You can lock down a laptop sufficiently so that even though you've lost physical control of the machine, nothing short of replacing the hard disk is going to compromise the system. If your employees are doing that just to circumvent IT policy, maybe THEY should be treated as the hostile one, not the laptop.
I won't disagree with that, but most compromised computers weren't compromised because they weren't firewalled. They were compromised because of an exploit in some of the software they use to access the internet (like a web browser), or because they ran malware.
Fine, it'd be like dusting off your 2006 DEC Alpha and getting all bitchy that Windows doesn't support it anymore.
The point is that even the newest PowerPC mac can't support anything newer than OS X 10.5, which hasn't had a security update in two and a half years. That might have been fine back when I was stuck with a 68k mac during the PowerPC transition, but that thing never got hooked up to any network (not even the internet). How useful today is a computer that shouldn't be connected to the internet?
The difference is that a P4 running Win7 is still getting security updates. An eMac hasn't gotten any security updates in something like half a decade, and can't (or at least shouldn't) be connected to any network. That could be problematic.
Those were just for collecting fuel (although perhaps they and a combination of tractors were used to collect them to prevent buildup). In actual fact, TNG defined the ship as having navigational deflectors specifically to address the problem if the large particle densities caused by FTL travel...
I'm amused that Alcubierre's theoretical warp drive concept from 1994 works pretty much the same way the fictional warp drive from a 1987 television show does, down to having many of the same side effects...
As to why I reference only TNG, I don't think TOS actually tried to put scientific explanations on any of this stuff.
Apple does have premium pricing, but they're not four times Dell. Not if you match up both the specs and form factor as closely as possible. The Mac Air, for example, is priced similarly to comparable ultrabooks.
I'd imagine you want your students to be prepared to enter the industry and be able to use the current software. You could teach the core skills using Office 95, but your students would find themselves rather confused when faced with the current version of Office, since the interface is completely different. They'd have the core skills, but be unable to apply them.
There's also concerns about security. Is it really a good idea to connect a system to a network which hasn't seen a security update in half a decade (for the 800MHz eMac, which supports only OS 10.4)? If your institution is going to run OS X, you shouldn't be running any machine that doesn't support 10.7, the only version of the OS currently getting updates.
The requirements for that aren't particularly onerous. x64-64 support (Core 2 Duo macs or later), 2GB of RAM. You can do that on a Mac Mini from 2007, a full five years ago. Five years between replacing Apple computers is not unreasonable.
Apple announced their transition to Intel in June 2005. Having purchased a 68k mac during the transition to PowerPC, I would argue that buying a G4 mac with the intention to use it for 6-7 years right at the start of the transition was a braindead thing to do. If they had planned to replace them three years later, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But apparently they didn't.
In fact, as early as February 2006, you could get a similarly priced Intel mac, in the Mac Mini. So buying a G4 mac in 2006 would have been a really moronic move.
That's what I don't get. You can fault them for buying eMacs then, but they're old unsupported machines today. The article doesn't actually mention 2004, but if we assume they bought them at the start of 2004, you're talking about an 800MHz G4 processor with 128MB of RAM and a 1280x960 CRT.
Any software that requires an Intel mac (as I'm sure the more recent versions of Adobe's CS products like InDesign would) just won't run, and these things can't run a modern web browser (so Google Docs probably won't work right) since 128MB of RAM just isn't enough for modern web use (remember the OS needs a chunk of that).
So, yeah, I'd actually say they should have replaced these things long ago. They're close to useless today.
None of these problems were a big deal on the three episodes released on bluray so far. Yes, you can see set imperfections (the seams of carpeting around Worf's console on the bridge was the most obvious example), but they're not terribly distracting. The painted sets weren't obvious in any of the three episodes, but I recall seeing paint stipple on the sets on the DVDs, so this is probably no more of a problem than before.
The makeup held up especially well; Worf's closeup in Sins of the Father is incredibly impressive considering you've got his facial prosthetic taking up most of the frame, and you can't see any obvious seams or imperfections.
I'm not sure what exact film stock was used for TNG, but having watched the episodes on the sampler disc, I can tell you that there is an enormous difference in quality from the DVDs. This is because the DVDs themselves looked pretty bad; if we were comparing the best DVD can reproduce to the TNG bluray releases, the difference might be huge, but in reality we're comparing 1980s 480i video tape to well scanned super 35 film. Did they use the best stock money could buy? No. But the improvement is still enormous.
The biggest difference was The Inner Light. The bluray version had a fair amount of grain (they cranked up the brightness a ton), but the original (DVD) was incredibly dark, brown, and blurry. The other episodes, though, still see massive improvement. The close-ups on Worf's face in Sins of the Father was pretty impressive.
It should be noted that they weren't able to find all the original film reels. There is one shot in Sins of the Father that had to use the original betacam masters where they had lost the film, and the difference is pretty big. Luckily, it's just one shot.
You've taken a big (and wrong) leap to go from "Tegra 3 doesn't currently work with any LTE radios" to "Quadcores CAN'T work on US cellular networks- presently"
You could factually say "There are not currently any quad core SoCs on the market that are compatible with LTE".
I'm not necessarily arguing that it's not possible to set those kinds of prices, it depends on your average usage per customer. If your typical customer usage is low enough, such high caps can work, I'm sure. I'd think that $2.50 per terabyte extra would be below cost, though, even Cogent won't sell you bandwidth that cheaply...
$0.10 per terabyte would equate to roughly $0.03 per megabit. If you can convince Level 3 to sell you a GigE for $30 a month, then you'd be a billionaire by now, and Level 3 would be bankrupt. The actual prices are normally something like two orders of magnitude higher.
$25 for 4TB per month is pretty incredibly oversold. Quality bandwidth that is not.
While there are people who will rip you off with bandwidth prices that are way out of proportion to what it costs them, the general maxim of "you get what you pay for" applies here. Linode and Amazon both charge roughly the same, in the neighbourhood of $0.10 per gig; that's what you should expect to pay for quality bandwidth at a quality host.
Looking at the bandwidth pricing of the facility that buyvm hosts at, they've got an insane contention ratio.
You can actually get 100 megabit for $1300 in Montreal very easily (or cheaper), but you're talking about getting 100 megabit for $130, or $1.3 per megabit. That's possible, but at that commit size, that's bargain basement bandwidth.
An interesting part of the discussion (TFA, basically) was that it was difficult if not impossible to completely ensure this in an opensource browser, because there wasn't really any way to stop the user from modifying the browser and dumping the decrypted frames and audio.
What gets me is that it's a moot point anyhow, since nobody really wants to pirate this stuff themselves. Movies and TV shows are already easily available to/from pirates, from higher quality sources. They should simply settle for making it difficult to casually do (don't bother with no DRM, but also pressure browser makers to not support saving a stream) as a compromise towards casual piracy, and leave it at that.
That said, I'm still pretty happy with Netflix and Steam, so it's not that big a deal to me.
DRM == giving control of my computer to somebody else.
I fail to see how receiving an encrypted stream, decrypting it, then drawing the decrypted frames to a framebuffer, possibly re-encrypting them before they hit the HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort port, constitutes "giving control of [your] computer to somebody else."
This isn't all that different from using TLS to do your banking.
Netflix would be just as happy to do away with all DRM. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to get enough content licenses to have a sustainable business if that were the case.
Legally, it doesn't legitimize piracy. Morally, it does, for most Canadians. You can't attach a private music copying levy to digital cameras and expect people to not feel justified in downloading whatever they want. Otherwise, what are they paying for? Theoretically the fee is for private copying, yes, but most Canadians would not recognize private copying as something that warrants payment, so in their minds, the fee just covers music in general.
Luckily, the attempt to get a music levy on digital cameras hasn't gone anywhere. Not that it made any sense to begin with, but that's the kind of stuff we have to put up with here. They also got a $40 levy on iPod sales for a while (got shot down), and they're always trying to put a levy on all internet connections.
Of course, the private copying regime is also why it's legal to download MP3s from the internet without paying for them in Canada, because this action is an individual making a private copy, which is of course legal. If the record industry hadn't pushed for the private copying regime, this might not be the case... By the same token, the person sending the file typically isn't responsible, so long as they merely made available and didn't actively initiate the transfer. Making available was compared by the courts to a library putting in a photocopier (which is standard in all Canadian libraries in my experience); the library is not liable when somebody photocopies a book without permission.
Who goes out and buys an 18 wheel Mack truck then complains when it doesn't fit in their suburban driveway? Horses for courses and all that..
Far too many people, it seems. In most cases, the problem is solved by throwing more RAM at the problem, rather than properly configuring Apache to work (well!) within the available RAM.
I wasn't arguing in favour of anything. I was simply explaining what the poster meant by "post-webkit". I was relaying fact, not giving an opinion (except for where I said "it's nice to code for" in relation to WP7). I made no arguments for or against either webkit or gecko.
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You can lock down a laptop sufficiently so that even though you've lost physical control of the machine, nothing short of replacing the hard disk is going to compromise the system. If your employees are doing that just to circumvent IT policy, maybe THEY should be treated as the hostile one, not the laptop.
I won't disagree with that, but most compromised computers weren't compromised because they weren't firewalled. They were compromised because of an exploit in some of the software they use to access the internet (like a web browser), or because they ran malware.
Fine, it'd be like dusting off your 2006 DEC Alpha and getting all bitchy that Windows doesn't support it anymore.
The point is that even the newest PowerPC mac can't support anything newer than OS X 10.5, which hasn't had a security update in two and a half years. That might have been fine back when I was stuck with a 68k mac during the PowerPC transition, but that thing never got hooked up to any network (not even the internet). How useful today is a computer that shouldn't be connected to the internet?
Making your life "much more complicated"? It's an outdated web browser. Update to something modern and move on with your life.
The difference is that a P4 running Win7 is still getting security updates. An eMac hasn't gotten any security updates in something like half a decade, and can't (or at least shouldn't) be connected to any network. That could be problematic.
Those were just for collecting fuel (although perhaps they and a combination of tractors were used to collect them to prevent buildup). In actual fact, TNG defined the ship as having navigational deflectors specifically to address the problem if the large particle densities caused by FTL travel...
I'm amused that Alcubierre's theoretical warp drive concept from 1994 works pretty much the same way the fictional warp drive from a 1987 television show does, down to having many of the same side effects...
As to why I reference only TNG, I don't think TOS actually tried to put scientific explanations on any of this stuff.
Apple does have premium pricing, but they're not four times Dell. Not if you match up both the specs and form factor as closely as possible. The Mac Air, for example, is priced similarly to comparable ultrabooks.
I'd imagine you want your students to be prepared to enter the industry and be able to use the current software. You could teach the core skills using Office 95, but your students would find themselves rather confused when faced with the current version of Office, since the interface is completely different. They'd have the core skills, but be unable to apply them.
There's also concerns about security. Is it really a good idea to connect a system to a network which hasn't seen a security update in half a decade (for the 800MHz eMac, which supports only OS 10.4)? If your institution is going to run OS X, you shouldn't be running any machine that doesn't support 10.7, the only version of the OS currently getting updates.
The requirements for that aren't particularly onerous. x64-64 support (Core 2 Duo macs or later), 2GB of RAM. You can do that on a Mac Mini from 2007, a full five years ago. Five years between replacing Apple computers is not unreasonable.
If you're trying to train people to work in industry, training them on old software that nobody uses anymore is doing them a disservice.
Emacs were a great choice back in 2005/6
Apple announced their transition to Intel in June 2005. Having purchased a 68k mac during the transition to PowerPC, I would argue that buying a G4 mac with the intention to use it for 6-7 years right at the start of the transition was a braindead thing to do. If they had planned to replace them three years later, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But apparently they didn't.
In fact, as early as February 2006, you could get a similarly priced Intel mac, in the Mac Mini. So buying a G4 mac in 2006 would have been a really moronic move.
That's what I don't get. You can fault them for buying eMacs then, but they're old unsupported machines today. The article doesn't actually mention 2004, but if we assume they bought them at the start of 2004, you're talking about an 800MHz G4 processor with 128MB of RAM and a 1280x960 CRT.
Any software that requires an Intel mac (as I'm sure the more recent versions of Adobe's CS products like InDesign would) just won't run, and these things can't run a modern web browser (so Google Docs probably won't work right) since 128MB of RAM just isn't enough for modern web use (remember the OS needs a chunk of that).
So, yeah, I'd actually say they should have replaced these things long ago. They're close to useless today.
None of these problems were a big deal on the three episodes released on bluray so far. Yes, you can see set imperfections (the seams of carpeting around Worf's console on the bridge was the most obvious example), but they're not terribly distracting. The painted sets weren't obvious in any of the three episodes, but I recall seeing paint stipple on the sets on the DVDs, so this is probably no more of a problem than before.
The makeup held up especially well; Worf's closeup in Sins of the Father is incredibly impressive considering you've got his facial prosthetic taking up most of the frame, and you can't see any obvious seams or imperfections.
I'm not sure what exact film stock was used for TNG, but having watched the episodes on the sampler disc, I can tell you that there is an enormous difference in quality from the DVDs. This is because the DVDs themselves looked pretty bad; if we were comparing the best DVD can reproduce to the TNG bluray releases, the difference might be huge, but in reality we're comparing 1980s 480i video tape to well scanned super 35 film. Did they use the best stock money could buy? No. But the improvement is still enormous.
The biggest difference was The Inner Light. The bluray version had a fair amount of grain (they cranked up the brightness a ton), but the original (DVD) was incredibly dark, brown, and blurry. The other episodes, though, still see massive improvement. The close-ups on Worf's face in Sins of the Father was pretty impressive.
It should be noted that they weren't able to find all the original film reels. There is one shot in Sins of the Father that had to use the original betacam masters where they had lost the film, and the difference is pretty big. Luckily, it's just one shot.
You've taken a big (and wrong) leap to go from "Tegra 3 doesn't currently work with any LTE radios" to "Quadcores CAN'T work on US cellular networks- presently"
You could factually say "There are not currently any quad core SoCs on the market that are compatible with LTE".
I'm not necessarily arguing that it's not possible to set those kinds of prices, it depends on your average usage per customer. If your typical customer usage is low enough, such high caps can work, I'm sure. I'd think that $2.50 per terabyte extra would be below cost, though, even Cogent won't sell you bandwidth that cheaply...
I'm sure if you were doing many petabytes of traffic through Linode, they'd be willing to cut you a volume discount :P
$0.10 per terabyte would equate to roughly $0.03 per megabit. If you can convince Level 3 to sell you a GigE for $30 a month, then you'd be a billionaire by now, and Level 3 would be bankrupt. The actual prices are normally something like two orders of magnitude higher.
In other words, bullshit.
$25 for 4TB per month is pretty incredibly oversold. Quality bandwidth that is not.
While there are people who will rip you off with bandwidth prices that are way out of proportion to what it costs them, the general maxim of "you get what you pay for" applies here. Linode and Amazon both charge roughly the same, in the neighbourhood of $0.10 per gig; that's what you should expect to pay for quality bandwidth at a quality host.
Looking at the bandwidth pricing of the facility that buyvm hosts at, they've got an insane contention ratio.
You can actually get 100 megabit for $1300 in Montreal very easily (or cheaper), but you're talking about getting 100 megabit for $130, or $1.3 per megabit. That's possible, but at that commit size, that's bargain basement bandwidth.
An interesting part of the discussion (TFA, basically) was that it was difficult if not impossible to completely ensure this in an opensource browser, because there wasn't really any way to stop the user from modifying the browser and dumping the decrypted frames and audio.
What gets me is that it's a moot point anyhow, since nobody really wants to pirate this stuff themselves. Movies and TV shows are already easily available to/from pirates, from higher quality sources. They should simply settle for making it difficult to casually do (don't bother with no DRM, but also pressure browser makers to not support saving a stream) as a compromise towards casual piracy, and leave it at that.
That said, I'm still pretty happy with Netflix and Steam, so it's not that big a deal to me.
DRM == giving control of my computer to somebody else.
I fail to see how receiving an encrypted stream, decrypting it, then drawing the decrypted frames to a framebuffer, possibly re-encrypting them before they hit the HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort port, constitutes "giving control of [your] computer to somebody else."
This isn't all that different from using TLS to do your banking.
Netflix would be just as happy to do away with all DRM. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to get enough content licenses to have a sustainable business if that were the case.
Legally, it doesn't legitimize piracy. Morally, it does, for most Canadians. You can't attach a private music copying levy to digital cameras and expect people to not feel justified in downloading whatever they want. Otherwise, what are they paying for? Theoretically the fee is for private copying, yes, but most Canadians would not recognize private copying as something that warrants payment, so in their minds, the fee just covers music in general.
Luckily, the attempt to get a music levy on digital cameras hasn't gone anywhere. Not that it made any sense to begin with, but that's the kind of stuff we have to put up with here. They also got a $40 levy on iPod sales for a while (got shot down), and they're always trying to put a levy on all internet connections.
Of course, the private copying regime is also why it's legal to download MP3s from the internet without paying for them in Canada, because this action is an individual making a private copy, which is of course legal. If the record industry hadn't pushed for the private copying regime, this might not be the case... By the same token, the person sending the file typically isn't responsible, so long as they merely made available and didn't actively initiate the transfer. Making available was compared by the courts to a library putting in a photocopier (which is standard in all Canadian libraries in my experience); the library is not liable when somebody photocopies a book without permission.
Who goes out and buys an 18 wheel Mack truck then complains when it doesn't fit in their suburban driveway? Horses for courses and all that..
Far too many people, it seems. In most cases, the problem is solved by throwing more RAM at the problem, rather than properly configuring Apache to work (well!) within the available RAM.
I wasn't arguing in favour of anything. I was simply explaining what the poster meant by "post-webkit". I was relaying fact, not giving an opinion (except for where I said "it's nice to code for" in relation to WP7). I made no arguments for or against either webkit or gecko.