For me, Flash has never provided anything of value -- just ads and badly written web sites is my opinion of it. I think Flash is crap.
You're entitled to your opinion.
But Flash remains a remarkably viable platform with mature development tools for animation, video and games. Amanita Design comes vividly to mind with games like Samorost, Machinarium, and Botanicula.
Animation in adds and badly designed websites don't go away simply because their developers have migrated to HTML5.
Buy a computer that has the specs you want. Then wipe the hard drive and install Debian. Return the Windows 8 license for a refund. Problem solved.
Even if this ploy is successful --- it's a perfectly ridiculous waste of time and money that will net you next to nothing.
Microsoft has released licensing rates for OEM Windows 8, including US$60-80 for Windows 8, US$80-100 for Windows 8 Pro (with Office) and US$50-65 for Windows RT (with Office), according to Taiwan-based notebook supply chain makers.
Then there is the small matter of warranty service and technical support.
You purchased a system with hardware, software and drivers certified for Win 8, remember. Diagnosing and repairing problems associated with any random --- and customized --- Linux distro was not part of the deal,
You are obviously not familiar with Burma Shave, its a 1950s thing.
It's easy to forget that almost all cross country traffic before the construction of the Interstates moved on two lane rural roads at an average speed of 45 mph or less. The first Burma Shave signs were placed in 1925. The verses began appearing in 1929.
Here are two examples from 1939:
Hardly a driver / Is now alive / Who passed / On hills / At 75 / Burma-Shave
Past / Schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma-Shave
The NFL exists to sell beer and hookers I don't see why the taxpayer has to subsidize them beyond what we already do.
The bottom line is that soldiers have chosen to do a job. I can't tell you how many times my choices have prevented me from participating in a national event. But we are grownups and we deal.
You don't seem to be dealing with it very well.
More like you are carrying a chip on your shoulder the size of a 2x4.
Within the Morale Service Division of the War Department, a ''radio section'' of the Bureau of Public Relations was formed in 1941 to make sports broadcasts available to personnel scattered in locations outside the United States.
While in practice the pragmatics of the situation are that you are right, in principal I believe that we should be talking to the anti-trust authorities - both sides of the Atlantic - because this is very clear abuse of monopoly. Unless, of course, Microsoft irrevocably commits to authorise any version of any competing operating system for free, in which case the whole point of secure boot has just vanished.
UEFI and Secure Boot are not backed by Microsoft alone.
The Unified EFI Forum or UEFI Forum (where UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from eleven "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies.
Secure Boot was introduced in v. 2.2 of the UEFI spec,. ca. 2008-2009.
The geek feels ambushed and pole-axed by a technology that has been in development for over five years. But if he had been paying attention he would known this was coming. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
''Secure boot'' is a technology described by recent revisions of the UEFI specification; it offers the prospect of a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that can improve the security of many system deployments. Linux and other open operating systems will be able to take advantage of secure boot if it is implemented properly in the hardware.
Why in hell did the world give Microsoft control over computer bootup hardware?
The enthusiast buys or builds his x86 mid-tower Linux PC using cheap generic hardware designed for the Windows eco-system.
His neighbor simply ges out and buy the OEM Windows product.
He has to be persuaded to install Linux as a secondary operating system --- which is not an easy sale. He doesn't like mucking around with core system software. He won't disable hardware level security, There little in FOSS of interest to him that hasn't been ported to Windows.
In a down market, the Windows division generated $5.9 billion in second quarter revenues for Microsoft --- up 24% from a year ago. That translates into a lot of sales of Windows 8 certified motherboards.
The corporate and institutional buyer has his own reasons for moving towards UEFI and secure boot.
Not to mention, Sasha Grey wasn't around back then for Bell to copy the 'mercury as a variable resistor' idea from by bribing a patent clerk.
Did you read the article you quote?
It is Elisha Gray not Sasha Grey.
The clerk was by then a hopeless alcoholic who by his own admission could be bought and paid for. His multiple --- and conflicting --- affidavits appear in 1886 --- at the height of the litigation over Bell's patents. 600 cases not one of which were lost.
Gray was an electrical engineer with a national reputation, a multi-million dollar patent portfolio of his own and one of the founders, of Western Union. He was in the audience at the 1876 Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia when Bell demonstrated his telephone.
The phonograph. The typewriter.
The Fair is the high water mark of nineteenth century American invention.
But Gray is on the sidelines? Not taking center stage?
Bell Telephone began stringing wires in1877. There are almost 50,000 Bell phones in service by 1880. Where is Elisha Gray and where is Western Union?
Oh, sure, fall back to Edison and his Light-bulb then? Incandescent light bulbs were in the European patent office 2 years before Edison's.
---- and every one of them had to be wired in series like a string of Christmas lights. That made them as useless for residential lighting as the carbon arc lamps of a state prison.
Edison was a system builder. The light bulb is only the beginning. You need to design generating plants. Wiring, Fuses. Plugs. Switches. Electrical meters for billing purposes. Training programs for a new generation of electricians.
Remember, too, that no one in the general population has any practical, everyday, experience with electricity and its dangers.
If that's the case, why isn't every Starbucks shut down for facilitating CP downloads?
So very public.
Surveillance cameras are a given.
What could possibly go wrong?
MBTA Transit Police report a man trying to hold up the Dunkin' Donuts at 99 Cambridge St. in Charlestown yesterday had his plans foiled by a T cop in search of a cup of coffee.
An early episode of "Perry Mason" (ca 1959) turned on the use of an R/C device to manipulate an antiquated gas space heater, establishing an alibi for the killing.
When the inventor of the gadget became a plausible suspect, Mason had the gas line inspected for undocumented repairs. In the end, that made it obvious the real killer had to be the first one to discover the body --- giving himself enough time to remove the device and cover his tracks.
I've been running an open wifi for over a year with no problems so far. I have a dual ethernet linux box running iptables with a set of white listed ports allowed through. My wifi routers are mere access points all switched on a single subnet to the linux firewall. Over time I looked at generated traffic and opened up ports various devices use for legitimate services like 993, 587, 443 etc. I block all UDP ports except 123, 4500 and 500. Some services, like iCloud, like to abuse the network using UDP. streams. That along with all unauthorized port traffic gets dropped (using -j DROP) into the bit bucket --
In plain English, you set up a system that is workable and safe but intelligible only to the IT pro. You're the guy who installed the access points for our community center, upscale restaurants, golf course and small boat harbor on the Great Lakes.
Strangers cruising residential neighborhoods beyond the village center aren't particularly common or particularly welcome.
There is no invitation to linger.
The access roads into town are waterfront or rural. Estate homes and farms. Their owners more prickly about intrusions on their lands and privacy then most. The technical problems are daunting even if you could get everyone's cooperation.
Distract the masses with things like immigration reform, gay rights, abortion, things that get people excited. Then while everyone is screaming about those things, pass laws that screw over the common person.
Does the geek ever listen to what he is saying?
Each of the issues mentioned here have a profound intimacy and significance, They represent the driving - primal - forces currently at work in American law and politics.
His pet political causes sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench because, quite frankly, my dear, no one gives a damn.
You know MS university included everything and only cost $99. Unlimited US and canada is 2.99 a month. Pretty much if you are going use Skype to call phones, you will pay the three bucks. Most will just skype between computers for free, so this part of it is pointless.
These are Skype world minutes. One hour, call anywhere.
The student version of Office 365 is $80 for four years and two PCs + your mobile devices.
So if your kids want to use Word to make a Lemonade Stand sign so they can sell Lemonade for.05 a cup on the front lawn? Ilegal!
Even worse your kids want to help out with Hurricane Sandy relief by making signs and posting them around the neighborhood telling people how they can help their local non-profit? Illegal!
The simplest and most sensible reading of the TOS is that if you are running a business out of your home may be forced to move up to a higher tier of service. For many of the same reasons why your ISP doesn't want you setting up a sever under a baseline residential account.
Try typesetting a book sometime in Microsoft Word.
Why in the name of god would you want to do that?
Layout and design for publication is a trade and profession in itself. It has always demanded a very different set of skills and tools then the writer's.
At one time many home users had free or inexpensive access to MS Office through enterprise licensing. I recall install such a free copy on my mothers machine years back. If such free licensing were still available, I could see home users accessing MS Office.
The current bundle is Office Professional Plus 2013, which includes Lync.
Regional pricing varies a little, up and down. If you happen to be one of the sixty or so people living in the Pitcarin Islands, the cost is $15, plus S&H on the media. if required.
Ars Technica had this to say about Office 365 Home Premium:
Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013---Office 2013 Home and Student---is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.
Home Premium also comes with licenses for five installs of the suite---including Office 2011 for Mac installs for those households with mixed operating system allegiances. Home and Student has been trimmed down to allowing just one installation per license. And as part of its subscription, customers will also get 60 minutes a month of Skype calls to phone numbers within the US (as Microsoft continues to position Skype as the consumer version of its Lync enterprise voice, video, and messaging service). And it comes with an additional 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive cloud storage. While you can install Office on five systems at once through Home Premium, where those five licenses are is fungible. You can manage which computers are actively using their Office user licenses from the account webpage, and you can shut off one to make room for another when necessary. That means your licenses can travel with you from computer to computer, and---at least theoretically, if you keep all your data in SkyDrive or a networked drive---you can be up and running with a new PC in a manner of minutes.
Phrases like "home user" mislead the geek, I think.
"Software for the professional working at home and abroad" would be closer to the truth for a product like Office. Everyone in the family may be using the program --- in part because they share the same interests and ambitions.
But for him, it is one of the fundamental tools of his trade.
The article closes by asking 'Will you [pay up]?' The consensus in the comments is a resounding 'NO,' with frequent mentions of the suitability of OpenOffice for home productivity.
Perfectly predictable ---
and as utterly meaningless as the responses to any self-selecting online poll.
I imagine that without the Windows Hegemony, Microsoft would -never- have been able to kill wordperfect.
WordPerfect was a character based DOS era word processor ported to every platform known to man --- each with own fiefdom within the company. In late 1993, WPC had bloated to 5,500 employees and was bleeding red ink from every pore.
Don't you dare tamper with that washing machine or the DMCA will come get you.
I know this will come as a shock to the geek.
But the number of people who have the time, skills, tools. and the desire to muck around with the complex inner workings of household appliances with replacement costs of $500 to $1000 and up --- way up --- is negligible.
So, let's hope that WebM can compete with H.265, because then we have a real chance of largely getting rid of proprietary video standards.
WebM is a distribution codec for YouTube. H.264 is core technology in digital television.
Theatrical production. Cable, broadcast and satellite distribution. Home video. Industrial applications... The list goes on and on and on.
The licensors of H.264/HEVC are global giants in R&D and manufacturing. Philips. Samsung, Mitsubishi. Panasonic. Toshiba. The 1181 H.264 licensees operate on more or less the same scale. The standards they adopt are the standards which stick.
What is more reasonable; for me to ask them to install a second VoIP client that does not spy on them, or for them to ask me to install a second VoIP client that does spy on me?
That depends on whether you need to talk to them more then they need to talk to you.
You're the geek, remember. The guy who will always be more comfortable installing and maintaining multiple messaging clients than they are.
Time to create an open source skype alternative. We have the technology, knowhow and codecs necessary to make this happen.
What we don't have are 660+ million registered users. Landline and mobile access. Clients available now for every platform. PC. Tablets. Phones. TV sets. Video game consoles. Automobiles. GM Lets You Skype From Your Car
I have zero sympathy for this kind of hacker, but that's a lot of time for a DDOS that apparently they didn't even execute if I read the charges right.
Attempt a felony, be charged with a felony.
Join in a criminal conspiracy, provide support for the conspiracy, go down with your co-conspirators.
It doesn't matter whether the conspiracy succeeds or fails. Traditionally, it didn't matter whether you expected things to be taken as far as they were or end as badly as they did. There are echoes of this in the felony murder rule.
You don't want to be caught driving the getaway car in a holdup where someone gets shot. You don't even want to be the guy who supplied the car used in the robbery,
''Perpetrators of distributed denial of service attacks laud them as civil protests but they can be incredibly damaging to the finances and reputations of online businesses. Simultaneously, they impact on the general public's ability to use online services,'' said detective chief inspector Terry Wilson of the PCeU.
''These men provided the infrastructure for such attacks. The sentences they have received are indicative of how serious the crime is and the tough approach the courts will take to such criminals.''
In April last year, an anti-abortion activist with links to Anonymous was given 32 months in prison for hacking into the records and website of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS).
Dawson computer science professor Alex Simonelis said his department forbids hacking as an 'extreme example' of 'behavior that is unacceptable in a computing professional.' And, in a news conference on Tuesday, Dawson's administration stuck to that line, saying that Al-Khabaz's actions show he is 'no longer suited for the profession.'
The geek's encounters with the law --- with society as a whole --- have not been ending well for him. The Internet is not his private playground anymore. Intrusions into other people's systems and software may end in a felony charge.
I've no doubt that the geek can still find shelter and support in his own community when things go south, but the climate outside is not so warm and welcoming anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, Flash has never provided anything of value -- just ads and badly written web sites is my opinion of it. I think Flash is crap.
You're entitled to your opinion.
But Flash remains a remarkably viable platform with mature development tools for animation, video and games. Amanita Design comes vividly to mind with games like Samorost, Machinarium, and Botanicula.
Animation in adds and badly designed websites don't go away simply because their developers have migrated to HTML5.
Buy a computer that has the specs you want. Then wipe the hard drive and install Debian. Return the Windows 8 license for a refund. Problem solved.
Even if this ploy is successful --- it's a perfectly ridiculous waste of time and money that will net you next to nothing.
Microsoft has released licensing rates for OEM Windows 8, including US$60-80 for Windows 8, US$80-100 for Windows 8 Pro (with Office) and US$50-65 for Windows RT (with Office), according to Taiwan-based notebook supply chain makers.
Microsoft unveils Windows 8 OEM licensing charges
Then there is the small matter of warranty service and technical support.
You purchased a system with hardware, software and drivers certified for Win 8, remember. Diagnosing and repairing problems associated with any random --- and customized --- Linux distro was not part of the deal,
I'm confused why anyone - especially a technology-driven site like Slashdot - would create a "separate but equal" website just for mobile devices.
The mobile device is app-oriented not browser oriented.
I don't think sees the full implications of that. The name-branded and filtered "app store" is only the tip of the iceberg,
You are obviously not familiar with Burma Shave, its a 1950s thing.
It's easy to forget that almost all cross country traffic before the construction of the Interstates moved on two lane rural roads at an average speed of 45 mph or less. The first Burma Shave signs were placed in 1925. The verses began appearing in 1929.
Here are two examples from 1939:
Hardly a driver / Is now alive / Who passed / On hills / At 75 / Burma-Shave
Past / Schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma-Shave
Burma-Shave
The NFL exists to sell beer and hookers I don't see why the taxpayer has to subsidize them beyond what we already do.
The bottom line is that soldiers have chosen to do a job. I can't tell you how many times my choices have prevented me from participating in a national event. But we are grownups and we deal.
You don't seem to be dealing with it very well.
More like you are carrying a chip on your shoulder the size of a 2x4.
Within the Morale Service Division of the War Department, a ''radio section'' of the Bureau of Public Relations was formed in 1941 to make sports broadcasts available to personnel scattered in locations outside the United States.
The Armed Forces Radio Service
While in practice the pragmatics of the situation are that you are right, in principal I believe that we should be talking to the anti-trust authorities - both sides of the Atlantic - because this is very clear abuse of monopoly. Unless, of course, Microsoft irrevocably commits to authorise any version of any competing operating system for free, in which case the whole point of secure boot has just vanished.
UEFI and Secure Boot are not backed by Microsoft alone.
The Unified EFI Forum or UEFI Forum (where UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from eleven "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies.
Unified EFI Forum
Secure Boot was introduced in v. 2.2 of the UEFI spec,. ca. 2008-2009.
The geek feels ambushed and pole-axed by a technology that has been in development for over five years. But if he had been paying attention he would known this was coming. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
''Secure boot'' is a technology described by recent revisions of the UEFI specification; it offers the prospect of a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that can improve the security of many system deployments. Linux and other open operating systems will be able to take advantage of secure boot if it is implemented properly in the hardware.
Making UEFI Secure Boot Work With Open Platforms
Why in hell did the world give Microsoft control over computer bootup hardware?
The enthusiast buys or builds his x86 mid-tower Linux PC using cheap generic hardware designed for the Windows eco-system.
His neighbor simply ges out and buy the OEM Windows product.
He has to be persuaded to install Linux as a secondary operating system --- which is not an easy sale. He doesn't like mucking around with core system software. He won't disable hardware level security, There little in FOSS of interest to him that hasn't been ported to Windows.
In a down market, the Windows division generated $5.9 billion in second quarter revenues for Microsoft --- up 24% from a year ago. That translates into a lot of sales of Windows 8 certified motherboards.
The corporate and institutional buyer has his own reasons for moving towards UEFI and secure boot.
It is not going away.
Not to mention, Sasha Grey wasn't around back then for Bell to copy the 'mercury as a variable resistor' idea from by bribing a patent clerk.
Did you read the article you quote?
It is Elisha Gray not Sasha Grey.
The clerk was by then a hopeless alcoholic who by his own admission could be bought and paid for. His multiple --- and conflicting --- affidavits appear in 1886 --- at the height of the litigation over Bell's patents. 600 cases not one of which were lost.
Gray was an electrical engineer with a national reputation, a multi-million dollar patent portfolio of his own and one of the founders, of Western Union. He was in the audience at the 1876 Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia when Bell demonstrated his telephone.
The phonograph. The typewriter.
The Fair is the high water mark of nineteenth century American invention.
But Gray is on the sidelines? Not taking center stage?
Bell Telephone began stringing wires in1877. There are almost 50,000 Bell phones in service by 1880. Where is Elisha Gray and where is Western Union?
Oh, sure, fall back to Edison and his Light-bulb then? Incandescent light bulbs were in the European patent office 2 years before Edison's.
---- and every one of them had to be wired in series like a string of Christmas lights. That made them as useless for residential lighting as the carbon arc lamps of a state prison.
Edison was a system builder. The light bulb is only the beginning. You need to design generating plants. Wiring, Fuses. Plugs. Switches. Electrical meters for billing purposes. Training programs for a new generation of electricians.
Remember, too, that no one in the general population has any practical, everyday, experience with electricity and its dangers.
If that's the case, why isn't every Starbucks shut down for facilitating CP downloads?
So very public.
Surveillance cameras are a given.
What could possibly go wrong?
MBTA Transit Police report a man trying to hold up the Dunkin' Donuts at 99 Cambridge St. in Charlestown yesterday had his plans foiled by a T cop in search of a cup of coffee.
T cop foils spoonpoint robbery of Dunkin' Donuts
An early episode of "Perry Mason" (ca 1959) turned on the use of an R/C device to manipulate an antiquated gas space heater, establishing an alibi for the killing.
When the inventor of the gadget became a plausible suspect, Mason had the gas line inspected for undocumented repairs. In the end, that made it obvious the real killer had to be the first one to discover the body --- giving himself enough time to remove the device and cover his tracks.
I've been running an open wifi for over a year with no problems so far. I have a dual ethernet linux box running iptables with a set of white listed ports allowed through. My wifi routers are mere access points all switched on a single subnet to the linux firewall. Over time I looked at generated traffic and opened up ports various devices use for legitimate services like 993, 587, 443 etc. I block all UDP ports except 123, 4500 and 500. Some services, like iCloud, like to abuse the network using UDP. streams. That along with all unauthorized port traffic gets dropped (using -j DROP) into the bit bucket --
In plain English, you set up a system that is workable and safe but intelligible only to the IT pro. You're the guy who installed the access points for our community center, upscale restaurants, golf course and small boat harbor on the Great Lakes.
Strangers cruising residential neighborhoods beyond the village center aren't particularly common or particularly welcome.
There is no invitation to linger.
The access roads into town are waterfront or rural. Estate homes and farms. Their owners more prickly about intrusions on their lands and privacy then most. The technical problems are daunting even if you could get everyone's cooperation.
As the courts have already demonstrated: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/judge-copyright-troll-cant-bully-internet-subscriber-bogus-legal-theory
The rulings of a lone trial court judge --- not a federal district court of appeals --- is a very slim reed on which to lean.
Distract the masses with things like immigration reform, gay rights, abortion, things that get people excited. Then while everyone is screaming about those things, pass laws that screw over the common person.
Does the geek ever listen to what he is saying?
Each of the issues mentioned here have a profound intimacy and significance, They represent the driving - primal - forces currently at work in American law and politics.
His pet political causes sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench because, quite frankly, my dear, no one gives a damn.
You know MS university included everything and only cost $99. Unlimited US and canada is 2.99 a month. Pretty much if you are going use Skype to call phones, you will pay the three bucks. Most will just skype between computers for free, so this part of it is pointless.
These are Skype world minutes. One hour, call anywhere.
The student version of Office 365 is $80 for four years and two PCs + your mobile devices.
So if your kids want to use Word to make a Lemonade Stand sign so they can sell Lemonade for .05 a cup on the front lawn? Ilegal!
Even worse your kids want to help out with Hurricane Sandy relief by making signs and posting them around the neighborhood telling people how they can help their local non-profit? Illegal!
The simplest and most sensible reading of the TOS is that if you are running a business out of your home may be forced to move up to a higher tier of service. For many of the same reasons why your ISP doesn't want you setting up a sever under a baseline residential account.
Try typesetting a book sometime in Microsoft Word.
Why in the name of god would you want to do that?
Layout and design for publication is a trade and profession in itself. It has always demanded a very different set of skills and tools then the writer's.
At one time many home users had free or inexpensive access to MS Office through enterprise licensing. I recall install such a free copy on my mothers machine years back. If such free licensing were still available, I could see home users accessing MS Office.
The Microsoft Home Use Program is still very much alive.
HUP has a global reach and is multilingual.
The current bundle is Office Professional Plus 2013, which includes Lync.
Regional pricing varies a little, up and down. If you happen to be one of the sixty or so people living in the Pitcarin Islands, the cost is $15, plus S&H on the media. if required.
Ars Technica had this to say about Office 365 Home Premium:
Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013---Office 2013 Home and Student---is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.
Home Premium also comes with licenses for five installs of the suite---including Office 2011 for Mac installs for those households with mixed operating system allegiances. Home and Student has been trimmed down to allowing just one installation per license. And as part of its subscription, customers will also get 60 minutes a month of Skype calls to phone numbers within the US (as Microsoft continues to position Skype as the consumer version of its Lync enterprise voice, video, and messaging service). And it comes with an additional 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive cloud storage.
While you can install Office on five systems at once through Home Premium, where those five licenses are is fungible. You can manage which computers are actively using their Office user licenses from the account webpage, and you can shut off one to make room for another when necessary. That means your licenses can travel with you from computer to computer, and---at least theoretically, if you keep all your data in SkyDrive or a networked drive---you can be up and running with a new PC in a manner of minutes.
Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service
Phrases like "home user" mislead the geek, I think.
"Software for the professional working at home and abroad" would be closer to the truth for a product like Office. Everyone in the family may be using the program --- in part because they share the same interests and ambitions.
But for him, it is one of the fundamental tools of his trade.
The article closes by asking 'Will you [pay up]?' The consensus in the comments is a resounding 'NO,' with frequent mentions of the suitability of OpenOffice for home productivity.
Perfectly predictable ---
and as utterly meaningless as the responses to any self-selecting online poll.
Now and again Ars Technica enjoys puncturing the geek's wish-fulfillment and over-inflated ego with a headline like this: Microsoft fails to notice the death of the PC, posts record revenue figures instead.
"The Windows Division once more becomes the company's biggest money-maker."
I imagine that without the Windows Hegemony, Microsoft would -never- have been able to kill wordperfect .
WordPerfect was a character based DOS era word processor ported to every platform known to man --- each with own fiefdom within the company. In late 1993, WPC had bloated to 5,500 employees and was bleeding red ink from every pore.
Almost Perfect
Don't you dare tamper with that washing machine or the DMCA will come get you.
I know this will come as a shock to the geek.
But the number of people who have the time, skills, tools. and the desire to muck around with the complex inner workings of household appliances with replacement costs of $500 to $1000 and up --- way up --- is negligible.
So, let's hope that WebM can compete with H.265, because then we have a real chance of largely getting rid of proprietary video standards.
WebM is a distribution codec for YouTube. H.264 is core technology in digital television.
Theatrical production. Cable, broadcast and satellite distribution. Home video. Industrial applications... The list goes on and on and on.
The licensors of H.264/HEVC are global giants in R&D and manufacturing. Philips. Samsung, Mitsubishi. Panasonic. Toshiba. The 1181 H.264 licensees operate on more or less the same scale. The standards they adopt are the standards which stick.
What is more reasonable; for me to ask them to install a second VoIP client that does not spy on them, or for them to ask me to install a second VoIP client that does spy on me?
That depends on whether you need to talk to them more then they need to talk to you.
You're the geek, remember. The guy who will always be more comfortable installing and maintaining multiple messaging clients than they are.
Time to create an open source skype alternative. We have the technology, knowhow and codecs necessary to make this happen.
What we don't have are 660+ million registered users. Landline and mobile access. Clients available now for every platform. PC. Tablets. Phones. TV sets. Video game consoles. Automobiles. GM Lets You Skype From Your Car
I have zero sympathy for this kind of hacker, but that's a lot of time for a DDOS that apparently they didn't even execute if I read the charges right.
Attempt a felony, be charged with a felony.
Join in a criminal conspiracy, provide support for the conspiracy, go down with your co-conspirators.
It doesn't matter whether the conspiracy succeeds or fails. Traditionally, it didn't matter whether you expected things to be taken as far as they were or end as badly as they did. There are echoes of this in the felony murder rule.
You don't want to be caught driving the getaway car in a holdup where someone gets shot. You don't even want to be the guy who supplied the car used in the robbery,
''Perpetrators of distributed denial of service attacks laud them as civil protests but they can be incredibly damaging to the finances and reputations of online businesses.
Simultaneously, they impact on the general public's ability to use online services,'' said detective chief inspector Terry Wilson of the PCeU.
''These men provided the infrastructure for such attacks. The sentences they have received are indicative of how serious the crime is and the tough approach the courts will take to such criminals.''
In April last year, an anti-abortion activist with links to Anonymous was given 32 months in prison for hacking into the records and website of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS).
UK Anonymous Hackers Get Jail Time
Weatherhead, who got 18 months, was the only one whose case went to trial.
Juries convict. The geek serves hard time. You are going to see this happen more often, not less.
Dawson computer science professor Alex Simonelis said his department forbids hacking as an 'extreme example' of 'behavior that is unacceptable in a computing professional.' And, in a news conference on Tuesday, Dawson's administration stuck to that line, saying that Al-Khabaz's actions show he is 'no longer suited for the profession.'
The geek's encounters with the law --- with society as a whole --- have not been ending well for him. The Internet is not his private playground anymore. Intrusions into other people's systems and software may end in a felony charge.
I've no doubt that the geek can still find shelter and support in his own community when things go south, but the climate outside is not so warm and welcoming anymore.