Most of the free software with available source code is not windows specific, and most software that runs on linux has already been recompiled for ARM. The only reasons to run windows are for using proprietary software not available anywhere else, and most of this hasn't been ported to ARM and won't get ported unless there is a significant user base first, but that user base won't emerge unless the software is there - chicken and egg. IA64 and Alpha had exactly the same problem.
It was worse than that, the different systems were incompatible yet shared the same branding which implied some level of compatibility. This resulted in disappointed customers who bought something expecting it would be compatible, only to find out that it wasnt./=
They said the same about IBM mainframes. They said the same about DEC VAX. They said the same about Sun.
Intel and Microsoft exist because they attacked from the low end, and provided a cheaper more readily available product, made money through economies of scale and were able to fund more research. ARM is doing the same thing.
Also the market is evolving, away from standalone desktops and towards thin clients connected to third party services. What's running on the client is becoming less and less important.
The overlap (and exhaustion in very large businesses) of RFC1918 address space is yet another reason to use ipv6... You can use part of your own globally routable address space for internal use, and as its your own allocated address space noone else should be using it for anything.
How is this blackmail? Make the early beta versions available for linux, linux users tend to be more technically literate and therefore more useful as beta testers.
Exactly this... When i first used the internet, it was commonly accepted that you don't give out your real information online... Now people post all kinds of information about themselves, you can usually build up a very detailed profile of someone just from what they make available publicly.
Now, people think i'm weird for signing up to websites using aliases and not having a facebook page.
Credit cards aren't so widely accepted in many countries... While mastercard and visa are the two most widely accepted and issued types of cards there are various others... Some places won't issue visa/mc, and some places won't take them.
Several times i've travelled to countries only to find that they have a type of payment that's popular locally but simply doesn't exist in other countries, and there will usually be some places which only accept these local payment methods and don't take visa or mastercard.
You end up having to take cash when you travel because it's easier acquiring country-specific cash than it is gaining access to a country-specific payment system, but for most things cash is horribly inconvenient.
The bosses are ultimately responsible for the actions of their employees, and could have stepped in at any time to put a stop to any activity taking place. It's for a court to decide if they were complicit in the actions or unaware of it taking place. For minor crimes that the top level were not aware of perhaps you should only punish those directly responsible, but for any sufficiently large scale crimes the top level execs should either be punished for being complicit in the crimes, or punished for being criminally negligent if they were unaware of them.
While I agree that it is asinine, prison time is a bit over the top.
Why is prison time over the top? Billing people for services they never subscribed to is FRAUD... If an individual did this, they would be prosecuted and sentenced to jail time. Why should this be any different if a corporation does it?
Centurylink's name and branding was on the bills... As per centurylink's arguments in court, the people who received the bills were NOT their customers.
Thus fraud has clearly occurred, because people who are not customers of centurylink were billed for centurylink services.
There's no absolute guarantees, however a court would decide wether the level of risk taken along with any appropriate mitigations taken were reasonable or negligent on your part...
If you took all reasonable steps to ensure the product was safe and mitigate potential risks there should be no problem. After all, nothing is completely safe and there are always risks.
If you didn't order a service but were still charged for it then its true, you aren't a customer..
However as you aren't a customer, you also can't have agreed to any arbitration clauses since there was never any agreement or contract in place between you and the provider for the service they charged you for.
If a company charged you for a service and you were not a customer of that service and did not have an agreement in place to purchase that service, then that company committed fraud.
The problem with the various cashless options is that a lot of them are country or region specific, so when you have tourists visiting it's often difficult for them to make use of the local payment systems,especially since many such systems disallow registration from users outside of the country.
Software has a fixed cost to produce, they can have infinite additional users for zero extra cost once the software is written. The costs to provide a service increase as you add users. It's much harder to provide a free service than free software, especially if it becomes popular.
Attempting to attack nazis, making them angry and drawing attention to them is helping them. Attempting to ban nazi or other extremist propaganda turns it into the forbidden fruit, which also attracts people. The only sensible way to combat extremism is to ensure that people are well educated, people will reject it on their own without needing to hide it.
General purpose open computing *is* unsafe for most people, and people with zero technical knowledge using complex general purpose systems has resulted in epidemics of compromised machines, identity theft and all manner of other problems.
Many people are better off with a hardened device managed by someone else, wether its a chromebook, tablet or games console (a console is fundamentally no different, its just designed to play games instead of browse websites).
Were it not for a need to access the internet, many people would never have even considered purchasing a computer.
Although since it's open source, could someone not create a fork that was linked to someone else's service instead of google's?
Not trusting google is fine, but people without the technical knowledge to operate a full blown laptop could hire someone they trust to manage a forked chromebook for them.
I second this.. I never blocked ads until they started becoming intrusive (sound, delaying page loads, breaking page layout or altering it as they load slowly etc)... I block ads on this site because the default ads sometimes break scrolling in safari on osx.
Indeed, chromeos may be a closed system in its default configuration, but its still open source and its success actually provides significant benefits to those of us who want to use regular linux distros... You used to get websites which check your user agent string and reject anything which is not windows or macos, such things are less common these days thanks to mobile and chromeos... Manufacturers shipping devices with chromeos ensures that the hardware is compatible with chromeos, and thus also with linux. The same hardware can also usually be bought in other models of devices. Previously most non-server hardware was never tested with linux and could have all kinds of stupid compatibility problems.
The point about netburst was high clockrates, atom cpus tend not to have such high clockrates. Most (all?) chromebooks can be repurposed to run a full blown linux if you want to, or you can run chromeos in developer mode which is basically linux anyway.
Full blown laptops are geek toys, designed for geeks by geeks... The average reader of slashdot might be capable of operating such a tool, but most people are not and many people would never have bought such a machine at all if it wasn't the only available tool for doing some key activity (eg internet access)... Now there are many new tools which are far more suitable for most people's needs (chromebooks, tablets, phones, games consoles etc), the niches that require a full blown laptop are shrinking.
Only with rail your limited to the slowest vehicle on the track, your stopping distances are longer so you have to leave larger gaps between vehicles, you can't swerve to avoid unexpected obstacles, a faulty vehicle blocks the entire track until it can be removed, every time you stop you cause delays to those behind you (or further increase the distances required between vehicles) unless you can get off the main track, you can only go where there's tracks and cannot make arbitrary turns, you have to follow pre planned routes because of the scheduling required to try and avoid delays etc...
And you can still encounter unexpected obstacles on a train track, its just that you have to either plough through them or stop until they're cleared. There's no way to route around like there is on a road.
Rail is inferior to road in many ways, hence why there are so many more road users.
Strict emissions rules have resulted in companies cheating (eg VW)... It results in higher prices for cars.. It has resulted in various other ways to game the system - eg there are rules on CO2 emissions, but no rules on emission of other things so cars now generate less CO2 and more things which aren't so heavily regulated, which are potentially worse for both health and the environment.
I don't drive much, maybe 1000 miles per year... I have an old car which is not terribly efficient, if i were to replace it today with the most efficient car currently available, how many miles would i have to drive before the reduced fuel consumption compensated for the extra energy used to actually build the car?
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Most of the free software with available source code is not windows specific, and most software that runs on linux has already been recompiled for ARM.
The only reasons to run windows are for using proprietary software not available anywhere else, and most of this hasn't been ported to ARM and won't get ported unless there is a significant user base first, but that user base won't emerge unless the software is there - chicken and egg. IA64 and Alpha had exactly the same problem.
It was worse than that, the different systems were incompatible yet shared the same branding which implied some level of compatibility. This resulted in disappointed customers who bought something expecting it would be compatible, only to find out that it wasnt./=
They said the same about IBM mainframes.
They said the same about DEC VAX.
They said the same about Sun.
Intel and Microsoft exist because they attacked from the low end, and provided a cheaper more readily available product, made money through economies of scale and were able to fund more research. ARM is doing the same thing.
Also the market is evolving, away from standalone desktops and towards thin clients connected to third party services. What's running on the client is becoming less and less important.
The overlap (and exhaustion in very large businesses) of RFC1918 address space is yet another reason to use ipv6...
You can use part of your own globally routable address space for internal use, and as its your own allocated address space noone else should be using it for anything.
How is this blackmail?
Make the early beta versions available for linux, linux users tend to be more technically literate and therefore more useful as beta testers.
Exactly this...
When i first used the internet, it was commonly accepted that you don't give out your real information online... Now people post all kinds of information about themselves, you can usually build up a very detailed profile of someone just from what they make available publicly.
Now, people think i'm weird for signing up to websites using aliases and not having a facebook page.
Credit cards aren't so widely accepted in many countries...
While mastercard and visa are the two most widely accepted and issued types of cards there are various others... Some places won't issue visa/mc, and some places won't take them.
Several times i've travelled to countries only to find that they have a type of payment that's popular locally but simply doesn't exist in other countries, and there will usually be some places which only accept these local payment methods and don't take visa or mastercard.
You end up having to take cash when you travel because it's easier acquiring country-specific cash than it is gaining access to a country-specific payment system, but for most things cash is horribly inconvenient.
The bosses are ultimately responsible for the actions of their employees, and could have stepped in at any time to put a stop to any activity taking place.
It's for a court to decide if they were complicit in the actions or unaware of it taking place. For minor crimes that the top level were not aware of perhaps you should only punish those directly responsible, but for any sufficiently large scale crimes the top level execs should either be punished for being complicit in the crimes, or punished for being criminally negligent if they were unaware of them.
While I agree that it is asinine, prison time is a bit over the top.
Why is prison time over the top?
Billing people for services they never subscribed to is FRAUD...
If an individual did this, they would be prosecuted and sentenced to jail time. Why should this be any different if a corporation does it?
Also consider then...
Centurylink's name and branding was on the bills...
As per centurylink's arguments in court, the people who received the bills were NOT their customers.
Thus fraud has clearly occurred, because people who are not customers of centurylink were billed for centurylink services.
There's no absolute guarantees, however a court would decide wether the level of risk taken along with any appropriate mitigations taken were reasonable or negligent on your part...
If you took all reasonable steps to ensure the product was safe and mitigate potential risks there should be no problem. After all, nothing is completely safe and there are always risks.
If you didn't order a service but were still charged for it then its true, you aren't a customer..
However as you aren't a customer, you also can't have agreed to any arbitration clauses since there was never any agreement or contract in place between you and the provider for the service they charged you for.
If a company charged you for a service and you were not a customer of that service and did not have an agreement in place to purchase that service, then that company committed fraud.
The problem with the various cashless options is that a lot of them are country or region specific, so when you have tourists visiting it's often difficult for them to make use of the local payment systems,especially since many such systems disallow registration from users outside of the country.
This should not void the warranty on the hardware...
Software has a fixed cost to produce, they can have infinite additional users for zero extra cost once the software is written.
The costs to provide a service increase as you add users.
It's much harder to provide a free service than free software, especially if it becomes popular.
Attempting to attack nazis, making them angry and drawing attention to them is helping them.
Attempting to ban nazi or other extremist propaganda turns it into the forbidden fruit, which also attracts people.
The only sensible way to combat extremism is to ensure that people are well educated, people will reject it on their own without needing to hide it.
And they can tell what site you accessed based on the HOST header or the SNI parameter when negotiating SSL...
General purpose open computing *is* unsafe for most people, and people with zero technical knowledge using complex general purpose systems has resulted in epidemics of compromised machines, identity theft and all manner of other problems.
Many people are better off with a hardened device managed by someone else, wether its a chromebook, tablet or games console (a console is fundamentally no different, its just designed to play games instead of browse websites).
Were it not for a need to access the internet, many people would never have even considered purchasing a computer.
Although since it's open source, could someone not create a fork that was linked to someone else's service instead of google's?
Not trusting google is fine, but people without the technical knowledge to operate a full blown laptop could hire someone they trust to manage a forked chromebook for them.
I second this..
I never blocked ads until they started becoming intrusive (sound, delaying page loads, breaking page layout or altering it as they load slowly etc)...
I block ads on this site because the default ads sometimes break scrolling in safari on osx.
Indeed, chromeos may be a closed system in its default configuration, but its still open source and its success actually provides significant benefits to those of us who want to use regular linux distros...
You used to get websites which check your user agent string and reject anything which is not windows or macos, such things are less common these days thanks to mobile and chromeos...
Manufacturers shipping devices with chromeos ensures that the hardware is compatible with chromeos, and thus also with linux. The same hardware can also usually be bought in other models of devices. Previously most non-server hardware was never tested with linux and could have all kinds of stupid compatibility problems.
The point about netburst was high clockrates, atom cpus tend not to have such high clockrates.
Most (all?) chromebooks can be repurposed to run a full blown linux if you want to, or you can run chromeos in developer mode which is basically linux anyway.
Full blown laptops are geek toys, designed for geeks by geeks... The average reader of slashdot might be capable of operating such a tool, but most people are not and many people would never have bought such a machine at all if it wasn't the only available tool for doing some key activity (eg internet access)...
Now there are many new tools which are far more suitable for most people's needs (chromebooks, tablets, phones, games consoles etc), the niches that require a full blown laptop are shrinking.
Only with rail your limited to the slowest vehicle on the track, your stopping distances are longer so you have to leave larger gaps between vehicles, you can't swerve to avoid unexpected obstacles, a faulty vehicle blocks the entire track until it can be removed, every time you stop you cause delays to those behind you (or further increase the distances required between vehicles) unless you can get off the main track, you can only go where there's tracks and cannot make arbitrary turns, you have to follow pre planned routes because of the scheduling required to try and avoid delays etc...
And you can still encounter unexpected obstacles on a train track, its just that you have to either plough through them or stop until they're cleared. There's no way to route around like there is on a road.
Rail is inferior to road in many ways, hence why there are so many more road users.
Strict emissions rules have resulted in companies cheating (eg VW)...
It results in higher prices for cars..
It has resulted in various other ways to game the system - eg there are rules on CO2 emissions, but no rules on emission of other things so cars now generate less CO2 and more things which aren't so heavily regulated, which are potentially worse for both health and the environment.
I don't drive much, maybe 1000 miles per year... I have an old car which is not terribly efficient, if i were to replace it today with the most efficient car currently available, how many miles would i have to drive before the reduced fuel consumption compensated for the extra energy used to actually build the car?