Corporations don't care about your health, they only care about their profits... Selling you drugs which you have to keep taking for the rest of your life is far more profitable than a one off cure, so none of the drugs companies will put effort into finding a proper cure. How many ailments do people the world over suffer that require them to take a cocktail of drugs for the rest of their lives? Keeping people ill and dependent on your drugs is profitable.
The government on the other hand, should not want a sickly population, it is in the interest of the nation to cure you to make you a more useful member of society. Unfortunately, big business has its hooks into government so whats best for the country takes a back seat.
A private sector company in the same situation as the DSA would behave much worse... They are a monopoly, no other organization in the UK is permitted to perform driving tests... If you think the government is slow, just see what a for-profit company would do in the same situation...
Thinking as a business that has a monopoly on driving tests.
First of all there's too many test centers, let's close down most of the outlying ones and make people take tests in the center of major cities...
The test is also too easy, so lets make it harder because more failures mean more people coming back to retake the test... Also by having the test centers in the middle of major cities, the tests will be harder by virtue of there being more traffic, and by being located far away from where people live and take lessons they will be unfamiliar with the roads.
There's no reason to do anything about the waiting list, hiring more examiners would be expensive, and there is no risk of losing customers because they have nowhere else to go. Better to keep the current level because it ensures all the examiners will be busy all of the time.
The problem is when corporations get so big that they have undue influence over the government...
If there was a fair procurement process for government contracts, like there's supposed to be, such that anyone could bid and the best option wins... This wouldn't be a problem, if one corporation pisses the government money up the wall and does a poor job they lose the contract and it goes to someone better... The trouble is, we have corrupt bloated corporations bribing a corrupt bloated government so that millions of taxpayers money flows into these corporations, who are free to be as incompetent as they want safe in the knowledge that they won't lose the contracts and will just keep getting more money.
Laws governing permissible transmit power and frequencies vary around the world... Most of the official firmwares on these devices can be configured to know your location and will adjust the available options according to local laws... Sometimes the options are hard set in the firmware distributed in each region. They are almost always set in software because that's much cheaper than producing different hardware revisions for each country.
Many of these routers use Atheros chipsets, which do have completely open drivers available... There are also other chipsets which have fully open drivers available, tho some drivers have proprietary firmware blobs these execute on the device itself and are thus os independent... I have a device running OpenWRT which uses an Atheros chipset.... I tend to avoid anything made by Broadcom...
Interestingly, Broadcom also make wired ethernet cards and have released open drivers for these, my last experience with broadcom wired ethernet (i believe a 100mbit chipset 440 or something) was terrible, it was incompatible with some types of switches (major packetloss and abysmal performance, other brands of nic talked to the switches fine) and it would drop link when you flooded it with traffic.
Having open drivers allows you to upgrade the kernel, which as you pointed out might be subject to incompatible changes.. It also allows you to change the kernel, what if someone wanted to put OpenBSD or something else on this device? A device which is restricted to running a small subset of available linux versions is hardly open...
Also, hardware where the only difference between a $100 card and a $1000 card are the drivers is a total scam... Having bought a piece of hardware, people should have the right to use it for anything they choose, and reprogram it however they see fit to get the most performance out of it (who remembers the C64 and Amiga systems, where creative coding got them doing all kinds of things never intended by commodore)...
If i pay an extra $900 for a high end card, i would expect to receive an item of considerably higher quality, at the very least for very little effort ATI could have included more memory on the board and increased the clockrate (like they do with cpus, they test each cpu and the top few percent get clocked higher)... If anything, the cheaper card actually cost them more to produce because they went to additional effort to cripple it.
Trying to scam extra money out of people in this way is not good for the buyer, and not a practice anyone would want to support.
Less armor makes you lighter and more agile, and thus better able to dodge attacks or run away?
Not that this is a valid analogy, every piece of code running on your system could potentially have security flaws... More code, more chance of exploitation.
So basically it's a punishment for people who are smart enough to put together their own machine... Years ago, computers came with a programming language (typically BASIC) built in, and actually encouraged you to learn. These days, MS does everything they can to discourage you from learning, including punishing you for daring to learn how to assemble your own hardware.
Tho i guess it is in their interest to keep users as incompetent as possible, as the level of user knowledge increases the chances of them moving to linux or mac increase massively.
Why not? Make it an option.. Plenty of people modify their cars by replacing the engine or other such changes, being able to buy an engineless car means not having to get rid of a lump you dont want, and even then it isnt so bad because car manufacturers generally dont try to stop people reselling engines or other components on the used market.
Having a single warranty can also be a bad thing... I build machines from parts, and upgrade gradually piece by piece such that if the current machine were to fail i could usually substitute the failed part for its older counterpart at least temporarily, for troubleshooting and while i order a replacement. If a part fails out of warranty (ie its over a year old and probably quite obsolete) i usually buy a newer equivalent too, on the other hand failures are very rare because i tend to buy decent quality parts.
System vendors will often require you to send the whole machine off for repair, leaving you with nothing. With parts i can send the individual part out for repair, or order a single part replacement, and use a spare while i wait.
A board that can tolerate being overclocked is likely to be under very little stress when running at its intended speed... A board that crashes as soon as you overclock it is already likely to be very close to it's limit... That's why cars with big lazy engines generally tend to last much longer, they're under a lot less stress. Same applies to a PSU too, if you run it close to it's max output it will be less efficient and burn out quicker.
A Thinkpad P100 is a fairly old machine (when systems were generally made to a higher quality) and the thinkpads themselves are fairly highend... Pre built machines can be extremely reliable if you buy highend ones, but you will pay a premium for them.
It depends on your intended use of the machine and how long you intend to keep it... Prebuilt machines, especially the really cheap ones tend to have the lowest quality components fitted, and most people when building their own won't go for the really cheap stuff...
Personally i keep a desktop which i don't use a huge amount... Rather than buy a whole new machine every couple of years, i upgrade it piece by piece. It's case and power supply are many years old (and were quite expensive when bought). Keyboard is even older, tho i might have to replace it in future if i can't find a motherboard which supports PS/2. Screen is quite a few years old too. Most recently i replaced the motherboard and cpu, but everything else is at least one or more iterations behind.
Under "contact us" there is a colombian address... Many websites are written in english to target a larger audience, i would imagine that a significant portion of colombians don't have internet access so they may find it's more effective to advertise to them in local media... It's probably also more profitable for them to sell most of their devices to foreign countries.
The code in many games is capable of handling either, infact many games can handle multiple resolutions... The wii supports both pal and ntsc, and 480p... Other consoles support a lot more. And a lot of the games are coded through vendor supported libraries that won't care at all about the resolution.
Extra languages are not *needed* for Europe... Games sold in the US and Canada will almost certainly support english, and could easily have support for spanish and french too... And most of the people i know in countries like holland and sweden will play games in english anyway.
Having multiple language versions available is one thing, but preventing people from running foreign versions is underhanded. What if someone living in the US wants to play a game in german? What if people in europe don't want to wait for a local version, and can speak english anyway so don't care about the language?
And how about games that never get released in a particular region at all?
And the idea of consumers being confused by a foreign version is utterly ridiculous, even the most un-knowledgeable of consumers will notice that the packaging is written in a foreign language.
Funny someone mentions coca cola, a lot of smaller takeaways and restaurants have foreign branded cans of coke, where the writing on the can will be written in polish, turkish or german... I imagine they're imported because they're cheaper in those countries.
They want to enforce region locking, or they wouldn't have implemented it to start with...
Region locking hurts legitimate users, and is used to screw them out of more money... Region locking should be illegal. It does absolutely NOTHING to benefit the consumer.
Windows is actually an extremely poor gaming platform, it's just that more games are made for it... Back in the days, Amiga and Dos games were massively better than their windows counterparts on similar or identical hardware... A system with almost identical specs to an original xbox will have major trouble running the windows version of games like halo, which the xbox handles just fine. Assuming you have proper drivers for all your hardware on both platforms, linux games will typically outperform windows versions of the same game, games running under wine can sometimes outperform windows too.
Installing lots of software, including games, will gradually bog down a windows system... The drm drivers included by many games are a prime candidate for this, and remain running when you play other games, not to mention other background tasks like AV.
What we really need, is a small minimalistic driver layer for running games on, or better yet, hardware level standards so that games can run directly on the metal without any os overhead...
I currently maintain a windows machine for the sole purpose of gaming, and i use mac and linux machines for everything else... As a result, my system runs better than other people who use a single windows system for other things as well, but it still has its problems.
AV only works because there are multiple options out there... If a single product becomes dominant, then the code required to defeat it simply becomes a standard component of any malware... It effectively just becomes an extension of the os which any malware needs to get round in order to function. Currently any malware that wants to do that, has to deal with multiple different av possibilities which is a lot more work for the malware authors.
Microsoft products have traditionally been inferior to their competitors, and have traditionally been mocked or ignored by their competitors until it became too late... Expect to see heavy marketing and tactics like bundling etc to force the competitors out of the market, and if that happens you can pretty much expect MS to stagnate this product because it won't be a profit centre.
I do something similar on my home phone, i have asterisk answer and play through a few sound samples, usually of famous people... Some of the marketing callers stay on the line for quite a while trying to sell stuff to arnold schwarzenegger.
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Corporations don't care about your health, they only care about their profits...
Selling you drugs which you have to keep taking for the rest of your life is far more profitable than a one off cure, so none of the drugs companies will put effort into finding a proper cure. How many ailments do people the world over suffer that require them to take a cocktail of drugs for the rest of their lives?
Keeping people ill and dependent on your drugs is profitable.
The government on the other hand, should not want a sickly population, it is in the interest of the nation to cure you to make you a more useful member of society. Unfortunately, big business has its hooks into government so whats best for the country takes a back seat.
A private sector company in the same situation as the DSA would behave much worse...
They are a monopoly, no other organization in the UK is permitted to perform driving tests... If you think the government is slow, just see what a for-profit company would do in the same situation...
Thinking as a business that has a monopoly on driving tests.
First of all there's too many test centers, let's close down most of the outlying ones and make people take tests in the center of major cities...
The test is also too easy, so lets make it harder because more failures mean more people coming back to retake the test... Also by having the test centers in the middle of major cities, the tests will be harder by virtue of there being more traffic, and by being located far away from where people live and take lessons they will be unfamiliar with the roads.
There's no reason to do anything about the waiting list, hiring more examiners would be expensive, and there is no risk of losing customers because they have nowhere else to go. Better to keep the current level because it ensures all the examiners will be busy all of the time.
The problem is when corporations get so big that they have undue influence over the government...
If there was a fair procurement process for government contracts, like there's supposed to be, such that anyone could bid and the best option wins... This wouldn't be a problem, if one corporation pisses the government money up the wall and does a poor job they lose the contract and it goes to someone better...
The trouble is, we have corrupt bloated corporations bribing a corrupt bloated government so that millions of taxpayers money flows into these corporations, who are free to be as incompetent as they want safe in the knowledge that they won't lose the contracts and will just keep getting more money.
Not all of us..
Some people used architectures other than x86 which didn't need such nasty hacks.
Laws governing permissible transmit power and frequencies vary around the world... Most of the official firmwares on these devices can be configured to know your location and will adjust the available options according to local laws... Sometimes the options are hard set in the firmware distributed in each region. They are almost always set in software because that's much cheaper than producing different hardware revisions for each country.
Many of these routers use Atheros chipsets, which do have completely open drivers available...
There are also other chipsets which have fully open drivers available, tho some drivers have proprietary firmware blobs these execute on the device itself and are thus os independent... I have a device running OpenWRT which uses an Atheros chipset....
I tend to avoid anything made by Broadcom...
Interestingly, Broadcom also make wired ethernet cards and have released open drivers for these, my last experience with broadcom wired ethernet (i believe a 100mbit chipset 440 or something) was terrible, it was incompatible with some types of switches (major packetloss and abysmal performance, other brands of nic talked to the switches fine) and it would drop link when you flooded it with traffic.
Having open drivers allows you to upgrade the kernel, which as you pointed out might be subject to incompatible changes..
It also allows you to change the kernel, what if someone wanted to put OpenBSD or something else on this device?
A device which is restricted to running a small subset of available linux versions is hardly open...
Also, hardware where the only difference between a $100 card and a $1000 card are the drivers is a total scam... Having bought a piece of hardware, people should have the right to use it for anything they choose, and reprogram it however they see fit to get the most performance out of it (who remembers the C64 and Amiga systems, where creative coding got them doing all kinds of things never intended by commodore)...
If i pay an extra $900 for a high end card, i would expect to receive an item of considerably higher quality, at the very least for very little effort ATI could have included more memory on the board and increased the clockrate (like they do with cpus, they test each cpu and the top few percent get clocked higher)...
If anything, the cheaper card actually cost them more to produce because they went to additional effort to cripple it.
Trying to scam extra money out of people in this way is not good for the buyer, and not a practice anyone would want to support.
Less armor makes you lighter and more agile, and thus better able to dodge attacks or run away?
Not that this is a valid analogy, every piece of code running on your system could potentially have security flaws... More code, more chance of exploitation.
Which just means they will work even harder to increase the level of lock-in.
So basically it's a punishment for people who are smart enough to put together their own machine...
Years ago, computers came with a programming language (typically BASIC) built in, and actually encouraged you to learn. These days, MS does everything they can to discourage you from learning, including punishing you for daring to learn how to assemble your own hardware.
Tho i guess it is in their interest to keep users as incompetent as possible, as the level of user knowledge increases the chances of them moving to linux or mac increase massively.
Why not? Make it an option..
Plenty of people modify their cars by replacing the engine or other such changes, being able to buy an engineless car means not having to get rid of a lump you dont want, and even then it isnt so bad because car manufacturers generally dont try to stop people reselling engines or other components on the used market.
Having a single warranty can also be a bad thing...
I build machines from parts, and upgrade gradually piece by piece such that if the current machine were to fail i could usually substitute the failed part for its older counterpart at least temporarily, for troubleshooting and while i order a replacement. If a part fails out of warranty (ie its over a year old and probably quite obsolete) i usually buy a newer equivalent too, on the other hand failures are very rare because i tend to buy decent quality parts.
System vendors will often require you to send the whole machine off for repair, leaving you with nothing. With parts i can send the individual part out for repair, or order a single part replacement, and use a spare while i wait.
A board that can tolerate being overclocked is likely to be under very little stress when running at its intended speed... A board that crashes as soon as you overclock it is already likely to be very close to it's limit...
That's why cars with big lazy engines generally tend to last much longer, they're under a lot less stress.
Same applies to a PSU too, if you run it close to it's max output it will be less efficient and burn out quicker.
A Thinkpad P100 is a fairly old machine (when systems were generally made to a higher quality) and the thinkpads themselves are fairly highend... Pre built machines can be extremely reliable if you buy highend ones, but you will pay a premium for them.
It depends on your intended use of the machine and how long you intend to keep it...
Prebuilt machines, especially the really cheap ones tend to have the lowest quality components fitted, and most people when building their own won't go for the really cheap stuff...
Personally i keep a desktop which i don't use a huge amount... Rather than buy a whole new machine every couple of years, i upgrade it piece by piece. It's case and power supply are many years old (and were quite expensive when bought). Keyboard is even older, tho i might have to replace it in future if i can't find a motherboard which supports PS/2. Screen is quite a few years old too.
Most recently i replaced the motherboard and cpu, but everything else is at least one or more iterations behind.
On the xbox perhaps, but the windows implementation brings with it tons of other unnecessary bloat.
Under "contact us" there is a colombian address...
Many websites are written in english to target a larger audience, i would imagine that a significant portion of colombians don't have internet access so they may find it's more effective to advertise to them in local media... It's probably also more profitable for them to sell most of their devices to foreign countries.
The code in many games is capable of handling either, infact many games can handle multiple resolutions... The wii supports both pal and ntsc, and 480p... Other consoles support a lot more. And a lot of the games are coded through vendor supported libraries that won't care at all about the resolution.
Extra languages are not *needed* for Europe...
Games sold in the US and Canada will almost certainly support english, and could easily have support for spanish and french too... And most of the people i know in countries like holland and sweden will play games in english anyway.
Having multiple language versions available is one thing, but preventing people from running foreign versions is underhanded. What if someone living in the US wants to play a game in german? What if people in europe don't want to wait for a local version, and can speak english anyway so don't care about the language?
And how about games that never get released in a particular region at all?
And the idea of consumers being confused by a foreign version is utterly ridiculous, even the most un-knowledgeable of consumers will notice that the packaging is written in a foreign language.
Funny someone mentions coca cola, a lot of smaller takeaways and restaurants have foreign branded cans of coke, where the writing on the can will be written in polish, turkish or german... I imagine they're imported because they're cheaper in those countries.
They want to enforce region locking, or they wouldn't have implemented it to start with...
Region locking hurts legitimate users, and is used to screw them out of more money... Region locking should be illegal. It does absolutely NOTHING to benefit the consumer.
Windows is actually an extremely poor gaming platform, it's just that more games are made for it...
Back in the days, Amiga and Dos games were massively better than their windows counterparts on similar or identical hardware...
A system with almost identical specs to an original xbox will have major trouble running the windows version of games like halo, which the xbox handles just fine.
Assuming you have proper drivers for all your hardware on both platforms, linux games will typically outperform windows versions of the same game, games running under wine can sometimes outperform windows too.
Installing lots of software, including games, will gradually bog down a windows system... The drm drivers included by many games are a prime candidate for this, and remain running when you play other games, not to mention other background tasks like AV.
What we really need, is a small minimalistic driver layer for running games on, or better yet, hardware level standards so that games can run directly on the metal without any os overhead...
I currently maintain a windows machine for the sole purpose of gaming, and i use mac and linux machines for everything else... As a result, my system runs better than other people who use a single windows system for other things as well, but it still has its problems.
AV only works because there are multiple options out there...
If a single product becomes dominant, then the code required to defeat it simply becomes a standard component of any malware... It effectively just becomes an extension of the os which any malware needs to get round in order to function.
Currently any malware that wants to do that, has to deal with multiple different av possibilities which is a lot more work for the malware authors.
Microsoft products have traditionally been inferior to their competitors, and have traditionally been mocked or ignored by their competitors until it became too late...
Expect to see heavy marketing and tactics like bundling etc to force the competitors out of the market, and if that happens you can pretty much expect MS to stagnate this product because it won't be a profit centre.
Unless your roaming...
I do something similar on my home phone, i have asterisk answer and play through a few sound samples, usually of famous people... Some of the marketing callers stay on the line for quite a while trying to sell stuff to arnold schwarzenegger.
Linux is even better at breaking compatibility with all that ancient cruft...