I don't see that one working. In that case, Apple would blame Microsoft for creating bad software for the Mac, and urge customers to switch to Apple's own iWork-suite. It would probably would be far worse for Microsoft than for Apple...
I'd recommend the installation of the software because unlike other direct marketing approaches, this one is very much more precise.
So, what? It is spyware. It obviously doesn't respect our right to privacy and we still have to pay for it. Even having it on the disc is questionable, because as a normal user won't know if you are required to have it or not. Most people just click "I Agree" on any software installed from a disc because they trust the software vendors, when they obviously shouldn't. I would imagine the legitimacy of this is questionable.
If the hardware turns out to be extremely buggy, then it might be Intel's advantage not to publish any documentation. Their drivers and firmware code might be full of software based workarounds for hardware flaws that the PR-department would not want the public to see. If this was the case, publishing these to the open source community would make a hole in Intel's credibility as a hardware manufacturer, and possible create monetary losses in selling new products.
Note that I'm not saying that this is the case, but it might be.
When I went to the site it said "Loading". Waited a while, and nothing happened. I clicked on the "fullscreen" button and a up came video of some gay-looking guy in a gay-looking MSN butterfly costume. I almost puked when I saw that, and took a quick close window shorcut, but no! It popped up a JavaScript dialog asking if I'm sure. Hell, yes I am! The only thing missing is Clippy or that braindead dog that Microsoft ships XP with. Ugh. I'm going to blacklist this site. It was truly tasteless...
Steve said iTV would use wireless streaming or Ethernet and it would have an USB port and a built-in power supply, which kind of points to AirPort Express (and AirPort Extreme), which has wireless (obviously), Ethernet, USB and AirTunes (analog+optical audio). Sounds to me something you could build iTV on.
Don't know what kind of software it runs, though. Probably something custom made with a couple of shared libraries with OS X.
Well, uh. Blocking JavaScript will only block this particular implementation of tracking, but it won't fix the problem. And please stop sending this Firefox propaganda here. It is not informative, as pretty much everyone here are already aware of the extension mentioned. Why are these comments are modded up?
I say this as a bike rider/pedestrian. The roads are designed for car drivers, who of many have no respect of bike riders/pedestrians like me and you. I see weekly drivers at crossings and crosswalks that accelerate when they see someone is trying to cross the road. This is just shows the immaturity of many drivers. It looks especially stupid when it is winter time here and the temperature is something like -20 C (-68 F) and car drivers sitting comfortably in their warm cars are trying to ram you freezing outside. Really. Accelerating in this situations is just disgusting. Every year some kids that start school for the first time die because of some jerk doesn't have the patience to wait for the next green lights. I am a strong supporter of commuting, but commuting has here been made more expensive than using private cars. Roads are designed so that cars get the most straight road, when pedestrians and bikers have to shuttle between short pieces of road. And the traffic lights... There was some discussion in the main newspaper, that it would actually be more safe for bike riders and pedestrians to cross the road when the lights are red rather than green. I do always wait for the green light, and I must admit that there is a bit of sweet revenge when you see the angry faces of car drivers, when you stop the traffic on the road. The wait is however a small price for them to pay, after they've taken somebody's life.
Because almost all of my crashes are caused by driver or hardware problems, its helpful knowing just what that problem is so I can fix the driver or replace the hardware
Fix the driver? Replace the hardware? Not on a Mac. And besides, OS X does output diagnostics for people like you. It just doesn't show it to the enduser on screen, which is fine. This was the first website I found on kernel panic debugging on OS X if you are interested.
I think you hit the nail on this one. I wish I'd have mod points right know. There is way too much effort going on trying to get people to use obscure passwords. The simple fact is that limiting the number of possible login tries would basically render any bruteforce attacks unusable, which is why we have to have complex passwords in the first place. If you see more than ten attempts, you can be pretty sure it is a bruteforce attack. It could be the user him/herself trying to remember the password or it could be a malicious user. Anyway, it is a bruteforce attack, and should be denied. This would be so much easier, than to get everyone to use "good" passwords. I still don't get why people think it is a-okay to allow hundreds or thousands of login attempts per minute... It's not like the valid user would even type that fast.
If you do a reverse lookup on www.zcodec.com (85.255.117.106), you'll get "85.255.117.106-xbox.dedi.inhoster.com". That doesn't sound right for a legit download. Not that you'd normally do such lookups...
As somebody already said, OS X users don't restart or shutdown. But when we do, we can just mute sound before shutting down and restarting, and there won't be any startup sound. There are also some utilities to disable the startup chime if you don't want to mute before restarting.
The startup sound is there for debug purposes, I suppose, because it indicates the moment the computer will start booting its operating system. For instance if you want to boot a CD without using the OS, you need to hold on 'C' until you hear the chime. Same goes with Firewire target-disk mode, OpenFirmware etc. Just to be clear, the startup sound is built into the firmware, not OS X.
Write down the serial number of the iPod somewhere safe. If it then gets stolen in-flight, report the theft. In mid-air, the thief is not going anywhere. With the serial number, you can prove that the device is yours.
...and no. You would not need to check every passenger, just the ones sitting next to you, and the ones who passed your seat in the hallway when you were absent.
Not to mention that you have to upload it, too, which is usually a order of magnitude slower.
True. Uploading will be very slow and you would have to consider the fact that depending on the system you might need to upload the same data more than once. However, uploading backups would not be as a big priority to users as restoring them. It could happen all the time slowly in the background. Once all the data, say 80 GB, is uploaded you would only need to update the changes. Say you changed an average of 1 GB of your data in a week, it would be enough to have 512 kbps upstream to update the changes to one destination without interrupting your websurfing. Thus it would be possible, but unless your files are just plaintext, the backups would most likely lag from the local copy and updating all the time might interfere with your work (or entertainment).
those redundancy of course is incredibly wasteful. Just imagine if everybody used 10Gbyte for backups, he would need to provide 100Gbyte for others to keep up the ratios...
True. This would be a limiting factor in distributing large backups to other clients. The network would almost need to run on professional servers with dedicated resources, if you really wanted it to be redundant. Why they should choose this instead of the usual RAID is beyond me.
The problem with this idea is bandwidth and speed. You think your broadband is fast, but if you have to download the 27 gigabytes of photos, music and stuff, it won't be exactly fast on a 8 Mbps DSL, not to talk about 1 Mbps or less. You might wait a couple of hours, but you won't wait a couple of days.
Okay. So you tell me that amount of available bandwidth will increase? But so will the amount of data that needs to be backed up. And it will grow faster than the bandwidth. Think of homemade movies. You can already fill up your average drive in no-time. What do you then do, when you get a HD camera?
Although the idea isn't a new one, I think it is still neat. It might work for some stuff, but I don't see this becoming mainstream with technologies like Time Machine coming to the end-users.
I was under the impression that since Windows XP SP2, Microsoft decided to disable raw sockets. Gibson's concerns were valid. There is no reason why there should be raw socket functionality on any consumer-level product. Raw sockets doesn't maybe make the computer itself more vulnerable, but it definitely can make it a bigger threat to other machines and networks, once compromised. The casual user doesn't use it and therefore won't even notice it's gone, not to speak of knowing about its existance in the first place. Just because a couple of guys want to play around with their network on their Windows XP Home Editions, you shouldn't enable raw sockets on the rest of the 99,9% of the computers. Period.
When Microsoft [...], they'll be able to take on the iPod.
No, they won't. Microsoft is not hip. It will not be hip, unlike Apple. iPod is a lifestyle-device, and you simply cannot sell it with a brand like Microsoft. It simply is not cool. Sorry.
I have been a full-time Mac OS X user since 10.2. I have used every release before that. Before Jaguar, NetBSD was my choice for desktop use. The workstations I've used in laboratories are mostly Windows, but there are many Linux based services available to be used via secure shell. What comes to others, about half of laptops you see around are Macs. And of the rest some are running Linux. I don't think anyone is picky of the OS. This is probably what scares Microsoft. I dropped in at their presentation maybe a year ago, and there was no doubt that there were some kind of hostility against Microsoft there. During the same time the "alliance" was formed. Coincidence?
This being said, I should also mention that my studies are more hardware related. I'm a "coder" just on my spare time, and that hardly involves Microsoft Windows.:-)
And what comes to GUIs is that they should not probably be designed by IT people anyway...
My copy of Windows was paid by the school, which decides how the money is being distributed. It found it important for their IT students to have Microsoft's developer tools for Windows. You might argue that it was a bad choice, but the money would have been used by the school anyway. It didn't increaset the budget. Also I think you really overestimate the percentage of this in the taxes. If you actually want to "fool" the system, just move abroad, like Linus Torvalds. But you won't get the things that really costs money, like public health care etc. Just how much do you think this costs when you compare it to anything else? Hell, the Parliament uses more money for their festivities than this, and this is what you would cut from the budget?
While I *agree* that state funded schooling is a requirement of any enlightened society, I would not consider it free.
I believe I have already addressed this on this thread. I would not consider it free in the sense you talk about it either. As in the very post you replied to, I talked about this all being paid by the taxpayers. This is not the point. It is natural that it costs somebody something. The point is that to the students it is free. This means that you can try to apply pretty much wherever you want regardless of your parents financial situation. Some students have money, others don't. You can not expect students themselves to pay costs of the education system, so it's either parents or the working society. I think the latter is a much fairer choice for students in general.
The downside is of course higher taxes, but it is something pretty much everyone accept here, starting with the folks at the right wing to the folks at the left wing.
How did the 'best' schools get created? Did they get created with government money? Or did they start privately and were later made free-for-all?... To put it another way, is state-budgeting limiting the growth of Scandinavian higher education?
The history of many universities and other schools, goes way back before Finnish independence. I don't unfortunately know all the history of their creation, but they are pretty much all public schools today. Private schools are extremely rare, and they are bound very much to the same rules as public schools. For instance private schools aren't allowed to take tuition fees either, in exception for some international schools. So, yes. State-budgeting is the limiting factor, if there was a lack of money in education.
...you see an interesting trend: the best are very good indeed, but the quality of education falls off quite dramatically after that. The reason being that taxes only go so far, and countries tend to finance institutions of higher education keeping national prestige in mind...
A big factor in calculating the amount of government money a school gets is the amount of accepted students per year. Thus popular schools with more students will get more money, but the money per student is pretty constant. Ofcourse this has been abused by the schools so that they accept lots of students that never will have a chance to graduate, meaning more money per graduating student. This loophole is however going to be fixed in the next few years. But basically, the amount of money schools get are all calculated from the same formula. The differences in the quality of education, which still exists, are more due to popularity of some schools than budgeting. As all applicants are ranked, the brightest ones tend all to be accepted in the most popular school. Same thing applies to teachers.
So how does you feel about Linus, who's presumably having to pay no taxes now that he's living in the US?... Apparently a lot of successful Scandinavians do this as well.
I don't think it is a big problem. Everyone are free to move as they want, and the system can handle that. If you got your education here, your family, relatives etc. did most likely pay all kinds of taxes compensating the loss.
The way schools are allowed to choose students is regulated by law and you stick to it. You don't donate money at all to schools, as it certainly will be regarded as corruption. The only way money makes difference is that you can put your kid on expensive refresher courses. So yes, the system does do a pretty good job there. What the system has yet not solved is how to get the brightest students to choose the right field of study, but that is an other discussion.
This is getting a bit offtopic, but you know. For me, it is completely free. I live in Finland and we have no tuition fees here. Just apply to any government registered school and don't pay any cent for it. Plus, we get student financial aid from the government about 250 euros per month (320 dollars), which we don't need to pay back. Also, students get financial aid to pay their rent (200 euros per month = 255 dollars, no need to pay back either), as well very beneficial loans backed by the government. If Finnish citizens go abroad as exchange students, the government will pay all tuition fees abroad also.
Of course, all of this is paid by the taxpayers. And I don't currently pay any tax. But someday I will. And honestly, I have no problem that after a couple of years I will pay someone's else's education, because someone already did the same for me. This system has it's flaws, but I think it still might be one of the best on the planet. You can be completely broke and still get to the best schools, if you are smart enough.
Microsoft has an academic developer program, where they give all kind of software for free. I downloaded Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and some other software as well. You get an ISO image and your own serial code for the software by downloading from this website with an unique login. Other software that I remember being available was the Visual Studio and SQL server. I don't remember the specifics, as I rather use my Mac. Microsoft Office could not be downloaded.
I believe this is just a way for them to try to keep new developers using Windows, rather than switching to Linux or OS X. Some membership fee is paid by the school, but I don't see any of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see that one working. In that case, Apple would blame Microsoft for creating bad software for the Mac, and urge customers to switch to Apple's own iWork-suite. It would probably would be far worse for Microsoft than for Apple...
So, what? It is spyware. It obviously doesn't respect our right to privacy and we still have to pay for it. Even having it on the disc is questionable, because as a normal user won't know if you are required to have it or not. Most people just click "I Agree" on any software installed from a disc because they trust the software vendors, when they obviously shouldn't. I would imagine the legitimacy of this is questionable.
If the hardware turns out to be extremely buggy, then it might be Intel's advantage not to publish any documentation. Their drivers and firmware code might be full of software based workarounds for hardware flaws that the PR-department would not want the public to see. If this was the case, publishing these to the open source community would make a hole in Intel's credibility as a hardware manufacturer, and possible create monetary losses in selling new products.
Note that I'm not saying that this is the case, but it might be.
You'd have to be an insider to get the documentation.
When I went to the site it said "Loading". Waited a while, and nothing happened. I clicked on the "fullscreen" button and a up came video of some gay-looking guy in a gay-looking MSN butterfly costume. I almost puked when I saw that, and took a quick close window shorcut, but no! It popped up a JavaScript dialog asking if I'm sure. Hell, yes I am! The only thing missing is Clippy or that braindead dog that Microsoft ships XP with. Ugh. I'm going to blacklist this site. It was truly tasteless...
Steve said iTV would use wireless streaming or Ethernet and it would have an USB port and a built-in power supply, which kind of points to AirPort Express (and AirPort Extreme), which has wireless (obviously), Ethernet, USB and AirTunes (analog+optical audio). Sounds to me something you could build iTV on.
Don't know what kind of software it runs, though. Probably something custom made with a couple of shared libraries with OS X.
Mac OS X on the iTV? Don't be silly. The next thing you tell me is that there's a toaster that runs NetBSD...
Oh wait...
Well, uh. Blocking JavaScript will only block this particular implementation of tracking, but it won't fix the problem. And please stop sending this Firefox propaganda here. It is not informative, as pretty much everyone here are already aware of the extension mentioned. Why are these comments are modded up?
I say this as a bike rider/pedestrian. The roads are designed for car drivers, who of many have no respect of bike riders/pedestrians like me and you. I see weekly drivers at crossings and crosswalks that accelerate when they see someone is trying to cross the road. This is just shows the immaturity of many drivers. It looks especially stupid when it is winter time here and the temperature is something like -20 C (-68 F) and car drivers sitting comfortably in their warm cars are trying to ram you freezing outside. Really. Accelerating in this situations is just disgusting. Every year some kids that start school for the first time die because of some jerk doesn't have the patience to wait for the next green lights. I am a strong supporter of commuting, but commuting has here been made more expensive than using private cars. Roads are designed so that cars get the most straight road, when pedestrians and bikers have to shuttle between short pieces of road. And the traffic lights... There was some discussion in the main newspaper, that it would actually be more safe for bike riders and pedestrians to cross the road when the lights are red rather than green. I do always wait for the green light, and I must admit that there is a bit of sweet revenge when you see the angry faces of car drivers, when you stop the traffic on the road. The wait is however a small price for them to pay, after they've taken somebody's life.
Rest in peace, Rob.
Fix the driver? Replace the hardware? Not on a Mac. And besides, OS X does output diagnostics for people like you. It just doesn't show it to the enduser on screen, which is fine. This was the first website I found on kernel panic debugging on OS X if you are interested.
I think you hit the nail on this one. I wish I'd have mod points right know. There is way too much effort going on trying to get people to use obscure passwords. The simple fact is that limiting the number of possible login tries would basically render any bruteforce attacks unusable, which is why we have to have complex passwords in the first place. If you see more than ten attempts, you can be pretty sure it is a bruteforce attack. It could be the user him/herself trying to remember the password or it could be a malicious user. Anyway, it is a bruteforce attack, and should be denied. This would be so much easier, than to get everyone to use "good" passwords. I still don't get why people think it is a-okay to allow hundreds or thousands of login attempts per minute... It's not like the valid user would even type that fast.
If you do a reverse lookup on www.zcodec.com (85.255.117.106), you'll get "85.255.117.106-xbox.dedi.inhoster.com". That doesn't sound right for a legit download. Not that you'd normally do such lookups...
As somebody already said, OS X users don't restart or shutdown. But when we do, we can just mute sound before shutting down and restarting, and there won't be any startup sound. There are also some utilities to disable the startup chime if you don't want to mute before restarting.
The startup sound is there for debug purposes, I suppose, because it indicates the moment the computer will start booting its operating system. For instance if you want to boot a CD without using the OS, you need to hold on 'C' until you hear the chime. Same goes with Firewire target-disk mode, OpenFirmware etc. Just to be clear, the startup sound is built into the firmware, not OS X.
Write down the serial number of the iPod somewhere safe. If it then gets stolen in-flight, report the theft. In mid-air, the thief is not going anywhere. With the serial number, you can prove that the device is yours.
True. Uploading will be very slow and you would have to consider the fact that depending on the system you might need to upload the same data more than once. However, uploading backups would not be as a big priority to users as restoring them. It could happen all the time slowly in the background. Once all the data, say 80 GB, is uploaded you would only need to update the changes. Say you changed an average of 1 GB of your data in a week, it would be enough to have 512 kbps upstream to update the changes to one destination without interrupting your websurfing. Thus it would be possible, but unless your files are just plaintext, the backups would most likely lag from the local copy and updating all the time might interfere with your work (or entertainment).
True. This would be a limiting factor in distributing large backups to other clients. The network would almost need to run on professional servers with dedicated resources, if you really wanted it to be redundant. Why they should choose this instead of the usual RAID is beyond me.
The problem with this idea is bandwidth and speed. You think your broadband is fast, but if you have to download the 27 gigabytes of photos, music and stuff, it won't be exactly fast on a 8 Mbps DSL, not to talk about 1 Mbps or less. You might wait a couple of hours, but you won't wait a couple of days.
Okay. So you tell me that amount of available bandwidth will increase? But so will the amount of data that needs to be backed up. And it will grow faster than the bandwidth. Think of homemade movies. You can already fill up your average drive in no-time. What do you then do, when you get a HD camera?
Although the idea isn't a new one, I think it is still neat. It might work for some stuff, but I don't see this becoming mainstream with technologies like Time Machine coming to the end-users.
I was under the impression that since Windows XP SP2, Microsoft decided to disable raw sockets. Gibson's concerns were valid. There is no reason why there should be raw socket functionality on any consumer-level product. Raw sockets doesn't maybe make the computer itself more vulnerable, but it definitely can make it a bigger threat to other machines and networks, once compromised. The casual user doesn't use it and therefore won't even notice it's gone, not to speak of knowing about its existance in the first place. Just because a couple of guys want to play around with their network on their Windows XP Home Editions, you shouldn't enable raw sockets on the rest of the 99,9% of the computers. Period.
No, they won't. Microsoft is not hip. It will not be hip, unlike Apple. iPod is a lifestyle-device, and you simply cannot sell it with a brand like Microsoft. It simply is not cool. Sorry.
I don't think we disagree to too much here.
I have been a full-time Mac OS X user since 10.2. I have used every release before that. Before Jaguar, NetBSD was my choice for desktop use. The workstations I've used in laboratories are mostly Windows, but there are many Linux based services available to be used via secure shell. What comes to others, about half of laptops you see around are Macs. And of the rest some are running Linux. I don't think anyone is picky of the OS. This is probably what scares Microsoft. I dropped in at their presentation maybe a year ago, and there was no doubt that there were some kind of hostility against Microsoft there. During the same time the "alliance" was formed. Coincidence?
This being said, I should also mention that my studies are more hardware related. I'm a "coder" just on my spare time, and that hardly involves Microsoft Windows. :-)
And what comes to GUIs is that they should not probably be designed by IT people anyway...
My copy of Windows was paid by the school, which decides how the money is being distributed. It found it important for their IT students to have Microsoft's developer tools for Windows. You might argue that it was a bad choice, but the money would have been used by the school anyway. It didn't increaset the budget. Also I think you really overestimate the percentage of this in the taxes. If you actually want to "fool" the system, just move abroad, like Linus Torvalds. But you won't get the things that really costs money, like public health care etc. Just how much do you think this costs when you compare it to anything else? Hell, the Parliament uses more money for their festivities than this, and this is what you would cut from the budget?
I believe I have already addressed this on this thread. I would not consider it free in the sense you talk about it either. As in the very post you replied to, I talked about this all being paid by the taxpayers. This is not the point. It is natural that it costs somebody something. The point is that to the students it is free. This means that you can try to apply pretty much wherever you want regardless of your parents financial situation. Some students have money, others don't. You can not expect students themselves to pay costs of the education system, so it's either parents or the working society. I think the latter is a much fairer choice for students in general.
The downside is of course higher taxes, but it is something pretty much everyone accept here, starting with the folks at the right wing to the folks at the left wing.
The history of many universities and other schools, goes way back before Finnish independence. I don't unfortunately know all the history of their creation, but they are pretty much all public schools today. Private schools are extremely rare, and they are bound very much to the same rules as public schools. For instance private schools aren't allowed to take tuition fees either, in exception for some international schools. So, yes. State-budgeting is the limiting factor, if there was a lack of money in education.
A big factor in calculating the amount of government money a school gets is the amount of accepted students per year. Thus popular schools with more students will get more money, but the money per student is pretty constant. Ofcourse this has been abused by the schools so that they accept lots of students that never will have a chance to graduate, meaning more money per graduating student. This loophole is however going to be fixed in the next few years. But basically, the amount of money schools get are all calculated from the same formula. The differences in the quality of education, which still exists, are more due to popularity of some schools than budgeting. As all applicants are ranked, the brightest ones tend all to be accepted in the most popular school. Same thing applies to teachers.
I don't think it is a big problem. Everyone are free to move as they want, and the system can handle that. If you got your education here, your family, relatives etc. did most likely pay all kinds of taxes compensating the loss.
The way schools are allowed to choose students is regulated by law and you stick to it. You don't donate money at all to schools, as it certainly will be regarded as corruption. The only way money makes difference is that you can put your kid on expensive refresher courses. So yes, the system does do a pretty good job there. What the system has yet not solved is how to get the brightest students to choose the right field of study, but that is an other discussion.
This is getting a bit offtopic, but you know. For me, it is completely free. I live in Finland and we have no tuition fees here. Just apply to any government registered school and don't pay any cent for it. Plus, we get student financial aid from the government about 250 euros per month (320 dollars), which we don't need to pay back. Also, students get financial aid to pay their rent (200 euros per month = 255 dollars, no need to pay back either), as well very beneficial loans backed by the government. If Finnish citizens go abroad as exchange students, the government will pay all tuition fees abroad also.
Of course, all of this is paid by the taxpayers. And I don't currently pay any tax. But someday I will. And honestly, I have no problem that after a couple of years I will pay someone's else's education, because someone already did the same for me. This system has it's flaws, but I think it still might be one of the best on the planet. You can be completely broke and still get to the best schools, if you are smart enough.
Microsoft has an academic developer program, where they give all kind of software for free. I downloaded Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and some other software as well. You get an ISO image and your own serial code for the software by downloading from this website with an unique login. Other software that I remember being available was the Visual Studio and SQL server. I don't remember the specifics, as I rather use my Mac. Microsoft Office could not be downloaded.
I believe this is just a way for them to try to keep new developers using Windows, rather than switching to Linux or OS X. Some membership fee is paid by the school, but I don't see any of it.