Ultimately, encryption is meaningless. If the NSA (or any other governmental agency) wants something, they will get it.
Even if you invent some suoer-duoer-impossible-to-crack encryption, they will simply go to a secret court (that is accountable to no one) and get a secret order, that you must comply with and that you aren't allowed to talk about under penalty of going to prison, on the grounds of NATIONAL SECURITY.
Until *THAT* problem is addressed, encryption is meaningless.
Installed the update and it didn't turn my laptop into a smoking crater on my desk; so far, so good..
Just wait till Firefox 29, aka Australisaurus (assuming they stick to their release schedule).
If you haven't had the displeasure yet, check out one of the recent beta builds. It is a marvel of stupidity and in one fell swoop Mozilla has managed to destroy almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place.
Windows 8.1 with the newly leaked "Update 1" un-does many of the mistakes Microsoft made with Windows 8. After a bit of tweaking and wrangling, I was able to get a system that was actually usable and very similar to Windows 7, other than:
(a) An ugly, shitty color scheme (b) A "Start Screen" that is cluttered and less useful that the old "Start Menu" and (c) Windows Explorer (now called "File Explorer") uses the Godawful "ribbon" which makes things more cluttered, confusing and overall less useful.
Windows 8 still sucks and is pointless, but with the addition of the new Update 1 it's a lot closed to what Windows 8 should have been in the first place.
All told, up to five "malware.binary" alarms reportedly sounded, each graded at the top of FireEye's criticality scale, and which were seen by Target's information security teams first in Bangalore, and then Minneapolis.
Yeah, those fools should have definitely given their money to the pros. You know what, that's too much sarcasm for me to fart out at once. This sounds essentially like the subprime mortgage crisis. And a lot of other banking crises. It doesn't seem totally insane to me to trust your friend Joe in a trailer over the banking industry: when he runs off with my money, at least he might go to jail rather than getting millions in rewards.
As much as people (including me) like to hate on banks, when was the last time you actually lost money? When was the last time you put money in a bank and they "lost" all or part of it? When was the last time you put money in a bank and lost all or part of it because the bank was robbed?
Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.
There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:
- I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google - Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit - Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do - ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time
Sure you do. And when those damages amount to $20, and your legal costs amount to a few thousand, it's just not profitable as a business model, which is what it is used as in the states.
Someone did a study a while back and found that the amount of money the RIAA/MPAA has spent on legal costs far exceeds the amount of money they have received in settlements. Something that everyone (excecpt the RIAA/MPAA Mafia) already knew.
Yes, they get 450 million users which I think probably 350 million are frequent users. But how many already have Facebook? I am still wondering given the rapid changes in user preferences if WhatsApp will be popular long enough for Facebook to consider it a wise purchase.
The WhatsApp numbers don't add up. The first year is free and then they charge $1 a year. But their revenue last year was only $20 Million. I would appear that there is a 96% churn rate and only 4% of those alleged 450 million users stay with WhatsApp for more than a year.
Realistically Facebook could have done this kind of App internally way cheaper.
Yes, it would have been much cheaper to do it internally, but then they wouldn't get the 450 million new advertising targets. Of course Facebook may be very disappointed when they find out that WhatsApp doesn't bring in much revenue. With the ubiquity of Facebook I would think there is substantial overlap between Facebook and just about anyone else.
Hey should give all 450 million customers a $1 refund.
They supposedly have 450 million users and charge $1 a year, but in 2013 they only had $20 Million in revenue. Either the 450 million users is an inflated meaningless number, or they have huge churn where only 4% of users stick around past the first year that's free.
And this promise that nothing's going to change? Laughable. If nothing else it will receive facebook branding (subtle, such as color changes) pretty quickly, and the only reason to build it out further is so that they can reap even further benefits (read: more users) over to facebook at a later point.
"Independent"? Nothing will change? LOL. They are in for a big surprise if they actually believe Facebook's line of bullshit. And here's a short piece of one of their blog entries:
When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
Now that Facebook has spent $4 Billion Dollars (the $12 Billion in funny money is irrelevant) these guys are in for a rude awakening.
Actually what's cool about this approach is that the startup company behind it has made the new technology compatible with existing LTE (4G) networks. So operators wouldn't need to swap out the old for the new all at once, as they did to make the leap from 3G to 4G. Rather, they could just use pCell where they need to, such as in busy urban centers, and LTE users wouldn't know the difference (except for the suddenly good reception).
According to TFA (which of course no one read):
"“Demand for spectrum has outpaced our ability to innovate,” says Perlman. The reason isn’t for a lack of ideas. The wireless industry is pursuing plenty of them, including small cells, millimeter-wave spectrum, fancy interference coordination, and multiple antenna schemes such as MIMO. But Perlman thinks many of these fixes are just clever kludges for an outdated system. The real bottleneck, he argues, is the fundamental design of the cellular network. “There is no solution if you stick with cells,” he says.
Even though it is technically compatible with 4G you still have to deploy millions of new antennas. He may have invented the greatest wireless technology ever, but it's dead on arrival due to cost.
This whole thing started when somebody posted a screenshot of some disassembled code, which showed, among other things, that the software is using undocumented functions to enumerate all the cached entries.
So Valve spent X number of man hours developing this anti-cheating module, plus XX more hours figuring out undocumented functions that they need to accomplish this, and then, THEY ABANDONED THE WHOLE THING AFTER 13 DAYS because people figured out a way around it..
I understand that Valve want to stop cheating and that's OK. But, seriously, did nobody at Valve just think for a minute and say "before we spend a lot of time developing this, how easy will it be for the cheaters to circumvent?"
Yea, remember that failed scifi show, Terra Nova? Thing cost $2million an episode.
Game of Thrones? $6million for the first season episodes.
Short of something unprecedented with Kickstarter it's won't be crowdfunded. While the cost drops over time, you still need a ton of money to get it off the ground and sustain it for several years.
They don't *HAVE* have to be expensive. The expensive is a side effect of the massive Hollywood egos.
TV shows are expensive because of:
Producers, Directors and actors all demanding huge salaries.
Multiple Producers, Assistant Producers, Executive Producers -- I've seem 8 or more "Producers" listed in the credits for various TV shows. Then there are Directors, Editors, etc.
Everybody -- EVERYBODY -- has an assistant ( or several ) because God forbid they might have to get their own coffee or wipe their own ass.
Sets and special effects are all outsourced to various companies who charge the TV studios the same way that government contractors charge the government for their work.
The Tonight Show (Jay Leno ) which is nothing more than a guy sitting at a desk talking to people has a staff of over 100.
I think what a lot of people (particularly Slashdotters) fail to realize is the cost to produce some of these shows. Take a show like Portlandia - You'd think you could shoot it with a handycam and a Macbook, but in fact there is a large crew of professionals behind the scenes -
That's not a large crew of "professionals". That's a large crew of people standing around doing nothing of value. You need a director, somebody to hold the camera and somebody of hold the microphone. Everything else is all Hollywood bullshit. Assistants and assistants to assistants. Lackeys and assistant lackeys.
However, as a counterpoint, here is a far less histrionic story which shows that AOSP is growing FASTER than Goog'es own Android
Except you left out the part that says AOSP is growing faster than Google Android only in China and India.
As for the Ars Technica article, it's not histrionics to state facts:
Google apps—mainly Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store -- are Android's killer apps, and manufacturers want these apps on their phones.
While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. Joining the OHA requires a company to promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.
Acer was bit by this requirement when it tried to build devices that ran Alibaba's Aliyun OS in China. Aliyun is an Android fork, and when Google got wind of it, Acer was told to shut the project down or lose its access to Google apps.
This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon.
Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon doesn't have many other choices.
This is not future fantasy; it's happening right now. Just look into the current "basic income" debate in the EU: basically the idea is that all citizens get a basic income from the state
That "income" has to come from some where. So either the state prints more and more money, which is not sustainable ( ask Zimbabwe about their 11,000% inflation) or the state imposes more and more taxes, which is not sustainable.
The Star Trek universe is fantasy bullshit that is not possible in real life. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of the world around them understands this. In addition, most of the benefits of the Star Trek universe depend on fantasy technology that will never exist.
Equals a ISP landscape that will even more consumer unfriendly.
This merger doesn't reduce anyone's choice because there are very few (if any) areas where you currently have the option to choose one or the other. In the vast majority of areas you have exactly one choice for cable TV. If you are lucky, you might have 2 choices for Internet -- shitty expensive cable and shitty expensive DSL.
Force the monopoly cable and telephone companies to open up their networks. Then you will have real competition which will result in real consumer choice. It will also mean the end of stupid shit like monthly bandwidth caps.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately, encryption is meaningless. If the NSA (or any other governmental agency) wants something, they will get it.
Even if you invent some suoer-duoer-impossible-to-crack encryption, they will simply go to a secret court (that is accountable to no one) and get a secret order, that you must comply with and that you aren't allowed to talk about under penalty of going to prison, on the grounds of NATIONAL SECURITY.
Until *THAT* problem is addressed, encryption is meaningless.
Installed the update and it didn't turn my laptop into a smoking crater on my desk; so far, so good..
Just wait till Firefox 29, aka Australisaurus (assuming they stick to their release schedule).
If you haven't had the displeasure yet, check out one of the recent beta builds. It is a marvel of stupidity and in one fell swoop Mozilla has managed to destroy almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place.
Try the same test with Windows 8.1....
Windows 8.1 with the newly leaked "Update 1" un-does many of the mistakes Microsoft made with Windows 8. After a bit of tweaking and wrangling, I was able to get a system that was actually usable and very similar to Windows 7, other than:
(a) An ugly, shitty color scheme
(b) A "Start Screen" that is cluttered and less useful that the old "Start Menu" and
(c) Windows Explorer (now called "File Explorer") uses the Godawful "ribbon" which makes things more cluttered, confusing and overall less useful.
Windows 8 still sucks and is pointless, but with the addition of the new Update 1 it's a lot closed to what Windows 8 should have been in the first place.
"Is this a signal that Microsoft decided that they need to compete with Apple by making their productivity applications free?"
In a word: no.
It's a signal that nobody uses OneNote because nobody knows what the fuck it is.
I remember it well -- before the anti Pluto is a Planet conspiracy. Good to see it's getting some recognition, rather than more damnation.
The whole "We changed our mind and decided that Pluto isn't a planet" is bullshit. Just say that Pluto and Eris are both planets and be done with it.
Well, there you go.
Yeah, those fools should have definitely given their money to the pros.
You know what, that's too much sarcasm for me to fart out at once. This sounds essentially like the subprime mortgage crisis. And a lot of other banking crises. It doesn't seem totally insane to me to trust your friend Joe in a trailer over the banking industry: when he runs off with my money, at least he might go to jail rather than getting millions in rewards.
As much as people (including me) like to hate on banks, when was the last time you actually lost money? When was the last time you put money in a bank and they "lost" all or part of it? When was the last time you put money in a bank and lost all or part of it because the bank was robbed?
10TB for $99 a month isn't too terrible for a backup if you value your data enough to do so.
That's $1200 a year. For the same $1200 you can buy a NAS box of equal or greater capacity that's yours and doesn't require monthly payments.
Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.
There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:
- I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google
- Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit
- Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do
- ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time
Except that many phones don't support plugging in USB drives. Come to think of it, a lot of tablets don't either.
So stop pretending that phones and tablets are real computers and stop trying to use them that way.
Sure you do. And when those damages amount to $20, and your legal costs amount to a few thousand, it's just not profitable as a business model, which is what it is used as in the states.
Someone did a study a while back and found that the amount of money the RIAA/MPAA has spent on legal costs far exceeds the amount of money they have received in settlements. Something that everyone (excecpt the RIAA/MPAA Mafia) already knew.
Yes, they get 450 million users which I think probably 350 million are frequent users. But how many already have Facebook? I am still wondering given the rapid changes in user preferences if WhatsApp will be popular long enough for Facebook to consider it a wise purchase.
The WhatsApp numbers don't add up. The first year is free and then they charge $1 a year. But their revenue last year was only $20 Million. I would appear that there is a 96% churn rate and only 4% of those alleged 450 million users stay with WhatsApp for more than a year.
Yes, it would have been much cheaper to do it internally, but then they wouldn't get the 450 million new advertising targets. Of course Facebook may be very disappointed when they find out that WhatsApp doesn't bring in much revenue. With the ubiquity of Facebook I would think there is substantial overlap between Facebook and just about anyone else.
Hey should give all 450 million customers a $1 refund.
They supposedly have 450 million users and charge $1 a year, but in 2013 they only had $20 Million in revenue. Either the 450 million users is an inflated meaningless number, or they have huge churn where only 4% of users stick around past the first year that's free.
And this promise that nothing's going to change? Laughable. If nothing else it will receive facebook branding (subtle, such as color changes) pretty quickly, and the only reason to build it out further is so that they can reap even further benefits (read: more users) over to facebook at a later point.
"Independent"? Nothing will change? LOL. They are in for a big surprise if they actually believe Facebook's line of bullshit. And here's a short piece of one of their blog entries:
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index...
Why We Don't Sell Ads
When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
Now that Facebook has spent $4 Billion Dollars (the $12 Billion in funny money is irrelevant) these guys are in for a rude awakening.
Actually what's cool about this approach is that the startup company behind it has made the new technology compatible with existing LTE (4G) networks. So operators wouldn't need to swap out the old for the new all at once, as they did to make the leap from 3G to 4G. Rather, they could just use pCell where they need to, such as in busy urban centers, and LTE users wouldn't know the difference (except for the suddenly good reception).
According to TFA (which of course no one read):
"“Demand for spectrum has outpaced our ability to innovate,” says Perlman. The reason isn’t for a lack of ideas. The wireless industry is pursuing plenty of them, including small cells, millimeter-wave spectrum, fancy interference coordination, and multiple antenna schemes such as MIMO. But Perlman thinks many of these fixes are just clever kludges for an outdated system. The real bottleneck, he argues, is the fundamental design of the cellular network. “There is no solution if you stick with cells,” he says.
Even though it is technically compatible with 4G you still have to deploy millions of new antennas. He may have invented the greatest wireless technology ever, but it's dead on arrival due to cost.
This whole thing started when somebody posted a screenshot of some disassembled code, which showed, among other things, that the software is using undocumented functions to enumerate all the cached entries.
So Valve spent X number of man hours developing this anti-cheating module, plus XX more hours figuring out undocumented functions that they need to accomplish this, and then, THEY ABANDONED THE WHOLE THING AFTER 13 DAYS because people figured out a way around it..
I understand that Valve want to stop cheating and that's OK. But, seriously, did nobody at Valve just think for a minute and say "before we spend a lot of time developing this, how easy will it be for the cheaters to circumvent?"
Yea, remember that failed scifi show, Terra Nova?
Thing cost $2million an episode.
Game of Thrones?
$6million for the first season episodes.
Short of something unprecedented with Kickstarter it's won't be crowdfunded. While the cost drops over time, you still need a ton of money to get it off the ground and sustain it for several years.
They don't *HAVE* have to be expensive. The expensive is a side effect of the massive Hollywood egos.
TV shows are expensive because of:
Producers, Directors and actors all demanding huge salaries.
Multiple Producers, Assistant Producers, Executive Producers -- I've seem 8 or more "Producers" listed in the credits for various TV shows. Then there are Directors, Editors, etc.
Everybody -- EVERYBODY -- has an assistant ( or several ) because God forbid they might have to get their own coffee or wipe their own ass.
Sets and special effects are all outsourced to various companies who charge the TV studios the same way that government contractors charge the government for their work.
The Tonight Show (Jay Leno ) which is nothing more than a guy sitting at a desk talking to people has a staff of over 100.
I think what a lot of people (particularly Slashdotters) fail to realize is the cost to produce some of these shows. Take a show like Portlandia - You'd think you could shoot it with a handycam and a Macbook, but in fact there is a large crew of professionals behind the scenes -
That's not a large crew of "professionals". That's a large crew of people standing around doing nothing of value. You need a director, somebody to hold the camera and somebody of hold the microphone. Everything else is all Hollywood bullshit. Assistants and assistants to assistants. Lackeys and assistant lackeys.
However, as a counterpoint, here is a far less histrionic story which shows that AOSP is growing FASTER than Goog'es own Android
Except you left out the part that says AOSP is growing faster than Google Android only in China and India.
As for the Ars Technica article, it's not histrionics to state facts:
Google apps—mainly Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store -- are Android's killer apps, and manufacturers want these apps on their phones.
While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. Joining the OHA requires a company to promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.
Acer was bit by this requirement when it tried to build devices that ran Alibaba's Aliyun OS in China. Aliyun is an Android fork, and when Google got wind of it, Acer was told to shut the project down or lose its access to Google apps.
This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon.
Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon doesn't have many other choices.
This is not future fantasy; it's happening right now. Just look into the current "basic income" debate in the EU: basically the idea is that all citizens get a basic income from the state
That "income" has to come from some where. So either the state prints more and more money, which is not sustainable ( ask Zimbabwe about their 11,000% inflation) or the state imposes more and more taxes, which is not sustainable.
The Star Trek universe is fantasy bullshit that is not possible in real life. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of the world around them understands this. In addition, most of the benefits of the Star Trek universe depend on fantasy technology that will never exist.
Serves them right for using crappy Chinese made components.
Equals a ISP landscape that will even more consumer unfriendly.
This merger doesn't reduce anyone's choice because there are very few (if any) areas where you currently have the option to choose one or the other. In the vast majority of areas you have exactly one choice for cable TV. If you are lucky, you might have 2 choices for Internet -- shitty expensive cable and shitty expensive DSL.
Force the monopoly cable and telephone companies to open up their networks. Then you will have real competition which will result in real consumer choice. It will also mean the end of stupid shit like monthly bandwidth caps.
I don't think there area any areas where both TW and Comcast operate. So it won't change the number of choices for anyone.
This is true.
You will just replace one shitty company with an even shittier company.
Well... "meta" is "beta" with an 'M'.
Fuck Meta?
I call this bullcrap. All music nowadays is already compressed to death.
Not everyone listens to the shit music produced in the last few years.