The locks don't make the phone cheaper, they effectively extend you a line of credit (like a loan) for the phone that you pay off over the term of your contract... The provider locks are there to try and prevent you using the phone with a competing service, although it seems rather pointless to do this. Application locks on the other hand, just suck... The operator intentionally crippling the features of a phone (and often not telling you in advance) is a terrible thing to do.
If you were to buy a cheap phone on contract, and then use it with another operator you would still be paying for the original contracted service. The provider wouldnt lose anything (and probably gain because you wouldnt be using your inclusive minutes). If you break the contract and stop paying, then they can take you to court for breach of contract anyway. What it does do, is prevent people from going on holiday and using a locally acquired sim. I recently went to another country for a week, and would have liked to buy a prepaid sim locally, not only so i could call people there far more cheaply than using roaming, but also so the people i was visiting could call me at local rate instead of international rate (and i would have been paying for the incoming calls on roaming too).
Preventing the use of certain phone features is just ridiculous, for instance Orange UK disable the SIP client on nokia N95 phones. I would like to use that SIP client when within range of my wireless AP at home or at work to make cheaper calls, especially international calls and calls to internal extensions. Orange disable this to prevent people saving money this way. BTW, if anyone knows how to unlock an N95 and get this functionality back please let me know.
Well fireworks are legal to set off in your backyard, they're small bombs... If the bomb is big enough to damage someone else's property then they might arrest you for criminal damage, but if it just explodes in your back yard and makes a crater in your lawn noone will care.
Schools often have limited space, thus the science department will use all of their allocated space to make labs, which then results in them having to do book study in those labs... At least thats how it was in our school, all the science classrooms were kitted out as labs but we often just did book studies there. The presence of chemicals and equipment in the drawers and cupboards under the desks didn't help class discipline tho.
But how much faster could they have been if the same effort had been made on a more sane interface? Modern IA32 compatibles have to jump through hoops to get good performance
Remote exploits are not just limited to workstations either... What if someone exploits your hardware firewall? Inserting an additional device, an additional point of failure and additional point of exploitation doesn't help things... It also wastes power. Your OS should be secure in the first place. Your workstation OS should not be running any network listening services, and any server should only be running the services it needs (and a firewall wont help here, because if you need a service your going to let it through). And aside from providing an extra point of failure or exploitation, a firewall will hinder things your trying to do (like p2p, some games etc), and wont provide any extra security in these cases because you'l just end up opening these ports anyway. All a firewall helps with, is poorly designed systems that have unnecessary network services running which can't be turned off. Fix the OS design, dont compromise.
They are not supporting an option of the DHCP spec which is there for very old TCP stacks (so old, that i can't even think of one that requires it...). They don't even support some much newer systems, which don't require the broadcast flag (windows 3.1, sunos 4, amigaos)... Is it their fault that vista is behaving like a 20+ year old os without even needing to?
This particular option is designed to aid old implementations of TCP which can't receive unicast packets until they have received an IP address (which they dont have yet because DHCP hasnt given them one)... Vista has a new TCP stack, it would be incredibly stupid to implement such an ancient bug, especially when all earlier versions of windows worked correctly. Infact, the vista TCP stack does support receiving of unicast packets, and yet microsoft still chose to use the broadcast flag without reason. That's why this ridiculous behaviour can be turned off with a simple registry entry. The broadcast flag is intended for TCP stacks which _CANNOT_ support unicast, it is absoloutely incorrect to use it as the default on a stack which can support it. The broadcast flag is only intended for compatibility with very old TCP stacks (i cant think of any which requires it, and it makes sense that this legacy functionality was intended to be removed when you weren't using any of these legacy systems. So, did this swedish ISP have any reason to believe that people would be connecting ancient TCP stacks to their network? If not, it makes sense that they wouldn't support this legacy flag.
Have you actually read this supposed standard? Have you even read the slashdot stories talking about it? To sum it up... The spec may be partially open, but it refers to other non published specs/programs which arent. Microsoft's own implementation doesn't fully comply with the published specs. The format spec is very broken in several ways (some formulae fail to specify units of measurement etc) The format itself is also broken (date support is broken, support for different working-weeks as in the middle east is nonexistent etc)
And a lot more, try reading some of the recent stories...
It has already... However, if microsoft's format also gets ISO approval then noone will use ODF, despite it being a superior format in many ways, they will stick with the only one microsoft supports.
Most servers spend a lot of time idle, often far more time idle than busy... You don't buy a server that is just barely fast enough for your workload, your over-spec so that it can easily handle spikes in load and allow for future growth. Also, many business operations have busy hours and quiet hours, for instance internal servers at a company will usually only see much load during working hours.
A very expensive - and slow - PPC linux machine... You paid more than an equivalent PPC mac... You have all the disadvantages of PPC linux (questionably no flash, no java)... You dont have multiple processors, or the newer PPC chips (G5s etc) available in macs... You can't run MacOS natively (it might run under mac on linux, but not legitimately)
If you could run AmigaOS on PPC macs, or one of the games consoles i might consider getting it... A console because they have other uses, and a ppc mac because theyre cheap now.
This does highlight an interesting issue tho... Microsoft could screw millions of companies over, by changing the terms of their EULA... They can change it to include any new terms, and if you agreed to the original then your now bound by the new one (and must stop using the software if you disagree)... It seems microsoft are worried about a risk that they themselves impose on their customers. So the thing is, if microsoft are unwilling to accept a risk like this, why should any of their customers?
This does highlight an interesting issue tho... Microsoft could screw millions of companies over, by changing the terms of their EULA... They can change it to include any new terms, and if you agreed to the original then your now bound by the new one (and must stop using the software if you disagree)... It seems microsoft are worried about a risk that they themselves impose on their customers.
Smaller fish are less likely to hold patents, and thus aren't concerned by the new provisions... Sun and IBM have already granted open-ended patent licenses to users of open source software, so the gplv3 is of little concern to them. They hold patents mostly for defensive purposes, to fight back incase they get sued.
Microsoft made the mistake of not specifying a time limit or a particular version on the vouchers... The vouchers are basically valid for "ANY version of Novell Linux at any time". They had no stipulation that only certain approved versions would be valid, they could easily have made the vouchers only valid for the current version and later offered newer vouchers covering newer versions...
To put it another way, If i'm a budget car manufacturer and i give you a voucher entitling you to "any vehicle from my range" with no expiry... And you dont like any of my budget cars, so you file the voucher away... some time down the line i start producing a range of expensive luxury cars, would you not claim your free luxury car? It's my fault for giving you a voucher on those terms, you as a customer are only looking out for your own rights and best interests by claiming the best vehicle you can.
Your clearly low ranking enough to not have a proper understanding of why rich people and organisations "donate" to charity... I'm not a religious man, but one bible story always sticks with me.... It's the one about all the rich men who came into church and made a big show about how much they were donating, while a poor woman tried to hide how little she was donating. Who was more generous? The rich men who donated their pocket change, or the poor woman who donated a week's earnings? Charitable donations are a tax dodge and PR exercise, they also provide advertising opportunity and in microsoft's case potential lock-in... microsoft is even capable of directly profiting from charitable donations. Much of their donations are in the form of software, which costs them nothing to produce but they claim back the tax based on the retail price, thus making a profit at the taxpayer's expense. Plus, by donating proprietary software they are creating new locked-in customers. Start talking about charity when they donate no-strings-attached cash anonymously.
Also, if your proud of working at microsoft... what are your views on the ooxml format? What is your response to all the flaws in it that have been pointed out recently? And what about microsoft's ignoring of the existing iso standard, and trying to force their own through rather than proposing updates to the existing standard (if thats even necessary)?
And what is it exactly that makes you proud to work for microsoft? Your proud that your hard work goes to make someone else (who probably doesnt work very hard at all) even more rich, and that you yourself will never amount to much?
I'm sure the DX4/100 was actually on a 33mhz bus, with 3x multiplier despite the DX4 name... DX2/66 was ofcourse 33mhz bus, but you could get a DX/50 that was 50mhz both busrate and internally, and they were faster than DX2/66's for almost everything.
Processors always used to be quoted at the bus rate, not the internal clock... The 25mhz Motorola 68040 for instance, ran on a 25mhz bus but ran at twice that rate internally.
Those who have owned the Amiga name since the demise of Commodore have done so many things to screw it up... All this bullshit about amigaos 4, requiring it runs on dongled ppc hardware because of a supposed fear of piracy, theyre just shooting themselves in the foot. Piracy was what made the amiga, all amiga users i know had stacks of pirated games, and piracy is the best thing that could happen to amigaos 4 right now, because at least then they'd have some users some of whom may buy it and/or develop software for the platform. Noone is going to buy expensive and obsolete hardware just to try out a new os.
Coldfire targetted a completely different market to m68k, and was only loosely based on the instruction set... The market segment that m68k occupied was always intended to migrate to PPC... A lot of unix machines, macs, amigas, atari, games consoles etc, all used m68k... Macs moved across, IBM moved their unix line, sun ported solaris to ppc (briefly), amiga kinda went to ppc, and games consoles are now finally moving to ppc as motorola intended all those years ago. Tho, ppc was never as successfull as m68k was, motorola dropped the ball when they dropped compatibility. They wanted a clean break from legacy, but keeping legacy cruft is what kept x86 in the game.
What linux have you been using? I've never had such problems on linux, unless i did something stupid (like using non-dma ide drives)... I've had a linux 2.4.x system with a loadavg in the hundreds still able to play mp3s without skipping.
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I had a Blackberry 7290 from Vodafone, it was most certainly sim-locked to vodafone. It cost me about GBP3 to get it unlocked.
The locks don't make the phone cheaper, they effectively extend you a line of credit (like a loan) for the phone that you pay off over the term of your contract...
The provider locks are there to try and prevent you using the phone with a competing service, although it seems rather pointless to do this.
Application locks on the other hand, just suck... The operator intentionally crippling the features of a phone (and often not telling you in advance) is a terrible thing to do.
If you were to buy a cheap phone on contract, and then use it with another operator you would still be paying for the original contracted service. The provider wouldnt lose anything (and probably gain because you wouldnt be using your inclusive minutes). If you break the contract and stop paying, then they can take you to court for breach of contract anyway.
What it does do, is prevent people from going on holiday and using a locally acquired sim. I recently went to another country for a week, and would have liked to buy a prepaid sim locally, not only so i could call people there far more cheaply than using roaming, but also so the people i was visiting could call me at local rate instead of international rate (and i would have been paying for the incoming calls on roaming too).
Preventing the use of certain phone features is just ridiculous, for instance Orange UK disable the SIP client on nokia N95 phones. I would like to use that SIP client when within range of my wireless AP at home or at work to make cheaper calls, especially international calls and calls to internal extensions. Orange disable this to prevent people saving money this way.
BTW, if anyone knows how to unlock an N95 and get this functionality back please let me know.
Well fireworks are legal to set off in your backyard, they're small bombs...
If the bomb is big enough to damage someone else's property then they might arrest you for criminal damage, but if it just explodes in your back yard and makes a crater in your lawn noone will care.
Schools often have limited space, thus the science department will use all of their allocated space to make labs, which then results in them having to do book study in those labs...
At least thats how it was in our school, all the science classrooms were kitted out as labs but we often just did book studies there.
The presence of chemicals and equipment in the drawers and cupboards under the desks didn't help class discipline tho.
But how much faster could they have been if the same effort had been made on a more sane interface?
Modern IA32 compatibles have to jump through hoops to get good performance
Remote exploits are not just limited to workstations either... What if someone exploits your hardware firewall?
Inserting an additional device, an additional point of failure and additional point of exploitation doesn't help things... It also wastes power.
Your OS should be secure in the first place.
Your workstation OS should not be running any network listening services, and any server should only be running the services it needs (and a firewall wont help here, because if you need a service your going to let it through).
And aside from providing an extra point of failure or exploitation, a firewall will hinder things your trying to do (like p2p, some games etc), and wont provide any extra security in these cases because you'l just end up opening these ports anyway.
All a firewall helps with, is poorly designed systems that have unnecessary network services running which can't be turned off. Fix the OS design, dont compromise.
They are not supporting an option of the DHCP spec which is there for very old TCP stacks (so old, that i can't even think of one that requires it...). They don't even support some much newer systems, which don't require the broadcast flag (windows 3.1, sunos 4, amigaos)...
Is it their fault that vista is behaving like a 20+ year old os without even needing to?
This particular option is designed to aid old implementations of TCP which can't receive unicast packets until they have received an IP address (which they dont have yet because DHCP hasnt given them one)...
Vista has a new TCP stack, it would be incredibly stupid to implement such an ancient bug, especially when all earlier versions of windows worked correctly.
Infact, the vista TCP stack does support receiving of unicast packets, and yet microsoft still chose to use the broadcast flag without reason. That's why this ridiculous behaviour can be turned off with a simple registry entry. The broadcast flag is intended for TCP stacks which _CANNOT_ support unicast, it is absoloutely incorrect to use it as the default on a stack which can support it.
The broadcast flag is only intended for compatibility with very old TCP stacks (i cant think of any which requires it, and it makes sense that this legacy functionality was intended to be removed when you weren't using any of these legacy systems.
So, did this swedish ISP have any reason to believe that people would be connecting ancient TCP stacks to their network? If not, it makes sense that they wouldn't support this legacy flag.
Or once every patch tuesday, when all the machines configured for automatic updates finish their download and reboot.
Have you actually read this supposed standard? Have you even read the slashdot stories talking about it?
To sum it up...
The spec may be partially open, but it refers to other non published specs/programs which arent.
Microsoft's own implementation doesn't fully comply with the published specs.
The format spec is very broken in several ways (some formulae fail to specify units of measurement etc)
The format itself is also broken (date support is broken, support for different working-weeks as in the middle east is nonexistent etc)
And a lot more, try reading some of the recent stories...
It has already...
However, if microsoft's format also gets ISO approval then noone will use ODF, despite it being a superior format in many ways, they will stick with the only one microsoft supports.
Most servers spend a lot of time idle, often far more time idle than busy...
You don't buy a server that is just barely fast enough for your workload, your over-spec so that it can easily handle spikes in load and allow for future growth.
Also, many business operations have busy hours and quiet hours, for instance internal servers at a company will usually only see much load during working hours.
A very expensive - and slow - PPC linux machine...
You paid more than an equivalent PPC mac...
You have all the disadvantages of PPC linux (questionably no flash, no java)...
You dont have multiple processors, or the newer PPC chips (G5s etc) available in macs...
You can't run MacOS natively (it might run under mac on linux, but not legitimately)
If you could run AmigaOS on PPC macs, or one of the games consoles i might consider getting it... A console because they have other uses, and a ppc mac because theyre cheap now.
Well then you also do not own a microsoft windows product, but you do still own your several hundred dollars. Congratulations.
This does highlight an interesting issue tho...
Microsoft could screw millions of companies over, by changing the terms of their EULA... They can change it to include any new terms, and if you agreed to the original then your now bound by the new one (and must stop using the software if you disagree)... It seems microsoft are worried about a risk that they themselves impose on their customers.
So the thing is, if microsoft are unwilling to accept a risk like this, why should any of their customers?
This does highlight an interesting issue tho...
Microsoft could screw millions of companies over, by changing the terms of their EULA... They can change it to include any new terms, and if you agreed to the original then your now bound by the new one (and must stop using the software if you disagree)... It seems microsoft are worried about a risk that they themselves impose on their customers.
Smaller fish are less likely to hold patents, and thus aren't concerned by the new provisions...
Sun and IBM have already granted open-ended patent licenses to users of open source software, so the gplv3 is of little concern to them. They hold patents mostly for defensive purposes, to fight back incase they get sued.
Microsoft made the mistake of not specifying a time limit or a particular version on the vouchers...
The vouchers are basically valid for "ANY version of Novell Linux at any time".
They had no stipulation that only certain approved versions would be valid, they could easily have made the vouchers only valid for the current version and later offered newer vouchers covering newer versions...
To put it another way, If i'm a budget car manufacturer and i give you a voucher entitling you to "any vehicle from my range" with no expiry... And you dont like any of my budget cars, so you file the voucher away... some time down the line i start producing a range of expensive luxury cars, would you not claim your free luxury car? It's my fault for giving you a voucher on those terms, you as a customer are only looking out for your own rights and best interests by claiming the best vehicle you can.
Your clearly low ranking enough to not have a proper understanding of why rich people and organisations "donate" to charity...
I'm not a religious man, but one bible story always sticks with me.... It's the one about all the rich men who came into church and made a big show about how much they were donating, while a poor woman tried to hide how little she was donating. Who was more generous? The rich men who donated their pocket change, or the poor woman who donated a week's earnings?
Charitable donations are a tax dodge and PR exercise, they also provide advertising opportunity and in microsoft's case potential lock-in... microsoft is even capable of directly profiting from charitable donations. Much of their donations are in the form of software, which costs them nothing to produce but they claim back the tax based on the retail price, thus making a profit at the taxpayer's expense. Plus, by donating proprietary software they are creating new locked-in customers.
Start talking about charity when they donate no-strings-attached cash anonymously.
Also, if your proud of working at microsoft... what are your views on the ooxml format? What is your response to all the flaws in it that have been pointed out recently? And what about microsoft's ignoring of the existing iso standard, and trying to force their own through rather than proposing updates to the existing standard (if thats even necessary)?
And what is it exactly that makes you proud to work for microsoft? Your proud that your hard work goes to make someone else (who probably doesnt work very hard at all) even more rich, and that you yourself will never amount to much?
I'm sure the DX4/100 was actually on a 33mhz bus, with 3x multiplier despite the DX4 name... DX2/66 was ofcourse 33mhz bus, but you could get a DX/50 that was 50mhz both busrate and internally, and they were faster than DX2/66's for almost everything.
Processors always used to be quoted at the bus rate, not the internal clock... The 25mhz Motorola 68040 for instance, ran on a 25mhz bus but ran at twice that rate internally.
Those who have owned the Amiga name since the demise of Commodore have done so many things to screw it up...
All this bullshit about amigaos 4, requiring it runs on dongled ppc hardware because of a supposed fear of piracy, theyre just shooting themselves in the foot.
Piracy was what made the amiga, all amiga users i know had stacks of pirated games, and piracy is the best thing that could happen to amigaos 4 right now, because at least then they'd have some users some of whom may buy it and/or develop software for the platform.
Noone is going to buy expensive and obsolete hardware just to try out a new os.
In which case, a DX4/100 should have had no problem, even under win95...
Cool, you don't even need to *buy* yourself a junk car then.
Just steal one as/when you need it.
That said, wouldnt you rather lose a junk car than a decent one?
Coldfire targetted a completely different market to m68k, and was only loosely based on the instruction set...
The market segment that m68k occupied was always intended to migrate to PPC...
A lot of unix machines, macs, amigas, atari, games consoles etc, all used m68k...
Macs moved across, IBM moved their unix line, sun ported solaris to ppc (briefly), amiga kinda went to ppc, and games consoles are now finally moving to ppc as motorola intended all those years ago. Tho, ppc was never as successfull as m68k was, motorola dropped the ball when they dropped compatibility. They wanted a clean break from legacy, but keeping legacy cruft is what kept x86 in the game.
What linux have you been using?
I've never had such problems on linux, unless i did something stupid (like using non-dma ide drives)...
I've had a linux 2.4.x system with a loadavg in the hundreds still able to play mp3s without skipping.