Really, the answer as to why DRM (and such things) are doomed to failure lie in the hacker to security programmer ratio
Not really. The answer to why DRM is doomed to failure is because of a fundamental law of nature. In the words of Bruce Schneier "Making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet."
There's plenty of hackers trying to break well proven encryption as well, but yet for the most part they remain secure. This really isn't just a numbers game. CSS was broken by one guy, not 10,000. Sure, there's people making free software that uses the method DVD-Jon developed, but that's beside the point. And it's not like you really need to be an Einstein to break this stuff. If there wasn't a DVD-Jon, there'd have been a DVD-Fred (or whoever).
I didn't mean to imply that causing harm to an innocent third party is illegal, but it is clearly wrong, at least IMO.
I guess my point is that harm is pretty relative. I'd agree that adultery is wrong, but making a blanket statement about harm to "innocent" people goes too far. What's harm, and what's innocent? If I call George Bush the worst president in history, and it hurts his feelings, have I harmed him?
I believe a person's right to privacy ends when they're breaking the law -- adultery is still illegal last I checked
Maybe in some states, but last I checked it's not illegal in most states. at least insofar as it's a violation of a marriage contract --
I don't know much about marriage law. But I've never heard of anyone being charged with a crime, at least in the last 30 odd years for committing adultery. I was under the impression most states had "no fault divorce laws" on the books many years ago. or when their actions are causing harm to an innocent third party.
Wow, if "causing harm to an innocent third party" (assuming non-physical) is illegal, then can I put Rush Limbaugh in jail because he pisses me off?
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang
Why must we use physics to support atheistic antagonization of religious people?
I think the real question here is, why does religion have to try to explain unexplained phenomenon? Historically it's done a VERY poor job of that. Every time religion tries to explain away something, along comes someone like Galileo or Darwin with an explanation that doesn't require a god.
Religion should get out of the explanations business, and I'd argue even the "don't eat that" business and focus on the "don't do this/that" business. Not that we're all happy with the particulars of the "don't do this/that", but at least no one can prove you wrong.
There's always gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Pulling out a god to fill the gaps is a losing game.
that's why the US must deploy interceptors in Europe, instead of Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea. Same goes about Iran: the US has huge military presence in Turkey, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates, why not use those
I don't know a lot about anti ballistic missile technology, but I do know there's two different times you can intercept them. The "boost" phase when they're launched, and the re-entry phase when they re-enter the atmosphere. The cruise phase when they're in space is virtually impossible to intercept them since they're practically invisible.
One can imagine that the technology intercepts missiles in the re-entry phase, so having ABM technology near where the boost phase happens wouldn't be useful to intercept in the re-entry phase.
It's not about money; it's about a pathological principle: "Nobody cheats me, period".
I think you're right. But I also think eventually that money going to force these people to give up the idea they can stop people from "cheating" them. Either that, or they'll be replaced with people who will.
When CSS was first cracked it was the beginning of the end. With the latest cracks of AACS, we're nearing the end of the DRM battle. The content producers are pretty dumb, but if you beat them enough times eventually they'll learn.
My prediction is that this fight will wind up as a small footnote in the history of digital media. "In the late 90s through the 2000s content producers tried, and failed to protect digital content from being copied. Eventually they realized that providing easy paid access to content and extras was a far more effective means of ensuring people paid for content rather than freely exchanging it."
People are suggesting that computers have become unnecessarily bloated, and you bring up Java as a counterpoint? Are you going for +5 Funny, or what?
Are you really saying you'd like to go back to the days where software development was done using assembly, was extremely difficult to maintain and write? I know I don't.
"bloat" is just whatever you personally see no value in. The article seems to think anything but Word Processing and Spreadsheets are "bloat". Programmers don't waste resources just for fun. Having an interpreted language that's cross-platform takes resources, but they aren't without benefits. Interpreted languages like Java are 100 times easier and more productive to code in. The days of having to conserve every extra byte are over, and good riddance (tell that to the guys that had to save some extra bytes by using 2 digit years, e.g. Y2K). The thing you fail to see is the most precious resource is a programmers time, not memory or processor. If you don't like "bloat", you're free to go back to using that computer from 1986. The software still works on the old OS and computer. For some reason most people have abandoned those computers. I'd say the reason is because they want to do things they couldn't do in 1986, like say use the Internet, view high resolution graphics, etc, etc. Those things are hard to do on a megabyte or two of memory. I'm sure some clever person could do it, but the results wouldn't be very usable.
Personally, I don't use a word processor at all. It's basically useless to me. So to me "Microsoft Word" is just "bloat". When are these damn people going to stop installing these useless "word processor" thingies on my computer?
That sounds like my Mac IIci. Of course, it was also running Unix and a high performance X server at the same time (MachTen).
Sure, your IIci could probbably do something like what a modern machine can do, but add in stuff like automatic compiling of java code in the background, running a JVM and webserver, and the IIci would be struggling. Ask it to uncompress and play some highly compressed video all while doing the above, and it's lights out.
I guess I don't really understand what's really being show here. That a word processor and a spreadsheet haven't really gotten any "faster" since 1986? Duh. If all you want to do with your computer is word processing and some simple spreadsheet stuff, I'd agree that nothing has really gotten better.
But, of course I tell you this on a computer currently with 15-20 different windows open running a development environment, instant-messaging, multiple ssh sessions, browsers with multiple tabs, all connected to a global and local network.
Maybe you don't want to do any of these things, and that's fine. But it's pretty idiotic to compare two computers 21 years apart and not include all the stuff you couldn't do with it in 1986.
Re:Does it use a "hacked" kernel?
on
Fedora 7 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel
Linus and the other kernel devs have different, but partially overlapping goals. Distributions value stable, well tested kernels with new features as a secondary goal. Kernel devs want new features, increased performance, etc, with stability perhaps a bit less of a priority.
So it's not that Redhat/SuSe/Ubuntu "know better", it's that the distributions work on kernel stability a lot more than the kernel devs. This is NOT anything new. The days of thinking you should go get "the latest kernel from Linus" and just expect everything to work properly went away years ago. Did I used to go re-compile my kernel from the vanilla source? Sure. Do I do it anymore? Hell no, and without a good reason to I never will. If you want that sort of thing, pick a distribution that values the vanilla kernel. Otherwise stop griping.
this is just snake oil for feeble-minded people who don't realize that firewalls are for blocking access *between* networks not for closing ports that shouldn't be open in the first place on individual machines.
I guess I'm "feeble-minded" because I believe security should at best be layered, and also realize that protecting the inside of a network is important as well. Maybe you never thought that firewalls can restrict port access to only certain IP addresses that simply closing a port wouldn't allow?
There's nothing wrong with the concept of software firewalls. I use the built in ones on linux all the time. The problem with software firewalls is more the implementation. I'd never install McAffee or some other crappy 3rd party firewall on one of my Windows machines. It causes more problems than it solves.
Imagine the sheer number of domains they have registered, if only a few get shut down here and there it's probably a negligible percentage.
Why are you so sure the problems are negligible? The story is quite revealing that GoDaddy has little to no respect for its customers when they take down an entire domain with almost non-existent effort to contact the owner (one attempt, then take down the site seconds later). Then they make it extremely difficult to get in contact with anyone to fix the situation.
To me that kind of behavior is extremely revealing. Personally I'd bet that this kind of treatment from GoDaddy is a lot more common than you'd think, and it just never gets reported until a higher profile site gets taken down.
Especially the extremely popular titles he has listed on his website. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code? Sheesh, those books are so common they aren't worth the paper they're printed on. It's no loss if he burns them.
The thing is that the vast majority of books become useless once you've read them. Especially mass market fiction like Da Vinci and Potter. No one wants them because everyone that wanted to read them has, so there's an enormous surplus. With sights like Amazon.com selling books like these essentially for shipping charges, why would buy them at a brick-and-mortar? It's cheaper and easier to just pull up Amazon, click 3-4 times and wait a week. Most of the time you're buying from a used bookstore just like this guy with a surplus of that book and just wants to get rid of it and make a dollar on the shipping.
If SVN is so great... why is the majority not using it? It's not like it is entirely new.
Momentum for the most part. CVS is good enough 95% of the time, so it takes some reason to change over. I've recently started using svn after using cvs for years. I'm still not as familiar with svn as I am with CVS.
Personally I don't really like the different branching/tagging behavior in subversion, but I also think I just don't know it as well. Someday I'll have to find some decent documentation on how to use it properly.
* "Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol" - "We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24."
* "The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update" - "For every BTU dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34% energy gain.
You talk as if an positive energy gain was the end-all-be-all. 24-34%? That's horrible. Maybe we should be focusing on crops that are a lot more energy efficient, rather than building up all this infra-structure for a crop that _maybe_ produces 24%-34% more energy than it costs.
Rather than go through the trouble of defining entrapment, the point hit home easier by pointing out that, if it were true, the movie Donnie Brasco would have been 10 minutes long.
It's interesting that the same people who think that the phrase "are you a cop" is a get-out-of-jail-free card are the same people who think that everything in movies are true.
My conclusion is there's just way to much blind trust in the world.
I'm really tired that every time there's some kind of "person Y said thing X" on radio/TV people always talk about what was said in vague terms rather than actual quotes. If you're going to have some judgement about if it was right/wrong to suspend them, it's important to know what was actually said by who, not talking around what they said. Even the wikipedia article about the "incident" only goes so far as to refer to it as ""love to f--- that b----."
So what did they actually say? Here's the transscript I've been able to dig up. Charlie is some character called "homeless charlie".
Charlie: I tell you what, what's that George Bush bitch? Rice? Condoleeza Rice.
Anthony: Condoleeza Rice.
Charlie: I'd love to fuck that bitch dead, man. She needs a fucking man. I'll fuck that bitch --
Anthony: I just imagine the horror in Condoleeza Rice's face...
Opie: [laughter]... when she realizes what's going on...
Anthony:... as you were just like holding her down and fucking her.
Charlie: Punch her all in the fucking face. Shut up, bitch.
Anthony: That's exactly what I meant.
Charlie: You know, fuck, and George Bush wife? I'll fuck that bitch to death. She needs a man.
Anthony: You diggin' her?
Charlie: I love that.
Anthony: Hey woman, hey woman. I show you a real man. Why don't you come by my box I'll show you a real man.
Opie: Hey, what about the queen? Current events: The queen just finally went back to her dumb castle or whatever. Oh boy, we lost his mike. We lost Charlie's mike. We lost Charlie's mike.
Anthony: Oh no.
Opie: I can paraphrase.
Anthony:... and he was just saying something nice about the royal family.
Charlie: Fuck the queen. She lost -- you're lost, bitch. Why you coming over here for, you horse-faced lookin bitch?
Anthony: [whinny] You lost!
Charlie: Fuck that bitch.
I've never listened to Opie and Anthony, nor do I subscribe to sat radio, but I have to say it's a lot less offensive than I imagined from the little "raping Condi Rice, Laura Bush, and the Queen" summary I've read. It's really not any worse talk than you'd hear a few guys in a bar saying.
I guess I have to agree with the comment that the suspension was really more about trying to appease any government contacts that Sirius/XM has to grease the wheels on the (IMO really bad for the public) merger between the two.
Why? As far as Microsoft is concerned this is either a non-event (they weren't using microsoft before, they aren't now), or a slight move towards using Microsoft (going from a Mainframe to PCs moves them closer to the potential to use Microsoft software).
I would have thought the opposite: The big monoliths would have out-sourced unmotivated help desks that might do this. Smaller companies, I thought, where actually run by real people with a connection to their customers... Am I wrong?
Maybe. The other running theory is large companies have enough people to actually have procedures in place to catch these kind of things.
But it's been my observation that you're correct as well. Large companies lose any connection to customers, and tend to treat them as commodities to be tossed around.
Given the choice, I tend to chose the smaller companies that don't tend to screw me over all the time. I'd also tend to limit my exposure to these kind of hacks simply by having my hosting company manage my domain registration.
Your error is in thinking the hybrid aspect of the car doesn't matter once you get up to highway speeds. It's the electric motor +battery that was able to actually GET you up to the highway speed in a reasonable amount of time. Without the electric motor+battery that tiny little engine would have had poor acceleration, and you'd have thought "man.. this car is a freakin dog". Even if you didn't mind that, other people do, and wouldn't buy the car because of it, and thus the car would never have been created.
In other words, ignoring the electric motor+battery at highway speeds completely ignores that there's more to the car industry than pure mileage.
Hybrids are only more efficient for certain forms of driving. For cruising at motorway speeds the hybrid is just extra weight lowering efficiency.
While you're technically right about this, you've really missed one of the reasons the hybrid GETS such great mileage on the highway.
Hybrids are able to have very small engines which produce great mileage because they have an extra "boost" power when accelerating. People really dislike the slow acceleration that having a tiny engine alone produces. In effect the extra boost power allows the engine to be smaller and more efficient, and the car still has the ability to accelerate quickly. You can't really separate the electric part of the hybrid from the small engine, because one enabled the other. 100% of cars represents a lot of recycling and a lot of cost (and pollution) in expired and leaking batteries.
Actually hybrid batteries have a lot of nickel in them, which in its pure form goes for $24 a pound. In other words you should be getting money FROM a recycler when you give them your old hybrid battery.
The more we post articles about how Microsoft is claiming patent violations, the better it is for Microsoft.
Right, because slashdot is the only media outlet that posts tech news, and even if any other media outlets WERE to post such a story, they'll surely do a good story of explaining why it's a lot of hot air.
Wake up. This is a large story that was posted in a major magazine read by wannabe rich-guys. Slashdot is easily one of the best places to get a more objective picture of what Balmer is REALLY up to. The wannabe rich-guys aren't going to read slashdot, but they might talk to someone who does, or talk to someone who talks to someone. Here is where you get a straight story on what it all means, or at least a lot straighter story than you'll ever read in frickin Fortune magazine.
So far I've installed Ubuntu on 6 different machines, soon to be 7 for 3 different people (which includes myself). That includes 4 different laptops. I've only had two things not work (sound and a modem on a circa 1998 laptop). Everything else works as advertised. I even got dual monitor support to work, albeit after some major fighting, Googling, and installing proprietary NVidia drivers.
It's easily the best desktop experience I've had on Linux. The wi-fi cards I've tried "just work". That includes two different Atheros based cards, a prism based card, and some built Intel Pro-Wireless chipsets. The only thing that hasn't worked so far is my Broadcom based card, but that's not terribly surprising.
I'd say hands down that Ubuntu is actually a better experience than Windows. I didn't have to screw around downloading drivers for Windows, go and find the software I really needed to install (Office, Thunderbird, etc).
The OP's reason for changing that is that html and httpd are quite limiting in the interfaces you can create. Browsers, http, html were all created with the purpose of viewing documents. The fact that they've been robust enough to replace some applications is pretty amazing, but simply having a large installed base of browsers isn't really enough reason to mandate that all networked applications should use a brower.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, the answer as to why DRM (and such things) are doomed to failure lie in the hacker to security programmer ratio
Not really. The answer to why DRM is doomed to failure is because of a fundamental law of nature. In the words of Bruce Schneier "Making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet."
There's plenty of hackers trying to break well proven encryption as well, but yet for the most part they remain secure. This really isn't just a numbers game. CSS was broken by one guy, not 10,000. Sure, there's people making free software that uses the method DVD-Jon developed, but that's beside the point. And it's not like you really need to be an Einstein to break this stuff. If there wasn't a DVD-Jon, there'd have been a DVD-Fred (or whoever).
I didn't mean to imply that causing harm to an innocent third party is illegal, but it is clearly wrong, at least IMO.
I guess my point is that harm is pretty relative. I'd agree that adultery is wrong, but making a blanket statement about harm to "innocent" people goes too far. What's harm, and what's innocent? If I call George Bush the worst president in history, and it hurts his feelings, have I harmed him?
I believe a person's right to privacy ends when they're breaking the law -- adultery is still illegal last I checked
Maybe in some states, but last I checked it's not illegal in most states.
at least insofar as it's a violation of a marriage contract --
I don't know much about marriage law. But I've never heard of anyone being charged with a crime, at least in the last 30 odd years for committing adultery. I was under the impression most states had "no fault divorce laws" on the books many years ago.
or when their actions are causing harm to an innocent third party.
Wow, if "causing harm to an innocent third party" (assuming non-physical) is illegal, then can I put Rush Limbaugh in jail because he pisses me off?
Why must we use physics to support atheistic antagonization of religious people?
I think the real question here is, why does religion have to try to explain unexplained phenomenon? Historically it's done a VERY poor job of that. Every time religion tries to explain away something, along comes someone like Galileo or Darwin with an explanation that doesn't require a god.
Religion should get out of the explanations business, and I'd argue even the "don't eat that" business and focus on the "don't do this/that" business. Not that we're all happy with the particulars of the "don't do this/that", but at least no one can prove you wrong.
There's always gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Pulling out a god to fill the gaps is a losing game.
that's why the US must deploy interceptors in Europe, instead of Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea. Same goes about Iran: the US has huge military presence in Turkey, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates, why not use those
I don't know a lot about anti ballistic missile technology, but I do know there's two different times you can intercept them. The "boost" phase when they're launched, and the re-entry phase when they re-enter the atmosphere. The cruise phase when they're in space is virtually impossible to intercept them since they're practically invisible.
One can imagine that the technology intercepts missiles in the re-entry phase, so having ABM technology near where the boost phase happens wouldn't be useful to intercept in the re-entry phase.
It's not about money; it's about a pathological principle: "Nobody cheats me, period".
I think you're right. But I also think eventually that money going to force these people to give up the idea they can stop people from "cheating" them. Either that, or they'll be replaced with people who will.
When CSS was first cracked it was the beginning of the end. With the latest cracks of AACS, we're nearing the end of the DRM battle. The content producers are pretty dumb, but if you beat them enough times eventually they'll learn.
My prediction is that this fight will wind up as a small footnote in the history of digital media. "In the late 90s through the 2000s content producers tried, and failed to protect digital content from being copied. Eventually they realized that providing easy paid access to content and extras was a far more effective means of ensuring people paid for content rather than freely exchanging it."
People are suggesting that computers have become unnecessarily bloated, and you bring up Java as a counterpoint? Are you going for +5 Funny, or what?
Are you really saying you'd like to go back to the days where software development was done using assembly, was extremely difficult to maintain and write? I know I don't.
"bloat" is just whatever you personally see no value in. The article seems to think anything but Word Processing and Spreadsheets are "bloat". Programmers don't waste resources just for fun. Having an interpreted language that's cross-platform takes resources, but they aren't without benefits. Interpreted languages like Java are 100 times easier and more productive to code in. The days of having to conserve every extra byte are over, and good riddance (tell that to the guys that had to save some extra bytes by using 2 digit years, e.g. Y2K). The thing you fail to see is the most precious resource is a programmers time, not memory or processor. If you don't like "bloat", you're free to go back to using that computer from 1986. The software still works on the old OS and computer. For some reason most people have abandoned those computers. I'd say the reason is because they want to do things they couldn't do in 1986, like say use the Internet, view high resolution graphics, etc, etc. Those things are hard to do on a megabyte or two of memory. I'm sure some clever person could do it, but the results wouldn't be very usable.
Personally, I don't use a word processor at all. It's basically useless to me. So to me "Microsoft Word" is just "bloat". When are these damn people going to stop installing these useless "word processor" thingies on my computer?
That sounds like my Mac IIci. Of course, it was also running Unix and a high performance X server at the same time (MachTen).
Sure, your IIci could probbably do something like what a modern machine can do, but add in stuff like automatic compiling of java code in the background, running a JVM and webserver, and the IIci would be struggling. Ask it to uncompress and play some highly compressed video all while doing the above, and it's lights out.
I guess I don't really understand what's really being show here. That a word processor and a spreadsheet haven't really gotten any "faster" since 1986? Duh. If all you want to do with your computer is word processing and some simple spreadsheet stuff, I'd agree that nothing has really gotten better.
But, of course I tell you this on a computer currently with 15-20 different windows open running a development environment, instant-messaging, multiple ssh sessions, browsers with multiple tabs, all connected to a global and local network.
Maybe you don't want to do any of these things, and that's fine. But it's pretty idiotic to compare two computers 21 years apart and not include all the stuff you couldn't do with it in 1986.
Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel
Linus and the other kernel devs have different, but partially overlapping goals. Distributions value stable, well tested kernels with new features as a secondary goal. Kernel devs want new features, increased performance, etc, with stability perhaps a bit less of a priority.
So it's not that Redhat/SuSe/Ubuntu "know better", it's that the distributions work on kernel stability a lot more than the kernel devs. This is NOT anything new. The days of thinking you should go get "the latest kernel from Linus" and just expect everything to work properly went away years ago. Did I used to go re-compile my kernel from the vanilla source? Sure. Do I do it anymore? Hell no, and without a good reason to I never will. If you want that sort of thing, pick a distribution that values the vanilla kernel. Otherwise stop griping.
this is just snake oil for feeble-minded people who don't realize that firewalls are for blocking access *between* networks not for closing ports that shouldn't be open in the first place on individual machines.
I guess I'm "feeble-minded" because I believe security should at best be layered, and also realize that protecting the inside of a network is important as well. Maybe you never thought that firewalls can restrict port access to only certain IP addresses that simply closing a port wouldn't allow?
There's nothing wrong with the concept of software firewalls. I use the built in ones on linux all the time. The problem with software firewalls is more the implementation. I'd never install McAffee or some other crappy 3rd party firewall on one of my Windows machines. It causes more problems than it solves.
Imagine the sheer number of domains they have registered, if only a few get shut down here and there it's probably a negligible percentage.
Why are you so sure the problems are negligible? The story is quite revealing that GoDaddy has little to no respect for its customers when they take down an entire domain with almost non-existent effort to contact the owner (one attempt, then take down the site seconds later). Then they make it extremely difficult to get in contact with anyone to fix the situation.
To me that kind of behavior is extremely revealing. Personally I'd bet that this kind of treatment from GoDaddy is a lot more common than you'd think, and it just never gets reported until a higher profile site gets taken down.
Especially the extremely popular titles he has listed on his website. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code? Sheesh, those books are so common they aren't worth the paper they're printed on. It's no loss if he burns them.
The thing is that the vast majority of books become useless once you've read them. Especially mass market fiction like Da Vinci and Potter. No one wants them because everyone that wanted to read them has, so there's an enormous surplus. With sights like Amazon.com selling books like these essentially for shipping charges, why would buy them at a brick-and-mortar? It's cheaper and easier to just pull up Amazon, click 3-4 times and wait a week. Most of the time you're buying from a used bookstore just like this guy with a surplus of that book and just wants to get rid of it and make a dollar on the shipping.
If SVN is so great... why is the majority not using it? It's not like it is entirely new.
Momentum for the most part. CVS is good enough 95% of the time, so it takes some reason to change over. I've recently started using svn after using cvs for years. I'm still not as familiar with svn as I am with CVS.
Personally I don't really like the different branching/tagging behavior in subversion, but I also think I just don't know it as well. Someday I'll have to find some decent documentation on how to use it properly.
* "Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol" - "We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24."
* "The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update" - "For every BTU dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34% energy gain.
You talk as if an positive energy gain was the end-all-be-all. 24-34%? That's horrible. Maybe we should be focusing on crops that are a lot more energy efficient, rather than building up all this infra-structure for a crop that _maybe_ produces 24%-34% more energy than it costs.
Rather than go through the trouble of defining entrapment, the point hit home easier by pointing out that, if it were true, the movie Donnie Brasco would have been 10 minutes long.
It's interesting that the same people who think that the phrase "are you a cop" is a get-out-of-jail-free card are the same people who think that everything in movies are true.
My conclusion is there's just way to much blind trust in the world.
So what did they actually say? Here's the transscript I've been able to dig up. Charlie is some character called "homeless charlie".
I've never listened to Opie and Anthony, nor do I subscribe to sat radio, but I have to say it's a lot less offensive than I imagined from the little "raping Condi Rice, Laura Bush, and the Queen" summary I've read. It's really not any worse talk than you'd hear a few guys in a bar saying.
I guess I have to agree with the comment that the suspension was really more about trying to appease any government contacts that Sirius/XM has to grease the wheels on the (IMO really bad for the public) merger between the two.
This Will Not Bode Well For Microsoft
Why? As far as Microsoft is concerned this is either a non-event (they weren't using microsoft before, they aren't now), or a slight move towards using Microsoft (going from a Mainframe to PCs moves them closer to the potential to use Microsoft software).
I would have thought the opposite: The big monoliths would have out-sourced unmotivated help desks that might do this. Smaller companies, I thought, where actually run by real people with a connection to their customers... Am I wrong?
Maybe. The other running theory is large companies have enough people to actually have procedures in place to catch these kind of things.
But it's been my observation that you're correct as well. Large companies lose any connection to customers, and tend to treat them as commodities to be tossed around.
Given the choice, I tend to chose the smaller companies that don't tend to screw me over all the time. I'd also tend to limit my exposure to these kind of hacks simply by having my hosting company manage my domain registration.
Your error is in thinking the hybrid aspect of the car doesn't matter once you get up to highway speeds. It's the electric motor +battery that was able to actually GET you up to the highway speed in a reasonable amount of time. Without the electric motor+battery that tiny little engine would have had poor acceleration, and you'd have thought "man.. this car is a freakin dog". Even if you didn't mind that, other people do, and wouldn't buy the car because of it, and thus the car would never have been created.
In other words, ignoring the electric motor+battery at highway speeds completely ignores that there's more to the car industry than pure mileage.
Hybrids are only more efficient for certain forms of driving. For cruising at motorway speeds the hybrid is just extra weight lowering efficiency.
While you're technically right about this, you've really missed one of the reasons the hybrid GETS such great mileage on the highway.
Hybrids are able to have very small engines which produce great mileage because they have an extra "boost" power when accelerating. People really dislike the slow acceleration that having a tiny engine alone produces. In effect the extra boost power allows the engine to be smaller and more efficient, and the car still has the ability to accelerate quickly. You can't really separate the electric part of the hybrid from the small engine, because one enabled the other.
100% of cars represents a lot of recycling and a lot of cost (and pollution) in expired and leaking batteries.
Actually hybrid batteries have a lot of nickel in them, which in its pure form goes for $24 a pound. In other words you should be getting money FROM a recycler when you give them your old hybrid battery.
The more we post articles about how Microsoft is claiming patent violations, the better it is for Microsoft.
Right, because slashdot is the only media outlet that posts tech news, and even if any other media outlets WERE to post such a story, they'll surely do a good story of explaining why it's a lot of hot air.
Wake up. This is a large story that was posted in a major magazine read by wannabe rich-guys. Slashdot is easily one of the best places to get a more objective picture of what Balmer is REALLY up to. The wannabe rich-guys aren't going to read slashdot, but they might talk to someone who does, or talk to someone who talks to someone. Here is where you get a straight story on what it all means, or at least a lot straighter story than you'll ever read in frickin Fortune magazine.
So far I've installed Ubuntu on 6 different machines, soon to be 7 for 3 different people (which includes myself). That includes 4 different laptops. I've only had two things not work (sound and a modem on a circa 1998 laptop). Everything else works as advertised. I even got dual monitor support to work, albeit after some major fighting, Googling, and installing proprietary NVidia drivers.
It's easily the best desktop experience I've had on Linux. The wi-fi cards I've tried "just work". That includes two different Atheros based cards, a prism based card, and some built Intel Pro-Wireless chipsets. The only thing that hasn't worked so far is my Broadcom based card, but that's not terribly surprising.
I'd say hands down that Ubuntu is actually a better experience than Windows. I didn't have to screw around downloading drivers for Windows, go and find the software I really needed to install (Office, Thunderbird, etc).
You'd need a hell of a good reason to change that
The OP's reason for changing that is that html and httpd are quite limiting in the interfaces you can create. Browsers, http, html were all created with the purpose of viewing documents. The fact that they've been robust enough to replace some applications is pretty amazing, but simply having a large installed base of browsers isn't really enough reason to mandate that all networked applications should use a brower.