If I had points, I'd mod you up. The reality is, that it's Apple's phone. They can do what they want with it. Consumers have a choice. There is more than one phone out there.
Don't like it? Don't buy it.
I also still like mine. It's not perfect by a longshot, but it's the best I've had so far...
I was there in January during CES. I found it a little overpriced, however it was pretty fun. I thought that the Borg experience where you actually take part in a pre-scripted adventure was the most entertaining of the two. The transporter effect on the Klingon adventure was pretty interesting.
I agree with others that Quark's bar was pretty good. The drinks were good, and the food was actually good (and not too expensive, given that it was Vegas). Fun atmosphere. Maybe they should just move Quark's somewhere else. It would probably still be popular.
That said, it did have some rough edges on it. You could start to get the feel of things being a bit run-down and in need of some updating (older, burned-in computer monitors set in the display screens, etc). The IMAX films were getting pretty scratched up and were in bad shape - they really needed some crisp new prints.
Could it still be successful as a Vegas attraction? I dunno - it's been quite some time since TNG, and until the Trek franchise is re-invigorated, existing fans probably wouldn't have been quite as interested.
He hasn't been captured because he's dead, gone, kaput, etc. The only reason that the US administration doesn't admit that he's dead is that he's still useful as the image of a "big scary bad guy" to control the (voting) population...
1) I don't know about heavily restricted, and it certainly doesn't require a jailbreak - only if you want to run certain types of applications that Apple doesn't permit (VOIP over 3G for instance), or you don't want to wait a couple of weeks for Apple to digitally sign your application to put on iTMS.
2) Same with Canada - but the store unbricks the phone for you before you leave, or you can do it at home. Your choice, only needs to be done once. Of course anyone using the phone without iTunes is losing a ton of functionality.
3) Well, it plays the major format, MP3 natively - seeing as how that is 99.9% of my library, that works for me. Also supports a few other audio formats that Apple endorses. It plays MPEG-4 video, which isn't all common for downloaded files, but is extremely efficient for the size. There are lots of free converters available. I can convert a 30-min long TV show from AVI to MP4 in under 6 minutes on my quad-core machine.
4) The hype sort of depends on your point of view - for what it is, it's a pretty amazing phone. Internet & Google in your pocket with a UI that's actually usable. I'd rather that Apple gave consumers the choice of buying directly from them at an unsubsidised price rather than locking into a contract. In that respect, Apple did sell-out their customers.
5) Built in, yes. Expensive to replace? Maybe. I've never bothered getting a second battery for any of my phones. This one uses more power - maybe I'll want an extra battery, maybe I'll just plug it in more often. I have yet to get under 50% battery life, but I can charge at home, in the car, or at work if necessary, so I don't mind in any case. If the battery lasts 2 or 3 years, that's fine by me.
6) Ya, that grinds me - they could've added a MicroSD port on the phone, and they should still allow it to be used as a USB mass storage device in some manner as well.
Except that's not the way a hidden volume works. Unless you enter the keys for both the outer volume and inner volume at the same time, all you'd see is a 10GB partition with 5GB of data and 5GB of free space. Since Truecrypt encrypts free space when it creates a container (it's not like it's a bunch of 0s or something), there's no way of determining that there's a second container, and that the remaining 5GB aren't just unused regular space. This is done intentionally for preventing exactly the sort of scenario you described.
The downside is that if you just decrypt the outer volume, then fill up the entire outer volume with data, you'll overwrite the inner volume and destroy it because the operating system doesn't even know it's there unless it's active.
I'd allow them to install a quasi-intrusive DRM if it was time-limited. Ie: for the first 3 months, it phones home every 10 days to check on itself and only allows 3 installs. Then after 3 months it loses the phone home and bumps the installs to 6. Then after 6 months the DRM was removed entirely, I'd definitely buy it.
Or if they released it on Steam, using Steam's built-in DRM that allows for installs in as many locations as you want, but only one playable at a time, that would be fine.
And please note that a lot of the people who died in the terrorist attack died on the ground, not in the plane, which skews the odds even more (after all, planes are now supposed to be largely "takeover proof")....Still trying to figure out why Americans are so scared of this stuff. The odds of getting hit by lightning are higher than being in a plane during a terrorist incident.
I was sort of wondering about that... Then it occurred to me that if she and her family are "texan church-goin folk", then I'm not sure why they're complaining about calling her a virgin. Would they have been happier if they had described her as "not a virgin"?
Well, Kevin Rose just pulled the plug on Digg (at least in a temporary sense).
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts...
In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We've always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin
I feel bad for Kevin - I don't believe that anyone legitimately upset by this whole situation wants Digg to die. Unfortunately the moderators made a number of bad decisions that only made things worse. Perhaps they should've allowed one story on the topic and had everyone comment there. Keep that page up until they have a legitimate, hand delivered paper DMCA takedown request. Then users' anger would be focused where it really belongs (read MPAA).
With the moderators banning accounts and deleting posts, they took entirely the wrong approach, and are now suffering the consequences. Sadly, this may be a very, very hard lesson for Kevin / Digg.
When you create a social networking/commenting site, knowingly or not, you put yourself at the mercy of a large number of people who can be extremely volatile. Not a whole lot of difference between that and a good, old-fashioned mob of real people.
Here's hoping some good can come out of this whole unfortunate situation...
Nice comparison, but there's really only two that matter (at least on PCs):
ZIP for cross-platform compatibility (and for simplicity for less technically-minded users).
RAR for everything else (at 3rd in their "efficiency" list, it's easy to see why it's so popular, not to mention ease of use for splitting archives, etc).
I'll chime in as well with a statement that I've never had problems using TY media. Of all of the media I've used (and I use a lot - doing commercial DVD authoring), TY is the only one that has never once had a problem.
It's worth noting that this article is specifically talking about data archiving (obviously), where the +R format does offer advantages with error correction/handling. One size doesn't fit all for media however, and I still recommend using DVD-R for video DVD authoring as it has a much higher compatibility with set-top players.
I had a bad run with Western Digital drives a while back and switched to Maxtors, which I found to be very reliable when they were first putting out 250GB drives. Had a bad experience with a Seagate dropping dead within the first week after purchase, fortunately I got most of my data off of it.
Seagate also does NOT offer advance drive replacement in Canada, which means I'll never buy another of their products until this policy changes.
Had good luck with more recent Western Digital drives. Put 5 x 500GB in a RAID-5 server, and they're running great!
I suppose the bigger question is "why do Japanese labels want people to pirate their music?". Because if you don't offer people a legit way of downloading tracks, then people gravitate to the alternatives.
Doesn't really bother me much, but makes me curious about their business sense.
As an aside, Apple/iTunes/publishers also do the same thing with video content that's available to US customers only, and not to people from other geographic regions. The reason? Who knows, but I do know that it's costing them money from people like me that would prefer to purchase it easily rather than using alternatives...
The other way is to use Truecrypt in "partition" mode, where it's not writing to a file on a normally formatted filesystem, but just working with an unallocated partition somewhere on your drive.
I'm running my own mail server and using a system I read about which delays the initial SMTP "HELO" for 20-30 seconds before acknowledging the incoming connection.
If someone is sending spam, they're not going to wait that long before starting a new connection (it would slow them down something fierce, to maybe only sending 1 or 2 emails a minute).
This catches about 75% or more of the spam coming in - anything left is mopped-up by either spam assassin at the mail server level, or POPFile before my email client.
Sort of a 3-tiered approach. Very little (maybe 1 or 2) spams per-week get through.
I upgraded and was pleasantly surprised to find that of the 14 or so extensions that I use, only about 3 were "incompatible" with the new version - not nearly as bad as I had thought.
That said, I've had it freeze a couple of times on me (however the session-restore worked, and put me right back where I left-off when it started up again). Javascript is still a major stumbling block - it's really damn slow. Aside from fixing bugs, hopefully they put a lot of emphasis on optimizing their JS engine, as it really is sluggish on sites that use a lot of it (Digg and the like).
Unfortunately(?) it also makes people who designed and utilize the system look hopelessly incompetent (perhaps they are...) - so rather than admit the flaws in their system were the cause of the security breach, politicians and "insiders" use law enforcement to "wield a big stick" so other law-abiding citizens won't try anything naughty that might embarrass "the company" or "the government" in the future.
Of course, true criminals aren't going to reveal their hacks and workarounds in public, they're just going to use them to accomplish their goals. And the government should be FAR more frightened of that...
pwned: Someone who is bragging about their elite level of playing ability after the latest kill in a multiplayer game of some sort, yet is still unable to spell...
That's not quite accurate - DVD encryption was cracked "faster" because the key inside their executable wasn't encrypted - by analyzing the key and the protection, it was easier for people to find out how poor the content protection system really was. If they key wasn't revealed, it may have taken another few months to break it.
At any rate, my reaction to the whole lack of HD playback is kind of a yawn. I don't really care - I havn't purchased a machine that can play HD movies, and I have no reason to waste any of my money until a clear "format war" winner is established.
Until then, I'm perfectly happy with DVDs - shrug. Too bad media companies.
Wait until there is LOTS of blu-ray hardware and software out, as well as hundreds (thousands?) of movies released in the format. THEN hack it - then it will be too late for the companies to start making major changes to the hardware and software without impacting huge numbers of consumers (and risking a huge backlash).
If you hack it early, the media empirs will just make modifications to break the hack again, and if it's done early enough, they'll be able to do it without stirring up the masses
I firmly believe that the terrorists won with their 9/11 attack.
One attack, a few thousand people killed, and your country's civil rights are now being violated like never before "for the sake of security", and your constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
If anyone thinks that America has won the "war on terror", just think about what's been lost in the process...
Any bets on the timing of the _next_ American Civil War?
Slashdot Mirror
If I had points, I'd mod you up. The reality is, that it's Apple's phone. They can do what they want with it. Consumers have a choice. There is more than one phone out there.
Don't like it? Don't buy it.
I also still like mine. It's not perfect by a longshot, but it's the best I've had so far...
N.
I was there in January during CES. I found it a little overpriced, however it was pretty fun. I thought that the Borg experience where you actually take part in a pre-scripted adventure was the most entertaining of the two. The transporter effect on the Klingon adventure was pretty interesting.
I agree with others that Quark's bar was pretty good. The drinks were good, and the food was actually good (and not too expensive, given that it was Vegas). Fun atmosphere. Maybe they should just move Quark's somewhere else. It would probably still be popular.
That said, it did have some rough edges on it. You could start to get the feel of things being a bit run-down and in need of some updating (older, burned-in computer monitors set in the display screens, etc). The IMAX films were getting pretty scratched up and were in bad shape - they really needed some crisp new prints.
Could it still be successful as a Vegas attraction? I dunno - it's been quite some time since TNG, and until the Trek franchise is re-invigorated, existing fans probably wouldn't have been quite as interested.
N.
He hasn't been captured because he's dead, gone, kaput, etc. The only reason that the US administration doesn't admit that he's dead is that he's still useful as the image of a "big scary bad guy" to control the (voting) population...
Just responding to your points:
1) I don't know about heavily restricted, and it certainly doesn't require a jailbreak - only if you want to run certain types of applications that Apple doesn't permit (VOIP over 3G for instance), or you don't want to wait a couple of weeks for Apple to digitally sign your application to put on iTMS.
2) Same with Canada - but the store unbricks the phone for you before you leave, or you can do it at home. Your choice, only needs to be done once. Of course anyone using the phone without iTunes is losing a ton of functionality.
3) Well, it plays the major format, MP3 natively - seeing as how that is 99.9% of my library, that works for me. Also supports a few other audio formats that Apple endorses. It plays MPEG-4 video, which isn't all common for downloaded files, but is extremely efficient for the size. There are lots of free converters available. I can convert a 30-min long TV show from AVI to MP4 in under 6 minutes on my quad-core machine.
4) The hype sort of depends on your point of view - for what it is, it's a pretty amazing phone. Internet & Google in your pocket with a UI that's actually usable. I'd rather that Apple gave consumers the choice of buying directly from them at an unsubsidised price rather than locking into a contract. In that respect, Apple did sell-out their customers.
5) Built in, yes. Expensive to replace? Maybe. I've never bothered getting a second battery for any of my phones. This one uses more power - maybe I'll want an extra battery, maybe I'll just plug it in more often. I have yet to get under 50% battery life, but I can charge at home, in the car, or at work if necessary, so I don't mind in any case. If the battery lasts 2 or 3 years, that's fine by me.
6) Ya, that grinds me - they could've added a MicroSD port on the phone, and they should still allow it to be used as a USB mass storage device in some manner as well.
Except that's not the way a hidden volume works. Unless you enter the keys for both the outer volume and inner volume at the same time, all you'd see is a 10GB partition with 5GB of data and 5GB of free space. Since Truecrypt encrypts free space when it creates a container (it's not like it's a bunch of 0s or something), there's no way of determining that there's a second container, and that the remaining 5GB aren't just unused regular space. This is done intentionally for preventing exactly the sort of scenario you described.
The downside is that if you just decrypt the outer volume, then fill up the entire outer volume with data, you'll overwrite the inner volume and destroy it because the operating system doesn't even know it's there unless it's active.
N.
I'd allow them to install a quasi-intrusive DRM if it was time-limited. Ie: for the first 3 months, it phones home every 10 days to check on itself and only allows 3 installs. Then after 3 months it loses the phone home and bumps the installs to 6. Then after 6 months the DRM was removed entirely, I'd definitely buy it.
Or if they released it on Steam, using Steam's built-in DRM that allows for installs in as many locations as you want, but only one playable at a time, that would be fine.
Check with your lawyer, cross out the bits you don't like and initial them (or just send back a signed version that you've fixed).
I wouldn't sign a contract like that...
"terrorism - 3,000"
...Still trying to figure out why Americans are so scared of this stuff. The odds of getting hit by lightning are higher than being in a plane during a terrorist incident.
And please note that a lot of the people who died in the terrorist attack died on the ground, not in the plane, which skews the odds even more (after all, planes are now supposed to be largely "takeover proof").
N.
"What I am curious about is this: how many legitimate security threats have been stopped by the regulations in place now?"
According to the Government?
Lots.
That's all you need to know.
Be afraid.
I was sort of wondering about that... Then it occurred to me that if she and her family are "texan church-goin folk", then I'm not sure why they're complaining about calling her a virgin. Would they have been happier if they had described her as "not a virgin"?
I feel bad for Kevin - I don't believe that anyone legitimately upset by this whole situation wants Digg to die. Unfortunately the moderators made a number of bad decisions that only made things worse. Perhaps they should've allowed one story on the topic and had everyone comment there. Keep that page up until they have a legitimate, hand delivered paper DMCA takedown request. Then users' anger would be focused where it really belongs (read MPAA).
With the moderators banning accounts and deleting posts, they took entirely the wrong approach, and are now suffering the consequences. Sadly, this may be a very, very hard lesson for Kevin / Digg.
When you create a social networking/commenting site, knowingly or not, you put yourself at the mercy of a large number of people who can be extremely volatile. Not a whole lot of difference between that and a good, old-fashioned mob of real people.
Here's hoping some good can come out of this whole unfortunate situation...
N.
Nice comparison, but there's really only two that matter (at least on PCs):
ZIP for cross-platform compatibility (and for simplicity for less technically-minded users).
RAR for everything else (at 3rd in their "efficiency" list, it's easy to see why it's so popular, not to mention ease of use for splitting archives, etc).
I'll chime in as well with a statement that I've never had problems using TY media. Of all of the media I've used (and I use a lot - doing commercial DVD authoring), TY is the only one that has never once had a problem.
It's worth noting that this article is specifically talking about data archiving (obviously), where the +R format does offer advantages with error correction/handling. One size doesn't fit all for media however, and I still recommend using DVD-R for video DVD authoring as it has a much higher compatibility with set-top players.
N.
This is only for business/corporate versions which require a Vista license server.
When home/ultimate/media whatever is activated, it will stay activated.
I had a bad run with Western Digital drives a while back and switched to Maxtors, which I found to be very reliable when they were first putting out 250GB drives. Had a bad experience with a Seagate dropping dead within the first week after purchase, fortunately I got most of my data off of it.
Seagate also does NOT offer advance drive replacement in Canada, which means I'll never buy another of their products until this policy changes.
Had good luck with more recent Western Digital drives. Put 5 x 500GB in a RAID-5 server, and they're running great!
N.
I was disappointed that they didn't offer this information in the report - but not really surprised.
I suppose the bigger question is "why do Japanese labels want people to pirate their music?". Because if you don't offer people a legit way of downloading tracks, then people gravitate to the alternatives.
Doesn't really bother me much, but makes me curious about their business sense.
As an aside, Apple/iTunes/publishers also do the same thing with video content that's available to US customers only, and not to people from other geographic regions. The reason? Who knows, but I do know that it's costing them money from people like me that would prefer to purchase it easily rather than using alternatives...
The other way is to use Truecrypt in "partition" mode, where it's not writing to a file on a normally formatted filesystem, but just working with an unallocated partition somewhere on your drive.
I'm running my own mail server and using a system I read about which delays the initial SMTP "HELO" for 20-30 seconds before acknowledging the incoming connection.
If someone is sending spam, they're not going to wait that long before starting a new connection (it would slow them down something fierce, to maybe only sending 1 or 2 emails a minute).
This catches about 75% or more of the spam coming in - anything left is mopped-up by either spam assassin at the mail server level, or POPFile before my email client.
Sort of a 3-tiered approach. Very little (maybe 1 or 2) spams per-week get through.
N.
I upgraded and was pleasantly surprised to find that of the 14 or so extensions that I use, only about 3 were "incompatible" with the new version - not nearly as bad as I had thought.
That said, I've had it freeze a couple of times on me (however the session-restore worked, and put me right back where I left-off when it started up again). Javascript is still a major stumbling block - it's really damn slow. Aside from fixing bugs, hopefully they put a lot of emphasis on optimizing their JS engine, as it really is sluggish on sites that use a lot of it (Digg and the like).
N.
Unfortunately(?) it also makes people who designed and utilize the system look hopelessly incompetent (perhaps they are...) - so rather than admit the flaws in their system were the cause of the security breach, politicians and "insiders" use law enforcement to "wield a big stick" so other law-abiding citizens won't try anything naughty that might embarrass "the company" or "the government" in the future.
Of course, true criminals aren't going to reveal their hacks and workarounds in public, they're just going to use them to accomplish their goals. And the government should be FAR more frightened of that...
N.
pwned: Someone who is bragging about their elite level of playing ability after the latest kill in a multiplayer game of some sort, yet is still unable to spell...
That's not quite accurate - DVD encryption was cracked "faster" because the key inside their executable wasn't encrypted - by analyzing the key and the protection, it was easier for people to find out how poor the content protection system really was. If they key wasn't revealed, it may have taken another few months to break it.
At any rate, my reaction to the whole lack of HD playback is kind of a yawn. I don't really care - I havn't purchased a machine that can play HD movies, and I have no reason to waste any of my money until a clear "format war" winner is established.
Until then, I'm perfectly happy with DVDs - shrug. Too bad media companies.
N.
I'd rather he didn't - at least not yet...
Wait until there is LOTS of blu-ray hardware and software out, as well as hundreds (thousands?) of movies released in the format. THEN hack it - then it will be too late for the companies to start making major changes to the hardware and software without impacting huge numbers of consumers (and risking a huge backlash).
If you hack it early, the media empirs will just make modifications to break the hack again, and if it's done early enough, they'll be able to do it without stirring up the masses
N.
I firmly believe that the terrorists won with their 9/11 attack.
One attack, a few thousand people killed, and your country's civil rights are now being violated like never before "for the sake of security", and your constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
If anyone thinks that America has won the "war on terror", just think about what's been lost in the process...
Any bets on the timing of the _next_ American Civil War?