I was the biggest Sony geek. My TV, DVD player, receiver, console - all Sony. After the rootkit trick, I will no longer buy Sony electronics. Sony was great when they were an electronics company, and not a content owner. They are more concerned with making sure their electronics protects their content rather than building consumer electronics people want. I'm very disappointed, but there's plenty of other quality electronics companies that I can switch to - Toshiba, Samsung, etc.
I doubt that my boycott will have much effect on Sony. They won't notice that my electronics shelves no longer carry the Sony brandname, just as they haven't noticed I haven't purchased more than 5 music CD in over 5 years. I'm sure they chalk that up to illegal music downloads, but really, if you look at my music collection, I don't really have anything newer than 5 years ago.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. My everyday work computer is a powerbook with OS X, even though most of my servers are Windows. However, I fail to see how Microsoft is implicated in Sony's rootkit. Sony wrote the rootkit. Sony hid it. Sony installed it regardless of whether the user agreed to it or not. If you're arguing that Microsoft is responsible because it requires users to be administrators in order to install it, and average users are running administrator accounts, that would be disingenuous. This would have occurred regardless because even if it used a UNIX style administrator/user scheme, once the average user put their DRM CD from Sony in the drive asking them for administrator privileges, they would have done it. Why? Because it's a music CD from Sony. Same thing would have happened on OS X where the user is not administrator by default. A dialog box appears asking for admin privileges in order to install software that "enhances" the CD experience, and the user happily gives it because it's something they bought from a store in shiny shrink wrap, and not downloaded from the untrustworthy internet.
Funny that Sony's rootkit exploited consumer trust because they themselves don't trust the consumer.
I work for a web dev company and we need to test Safari and IE Mac compatibility, so I bought an old iMac from a friend of mine for this purpose. I created an Admin account and a general user shared account.
You specify which applications they are allowed to run through System Preferences, as well as prevent them from changing passwords, burning DVDs/CDs, etc. If you have any kind of proficiency with UNIX, you can prevent them from writing to anything on the hard drive by setting the permissions through the terminal. There might be a tool to do this already, but I just use the terminal for what I need.
I am a female gamer - I have been since I was 5 years old. I've always had a computer in my house since my Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20. I am heterosexual, attractive, working on my bachelors in mathematics and computer science, and play video games of all genre's - FPS, strategy, roleplaying, action, etc, etc. When I was growing up, I never saw a difference between 'boy toys' and 'girl toys' - I played with hot wheels cars with the neighbor boys and I had barbies as well, who always had a career of their own in my imaginary world. When playing with legos, I could reverse engineer every model listed on the box, but lacked the artistic flare to create my own images from scratch.
When I play games, I prefer to play a female avatar. There are a few male jerks who are just trying to cyb0r, but most are very cool. Nearly all of my online friends are guys who treat me exactly as I expect to be treated among my peers. They aren't looking for a girlfriend, they're just looking for a friend to play games with.
However, when I am in an IRC tech channel, I go by a male alias. While I am all for proving existing stereotypes wrong, I'm tired of arguing the same points over and over again. Unfortunately, I have found having a male alias gives me instant credibility that I don't get with a female alias. The bias is that I am an oddity, and therefore have to not only fight my point, but also the preconceived notion that I'm not supposed to know what I know.
I've always had a very, very strong interest in the sciences, and they were my favorite classes in school. I don't believe my aptitude and interest in science and gaming has anything at all with me being an oddity among my gender, but more with my upbringing that I never saw the difference between 'boy' interests and 'girl' interests.
Not likely. The marriage between MS and HP is for money, not love. They aren't going anywhere. Napster isn't owned by MS either, so it's a stretch to say this is a MS snub.
HP picking up iTunes is about money, not ideology. iTunes is a better service, but they clearly got sold on the HP branded iPods. Napster isn't making any money right now, and Apple is making money selling iPods. The deal was greatly weighted in favor of Napster - they were probably banking on the new revenue. HP simply got a better offer from Apple.
It's been discussed in several threads, but penalties are actually counterintuitive to what we want to do. Companies are outsourcing because of the bottom line. If you penalize them, large corporations with deep pockets will just pick up their entire operation and move elsewhere.
We want to stop the mass exodus of middle class jobs overseas. It's actually an incentive that you want to implement for keeping jobs domestic. You want to reward companies for keeping jobs domestic, not penalize for shipping them over.
That would have the reverse effect of what we want. Corporations with deep pockets will close down US interests and move to another country, who would be happy to take them without the restrictions. They could even lobby the new government to create policies even more favorable to them.
It's not really what anyone wants to hear, but you actually want to give incentives not penalties. It's sickening to think of giving further tax benefits to corporations that are shrinking the middle class, but they need to be offered a bottom line reason why they should keep jobs domestic. They won't do it just to keep a healthy US economy - they can pack up and move anywhere.
Lots of people mentioning the Action, Urgency, Excellent emails we used to get spammed with at EDS. The emails would be received last name, first name, so Dick Brown's emails came in as Brown, Dick. Now the rest of the world knows what we knew from this very appropriate description - he was fucking his customers and employees up the ass.
$55 million dollar salary and a $35 million dollar severance. My friends who got laid off got 2 weeks severance, which they changed from a one month severance just before a huge round of layoffs.
I take a bit of sardonic pleasure from EDS' recent troubles. They are exactly a product of what they built. A company that ineffective and corrupt doesn't get 'fixed' just by replacing the head of the viper.
Not to mention ANY computer type - Wintel, *NIX, Mac. I like www.musicrebellion.com for indies in MP3s, which I can play on my Wintel, Mac and iPod. However, the commercial stuff is in LiquidAudio or WMA. They're going to have to allow me the same flexibility as the indies before I'll fork over some cash on commercial download services.
If they don't want to do that...well...then I guess P2P is better.
I tried LiquidAudio a long time ago. I wasn't too impressed. They seem to have come a long way. However, limiting their software also alienates potential customers.
I don't know what the current estimate of the number of *nix users out there, but even if only 4% of people on Macs, that's still about 10 million potential customers. They aren't making money off the software; they're making money selling the music. To sell more music, they need more customers. It's highly unlikely that people who are looking for a new computer are going to factor in which internet music distribution supports which platform. It doesn't help nor hinder Dell or Apple's sales - only their own.
It's a product inconvenience, making the product less desirable. The free market always solves these problems in the end. If loss of sales due to these features offsets the sales they're allegedly losing due to P2P, they'll drop it. That's all.
We've seen the Entertainment industry become increasingly aggressive. In this economic slump, every sector is feeling the pinch, and the first thing to go in household budgets is the discretionary goods. Despite what the entertainment industry believes, people really can live without CDs and DVDs.
However, instead of blaming bad economic times, they blame P2P. Politicians believe it. It's there, everyone knows about it, and it's a "bad" thing to pass around Britney Spear's MP3s (gag). So even if the majority of people out there are not buying the CDs because they either don't have the extra cash to spare or because they don't like the crippled CDs, Sony and pals spin it to blame P2P. No matter what, P2P will be blamed for slumping sales - it's the perfect scapegoat for them to get politicians to listen to them. So we'll continue to get asinine legislation (at least in the U.S.) to protect some dinosaurs from a perceived threat versus the real threat (they are the cause of their own problems).
Maybe the market will work itself out, however, I fear the legislation that will pass in the meantime from some convincing corporations passing around the green. That's a lot harder to undo, even if the CEO's wake up and realize the truth. There isn't going to be a law that says, "Thou shalt buy whatever drivel Sony and Universal sells," however, laws like the DMCA has the ability to suppress free speech, which according to the U.S. Constitution *is* a god given right. The DMCA exists because of the RIAA's and MPAA's lobbying.
I believe that the DMCA will eventually be reversed (or at least modified), but it will take about 10 years or more...when people who grew up in the "MTV" video game era start entering politics and replace many of the people responsible for this.
I was pondering this myself. I don't know if it's price fixing, but it curiously seems to be collaboration. 4 big chains ganging up would be tough for anyone to fight.
Sendo CEO Hugh Brogan said in a statement. "While our mission of providing customers with feature-rich and ubiquitous devices remains unaltered, seeing that the Series 60 fully embraces both our mission and the new strategy, we decided to approach Nokia." Nokia's "platform utilizes open standards and technologies, such as MMS (Multimedia Message Service) and Java, jointly developed by the industry," he added.
Quote is from the ZDNet link.
They didn't exactly say it was because they couldn't get the source. What they said was Nokia uses open standards like MMS and Java, and they felt that was more in line with what they want to do. We know from history that Microsoft resists using existing standards where ever possible.
Absolutely. You can watch a full 90 minute movie on a fully charged battery with a little bit of charge to spare. As mentioned in other posts, you can save more battery power by playing it from the harddrive.
Here's something else that's really cool about the battery. In the event you need to swap the battery to a spare, when you get the low power warning, put your laptop to sleep before pulling out the battery (close the lid). You now have approximately 2-3 minutes of reserve power to change the battery! That's an ungodly amount of time to swap out a battery. Most Wintel laptops I know of aren't that forgiving...you have to have a spare already in hand to do a quick swap in record time.
I bought my TiBook 800MHz two months ago. The only thing that I am a little bit jealous about is the superdrive. Other than that, I already got my money's worth out of my TiBook, and I anticipate this lasting me approximately 3 years. By the time I'm ready to upgrade my laptop again, the DVD-R superdrive will be up to 16x+ speed, instead of the measily 1x of these first gens, so hah!
OS X allows you to print documents straight to PDF. This isn't free; Apple paid for the license, and is included in the cost of buying OS X.
There are still benefits to buying the full Adobe Acrobat package. For instance, you can't edit pdf files or create one from scratch, but the distiller functionality where you can "print" files to pdf is included. But it is not "free" - Apple paid for it and so do you if you bought OS X.
This is not comparing apples to apples. Apple did not develop their own document technology to give away for free; they licensed it from Adobe. That is why Preview renders in PDF, and you can print straight to pdf without installing any additional software.
They won't sue her. If they "fire" her, they'll probably give her a couple years severance pay in exchange for a draconian NDA that says she won't talk about what happened. They'll want to "appear" as though they are being proactive, but want to limit the damage she could cause by giving her story to the media.
It's more of an embarrassment at this point, and she probably wants it to be over with as bad as Microsoft does.
I have a TiBook 800 as well. The range smokes my old Armada with a PCMCIA Wi-Fi. I get complete coverage in my house, upstairs and downstairs, and out on my backyard patio. My Armada barely picks up the signal on the patio. With the TiBook, I can walk almost into my neighbor's yard before I drop signal. I just wanted coverage in my house and the backyard...which I got, most comfortably.
If I just listened to music in my living room, a format change might not be that big of a deal. I bought a DVD-A to try, and the multichannel sound was really nice...but now I have two copies of the CD. One I can listen to in my living room only; the other I can play in my desktop, laptop, car, and portable digital mp3 player.
I don't have the funds at the moment to buy a new audio player even if I wanted SACD for my living room, much less for my car and computer if they chose to make them available.
I'm happy with my "poor quality" CDs, especially since I haven't bought a new one since the RIAA and the music industry as a whole worked to make MP3.com's my.mp3.com service not nearly as convenient or useful. I would gladly pay for a service like that, but it's gone with no indication from the music industry that they will offer something similar - or better. They haven't made significant progress in offering a digital solution that isn't bound to a physical media.
I want to be able to play my music in my living room, on my digital MP3 player, on my computers and in my car without buying essentially the same thing 4 different times. As far as I see it, "regular" CDs are the only thing that fits the criteria.
Music is a luxury item, and I can certainly live without it until I'm offered something with significant value to me, which is not just quality (which I most likely won't be sensitive enough to notice anyway) and multichannel surround sound.
If you hold down command-v (verbose mode) while booting, you get to see the familiar UNIX command-line bootup - they just hide it from the "average" users with the Apple logo so they don't freak out when they see a bunch of ominous looking text scroll by.
If you type >console instead of a login name at the login screen, you go to a command line login.
Re:Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OpenOffice is working on a OS X port. It's currently a developer version using XFree86.
These are just a couple of quick examples, but the ability is there to continue OSS work on a very capable platform - it's already begun. I was amazed I was able to compile and install my favorite tools and utilities, right out of the box.
I used to have magazine subscriptions to several tech journals that were far more expensive than the $5 for views slashdot is proposing.
Let's not totally bash the advertisers either. Magazine subscriptions have a subscription fee and advertisements, which aren't always an evil thing. Advertisements do have their place - they inform you about new products and services that you otherwise might not be exposed to. As long as they aren't intrusive (ala popup adds or being forced to redirections to totally unrelated material), I don't mind. I plan on paying the subscription fee, but I'd also like for Slashdot to allow me the option to turn on advertisements that I DO want to see. I don't want to miss out on those ThinkGeek goodies!
I think of news journal sites like Slashdot the magazines of the modern era. They are dynamic content (updated daily instead of monthly), they save on paper waste, they are archived indefinitely (can refer to favorite articles very easily though search engines), and they are interactive (post your own comments about the topic). Sounds like a better bargain and service to me then my current print magazine subscriptions.
It's a win-win situation. Slashdot receives revenue to keep operating (and does not depend on advertiser revenue alone, where the vendors are given leverage to dictate size, placement, etc), and we get to continue to enjoy the content. Given the average salary of a tech worker, I think we can afford a mere $5 subscription to a service that we like. Heck, we don't have to pay the $5 at all if the advertisers foot the bill (but then they get leverage on size, placement, etc).
Re:My view: against encryption, for saving lives
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 1
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
The federal government has not demonstrated the burden of proof that any kind of encryption restrictions would have averted a disaster. Bin Laden's network knows the FBI/CIA handbook very well, and took great measures to avoid electronic surveillence.
The fact that most Americans polled would be willing to support encryption limitations shows how blindly we trust the feds to keep up safe. By mentioning this, they are "suggesting" that it would help keep us safer, without demonstrating any proof. What's worse is the majority of Americans aren't even asking them for it. The feds are asking to limit my methods of communication, so they need to give me irrefutable evidence (not theory) why this was damaging, and why they failed to use other more effective methods before I'm willing to say, "Ok, this is necessary." Anything else is an abuse of power, and taking advantage of a surprised populous who still have not been given an adequate explanation for why they failed to put together all the evidence they had before this occurred (which was not obtained through crypto, btw).
We do not have to sacrifice freedom for safety, and if we did, that would be the greatest casualty of all. The state motto for New Hampshire is the most no-nonsense about it: "Live Free or Die". If we really are that complacent to give up anything to the government without questioning what the motives are, we truly do not deserve liberty or safety.
In the thick of emotion and shock, certain federal agencies took advantage of the situation to shift the blame from their lack of vigilance to encryption communication. Evidence is showing irrefutably that these terrorist cells took great care to avoid electronic means that can easily be intercepted and monitored. The Bin Laden terrorist handbook says when in planning, the main means of communication and coordination is in person contact, which is why we see so many of these guys very busily travelling between key states and international countries. Bin Laden's organization knows FBI/CIA tactics intimately, and therefore knows how best to circumvent surveillence. They have not demonstrated the burden of proof that stricter encryption restrictions or "backdoors" would have helped them gather information at all.
If anything, I blame the FBI/CIA's dependence on technology surveillence, which they took to mean they could kick back while technology did all their work. All security, whether in national or in IT terms, requires constant vigilance, and anyone expecting tools to do their work for them are essentially allowing mischief to sneak in their "backdoors" while they kick back with their coffee and donuts.
Shame on the federal government for taking advantage of the emotions surrounding this event to further an agenda that in the end, will take away civil liberties and give a false sense of security.
Reading this article, it's clear that publishers are blind as to why eBooks are not popular.
The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
The tighter locks on eBooks is killing the format. eBooks aren't offering anything to the consumer they really want. Publishers are the ones who stand with the most to gain if they can get us to accept it.
A while back there was an article about an eBook version of "Alice in Wonderland". If you read the user agreement, it said that you may not give the eBook to others to read, and you may not read it out loud. You'd be a copyright violator for reading a book to a child, or lending a book to a friend. The absurdity is incomprehensible.
The current model in which the industry is trying to fashion eBook distribution is anti-consumer. Because digital distribution is a new frontier for a media format, copyright holders are trying to create their utopia in which fair use rights are obsolete.
Why would I want to buy a format that gives me less rights and less benefits than the printed version?
Slashdot Mirror
I was the biggest Sony geek. My TV, DVD player, receiver, console - all Sony. After the rootkit trick, I will no longer buy Sony electronics. Sony was great when they were an electronics company, and not a content owner. They are more concerned with making sure their electronics protects their content rather than building consumer electronics people want. I'm very disappointed, but there's plenty of other quality electronics companies that I can switch to - Toshiba, Samsung, etc.
I doubt that my boycott will have much effect on Sony. They won't notice that my electronics shelves no longer carry the Sony brandname, just as they haven't noticed I haven't purchased more than 5 music CD in over 5 years. I'm sure they chalk that up to illegal music downloads, but really, if you look at my music collection, I don't really have anything newer than 5 years ago.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. My everyday work computer is a powerbook with OS X, even though most of my servers are Windows. However, I fail to see how Microsoft is implicated in Sony's rootkit. Sony wrote the rootkit. Sony hid it. Sony installed it regardless of whether the user agreed to it or not. If you're arguing that Microsoft is responsible because it requires users to be administrators in order to install it, and average users are running administrator accounts, that would be disingenuous. This would have occurred regardless because even if it used a UNIX style administrator/user scheme, once the average user put their DRM CD from Sony in the drive asking them for administrator privileges, they would have done it. Why? Because it's a music CD from Sony. Same thing would have happened on OS X where the user is not administrator by default. A dialog box appears asking for admin privileges in order to install software that "enhances" the CD experience, and the user happily gives it because it's something they bought from a store in shiny shrink wrap, and not downloaded from the untrustworthy internet.
Funny that Sony's rootkit exploited consumer trust because they themselves don't trust the consumer.
I work for a web dev company and we need to test Safari and IE Mac compatibility, so I bought an old iMac from a friend of mine for this purpose. I created an Admin account and a general user shared account.
You specify which applications they are allowed to run through System Preferences, as well as prevent them from changing passwords, burning DVDs/CDs, etc. If you have any kind of proficiency with UNIX, you can prevent them from writing to anything on the hard drive by setting the permissions through the terminal. There might be a tool to do this already, but I just use the terminal for what I need.
I am a female gamer - I have been since I was 5 years old. I've always had a computer in my house since my Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20. I am heterosexual, attractive, working on my bachelors in mathematics and computer science, and play video games of all genre's - FPS, strategy, roleplaying, action, etc, etc. When I was growing up, I never saw a difference between 'boy toys' and 'girl toys' - I played with hot wheels cars with the neighbor boys and I had barbies as well, who always had a career of their own in my imaginary world. When playing with legos, I could reverse engineer every model listed on the box, but lacked the artistic flare to create my own images from scratch.
When I play games, I prefer to play a female avatar. There are a few male jerks who are just trying to cyb0r, but most are very cool. Nearly all of my online friends are guys who treat me exactly as I expect to be treated among my peers. They aren't looking for a girlfriend, they're just looking for a friend to play games with.
However, when I am in an IRC tech channel, I go by a male alias. While I am all for proving existing stereotypes wrong, I'm tired of arguing the same points over and over again. Unfortunately, I have found having a male alias gives me instant credibility that I don't get with a female alias. The bias is that I am an oddity, and therefore have to not only fight my point, but also the preconceived notion that I'm not supposed to know what I know.
I've always had a very, very strong interest in the sciences, and they were my favorite classes in school. I don't believe my aptitude and interest in science and gaming has anything at all with me being an oddity among my gender, but more with my upbringing that I never saw the difference between 'boy' interests and 'girl' interests.
Not likely. The marriage between MS and HP is for money, not love. They aren't going anywhere. Napster isn't owned by MS either, so it's a stretch to say this is a MS snub.
HP picking up iTunes is about money, not ideology. iTunes is a better service, but they clearly got sold on the HP branded iPods. Napster isn't making any money right now, and Apple is making money selling iPods. The deal was greatly weighted in favor of Napster - they were probably banking on the new revenue. HP simply got a better offer from Apple.
It's been discussed in several threads, but penalties are actually counterintuitive to what we want to do. Companies are outsourcing because of the bottom line. If you penalize them, large corporations with deep pockets will just pick up their entire operation and move elsewhere.
We want to stop the mass exodus of middle class jobs overseas. It's actually an incentive that you want to implement for keeping jobs domestic. You want to reward companies for keeping jobs domestic, not penalize for shipping them over.
That would have the reverse effect of what we want. Corporations with deep pockets will close down US interests and move to another country, who would be happy to take them without the restrictions. They could even lobby the new government to create policies even more favorable to them.
It's not really what anyone wants to hear, but you actually want to give incentives not penalties. It's sickening to think of giving further tax benefits to corporations that are shrinking the middle class, but they need to be offered a bottom line reason why they should keep jobs domestic. They won't do it just to keep a healthy US economy - they can pack up and move anywhere.
Lots of people mentioning the Action, Urgency, Excellent emails we used to get spammed with at EDS. The emails would be received last name, first name, so Dick Brown's emails came in as Brown, Dick. Now the rest of the world knows what we knew from this very appropriate description - he was fucking his customers and employees up the ass.
$55 million dollar salary and a $35 million dollar severance. My friends who got laid off got 2 weeks severance, which they changed from a one month severance just before a huge round of layoffs.
I take a bit of sardonic pleasure from EDS' recent troubles. They are exactly a product of what they built. A company that ineffective and corrupt doesn't get 'fixed' just by replacing the head of the viper.
Not to mention ANY computer type - Wintel, *NIX, Mac. I like www.musicrebellion.com for indies in MP3s, which I can play on my Wintel, Mac and iPod. However, the commercial stuff is in LiquidAudio or WMA. They're going to have to allow me the same flexibility as the indies before I'll fork over some cash on commercial download services.
If they don't want to do that...well...then I guess P2P is better.
I tried LiquidAudio a long time ago. I wasn't too impressed. They seem to have come a long way. However, limiting their software also alienates potential customers.
I don't know what the current estimate of the number of *nix users out there, but even if only 4% of people on Macs, that's still about 10 million potential customers. They aren't making money off the software; they're making money selling the music. To sell more music, they need more customers. It's highly unlikely that people who are looking for a new computer are going to factor in which internet music distribution supports which platform. It doesn't help nor hinder Dell or Apple's sales - only their own.
It's a product inconvenience, making the product less desirable. The free market always solves these problems in the end. If loss of sales due to these features offsets the sales they're allegedly losing due to P2P, they'll drop it. That's all.
We've seen the Entertainment industry become increasingly aggressive. In this economic slump, every sector is feeling the pinch, and the first thing to go in household budgets is the discretionary goods. Despite what the entertainment industry believes, people really can live without CDs and DVDs.
However, instead of blaming bad economic times, they blame P2P. Politicians believe it. It's there, everyone knows about it, and it's a "bad" thing to pass around Britney Spear's MP3s (gag). So even if the majority of people out there are not buying the CDs because they either don't have the extra cash to spare or because they don't like the crippled CDs, Sony and pals spin it to blame P2P. No matter what, P2P will be blamed for slumping sales - it's the perfect scapegoat for them to get politicians to listen to them. So we'll continue to get asinine legislation (at least in the U.S.) to protect some dinosaurs from a perceived threat versus the real threat (they are the cause of their own problems).
Maybe the market will work itself out, however, I fear the legislation that will pass in the meantime from some convincing corporations passing around the green. That's a lot harder to undo, even if the CEO's wake up and realize the truth. There isn't going to be a law that says, "Thou shalt buy whatever drivel Sony and Universal sells," however, laws like the DMCA has the ability to suppress free speech, which according to the U.S. Constitution *is* a god given right. The DMCA exists because of the RIAA's and MPAA's lobbying.
I believe that the DMCA will eventually be reversed (or at least modified), but it will take about 10 years or more...when people who grew up in the "MTV" video game era start entering politics and replace many of the people responsible for this.
I was pondering this myself. I don't know if it's price fixing, but it curiously seems to be collaboration. 4 big chains ganging up would be tough for anyone to fight.
Sendo CEO Hugh Brogan said in a statement. "While our mission of providing customers with feature-rich and ubiquitous devices remains unaltered, seeing that the Series 60 fully embraces both our mission and the new strategy, we decided to approach Nokia." Nokia's "platform utilizes open standards and technologies, such as MMS (Multimedia Message Service) and Java, jointly developed by the industry," he added.
Quote is from the ZDNet link.
They didn't exactly say it was because they couldn't get the source. What they said was Nokia uses open standards like MMS and Java, and they felt that was more in line with what they want to do. We know from history that Microsoft resists using existing standards where ever possible.
Absolutely. You can watch a full 90 minute movie on a fully charged battery with a little bit of charge to spare. As mentioned in other posts, you can save more battery power by playing it from the harddrive.
Here's something else that's really cool about the battery. In the event you need to swap the battery to a spare, when you get the low power warning, put your laptop to sleep before pulling out the battery (close the lid). You now have approximately 2-3 minutes of reserve power to change the battery! That's an ungodly amount of time to swap out a battery. Most Wintel laptops I know of aren't that forgiving...you have to have a spare already in hand to do a quick swap in record time.
It's the little things that goes into the design.
I bought my TiBook 800MHz two months ago. The only thing that I am a little bit jealous about is the superdrive. Other than that, I already got my money's worth out of my TiBook, and I anticipate this lasting me approximately 3 years. By the time I'm ready to upgrade my laptop again, the DVD-R superdrive will be up to 16x+ speed, instead of the measily 1x of these first gens, so hah!
OS X allows you to print documents straight to PDF. This isn't free; Apple paid for the license, and is included in the cost of buying OS X.
There are still benefits to buying the full Adobe Acrobat package. For instance, you can't edit pdf files or create one from scratch, but the distiller functionality where you can "print" files to pdf is included. But it is not "free" - Apple paid for it and so do you if you bought OS X.
This is not comparing apples to apples. Apple did not develop their own document technology to give away for free; they licensed it from Adobe. That is why Preview renders in PDF, and you can print straight to pdf without installing any additional software.
Not the same situation at all.
They won't sue her. If they "fire" her, they'll probably give her a couple years severance pay in exchange for a draconian NDA that says she won't talk about what happened. They'll want to "appear" as though they are being proactive, but want to limit the damage she could cause by giving her story to the media.
It's more of an embarrassment at this point, and she probably wants it to be over with as bad as Microsoft does.
I have a TiBook 800 as well. The range smokes my old Armada with a PCMCIA Wi-Fi. I get complete coverage in my house, upstairs and downstairs, and out on my backyard patio. My Armada barely picks up the signal on the patio. With the TiBook, I can walk almost into my neighbor's yard before I drop signal. I just wanted coverage in my house and the backyard...which I got, most comfortably.
If I just listened to music in my living room, a format change might not be that big of a deal. I bought a DVD-A to try, and the multichannel sound was really nice...but now I have two copies of the CD. One I can listen to in my living room only; the other I can play in my desktop, laptop, car, and portable digital mp3 player.
I don't have the funds at the moment to buy a new audio player even if I wanted SACD for my living room, much less for my car and computer if they chose to make them available.
I'm happy with my "poor quality" CDs, especially since I haven't bought a new one since the RIAA and the music industry as a whole worked to make MP3.com's my.mp3.com service not nearly as convenient or useful. I would gladly pay for a service like that, but it's gone with no indication from the music industry that they will offer something similar - or better. They haven't made significant progress in offering a digital solution that isn't bound to a physical media.
I want to be able to play my music in my living room, on my digital MP3 player, on my computers and in my car without buying essentially the same thing 4 different times. As far as I see it, "regular" CDs are the only thing that fits the criteria.
Music is a luxury item, and I can certainly live without it until I'm offered something with significant value to me, which is not just quality (which I most likely won't be sensitive enough to notice anyway) and multichannel surround sound.
If you hold down command-v (verbose mode) while booting, you get to see the familiar UNIX command-line bootup - they just hide it from the "average" users with the Apple logo so they don't freak out when they see a bunch of ominous looking text scroll by.
If you type >console instead of a login name at the login screen, you go to a command line login.
OpenOffice is working on a OS X port. It's currently a developer version using XFree86.
OpenOffice Mac
Chimera is an open OS X mozilla web browser in development.
Chimera
These are just a couple of quick examples, but the ability is there to continue OSS work on a very capable platform - it's already begun. I was amazed I was able to compile and install my favorite tools and utilities, right out of the box.
I used to have magazine subscriptions to several tech journals that were far more expensive than the $5 for views slashdot is proposing.
Let's not totally bash the advertisers either. Magazine subscriptions have a subscription fee and advertisements, which aren't always an evil thing. Advertisements do have their place - they inform you about new products and services that you otherwise might not be exposed to. As long as they aren't intrusive (ala popup adds or being forced to redirections to totally unrelated material), I don't mind. I plan on paying the subscription fee, but I'd also like for Slashdot to allow me the option to turn on advertisements that I DO want to see. I don't want to miss out on those ThinkGeek goodies!
I think of news journal sites like Slashdot the magazines of the modern era. They are dynamic content (updated daily instead of monthly), they save on paper waste, they are archived indefinitely (can refer to favorite articles very easily though search engines), and they are interactive (post your own comments about the topic). Sounds like a better bargain and service to me then my current print magazine subscriptions.
It's a win-win situation. Slashdot receives revenue to keep operating (and does not depend on advertiser revenue alone, where the vendors are given leverage to dictate size, placement, etc), and we get to continue to enjoy the content. Given the average salary of a tech worker, I think we can afford a mere $5 subscription to a service that we like. Heck, we don't have to pay the $5 at all if the advertisers foot the bill (but then they get leverage on size, placement, etc).
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
The federal government has not demonstrated the burden of proof that any kind of encryption restrictions would have averted a disaster. Bin Laden's network knows the FBI/CIA handbook very well, and took great measures to avoid electronic surveillence.
The fact that most Americans polled would be willing to support encryption limitations shows how blindly we trust the feds to keep up safe. By mentioning this, they are "suggesting" that it would help keep us safer, without demonstrating any proof. What's worse is the majority of Americans aren't even asking them for it. The feds are asking to limit my methods of communication, so they need to give me irrefutable evidence (not theory) why this was damaging, and why they failed to use other more effective methods before I'm willing to say, "Ok, this is necessary." Anything else is an abuse of power, and taking advantage of a surprised populous who still have not been given an adequate explanation for why they failed to put together all the evidence they had before this occurred (which was not obtained through crypto, btw).
We do not have to sacrifice freedom for safety, and if we did, that would be the greatest casualty of all. The state motto for New Hampshire is the most no-nonsense about it: "Live Free or Die". If we really are that complacent to give up anything to the government without questioning what the motives are, we truly do not deserve liberty or safety.
In the thick of emotion and shock, certain federal agencies took advantage of the situation to shift the blame from their lack of vigilance to encryption communication. Evidence is showing irrefutably that these terrorist cells took great care to avoid electronic means that can easily be intercepted and monitored. The Bin Laden terrorist handbook says when in planning, the main means of communication and coordination is in person contact, which is why we see so many of these guys very busily travelling between key states and international countries. Bin Laden's organization knows FBI/CIA tactics intimately, and therefore knows how best to circumvent surveillence. They have not demonstrated the burden of proof that stricter encryption restrictions or "backdoors" would have helped them gather information at all.
If anything, I blame the FBI/CIA's dependence on technology surveillence, which they took to mean they could kick back while technology did all their work. All security, whether in national or in IT terms, requires constant vigilance, and anyone expecting tools to do their work for them are essentially allowing mischief to sneak in their "backdoors" while they kick back with their coffee and donuts.
Shame on the federal government for taking advantage of the emotions surrounding this event to further an agenda that in the end, will take away civil liberties and give a false sense of security.
Reading this article, it's clear that publishers are blind as to why eBooks are not popular.
The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
The tighter locks on eBooks is killing the format. eBooks aren't offering anything to the consumer they really want. Publishers are the ones who stand with the most to gain if they can get us to accept it.
A while back there was an article about an eBook version of "Alice in Wonderland". If you read the user agreement, it said that you may not give the eBook to others to read, and you may not read it out loud. You'd be a copyright violator for reading a book to a child, or lending a book to a friend. The absurdity is incomprehensible.
The current model in which the industry is trying to fashion eBook distribution is anti-consumer. Because digital distribution is a new frontier for a media format, copyright holders are trying to create their utopia in which fair use rights are obsolete.
Why would I want to buy a format that gives me less rights and less benefits than the printed version?