You tie into the Telco, you need to play by the regulations for Telco.
Good luck with that. Skype (or any other VOIP provider, for that matter) is too much of a moving target to need to worry about non-enforceable legislation.
The bandwidth argument is largely bunk, as most AdBlock users don't come anywhere near their quota and are not using phone-network pay-per-byte services.
You obviously don't live in rural Australia. I can't get any kind of wired connection to my home, so I am reliant on Telstra's so-called NextG network, which *is* severely restricted in bandwidth.
The reality is that web content costs money to create. Web sites cost money to run.
True, and I would have less of a problem with that if advertising were restricted to a per-site basis. However, advertisers are too greedy to be content with that, and I certainly don't feel any obligation to provide tracking data for just anyone to monetise.
I am not opposed to advertising on principle, but marketroids have acquired an unhappy disposition to assume that every vacant space visible to the human eye is fair game for intrusive ads. Ditto, any quiet instant is fair game for filling with obnoxious "BUY!BUY!BUY!" noises (which is why my sound-card is always muted by default).
The internet was never originally constructed for the convenience of advertisers, and it is beyond arrogance for them to assume that it is acceptable to swamp the user's bandwidth (which in many cases comes at a premium price) with inane drivel and referrals to all of their scaly mates in the industry.
Non-intrusive text advertising is fine (and in my case, occasionally even effective), but overly heavy-handed marketing drives me away from websites. I make sure of this by adding them to my hosts file.
If this means I miss out on some content, then so be it. Everybody loses.
The problem is that all applications rely on the Window System.
And therein lies Ubuntu's future relevance, or lack of it. A few individuals have complained about certain flaws in X11 without offering anything useful or complete as an alternative, and I rather doubt if Canonical has the resources to do any better, given the vast amount of work involved. If Canonical insists on pursuing this path, I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu slips from being the most commonly-used(*) distribution to the least.
* This is from the perspective of an ancient Slackware user who doesn't give a fuck one way or another.;)
At first it made sense not using X.org since it's such a terrible mess.
What people usually mean when they say xorg is a mess (without any qualification or substantiation) is that they're bored with it. In reality, xorg is pretty damn powerful: it has a hell of a lot to do, and on the whole it does it remarkably well.
The way OS X handles multiple desktops seems like a total regression.
I normally refuse to say "This", since I hate the meme, but, well, this.
The way Apple carried on about their so-called "spaces" amused me tremendously, since the facility has been around in X11 environments since, err, not quite the dawn of time (I'm much older than that) but definitely in old versions of CDE, back in the early '90s.
I don't think it's very fair to say the Gnome project was a disaster. Sure, in the context of present-day desktop environments, GNOME 1.x looks pretty damn horrible now. But back then, comparing it to KDE (which, to be fair, was in some respects the more reliably functional interface) it was not bad. At that time, I really hated KDE, since it was so kfucking kluttered and kfugly.
I stuck with GNOME from 1997 until the end of the 2.x versions, since it did what I needed it to do reasonably well. Meanwhile, the early KDE 4.x releases were unusable. Sadly, GNOME 3.x has followed suit (and appears set to stay that way), while KDE has re-evolved itself in recent versions as a really nice, feature-rich environment.
These engines are tested with frozen turkeys and the like.
Citation definitely needed here. If a plane can be taken down by a little non-frozen boid, then presumably a frozen boid would do more damage. Though, in my experience, I don't believe I have ever seen a frozen turkey flapping around in commercial flight-paths.
What hope for aviation when the recreational lasers are mounted on recreational drones?
Pretty good, I suspect. I would have thought the cost of a suitable system for aiming and stabilising such a beam from a little flying machine flitting around in the breeze would be a bit high for non-military budgets.
That depends on what you're doing with it. If you're just playing games, you might be better off with an xbox or whatever, but I've been using Linux perfectly happily on the desktop since the mid-'90s.
De Icaza did some good work at the beginning with the GNOME project, but then spoilt it all by presiding over its being dumbed down into an ugly Mac clone, to the point where it ultimately became totally unusable. For all his bleating about a "developer-focused culture" in the Linux world, he has been right at the middle of it.
Who the f*ck is criticizing the Steve Jobs after he's dead???
Well, there was no shortage of good reasons not to like him. If I were Chris-Ann Brennan, for instance, I would probably have considered his behaviour to be unforgivable.
It shouldn't seem odd if you consider how little real innovation Apple has done over the last few years. The iPod was a stroke of genius in its time, and I guess the iRectangle(TM) was an obvious form of technology waiting to be invented. But since the first iPhone was released, Apple has done little more than tinker at the edges by changing that product's dimensions.
I'm not normally one to leap to Jobs' defence, but IMO he was right about the preferable size. However, I'm prepared to accept that since my acuity of vision is quite a lot less than 20/20 (I hope this is the only characteristic I share with that man - though I wouldn't object to having as much money), this might affect my perception. My Android phone is adequate for its purposes (actually, I'm very happy with it), but I struggle to use it if I don't have my glasses handy. But if I want a device that's small enough to carry in my pocket, I want it to be small enough to carry in my pocket *comfortably*, and a 7"-plus device doesn't qualify.
Also, anyone who doesn't know what it is probably wouldn't care much about it if they did. I had a look at it to see what all the hype was about a few weeks ago, and it struck me as a solution looking for a problem. A simple text editor suits my purposes quite adequately. Though obviously, there are many who don't agree - which is fine, since it's all about freedom of choice.
It probably won't, but there's nothing to say you have to use your ISP's DNS. You could even run your own if you felt like it. And if you routed your traffic through a VPN, packet inspection will probably just be a waste of resources.
Hey, look at that! The old Burson Marsteller astroturf team is back in action. BrokenHalo, exomondo, recoiledsnake all here.
Err, who? Maybe you need to go find something else to do. I have been a sysprog on a wide variety of "Big Iron" mainframes since the 1970s, and worked primarily with Linux boxes since 1995, so I really don't think I qualify as a Microsoft astroturfer. I just have some reservations about Ubuntu, that's all.
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You tie into the Telco, you need to play by the regulations for Telco.
Good luck with that. Skype (or any other VOIP provider, for that matter) is too much of a moving target to need to worry about non-enforceable legislation.
Steve Jobs told the USENIX audience in Phoenix, in June 1987, "that x was brain-damaged"
I would rather be brain-damaged than a total asswipe. What Jobs did to Chrisann Brennan was, or should have been unforgivable.
...and have two virtual currencies floating wildly against one another as well as USD?
Are you implying that the USD isn't a virtual currency after all?
For the conservatives we would have used them as intended and made the U.S. much safer by demonstrating that they can be used...
Exactly. And in the interests of the economy, we shouldn't build any more nuclear weapons until we've used the ones we've got.
The bandwidth argument is largely bunk, as most AdBlock users don't come anywhere near their quota and are not using phone-network pay-per-byte services.
You obviously don't live in rural Australia. I can't get any kind of wired connection to my home, so I am reliant on Telstra's so-called NextG network, which *is* severely restricted in bandwidth.
The reality is that web content costs money to create. Web sites cost money to run.
True, and I would have less of a problem with that if advertising were restricted to a per-site basis. However, advertisers are too greedy to be content with that, and I certainly don't feel any obligation to provide tracking data for just anyone to monetise.
Not to mention all the marketing and advertising people starving to death
...which is cheaper than sending them to Golgafringcham. :)
I am not opposed to advertising on principle, but marketroids have acquired an unhappy disposition to assume that every vacant space visible to the human eye is fair game for intrusive ads. Ditto, any quiet instant is fair game for filling with obnoxious "BUY!BUY!BUY!" noises (which is why my sound-card is always muted by default).
The internet was never originally constructed for the convenience of advertisers, and it is beyond arrogance for them to assume that it is acceptable to swamp the user's bandwidth (which in many cases comes at a premium price) with inane drivel and referrals to all of their scaly mates in the industry.
Non-intrusive text advertising is fine (and in my case, occasionally even effective), but overly heavy-handed marketing drives me away from websites. I make sure of this by adding them to my hosts file.
If this means I miss out on some content, then so be it. Everybody loses.
The problem is that all applications rely on the Window System.
;)
And therein lies Ubuntu's future relevance, or lack of it. A few individuals have complained about certain flaws in X11 without offering anything useful or complete as an alternative, and I rather doubt if Canonical has the resources to do any better, given the vast amount of work involved. If Canonical insists on pursuing this path, I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu slips from being the most commonly-used(*) distribution to the least.
* This is from the perspective of an ancient Slackware user who doesn't give a fuck one way or another.
At first it made sense not using X.org since it's such a terrible mess.
What people usually mean when they say xorg is a mess (without any qualification or substantiation) is that they're bored with it. In reality, xorg is pretty damn powerful: it has a hell of a lot to do, and on the whole it does it remarkably well.
The way OS X handles multiple desktops seems like a total regression.
I normally refuse to say "This", since I hate the meme, but, well, this.
The way Apple carried on about their so-called "spaces" amused me tremendously, since the facility has been around in X11 environments since, err, not quite the dawn of time (I'm much older than that) but definitely in old versions of CDE, back in the early '90s.
I don't think it's very fair to say the Gnome project was a disaster. Sure, in the context of present-day desktop environments, GNOME 1.x looks pretty damn horrible now. But back then, comparing it to KDE (which, to be fair, was in some respects the more reliably functional interface) it was not bad. At that time, I really hated KDE, since it was so kfucking kluttered and kfugly.
I stuck with GNOME from 1997 until the end of the 2.x versions, since it did what I needed it to do reasonably well. Meanwhile, the early KDE 4.x releases were unusable. Sadly, GNOME 3.x has followed suit (and appears set to stay that way), while KDE has re-evolved itself in recent versions as a really nice, feature-rich environment.
These engines are tested with frozen turkeys and the like.
Citation definitely needed here. If a plane can be taken down by a little non-frozen boid, then presumably a frozen boid would do more damage. Though, in my experience, I don't believe I have ever seen a frozen turkey flapping around in commercial flight-paths.
What hope for aviation when the recreational lasers are mounted on recreational drones?
Pretty good, I suspect. I would have thought the cost of a suitable system for aiming and stabilising such a beam from a little flying machine flitting around in the breeze would be a bit high for non-military budgets.
Linux makes a shitty desktop operating system.
That depends on what you're doing with it. If you're just playing games, you might be better off with an xbox or whatever, but I've been using Linux perfectly happily on the desktop since the mid-'90s.
De Icaza did some good work at the beginning with the GNOME project, but then spoilt it all by presiding over its being dumbed down into an ugly Mac clone, to the point where it ultimately became totally unusable. For all his bleating about a "developer-focused culture" in the Linux world, he has been right at the middle of it.
My sister-in-law had a bunny-rabbit that used to rape her 8-kg tom-cat.
Who the f*ck is criticizing the Steve Jobs after he's dead???
Well, there was no shortage of good reasons not to like him. If I were Chris-Ann Brennan, for instance, I would probably have considered his behaviour to be unforgivable.
It shouldn't seem odd if you consider how little real innovation Apple has done over the last few years. The iPod was a stroke of genius in its time, and I guess the iRectangle(TM) was an obvious form of technology waiting to be invented. But since the first iPhone was released, Apple has done little more than tinker at the edges by changing that product's dimensions.
You're absolutely right. There's no way his cancers would have progressed if he had stood right next to a nuclear bomb test.
...but what you want to do with it does.
I'm not normally one to leap to Jobs' defence, but IMO he was right about the preferable size. However, I'm prepared to accept that since my acuity of vision is quite a lot less than 20/20 (I hope this is the only characteristic I share with that man - though I wouldn't object to having as much money), this might affect my perception. My Android phone is adequate for its purposes (actually, I'm very happy with it), but I struggle to use it if I don't have my glasses handy. But if I want a device that's small enough to carry in my pocket, I want it to be small enough to carry in my pocket *comfortably*, and a 7"-plus device doesn't qualify.
Windows was something to laugh and point at. How times have changed.
Admittedly taking these two sentences out of context, this might show how some things just haven't changed. ;-)
Also, anyone who doesn't know what it is probably wouldn't care much about it if they did. I had a look at it to see what all the hype was about a few weeks ago, and it struck me as a solution looking for a problem. A simple text editor suits my purposes quite adequately. Though obviously, there are many who don't agree - which is fine, since it's all about freedom of choice.
then how are you expected to sensibly respond, beyond calling them liars?
You could inform them that splitting an infinitive is no longer considered a crime.
It probably won't, but there's nothing to say you have to use your ISP's DNS. You could even run your own if you felt like it. And if you routed your traffic through a VPN, packet inspection will probably just be a waste of resources.
Hey, look at that! The old Burson Marsteller astroturf team is back in action. BrokenHalo, exomondo, recoiledsnake all here.
Err, who? Maybe you need to go find something else to do. I have been a sysprog on a wide variety of "Big Iron" mainframes since the 1970s, and worked primarily with Linux boxes since 1995, so I really don't think I qualify as a Microsoft astroturfer. I just have some reservations about Ubuntu, that's all.