Why do you, Americans, put up with your mobile operators specifically disabling features (like tethering or bluetooth) on phones being sold via contracts? Here where I live (Finland), such action would be considered blatant fraud, because the operator would be advertising a specific phone model, while in reality, the phone model being advertised in reality has more or better features than the one sold to you under it's name by the operator.
BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality... they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc. Hell I can see my internal websites (not published to the internets) on my BB because it is basically VPN'd 24x7 to my work network.
Please, don't spread misinformation. Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time.
Phone companies have no interest in supplying phones that allow you to use information (over their pipes) as efficiently as possible. The more you are online, the more it costs them in infrastructure. They have have to appear minimally better than their competition.
Traditionally this has been the case, but for carries that don't offer "unlimited" data, there is an interest to encourage you to make the most of data usage. Data is the new voice.
Let me let you in on some inside information. The operators are HORRIFIED at the prospect of mobile network users actually using their unlimited data plans as much as possible. Most operators don't offer unlimited data because they want to be nice to their users, they do it because everyone else offers it too and people want it. So operators go on with offering unlimited data plans despite the fact that in most cases, their networks are NOWHERE NEAR capable of handling it. Right now, every single mobile operator that offers unlimited data over a mobile phone network either already utilizes "hidden" QoS and throttling or is scrambling to implement both as soon as possible.
This is joke of the year material. For those who don't know, the current versions of Fennec for the Nokia N900 basically crashes left and right on pretty much anything. Fennec isn't threating anything, anything soon.
In the comments on his own damn blog (linked in the TFA), Monty let it slip that he isn't worried about Oracle making MySQL closed source (they CAN'T, or well they can, but anyone can fork and make his own version right now). He is worried about the lucrative business agreements between MySQL AB and business customers willing to pay for a customized version if MySQL for their business use. In other words, he wants a piece of that pie (which he would never get should MySQL AB end up in Oracle's hands). What a greedy prick.
Perhaps Monty SHOULDN'T HAVE SOLD the damn thing in the first place if he's so worried about these things happening, no? Besides, there is NOTHING in the world preventing him from forking it, naming it something else and continuing development. NOTHING.
Malware is not the same thing as viruses. No amount of security in the operating system will save the user from getting a malware infection if he clicks "Yes" to anything. Unless the OS is locked down to the point of not being able to install anything.
When people get fed up with crippled "home" versions and paying more for "ultimate" versions, Linux will surely take off.
So that's never then.
Most users don't pay for Windows, it comes with a PC they buy.
Most users don't know there are multiple versions of XP, Vista and 7.
Most users also don't care.
Now cram your system into 85 cubic inches, under 3 lbs., and make it use less than 100 watts.
Why would anyone looking for a cheap computer care about any of those things?
I thought that was obvious. If you want a cheap computer, you obviously care about price and costs, that's a given. Electricity costs money, the less electricity a computer uses, the cheaper it's use is in the long run. A tower also occupies significantly more floor space than a Mac Mini or a similarly built PC, both of which you could just put on something (my Intel Atom based NAS is sitting on top of my bookshelf, good luck doing that with a PC ATX tower). Floor space costs money, because if you want more, it usually involves moving into a bigger apartment, which involves either a bigger rent or a bigger mortgage.
I just recently returned from a trip to India and found that many of the cyber cafes and family homes that I visited were not running the latest service-packs for Windows. I would attribute that to mostly being because although they had "broadband" their speed even during off hours were more around the range of 64 to 128 Kbps with high latency due to over subscription. Can any of you imagine downloading Windows XP SP3 over that kind of connection?
Yes.
Download the file once, overnight. Proceed to install it on all machines. The full installation file download is a mere 316mb.
Depends on what you call a customer. They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on. They try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it.
You might want to tell that to Psystar, because so far it doesn't look good for them at all.
PDF is often "non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted."
Have these people not heard of Google? Just because YOU can't write software to parse PDF files doesn't mean that nobody else can and that it doesn't already exist.
And trust me, I don't care how good a dev team you've put together, if they simply dumped the driver code out on the net I guarantee no one would be able to reverse engineer the damn thing.
Alright, I'll bite:
Considering a lot of opensource hardware drivers have been written by reverse engineering without having any original source code whatsoever to work with, why would having the code available suddenly make it harder?
RMS is a lot of things his critics accuse him off: he's a radical hippy type who pisses people off and makes the most outlandish predictions. He's also one of the most principled people I know. You can pretty much tell where Stallman will fall on an issue before anyone thinks to ask him - he'll be on whichever side means the most freedom for users.
"We are not here to give users what they want, we are here to spread freedom" - Richard Stallman
And don't pretend that you can force users to pick good passwords.
Err, sure you can? You can have a very harsh password policy automatically enforced by the system (rules including amount of lowercase and uppercase and letters and symbols with specific symbols or words being specifically disallowed to be used as part of the password). This is the easy part.
The hard part is getting the users to NOT write down this password on a piece of paper glued to the monitor.
For instance, take any desktop distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...) and a complete installation including multiple desktop environments, browsers, office suites, etc... still takes up less disk space, memory and CPU than does a bare installation of Windows Vista/7.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be severely misinformed regarding the performance of modern Linux distributions vs Windows 7 on modern hardware.
Yes, sure, you can use something like Debian and it will run faster than Windows 7 out of the box, but at what cost?
..why there are so many BSD variants while the linux kernel only has one?
Because BSDs are operating systems and linux is just a kernel. If you look at distrowatch, you will realise that there are HUNDREDS of Linux distributions.
A couple of years ago, a major ISP in Finland had a somewhat similar system. They wouldn't allow infected computers to take any other network access than HTTP and they redirected all HTTP traffic to a page saying "you're infected" and providing short instructions on how to fix it. It seems that they're not doing it anymore, but I don't know the reason.
The largest ISP in Finland, Elisa is still doing it and the system is actually working very well. I haven't seen a single false positive yet (yes I work in their helpdesk).
They're welcome to hang only my truecrypt volume as long as they like.
5th Amendment FTW
They won't have to. They politely ask you for the password to proceed with their inspection and when you politely decline, they politely inform you that you cannot board the plane until you do.
What's the point of pwning people in MMOs when that usually amounts to "my level is higher than yours, I win"? It's not a demonstration of skill, it's just a demonstration of how long you have played before that battle.
I am confused. When talking about PvP, why even bring pre-levelcap PvP into the discussion? It's irrelevant.
Yeah, pretty much. I wasn't impressed and cancelled my order. Blizzard doesn't have much to worry about here. It gets really good when you get into the forced PvP part. Once people learned that, every single person in my WoW guild who had been interested decided not to bother.
It seems that being ganked isn't exactly a feature people look for in games.
It does get really good when you get into the forced PvP part, none of that casual carebear blueshield / pveonly server bullshit in this game. I was impressed, kept my Aion preorder and cancelled my WOW subscription. Different strokes for different folks.
If you have can point to some part of their argument that's flawed, then do so.
Are you for real? Here is just 1 gem from their "campaign":
4. Lock-in: Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don't meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.
Are you insane? Removing support for older versions?
Windows 2000 (released on Feb 17, 2000) is supported until 13 July 2010.
Windows XP (released in Aug 2001 is supported until April 8, 2014
Now please, list for me, the free software OS distributions that are provided with security fixes for 10-12 years after release?
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you, Americans, put up with your mobile operators specifically disabling features (like tethering or bluetooth) on phones being sold via contracts? Here where I live (Finland), such action would be considered blatant fraud, because the operator would be advertising a specific phone model, while in reality, the phone model being advertised in reality has more or better features than the one sold to you under it's name by the operator.
BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality... they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc. Hell I can see my internal websites (not published to the internets) on my BB because it is basically VPN'd 24x7 to my work network.
Please, don't spread misinformation. Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time.
Phone companies have no interest in supplying phones that allow you to use information (over their pipes) as efficiently as possible. The more you are online, the more it costs them in infrastructure. They have have to appear minimally better than their competition.
Traditionally this has been the case, but for carries that don't offer "unlimited" data, there is an interest to encourage you to make the most of data usage. Data is the new voice.
Let me let you in on some inside information. The operators are HORRIFIED at the prospect of mobile network users actually using their unlimited data plans as much as possible. Most operators don't offer unlimited data because they want to be nice to their users, they do it because everyone else offers it too and people want it. So operators go on with offering unlimited data plans despite the fact that in most cases, their networks are NOWHERE NEAR capable of handling it. Right now, every single mobile operator that offers unlimited data over a mobile phone network either already utilizes "hidden" QoS and throttling or is scrambling to implement both as soon as possible.
This is joke of the year material. For those who don't know, the current versions of Fennec for the Nokia N900 basically crashes left and right on pretty much anything. Fennec isn't threating anything, anything soon.
In the comments on his own damn blog (linked in the TFA), Monty let it slip that he isn't worried about Oracle making MySQL closed source (they CAN'T, or well they can, but anyone can fork and make his own version right now). He is worried about the lucrative business agreements between MySQL AB and business customers willing to pay for a customized version if MySQL for their business use. In other words, he wants a piece of that pie (which he would never get should MySQL AB end up in Oracle's hands). What a greedy prick.
Perhaps Monty SHOULDN'T HAVE SOLD the damn thing in the first place if he's so worried about these things happening, no? Besides, there is NOTHING in the world preventing him from forking it, naming it something else and continuing development. NOTHING.
Malware is not the same thing as viruses. No amount of security in the operating system will save the user from getting a malware infection if he clicks "Yes" to anything. Unless the OS is locked down to the point of not being able to install anything.
When people get fed up with crippled "home" versions and paying more for "ultimate" versions, Linux will surely take off.
So that's never then. Most users don't pay for Windows, it comes with a PC they buy. Most users don't know there are multiple versions of XP, Vista and 7. Most users also don't care.
Now cram your system into 85 cubic inches, under 3 lbs., and make it use less than 100 watts.
Why would anyone looking for a cheap computer care about any of those things?
I thought that was obvious. If you want a cheap computer, you obviously care about price and costs, that's a given. Electricity costs money, the less electricity a computer uses, the cheaper it's use is in the long run. A tower also occupies significantly more floor space than a Mac Mini or a similarly built PC, both of which you could just put on something (my Intel Atom based NAS is sitting on top of my bookshelf, good luck doing that with a PC ATX tower). Floor space costs money, because if you want more, it usually involves moving into a bigger apartment, which involves either a bigger rent or a bigger mortgage.
http://xreal-project.net/
You are delusional if you think quake3 engine (id tech 3) is anywhere near UE3.
Still behind id software and their GPL releases of the game engines.
Please point me to GPL'ed sources of ID software engine technology equivalent to the technology described in TFA. Thanks.
I just recently returned from a trip to India and found that many of the cyber cafes and family homes that I visited were not running the latest service-packs for Windows. I would attribute that to mostly being because although they had "broadband" their speed even during off hours were more around the range of 64 to 128 Kbps with high latency due to over subscription. Can any of you imagine downloading Windows XP SP3 over that kind of connection?
Yes. Download the file once, overnight. Proceed to install it on all machines. The full installation file download is a mere 316mb.
Depends on what you call a customer. They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on. They try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it.
You might want to tell that to Psystar, because so far it doesn't look good for them at all.
Have these people not heard of Google? Just because YOU can't write software to parse PDF files doesn't mean that nobody else can and that it doesn't already exist.
And trust me, I don't care how good a dev team you've put together, if they simply dumped the driver code out on the net I guarantee no one would be able to reverse engineer the damn thing.
Alright, I'll bite: Considering a lot of opensource hardware drivers have been written by reverse engineering without having any original source code whatsoever to work with, why would having the code available suddenly make it harder?
RMS is a lot of things his critics accuse him off: he's a radical hippy type who pisses people off and makes the most outlandish predictions. He's also one of the most principled people I know. You can pretty much tell where Stallman will fall on an issue before anyone thinks to ask him - he'll be on whichever side means the most freedom for users.
"We are not here to give users what they want, we are here to spread freedom" - Richard Stallman
And don't pretend that you can force users to pick good passwords.
Err, sure you can? You can have a very harsh password policy automatically enforced by the system (rules including amount of lowercase and uppercase and letters and symbols with specific symbols or words being specifically disallowed to be used as part of the password). This is the easy part. The hard part is getting the users to NOT write down this password on a piece of paper glued to the monitor.
For instance, take any desktop distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...) and a complete installation including multiple desktop environments, browsers, office suites, etc... still takes up less disk space, memory and CPU than does a bare installation of Windows Vista/7.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be severely misinformed regarding the performance of modern Linux distributions vs Windows 7 on modern hardware. Yes, sure, you can use something like Debian and it will run faster than Windows 7 out of the box, but at what cost?
..why there are so many BSD variants while the linux kernel only has one?
Because BSDs are operating systems and linux is just a kernel. If you look at distrowatch, you will realise that there are HUNDREDS of Linux distributions.
A couple of years ago, a major ISP in Finland had a somewhat similar system. They wouldn't allow infected computers to take any other network access than HTTP and they redirected all HTTP traffic to a page saying "you're infected" and providing short instructions on how to fix it. It seems that they're not doing it anymore, but I don't know the reason.
The largest ISP in Finland, Elisa is still doing it and the system is actually working very well. I haven't seen a single false positive yet (yes I work in their helpdesk).
They're welcome to hang only my truecrypt volume as long as they like.
5th Amendment FTW
They won't have to. They politely ask you for the password to proceed with their inspection and when you politely decline, they politely inform you that you cannot board the plane until you do.
Unsurprisingly, the PvE servers are more popular then the PvP ones where ganking does exist
Proof or retraction. This claim couldn't be farther from the truth.
What's the point of pwning people in MMOs when that usually amounts to "my level is higher than yours, I win"? It's not a demonstration of skill, it's just a demonstration of how long you have played before that battle.
I am confused. When talking about PvP, why even bring pre-levelcap PvP into the discussion? It's irrelevant.
Yeah, pretty much. I wasn't impressed and cancelled my order. Blizzard doesn't have much to worry about here. It gets really good when you get into the forced PvP part. Once people learned that, every single person in my WoW guild who had been interested decided not to bother.
It seems that being ganked isn't exactly a feature people look for in games.
It does get really good when you get into the forced PvP part, none of that casual carebear blueshield / pveonly server bullshit in this game. I was impressed, kept my Aion preorder and cancelled my WOW subscription. Different strokes for different folks.
Are you for real? Here is just 1 gem from their "campaign":
Are you insane? Removing support for older versions?
Windows 2000 (released on Feb 17, 2000) is supported until 13 July 2010.
Windows XP (released in Aug 2001 is supported until April 8, 2014
Now please, list for me, the free software OS distributions that are provided with security fixes for 10-12 years after release?