diverse set of operating systems, then any particular Windows, IIS, Apache, Sendmail, etc. worm wouldn't be so catastrophic.. Of course, on the flip side, if you were running IIS when a massive IIS worm hits the net, people at least understand the problem, if your postfix mail server gets hit with a postfix attack, people corresponding with you won't see a front-page cnn article talking about it like they do IIS worms, so they will be less understanding...
Legitimate as in not violating the licensing terms of the original project. For example, if CinePaint was a closed-source product, it would be an illegitimate fork. Bastard GIMP.....
But I can't help but to think users would think it strange that the UI, while possibly keeping a consistant Feel, change looks with Every release now.... I mean, adding gradients in 98 and 2000 was pretty minor. The changes to XP were drastic enough, and looks playskool to me, but occasional change I understand (3.x to 95 for example) (even though Apple seems more concerned with this and only underwent one 'major' Look and feel overhaul in the Days of MacOS, everything until OSX was quite small, incremental changes, that only tend to add color). This really makes MS look like a company that really doesn't care about consistent UI, favoring instead eye candy. I appreciate Eye Candy (hell, I change Window Managers quite frequently, but I *do* seem to always come back to WindowMaker), but if you are supposedly catering to ease of use, it should be low on the priority list.
That new start menu seems in XP seems to be more about keeping the desktop clean and looking flashy. The frequently used items menu can be annoying as it can change, and some users just skip that list because they can almost never be sure what they are looking for is there, so why bother looking?
Everyone I know stuck with XP switches at least to the classic start menu first. A lot of business users I have dealt with insist on the classic look, because the new look doesn't look professional...
Edit.Xdefaults (or.Xresources, whatever) to do: Xcursor.theme: where name is a subdir of/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons or ~/.icons
Then: xrdb ~/.Xdefaults
Then: Restart your window manager, not necessarily X, just the window manager. Probably another way to do it, but that seems to reinitialize cursors in most cases.
The sd2xc utility mentioned below seems to work well.
I imagine that before too long all this functionality will be in a trivial app. Aside from having Xcursor reinit, I could have a nice gui program to do this inside of 15 minutes, and I'm too lazy to figure out how to do the reinit from PyGTK;)
I wonder what the deal is. I've hated having to buy laptops as a whole system bought from a single source. I've came to just accept that I have to live with it...
Why, you ask, do I care so much? Is it just to be 'elite'? Hell no, it is because I *hate* dealing with any problems that crop up in the warranty period. In dealing with my desktops, a part breaks under warranty, I contact that particular company, send in that *one* part, and have a replacement back in short order. Some people say they are afraid of hardware manufacturers trying to blame other pieces of equipment to avoid servicing, but that has never happened to me. I send it in, they test and verify that it is broken, and they fix it or send a working part. Has always been smooth for me, thankfully.
With the whole systems approach, something under warranty breaks. I call and say 'this portion of the laptop is broken, I want to send in this part, or at least remove the hard drive so some idiot tech doesn't see Linux, freak out, and reformat with Windows'. They say 'Linux isn't supported, you must include the hard drive, it *will* be wiped and replaced with Windows so we can run our test software to verify the problem is fixed, and if we cannot do this we will not repair it'. I've been fighting for weeks to get warranty repair without losing data. The problem is easy to test, if you press the power button and the power light comes on, the problem is fixed, end of story. If the power light stays off even though AC is connected, it is still broken. The problem with it has *nothing* to do with the drive, and they don't need to run any software to figure out if they fixed it or not. Why should it be any of their business what I run, when it clearly didn't cause the problem? Guess I got spoiled when I would call this same company regarding a business laptop and had them bend over backwards to kiss my ass regarding the very same request about not shipping a hard drive.
Also, come a year and a half after purchase, say my memory has a problem. Well, the system is out of warranty. With my desktop, the memory happens to have a lifetime warranty. Having a system where everything is at least a year warranty, with some parts longer is much better than having the whole thing end after a year.
A memory manufacturer has never threatened to deny me service because of the software I run, as long as I don't overclock. A video card manufacturer has never said they can erase my drive contents if they want to run tests. Why should I have to deal with this treatment for laptops? Why is it that I can even build PDAs from parts, and to this day I cannot build a real laptop from parts?
I stand corrected, guess I should RTFA. Now that is an interesting issue. Perhaps it is a case sensitive search program and caught the string "Office" and not "office"? Would seem stupid, but it is the only technical reason I could see...
They may be cease&desist happy, shooting them off without much verification, but before they would bring things to court, they would at least try to collect preliminary evidence and realize they have nothing...
It would be amusing, but I doubt anyone will bother to file a case before getting admissable evidence and reviewing it.
I would imagine that simply matching the word 'office' could be *WAY* too broad. I would suspect they search by filemasks, i.e.: *office*.zip *office*.exe etc... They probably don't search for Office without an executable or archive format extension common to windows, as rpm is not.
To be fair, that program was intentionally meant to draw just that kind of confusion. I was quite amused by its existence, but IIRC, the page itself said they didn't think the application was very practically useful, but it fit the name and creating confusion over the issue was more the goal than anything.
I could understand using 'decss' as a string to find and automate warning letters about (*If* you are willing to accept that decss was an immoral program, I disagree, but for the sake of argument..), as it is a rather unique name to the application at hand, and is not likely to be shared by something accidentally.
Office, however, is a rather generic name. It happens to be the only part of the MS Office name that is common to most of the warez zip files, I would guess (I actually don't have a warez copy of Office, the only copy of Office I have is the Office 97 that shipped with an older Gateway system, and I happen to only use it on that system, since it also is the only Windows machine in the house).
StarOffice, OpenOffice, and probably others would share this problem, and their script should be more careful about checking for this.
Of course, I don't expect too much out of the BSA, they are essentially a group of professional extortionists whose practices are probably illegal if thoroughly tested in court. Threatening to tell on you unless given money seems illegal to me, I would think they would have to go straight to court before doing anything, and that is only if the company being represented has signed off to let the BSA act on their behalf.. Of course, people running Linux and OpenOffice have nothing to worry about;)
Drivers are generic (at least in linux, everything modern is done through generic SCSI or scsi emulation over IDE.
My misunderstanding is saying that it was RW, when in fact it is just recordable, the new thing being able to stamp part of it to save on costs, but leave the rest open for whatever.
If they extended it to RW, then the save-on-the-cd concept could work (burning software can be lightweight, if specialized, cdrecord is small and can do a bit of stuff.)
Of course, the practical implications I still say are limited. Could be used in consoles to make discs more 'cartridge-like', but the tech would probably be ultimately slower than memory cards (unless you want the console to sound like a jet engine while saving), and console users have become used to memory cards. Nearly zero practical application of this strategy in PCs (maybe gaming on the go, but few people care).
It is new. I would debate usefulness, but it is novel.
The idea is that a subset of those sessions are write-once (CD-Rs). Maybe stamped, maybe burned (didn't read the article), but in any event, they can be written only once and never reused.
The rest of the disc would be CD-RW. So if you wrote a session and filled the disc, you could re-use a session burned to the RW section of the disc.
Not too useful. *Maybe* you could have a game run entirely from CD, saving progress in the RW area. If the drives are fast enough, and the game writers efficient with game state information required in a save file, this *could* be feasible. This is still a stretch as the cost/benefit ratio is still garbage...
If you are unwilling to put measures in place to prevent boot from CD then you have no hope whatsoever of securing your systems.
If someone can boot from a configuration other than the default OS, they have free reign, the system operates on their terms. Any IT manager who has security as a priority and takes no measures to prevent booting from CD by a common user deserves to lose their job.
If the user can exploit the recovery console to gain access, it means the data was insecure to begin with. Even if MS played nice and put restrictions on the recovery console, that would just be a false sense of security, as that does nothing to deal with non-MS released utilities that could do the same thing (i.e. a custom linux boot cd, etc).
Now the one thing I have seen suggested is that EFS might be defeated in the face of this. I have no idea if this is true, but if it is, *there* is your point of argument. EFS is *supposed* to protect data from just this sort of attack. If there exists a trivial method to access the data without the original password, then it is complete garbage. But if you think that just leaving an system bootable by CD without taking measures to encrypt sensitive data, instead relying on filesystem permissions alone to protect it, then you are a fool.
I don't think going full force against Iraq for crimes the US has failed to prove is the correct choice of action.
If the US does have *proof* of what the US alleges, it should be brought to the attention of the allies. If whatever evidence the US can present isn't convincing enough to sway allies, then it isn't enough to go to war. Going to war without the support of the allies and against the desires of the allies is bad. *If* Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, they sure as hell can't do anything with them right now under the scrutiny of the world. The US can afford to be patient in this matter.
It is *really* hard to believe anything the US government puts out about this issue. It is clear, the US are going to attack very soon, disregarding the position of all of its allies, disregarding the protests of the people. Iraq *knows* this, and is now faced with two options: 1) Destroy the missles, make themselves look good and appease most of the U.N. In doing so, making themselves weaker, and the US will attack anyway, because they don't give a damn. 2) Keep the missles. Piss off more of UN. Face more opponents in a war. Come out looking bad and beaten.
They cannot win in this situation. Hussein requests a internationally televised debate between him and Bush. Bush refuses to take it seriously. Why the hell not? No matter what Bush thinks, he should at least give the *appearance* he is interested in letting both sides be known and letting the people see them. If Bush's convicitons are right, why should he fear a debate? He certainly cannot claim the matter is too insignificant, it is a very critical issue for the whole world.
Also, saying explicitly that no matter how many protest in the US, he will not be swayed is boneheaded. The president is supposed to represent and accomodate the will of the people. If 60% of the people protested and he refuses to be swayed, he wouldn't be fulfilling his duty.
And if it is truly about getting rid of a dangerous tyrant, why the *hell* are they ignoring N. Korea, saying they are innocuous? Even if Iraq has weapons, they lack the delivery capability. N. Korea seems to have the capability to strike US Soil, and they make it public knowledge and make repeated threats. The US response comes off as 'Oh that silly N. Korea, they're harmless, ignore their nukes and delivery capacity, now Iraq, they are dangerous, they *might* have a warhead.. somewhere.... maybe... let's go attack iraq and liberate the iraqi oil... err people!'
*Maybe* the US military has good reason and evidence for an assault, I wouldn't doubt it. But even if they do have right on their side, they sure as hell are not handling it in a manner that looks good in the eyes of the world. Don't withold evidence. At least *pretend* to participate some in peaceful approaches to the issue (i.e. debate). Act consistantly towards threats (don't ignore N. Korea if your sole justification for war is to pre-empt aggressive nations.)
I know, Saddam and his regime isn't good. I know they are likely lying about a lot of things. But the US *cannot* just pretend the rest of the world's opinion and view does not matter. Everyone knows that ultimately this is about getting oil so those SUVs can keep on wasting that gas. If they treated N. Korea the same way and at least appeared to participate in peaceful, diplomatic approaches, the US would look a lot better.
Re:The article says MS tells you this beforehand
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Examining Microsoft Update
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, most other platforms do everything client side. The updater says 'give me a list of all available updates', and then the updater does the filtering client side. Only the release number overall of the OS is known.
Sure, updates downloaded from MS sites could be tracked easily anyway, each download request could be associated with IP and such. But if non-MS programs are being probed, then they are wrongly exploiting the updater.
Privacy violation?
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NYT on RFID Tags
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Unless you are stealing from the store, the clerk and the cash register know everything you buy anyway.
If it ends up having *any* impact on privacy, it would be too *improve* privacy. No matter what, the cash register system has the *potential* to track your purchases that you pay for. Currently, when you buy stuff, every individual item must be handled by the cashier to be scanned, so the cashier is intimately familiar with your purchase. If used properly, this thing could scan an entire cart without digging through every item. Items you want to hide can be hidden. They still are paid for, but the cashier only sees the total sum, not each purchase. Combine this with anonymous currency (only paper money right now) and individuals are in no way associated with their purchases, neither by humans nor by computer.
Afraid of those items being tracked after leaving the store? Rip out those tags when you are out of there.
One time on tv about half an hour before a broadcast advertising for the news. They said 'find out about a secret nuclear reactor, right in our own city!'
Then another commercial in the next break comes on. 'Watch as we show you a nuclear reactor, closer to your home than you probably think!' And it showed a picture of the nuclear engineering building at the local university. I burst into laughter. That reactor was hardly 'secret', it is a well advertised reactor, a very puny one. I toured it about 4 years ago....
Then the final commercial.... 'we'll show you our hidden camera investigation where our undercover reporter infiltrates security and gets into the reactor room!' And it showed a picture of something I could understand a layman mistaking for the reactor, but it certainly was not the reactor.
During the broadcast they made a big point of how they were able to see labs and classrooms, and then unveiled their 'killer' footage. The camera man, obviously excited, walks all around for a long time taking every possible shot he can of what *he* thought was a reactor, but it was just a cooling device not related to the reactor at all. About five minutes after the broadcast, they announce a correction, that they had learned that it wasn't a reactor, and that the place housing the reactor wasn't accessible, but still the thought this stuff was dangerous in the hands of terrorists because it said 'high voltage...'
The news always botches this stuff up. How many times have you seen news reports on a technology you are intimately familiar with and laughed your ass off at the inaccuracies?
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it, as the company was willing to sell a 'naked' laptop, which MS hates about as much as a Linux sale, if not more so. MS has posted articles urging companies not to ship 'naked' pcs as they are only catering to pirates. as there is no way a naked pc could get an OS legitimately, right?
MS has been shown to force OEMs through illegal pricing schemes to only ship a PC if a license for Windows is sold with it, even if shipped naked or with Linux instead.
The reason the desktop market is so open in the x86 world is because there is no way to go back once the path is taken. True, overcoming barrier to entry into the market might be a temptation for a fledgling company to try for a standard.However, market inertia in this case means the standard is useless. If only a small handful of no-name manufacturers stand behind a 'standard', the market used to big names would be too dubious of inexperienced newcomers. The fledgling company also knows that if by luck beyond luck the standard catches on and is widely adopted, the traditional manufacturers can start following the standards and drive the newcomer into the ground with their more efficient processes. Fledgling companies can see this and would rather play it safe and hope for big-name contracts rather than mass-market acceptance. That is my hypothesis, but IANABP.
How many laptop users change their wireless card once installed? Not many relative to hard drives, *especially* in a business environment. If a business uses drive imaging for set up, this is critical. With a PC, unscrew a few things, get the hard drive, plug it into a desktop (with 9 dollar adapter) and install the image. HDDs also are much much much more likely to fail than an airport card, and once out of warranty, who would want to pay apple the extortion fees of their repair service when it can be done much more cheaply yourself, so you are digging through the case to save money. The likelihood that a non-tech person trying to save money will do serious damage is much higher when they have to disassemble the whole thing as opposed to just getting at the hard drive. Same goes for memory, although easier to access than the drive, it is not a replacement/upgrade that is as likely as soon.
The ultimate question is, what is gained by making it harder to access this stuff? A few extra lines in the case. What is lost? A great deal of flexibility. I like Mac laptops because they are quiet, cool (except the fire hazard that is the 12" powerbook), and have long battery life. Laptops are significantly harder to service in general than desktops, but apple laptops really raise the bar in difficult to service laptops.
There are a lot more factors, even admitted by you.
You said you were in a special school, and advanced math, while your son is not. You say it is one of the finest education systems, but that reputation could be misformulated.
Different public school systems in the same state can have drastically different programs that proceed at really different paces. Look at Freshman at any college (where a lot of people from really different systems have to pick up wherever they can). When I was a college freshman just 5 years ago, I didn't need to take Calculus I, II, or III, and I came from a public school. Meanwhile, a few still needed precalculus, and some even algebra. Some school systems are complete crap, some are quite capable, it truly is a pot luck sort of thing. Also, in the case of the C in Math, that is one class, one teacher. When you start talking about individual teachers, you get a *lot* of difference. Even the best schools occasionally have a really bad teacher or a good teacher goes off the deep end for a year.
I started off in a really rural school district. It was decent, not great, but pretty good with traditional education. Now computers start entering into the system big time as the school system can finally afford them. The faculty lacks experience and thus many of the students knew more about electronics and computers than they did. Teachers with little experience beyond typewriters and basic word processors had to deal with computers that weren't the friendlist things to start with. By the time I left that system, I had been punished a lot for correcting mistakes made by them, including poorly configured printers that printed at about 3 minutes per page, when 5 ppm was possible. They thought I broke it because 'printers don't work that fast, they'll burn up', and reset it to the old mode. A system BSODed and I rebooted it to get research done. They banned me from computers in the school. I left the system and went elsewhere. I became an administrator of a network at another public school, and they encouraged students to become accustomed to the technology, not to be afraid of it.
I think what will cause it is the same thing that caused manufacturing to go oversees. As long as the majority of the US can maintain their standard of living, the lost jobs are 'somebody else's problems'. The money required to live caters to the majority, and thus cheap labor in the US just won't work. Maybe if this tips the scales so that a majority of the US suddenly are faced with these problems, then we will see some correction.
No, I gotta love accessibility.
My iBook... I can change the battery easily..... and I can lift the keyboard and access the airport card with little difficulty... Go through a pain in the ass and I can get to the memory slot... Getting to the hard drive requires pretty much disassembling the entire thing with a jeweler's screwdriver and a teeny-tiny allen wrench...
Typical PC laptop: I am within 2 or three screws of accessing mini-PCI,memory, and hard drive. This laptop allows you to get to much much more than an Apple product will let you get at. The PowerMac towers are relatively well designed with respect to upgrading, but ultimately, Apple products are a systems approach without easy path to maintenance and upgrade.
I couldn't care less about how the bottom of my laptop that I never look at anyway *looks*, I care about the utility. The bottom is a good place to make ass-ugly for the sake of upgrading, you aren't stuck looking at it while using it.
On the other hand, the Dell laptops I have used weigh a ton and suck battery like crazy when compared to Apple laptops. Some PC laptops I've seen weigh appropriate amounts (not by Dell), but none come close to an Apple laptop's battery life.. So it isn't exactly perfect on the PC side of laptops either...
The answer is that there is nothing in it for them. Manufacturing for OEMs means they have more control over the market and can get more cash per unit. The hard drives, optical drives, memory, CardBus, and mini-PCI all all standardized ways of manufacturers getting cash off the commodity laptop market. Meanwhile, the motherboards, case, power supply, battery, and display manufacturers make a killing by charging so much. Same reason Apple doesn't want clones, letting the market get too open and the prices start running down and eliminating profit margins very quickly. That is why PC laptops are almost as pricy as Apple laptops, and manufacturers recognize a good thing when they see it.
There have been. I've dealt with some of them in supporting employees at CAD places. They complain "everything is so squished" when they try to run a 4:3 resolution on them.... Sigh...
I can't remember the brands, but they weren't SGI displays. A lot of companies catering to engineers running CAD have wide displays out there..
If stuck in Windows, I prefer Trillian myself.
I can't see corporations seeing a benefit from anything beyond the current form of AIM (or MSN, or whatever).
Those that would embrace it see nothing wrong with using the central servers. That is what enables it to work. If the servers go down, *everyone* knows and understands. Reliability is important, but accountability is more important. If it is obvious to people that it isn't the company's fault, it isn't so bad for the company as it would be if they perceived that the company is too incompetent to maintain their mail server, or else not realize the server is down and assume an important communication goes through that didn't. If companies *really* wanted IM on that level, Jabber would see more widespread deployment.
On the other hand, a great number of companies don't take IM seriously. The market perception, especially by those in suits, is that IM is seen as a toy technology, for personal use only. At the previous two companies I worked at, any kind of IM client was banned by company policy, it was seen as too much of a distraction. Didn't stop people. The network administrator was forced to 'block' traffic. He then proceeded to block it only to the point where the suits could test and think it was effectively blocked, yet provided people circumvention tips when asked. This is a boneheaded strategy, it is another viable communication form. Even now, when dealing with companies with a problematic mail server who need to communicate with me and I ask if they have an IM service and they seem to find it funny to even think of using IM in such a way. The attitude reflects 'this is a place of business, why would we be on an IM service while working, that is preposterous!'. Phones are for 'instant communication', email is for electronic correspondence, and many suits see that as that, with no middleground to fill.
Personally, I think IM services are a great thing for business and personal use. It is a great way to communicate without being obtrusive into work. While doing IM, I can do other things while waiting for responses. If on the phone, it is really hard to do anything else but focus on the phone. I've always been fond of Jabber, and wish that it would catch on. I know better though. Suits that have stereotyped IM as a toy are going to be a really hard sell on this I think.
As if slashdot didn't mistake IIS and ISS enough as it is, now another ISS for slashdot...
All that aside, I have but one thing to say, I'm glad I use postfix.
Is it inherently more secure? Maybe, who knows. Is it more obscure and presents a smaller profile to attackers? Is it less used so a worm would targetted at postfix would have a poor propogation environment?
This is the good thing about having a good size set of nearly equivalent applications to perform the same function. If systems made use of a more diverse set of operating systems, then any particular Windows, IIS, Apache, Sendmail, etc. worm wouldn't be so catastrophic..
Of course, on the flip side, if you were running IIS when a massive IIS worm hits the net, people at least understand the problem, if your postfix mail server gets hit with a postfix attack, people corresponding with you won't see a front-page cnn article talking about it like they do IIS worms, so they will be less understanding...
Legitimate as in not violating the licensing terms of the original project. For example, if CinePaint was a closed-source product, it would be an illegitimate fork. Bastard GIMP.....
But I can't help but to think users would think it strange that the UI, while possibly keeping a consistant Feel, change looks with Every release now.... I mean, adding gradients in 98 and 2000 was pretty minor. The changes to XP were drastic enough, and looks playskool to me, but occasional change I understand (3.x to 95 for example) (even though Apple seems more concerned with this and only underwent one 'major' Look and feel overhaul in the Days of MacOS, everything until OSX was quite small, incremental changes, that only tend to add color). This really makes MS look like a company that really doesn't care about consistent UI, favoring instead eye candy. I appreciate Eye Candy (hell, I change Window Managers quite frequently, but I *do* seem to always come back to WindowMaker), but if you are supposedly catering to ease of use, it should be low on the priority list.
That new start menu seems in XP seems to be more about keeping the desktop clean and looking flashy. The frequently used items menu can be annoying as it can change, and some users just skip that list because they can almost never be sure what they are looking for is there, so why bother looking?
Everyone I know stuck with XP switches at least to the classic start menu first. A lot of business users I have dealt with insist on the classic look, because the new look doesn't look professional...
Supplement to other posts:
.Xdefaults (or .Xresources, whatever) to do: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons or ~/.icons
;)
Edit
Xcursor.theme: where name is a subdir of
Then:
xrdb ~/.Xdefaults
Then:
Restart your window manager, not necessarily X, just the window manager. Probably another way to do it, but that seems to reinitialize cursors in most cases.
The sd2xc utility mentioned below seems to work well.
I imagine that before too long all this functionality will be in a trivial app. Aside from having Xcursor reinit, I could have a nice gui program to do this inside of 15 minutes, and I'm too lazy to figure out how to do the reinit from PyGTK
I wonder what the deal is. I've hated having to buy laptops as a whole system bought from a single source. I've came to just accept that I have to live with it...
Why, you ask, do I care so much? Is it just to be 'elite'? Hell no, it is because I *hate* dealing with any problems that crop up in the warranty period. In dealing with my desktops, a part breaks under warranty, I contact that particular company, send in that *one* part, and have a replacement back in short order. Some people say they are afraid of hardware manufacturers trying to blame other pieces of equipment to avoid servicing, but that has never happened to me. I send it in, they test and verify that it is broken, and they fix it or send a working part. Has always been smooth for me, thankfully.
With the whole systems approach, something under warranty breaks. I call and say 'this portion of the laptop is broken, I want to send in this part, or at least remove the hard drive so some idiot tech doesn't see Linux, freak out, and reformat with Windows'. They say 'Linux isn't supported, you must include the hard drive, it *will* be wiped and replaced with Windows so we can run our test software to verify the problem is fixed, and if we cannot do this we will not repair it'. I've been fighting for weeks to get warranty repair without losing data. The problem is easy to test, if you press the power button and the power light comes on, the problem is fixed, end of story. If the power light stays off even though AC is connected, it is still broken. The problem with it has *nothing* to do with the drive, and they don't need to run any software to figure out if they fixed it or not. Why should it be any of their business what I run, when it clearly didn't cause the problem? Guess I got spoiled when I would call this same company regarding a business laptop and had them bend over backwards to kiss my ass regarding the very same request about not shipping a hard drive.
Also, come a year and a half after purchase, say my memory has a problem. Well, the system is out of warranty. With my desktop, the memory happens to have a lifetime warranty. Having a system where everything is at least a year warranty, with some parts longer is much better than having the whole thing end after a year.
A memory manufacturer has never threatened to deny me service because of the software I run, as long as I don't overclock. A video card manufacturer has never said they can erase my drive contents if they want to run tests. Why should I have to deal with this treatment for laptops? Why is it that I can even build PDAs from parts, and to this day I cannot build a real laptop from parts?
I stand corrected, guess I should RTFA. Now that is an interesting issue. Perhaps it is a case sensitive search program and caught the string "Office" and not "office"? Would seem stupid, but it is the only technical reason I could see...
They may be cease&desist happy, shooting them off without much verification, but before they would bring things to court, they would at least try to collect preliminary evidence and realize they have nothing...
It would be amusing, but I doubt anyone will bother to file a case before getting admissable evidence and reviewing it.
I would imagine that simply matching the word 'office' could be *WAY* too broad. I would suspect they search by filemasks, i.e.:
*office*.zip
*office*.exe
etc...
They probably don't search for Office without an executable or archive format extension common to windows, as rpm is not.
To be fair, that program was intentionally meant to draw just that kind of confusion. I was quite amused by its existence, but IIRC, the page itself said they didn't think the application was very practically useful, but it fit the name and creating confusion over the issue was more the goal than anything.
;)
I could understand using 'decss' as a string to find and automate warning letters about (*If* you are willing to accept that decss was an immoral program, I disagree, but for the sake of argument..), as it is a rather unique name to the application at hand, and is not likely to be shared by something accidentally.
Office, however, is a rather generic name. It happens to be the only part of the MS Office name that is common to most of the warez zip files, I would guess (I actually don't have a warez copy of Office, the only copy of Office I have is the Office 97 that shipped with an older Gateway system, and I happen to only use it on that system, since it also is the only Windows machine in the house).
StarOffice, OpenOffice, and probably others would share this problem, and their script should be more careful about checking for this.
Of course, I don't expect too much out of the BSA, they are essentially a group of professional extortionists whose practices are probably illegal if thoroughly tested in court. Threatening to tell on you unless given money seems illegal to me, I would think they would have to go straight to court before doing anything, and that is only if the company being represented has signed off to let the BSA act on their behalf.. Of course, people running Linux and OpenOffice have nothing to worry about
Drivers are generic (at least in linux, everything modern is done through generic SCSI or scsi emulation over IDE.
My misunderstanding is saying that it was RW, when in fact it is just recordable, the new thing being able to stamp part of it to save on costs, but leave the rest open for whatever.
If they extended it to RW, then the save-on-the-cd concept could work (burning software can be lightweight, if specialized, cdrecord is small and can do a bit of stuff.)
Of course, the practical implications I still say are limited. Could be used in consoles to make discs more 'cartridge-like', but the tech would probably be ultimately slower than memory cards (unless you want the console to sound like a jet engine while saving), and console users have become used to memory cards. Nearly zero practical application of this strategy in PCs (maybe gaming on the go, but few people care).
It is new. I would debate usefulness, but it is novel.
The idea is that a subset of those sessions are write-once (CD-Rs). Maybe stamped, maybe burned (didn't read the article), but in any event, they can be written only once and never reused.
The rest of the disc would be CD-RW. So if you wrote a session and filled the disc, you could re-use a session burned to the RW section of the disc.
Not too useful. *Maybe* you could have a game run entirely from CD, saving progress in the RW area. If the drives are fast enough, and the game writers efficient with game state information required in a save file, this *could* be feasible. This is still a stretch as the cost/benefit ratio is still garbage...
If you are unwilling to put measures in place to prevent boot from CD then you have no hope whatsoever of securing your systems.
If someone can boot from a configuration other than the default OS, they have free reign, the system operates on their terms. Any IT manager who has security as a priority and takes no measures to prevent booting from CD by a common user deserves to lose their job.
If the user can exploit the recovery console to gain access, it means the data was insecure to begin with. Even if MS played nice and put restrictions on the recovery console, that would just be a false sense of security, as that does nothing to deal with non-MS released utilities that could do the same thing (i.e. a custom linux boot cd, etc).
Now the one thing I have seen suggested is that EFS might be defeated in the face of this. I have no idea if this is true, but if it is, *there* is your point of argument. EFS is *supposed* to protect data from just this sort of attack. If there exists a trivial method to access the data without the original password, then it is complete garbage. But if you think that just leaving an system bootable by CD without taking measures to encrypt sensitive data, instead relying on filesystem permissions alone to protect it, then you are a fool.
I don't think going full force against Iraq for crimes the US has failed to prove is the correct choice of action.
If the US does have *proof* of what the US alleges, it should be brought to the attention of the allies. If whatever evidence the US can present isn't convincing enough to sway allies, then it isn't enough to go to war. Going to war without the support of the allies and against the desires of the allies is bad. *If* Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, they sure as hell can't do anything with them right now under the scrutiny of the world. The US can afford to be patient in this matter.
It is *really* hard to believe anything the US government puts out about this issue. It is clear, the US are going to attack very soon, disregarding the position of all of its allies, disregarding the protests of the people. Iraq *knows* this, and is now faced with two options:
1) Destroy the missles, make themselves look good and appease most of the U.N. In doing so, making themselves weaker, and the US will attack anyway, because they don't give a damn.
2) Keep the missles. Piss off more of UN. Face more opponents in a war. Come out looking bad and beaten.
They cannot win in this situation. Hussein requests a internationally televised debate between him and Bush. Bush refuses to take it seriously. Why the hell not? No matter what Bush thinks, he should at least give the *appearance* he is interested in letting both sides be known and letting the people see them. If Bush's convicitons are right, why should he fear a debate? He certainly cannot claim the matter is too insignificant, it is a very critical issue for the whole world.
Also, saying explicitly that no matter how many protest in the US, he will not be swayed is boneheaded. The president is supposed to represent and accomodate the will of the people. If 60% of the people protested and he refuses to be swayed, he wouldn't be fulfilling his duty.
And if it is truly about getting rid of a dangerous tyrant, why the *hell* are they ignoring N. Korea, saying they are innocuous? Even if Iraq has weapons, they lack the delivery capability. N. Korea seems to have the capability to strike US Soil, and they make it public knowledge and make repeated threats. The US response comes off as 'Oh that silly N. Korea, they're harmless, ignore their nukes and delivery capacity, now Iraq, they are dangerous, they *might* have a warhead.. somewhere.... maybe... let's go attack iraq and liberate the iraqi oil... err people!'
*Maybe* the US military has good reason and evidence for an assault, I wouldn't doubt it. But even if they do have right on their side, they sure as hell are not handling it in a manner that looks good in the eyes of the world. Don't withold evidence. At least *pretend* to participate some in peaceful approaches to the issue (i.e. debate). Act consistantly towards threats (don't ignore N. Korea if your sole justification for war is to pre-empt aggressive nations.)
I know, Saddam and his regime isn't good. I know they are likely lying about a lot of things. But the US *cannot* just pretend the rest of the world's opinion and view does not matter. Everyone knows that ultimately this is about getting oil so those SUVs can keep on wasting that gas. If they treated N. Korea the same way and at least appeared to participate in peaceful, diplomatic approaches, the US would look a lot better.
No, most other platforms do everything client side. The updater says 'give me a list of all available updates', and then the updater does the filtering client side. Only the release number overall of the OS is known.
Sure, updates downloaded from MS sites could be tracked easily anyway, each download request could be associated with IP and such. But if non-MS programs are being probed, then they are wrongly exploiting the updater.
Unless you are stealing from the store, the clerk and the cash register know everything you buy anyway.
If it ends up having *any* impact on privacy, it would be too *improve* privacy. No matter what, the cash register system has the *potential* to track your purchases that you pay for. Currently, when you buy stuff, every individual item must be handled by the cashier to be scanned, so the cashier is intimately familiar with your purchase. If used properly, this thing could scan an entire cart without digging through every item. Items you want to hide can be hidden. They still are paid for, but the cashier only sees the total sum, not each purchase. Combine this with anonymous currency (only paper money right now) and individuals are in no way associated with their purchases, neither by humans nor by computer.
Afraid of those items being tracked after leaving the store? Rip out those tags when you are out of there.
One time on tv about half an hour before a broadcast advertising for the news. They said 'find out about a secret nuclear reactor, right in our own city!'
Then another commercial in the next break comes on. 'Watch as we show you a nuclear reactor, closer to your home than you probably think!' And it showed a picture of the nuclear engineering building at the local university. I burst into laughter. That reactor was hardly 'secret', it is a well advertised reactor, a very puny one. I toured it about 4 years ago....
Then the final commercial.... 'we'll show you our hidden camera investigation where our undercover reporter infiltrates security and gets into the reactor room!' And it showed a picture of something I could understand a layman mistaking for the reactor, but it certainly was not the reactor.
During the broadcast they made a big point of how they were able to see labs and classrooms, and then unveiled their 'killer' footage. The camera man, obviously excited, walks all around for a long time taking every possible shot he can of what *he* thought was a reactor, but it was just a cooling device not related to the reactor at all. About five minutes after the broadcast, they announce a correction, that they had learned that it wasn't a reactor, and that the place housing the reactor wasn't accessible, but still the thought this stuff was dangerous in the hands of terrorists because it said 'high voltage...'
The news always botches this stuff up. How many times have you seen news reports on a technology you are intimately familiar with and laughed your ass off at the inaccuracies?