Think about it. Who would have more to gain by selling your information? Google, because they don't have an actual sellable product other than advertising, and selling personal information ties in really nicely there.
Of the two, who would have the most to lose from such a scheme? Microsoft, by leaps and bounds. People - the common man, even - hasn't trusted Microsoft since the 1990s. Microsoft (a large corporation as opposed to a startup, in most minds) selling personal data is sleazy and immoral; Google doing it is a breach of ethics, but that's business today, isn't it?
Eh? Since when has Microsoft supported their products in more of a token manner?
What will ultimately kill XP, and the older applications which run on it, is new hardware (or rather, old hardware that dies necessitating its replacement).
But honestly, MS doesn't want to outright kill these products. They'd rather have people using them than something non-MS. They want them around filling a segment of the market - and they're not going to die for decades, anyway - for one reason or another. What Microsoft is really concerned about is corporations and large companies upgrading to the latest, greatest: those companies and licensing is Microsoft's bread and butter.
Your brain already has the ability to handle two threads - via the left and right hemisphere. Each hemisphere can effectively process a single task at a time. Unfortunately, performance drops off markedly when you introduce a third process.
This is why people get overwhelmed when they've got too much to do, and why people able to focus on a single task myopically are able to get so much done in a short time: they get one task done, move on to the next and get it done, and so on.
Eh, your read is pretty close on the town in question - though it was not a Northern town. I grew up in New York and, yes, it is somewhat similar. Different, not as stupid, but similar.
Why in God's name would you reinstall anything that old?
If you simply must have something that old and outdated (ie which doesn't have drivers available on newer hardware) then put it in a virtual machine. Problem solved, and no driver headaches.
Seriously? We're talking about floppy drives here: they haven't been reliable medium for at least 5 years, but closer to 10. The last time I used them, I was only able to get 3 out of 10 I'd bought new to consistently (ie 1+ time) read + write data.
What's wrong with using a USB flash drive as a BIOS upgrade medium?
The last couple boards I bought don't even have a floppy connector (though the last one I bought -did- have serial headers... wow.)
(And, finally.. what kind of person flashes a BIOS? I don't think I've done that but once or twice, and that was on craptastic Compaq or HP vendor boards that were almost featureless.)
The beginning of the end for floppy disks was when they were inexpensive - and started to come in more than just "grey" and "black" colors. I noticed they ceased being a reliable medium shortly after AOL started to ship them for free as installation media, which matches the time they started to be colorful.
The last time I bought floppy disks, they were $1 each in packs of 10, with a $5 mail-in rebate. I threw out half of them after one or two uses due to bad sectors and unreliability.
I found some floppies in a box of stuff at work last week. The box had a bunch of SCSI and floppy cables, mounting brackets, and various other "IT office" things. This box was covered in dust, as was everything in the box. It'd not been touched in years.
In our office, I don't think there's a single floppy drive left to read these things, and if there were, it wouldn't matter: any useful purpose floppy disks once served has been supplanted by USB flash disks and bootable CDs. (There may even be a couple in systems still, but I doubt any has been used in 5+ years.) Hell, the systems unable to boot from USB are almost all gone in our customer sites by now, too.
Ironically, the last time I used a floppy disk, it was an AOL disk, and it was still working. I ceased using the things when Debian ceased providing an installation image set on them.
Realistically, the only use floppy disks (or rather, their drives) have is to recover potentially important data from older disks people haven't managed to move to other medium by now. But if it hasn't been done by now, chances are that media isn't all that important.
And yet, you assume that your daily life isn't full of such things. Chances are, it is - you just don't notice it.
On the one hand, if you put someone in front of a computer to work for the majority of their day, chances are they're dealing with a degree of User Support. That's bound to make anyone hostile towards other humans.
To me telling strangers or vague people everything all the time is giving up my privacy.
I lived in a small "population center" of 1200 people once, for about 8 months. It was living hell. Nothing you did - NOTHING - was private, and half of what you did do was misconstrued into something else entirely different. If the wrong person didn't like you, the most vicious rumors would spill out. It didn't matter if it was true; I know quite a few people were forced out of town on threat of fraudulent criminal charges, and heard suggestive rumor that the same thing was "in the works" to happen to me.
Since that time, I've been very, very protective of my privacy. Rumors in a small community can ruin a person, and your reputation is paramount in the business world to success (regardless of actual merit). As such, I'm careful about what it is I actually broadcast as "me".
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.
Just because it's Beta doesn't mean it's crap. What's your hang up?
Considering that MEch 4 barely ran stable when it was new and networking was always a hodgepodge of doesn't-work, that's kind of an odd dismissal. And you can download MW:LL now, not "at some future date" as you can with MW4.
Add to the fact that MW:LL has many, many more gameplay possibilities than MW4 ever had, and it's kind of a moot point.
I just wish I had a graphics card capable of playing Crysis - then I could attempt MW:LL.:-/
Don't be silly. Apple's bad behavior is a smokescreen for Microsoft's bad behavior; notice how Apple starts being really stupid with their app development pipeline right about the time that MS goes braindead and decides to lock Windows MObile 7 down to the point of being useless for anything but buying apps from the MS store?
Whether they were any good at it (see: late 90s), Apple has always been about hardware, too. They've been about a "platform".
They partially abandoned that when they brought the Mac to x86 and dumped PPC. But they've always been about granular total control of their product. Hell, they built their first Apple products themselves (the prototypes by hand). And you've never been able to buy their OS for anything but their own hardware.
Saying Apple isn't a hardware company is like saying IBM isn't a hardware company. It's the same approach, just different markets.
Kill ARM's business? Don't be silly. They'd simply reduce the supply of processors then enter into exclusive contracts with Apple.
In so doing, ARM would have record profits ($100/chip instead of $5/chip, or whatever) and Apple would have the only low-power, efficient portable devices on the market for some time.
The response to this article should be conclusive as to whether or not Apple users (in the "addicted" sense) are, in fact, fanatics: they're the only ones who seem to think this is anything but Bad News for the industry as a whole.
When Steve dies, he'll be turned into a God and prayed to by His followers. After all, he's already a demi-god.
Sounds like a good plot for a sub-mission in Fallout 4. The Vault Dweller must journey to Vault 73 to search out the GECKO. Unfortunately, he really needs to visit Vault 78 - the records just had flaked toner and it looked like it said 73. Vault 73 had actually been shut down early on due to the test subjects demonstrating mental instability and irrational behavior.
However: upon arrival at 73, he finds himself locked in and unable to exit. As he makes his way through the sterile, dissonate white Vault he encounters numerous crazed fanatics who assault him. In order to escape the Vault, he must bring reason to the Vault 73 dwellers by destroying the entombed original leader of the Vault.
That said, I think Apple will out of neccesity play the role Commodore had in the 1970s and 198os with MOS--it will have the security of an in-house supplier and ability to use tweaked designs for its own purposes (like CBM tweaked the 6502 to make the 6510 that was "just right" for the C64) yet allow the core to be used by others.
That's my thought. I thought about it some more, considering Apple's role in history, and came to another potential conclusion.
Is it possible that Apple is trying to finally get into the OEM hardware business? They stuck to a very "appliance" approach for decades. Why they did it is unknown, but many think that it was due to the inability to exercise control over the platform in a maintainable fashion - as Dell, et al. do with Windows due to drivers and 3rd party software.
With things the way they are now, though, that scenario has changed: the iPhone/iPad/iWhatever allow Apple essentially unlimited, centralized control. It really is an appliance, not a general purpose computing device. They're more like any of many phones out there which are made by Motorola (or whomever) but re-badged and slightly customized by the cellular carriers.
In essence, were Apple to purchase ARM, they'd have a perfect vertical platform they can control from the top to the bottom. They'd be able to license the hardware and software for each other to 3d party manufacturers, if they wanted.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple is a vertically integrated monopoly: check. Apple engages in anti-competitive practices, as is, with restrictions on what can and can not run on their platform(s): check.
Looks pretty clear cut to me that further vertical integration would be disadvantageous for customers.
As someone else said, ARM may not be the best platform for Google's servers.
If what you say is true - they're the divergent group of engineers - then it's quite possible that Google hired them for that very reason. Maybe they wanted to build a PPC architecture for Apple's iPad, or something else entirely. We do know that these engineers were focused on power efficiency, and that is a very big concern for Google (it's a large part of their operations costs, after all). There are a lot of ways to save power with a processor; switching architectures may not be the intended result. Maybe they're going to try and improve on the x86 processor (and then license the tech to Intel to make the CPUs for them).
That said, everyone and their mother seems to be going ARM these days. It wouldn't be surprising (to me) if Google has that in mind, too.
It's entirely plausible that a 200-level course would have its share of "What's Lee-nux?" types, from what I understand of how easy college entry-level CS stuff is these days.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. What I was talking about wasn't specifically "redhat" but in many of these "Learn RedHat" type books, they've got a bunch of useless sludge like:
* licensing related crap * how to configure shit in the GUI * how RH compares to product X * only the most -basic- command line tool use
I merely stated them as a "RedHat" or whatever books because RH is the most "Enterprisey" and is therefore most likely to have its books contain this sort of WIndows-centric approach.
Also, this is for a college course, yes? Ergo, the material should be educational and non-trivially difficult. Significantly, that should mean the students have to actually do some work for their grade, not skim over a synopsis. I would think "install an RPM | DEB | source based distribution with Apache and CUPS installed" would be a reasonable assignment for a 200-level, 3-5 day CS project.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah? Well, I can do this.
*whips out Zippo*
What, seriously?
Think about it. Who would have more to gain by selling your information? Google, because they don't have an actual sellable product other than advertising, and selling personal information ties in really nicely there.
Of the two, who would have the most to lose from such a scheme? Microsoft, by leaps and bounds. People - the common man, even - hasn't trusted Microsoft since the 1990s. Microsoft (a large corporation as opposed to a startup, in most minds) selling personal data is sleazy and immoral; Google doing it is a breach of ethics, but that's business today, isn't it?
*sigh*
Eh? Since when has Microsoft supported their products in more of a token manner?
What will ultimately kill XP, and the older applications which run on it, is new hardware (or rather, old hardware that dies necessitating its replacement).
But honestly, MS doesn't want to outright kill these products. They'd rather have people using them than something non-MS. They want them around filling a segment of the market - and they're not going to die for decades, anyway - for one reason or another. What Microsoft is really concerned about is corporations and large companies upgrading to the latest, greatest: those companies and licensing is Microsoft's bread and butter.
Your brain already has the ability to handle two threads - via the left and right hemisphere. Each hemisphere can effectively process a single task at a time. Unfortunately, performance drops off markedly when you introduce a third process.
This is why people get overwhelmed when they've got too much to do, and why people able to focus on a single task myopically are able to get so much done in a short time: they get one task done, move on to the next and get it done, and so on.
Eh, your read is pretty close on the town in question - though it was not a Northern town. I grew up in New York and, yes, it is somewhat similar. Different, not as stupid, but similar.
The American financial industry was modeled on European banking practices. And then adopted back again by Europe.
Why in God's name would you reinstall anything that old?
If you simply must have something that old and outdated (ie which doesn't have drivers available on newer hardware) then put it in a virtual machine. Problem solved, and no driver headaches.
Seriously? We're talking about floppy drives here: they haven't been reliable medium for at least 5 years, but closer to 10. The last time I used them, I was only able to get 3 out of 10 I'd bought new to consistently (ie 1+ time) read + write data.
What's wrong with using a USB flash drive as a BIOS upgrade medium?
The last couple boards I bought don't even have a floppy connector (though the last one I bought -did- have serial headers... wow.)
(And, finally.. what kind of person flashes a BIOS? I don't think I've done that but once or twice, and that was on craptastic Compaq or HP vendor boards that were almost featureless.)
The beginning of the end for floppy disks was when they were inexpensive - and started to come in more than just "grey" and "black" colors. I noticed they ceased being a reliable medium shortly after AOL started to ship them for free as installation media, which matches the time they started to be colorful.
The last time I bought floppy disks, they were $1 each in packs of 10, with a $5 mail-in rebate. I threw out half of them after one or two uses due to bad sectors and unreliability.
I found some floppies in a box of stuff at work last week. The box had a bunch of SCSI and floppy cables, mounting brackets, and various other "IT office" things. This box was covered in dust, as was everything in the box. It'd not been touched in years.
In our office, I don't think there's a single floppy drive left to read these things, and if there were, it wouldn't matter: any useful purpose floppy disks once served has been supplanted by USB flash disks and bootable CDs. (There may even be a couple in systems still, but I doubt any has been used in 5+ years.) Hell, the systems unable to boot from USB are almost all gone in our customer sites by now, too.
Ironically, the last time I used a floppy disk, it was an AOL disk, and it was still working. I ceased using the things when Debian ceased providing an installation image set on them.
Realistically, the only use floppy disks (or rather, their drives) have is to recover potentially important data from older disks people haven't managed to move to other medium by now. But if it hasn't been done by now, chances are that media isn't all that important.
That's why I go through and friend homeless people. It throws them off.
And yet, you assume that your daily life isn't full of such things. Chances are, it is - you just don't notice it.
On the one hand, if you put someone in front of a computer to work for the majority of their day, chances are they're dealing with a degree of User Support. That's bound to make anyone hostile towards other humans.
To me telling strangers or vague people everything all the time is giving up my privacy.
I lived in a small "population center" of 1200 people once, for about 8 months. It was living hell. Nothing you did - NOTHING - was private, and half of what you did do was misconstrued into something else entirely different. If the wrong person didn't like you, the most vicious rumors would spill out. It didn't matter if it was true; I know quite a few people were forced out of town on threat of fraudulent criminal charges, and heard suggestive rumor that the same thing was "in the works" to happen to me.
Since that time, I've been very, very protective of my privacy. Rumors in a small community can ruin a person, and your reputation is paramount in the business world to success (regardless of actual merit). As such, I'm careful about what it is I actually broadcast as "me".
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 223 characters.
Just because it's Beta doesn't mean it's crap. What's your hang up?
Considering that MEch 4 barely ran stable when it was new and networking was always a hodgepodge of doesn't-work, that's kind of an odd dismissal. And you can download MW:LL now, not "at some future date" as you can with MW4.
Add to the fact that MW:LL has many, many more gameplay possibilities than MW4 ever had, and it's kind of a moot point.
I just wish I had a graphics card capable of playing Crysis - then I could attempt MW:LL. :-/
Don't be silly. Apple's bad behavior is a smokescreen for Microsoft's bad behavior; notice how Apple starts being really stupid with their app development pipeline right about the time that MS goes braindead and decides to lock Windows MObile 7 down to the point of being useless for anything but buying apps from the MS store?
Seriously?
Whether they were any good at it (see: late 90s), Apple has always been about hardware, too. They've been about a "platform".
They partially abandoned that when they brought the Mac to x86 and dumped PPC. But they've always been about granular total control of their product. Hell, they built their first Apple products themselves (the prototypes by hand). And you've never been able to buy their OS for anything but their own hardware.
Saying Apple isn't a hardware company is like saying IBM isn't a hardware company. It's the same approach, just different markets.
Kill ARM's business? Don't be silly. They'd simply reduce the supply of processors then enter into exclusive contracts with Apple.
In so doing, ARM would have record profits ($100/chip instead of $5/chip, or whatever) and Apple would have the only low-power, efficient portable devices on the market for some time.
The response to this article should be conclusive as to whether or not Apple users (in the "addicted" sense) are, in fact, fanatics: they're the only ones who seem to think this is anything but Bad News for the industry as a whole.
When Steve dies, he'll be turned into a God and prayed to by His followers. After all, he's already a demi-god.
Sounds like a good plot for a sub-mission in Fallout 4. The Vault Dweller must journey to Vault 73 to search out the GECKO. Unfortunately, he really needs to visit Vault 78 - the records just had flaked toner and it looked like it said 73. Vault 73 had actually been shut down early on due to the test subjects demonstrating mental instability and irrational behavior.
However: upon arrival at 73, he finds himself locked in and unable to exit. As he makes his way through the sterile, dissonate white Vault he encounters numerous crazed fanatics who assault him. In order to escape the Vault, he must bring reason to the Vault 73 dwellers by destroying the entombed original leader of the Vault.
Or something like that.
That said, I think Apple will out of neccesity play the role Commodore had in the 1970s and 198os with MOS--it will have the security of an in-house supplier and ability to use tweaked designs for its own purposes (like CBM tweaked the 6502 to make the 6510 that was "just right" for the C64) yet allow the core to be used by others.
That's my thought. I thought about it some more, considering Apple's role in history, and came to another potential conclusion.
Is it possible that Apple is trying to finally get into the OEM hardware business? They stuck to a very "appliance" approach for decades. Why they did it is unknown, but many think that it was due to the inability to exercise control over the platform in a maintainable fashion - as Dell, et al. do with Windows due to drivers and 3rd party software.
With things the way they are now, though, that scenario has changed: the iPhone/iPad/iWhatever allow Apple essentially unlimited, centralized control. It really is an appliance, not a general purpose computing device. They're more like any of many phones out there which are made by Motorola (or whomever) but re-badged and slightly customized by the cellular carriers.
In essence, were Apple to purchase ARM, they'd have a perfect vertical platform they can control from the top to the bottom. They'd be able to license the hardware and software for each other to 3d party manufacturers, if they wanted.
Apple is a vertically integrated monopoly: check.
Apple engages in anti-competitive practices, as is, with restrictions on what can and can not run on their platform(s): check.
Looks pretty clear cut to me that further vertical integration would be disadvantageous for customers.
As someone else said, ARM may not be the best platform for Google's servers.
If what you say is true - they're the divergent group of engineers - then it's quite possible that Google hired them for that very reason. Maybe they wanted to build a PPC architecture for Apple's iPad, or something else entirely. We do know that these engineers were focused on power efficiency, and that is a very big concern for Google (it's a large part of their operations costs, after all). There are a lot of ways to save power with a processor; switching architectures may not be the intended result. Maybe they're going to try and improve on the x86 processor (and then license the tech to Intel to make the CPUs for them).
That said, everyone and their mother seems to be going ARM these days. It wouldn't be surprising (to me) if Google has that in mind, too.
The mark of the beast is an htaccess file?
Who'd have thunk.
It's entirely plausible that a 200-level course would have its share of "What's Lee-nux?" types, from what I understand of how easy college entry-level CS stuff is these days.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. What I was talking about wasn't specifically "redhat" but in many of these "Learn RedHat" type books, they've got a bunch of useless sludge like:
* licensing related crap
* how to configure shit in the GUI
* how RH compares to product X
* only the most -basic- command line tool use
I merely stated them as a "RedHat" or whatever books because RH is the most "Enterprisey" and is therefore most likely to have its books contain this sort of WIndows-centric approach.
Also, this is for a college course, yes? Ergo, the material should be educational and non-trivially difficult. Significantly, that should mean the students have to actually do some work for their grade, not skim over a synopsis. I would think "install an RPM | DEB | source based distribution with Apache and CUPS installed" would be a reasonable assignment for a 200-level, 3-5 day CS project.