So, just because a single "generic laptop" was sold with a crap GigE card then no one should be able to get such a connection?
It looks like a desperate attempt to bullshit their clients into believing that they want what they really want but the ISPs don't want to provide, and instead what they really want is what the ISPs is already providing. It's the "640kb is enough for everyone" shtick, but bullshittier.
Or in simpler term, Architects are not immune to delusion of self worth. Prostitutes in the street and opening time of the asian corner shop also has a social and psychological impact.
If you believe that the need to design spaces which are able to provide, among other benefits, a healthy (mentally speaking) and comfortable living experience is akin to "prostitutes in the street" then you are both a clueless idiot and needlessly rude. Meanwhile, if you don't understand this and you would like to understand then there is a simple exercise you can do on your own, which is to pull out a sheet of paper, think about the place you live in and just draw a simple diagram of what parts of that place are meaningful to you. If you end up covering some km of urban area with only a couple of scribbles then you live in a place that isn't that good to live in.
Funny, the civil engineers say exactly the opposite and boast how they need so much more technical know-how than for mere architects.
I am a civil engineer, mind you, and although I (and other civil engineers) know more about technical such as how to design proper public sanitation networks, structural systems and even the building processes, knowing how to properly define spaces and to adequately plan the urban space are entirely different beasts. That's the job for an architect, and they tend to do it very well.
Have you actually looked at the map you've linked? It's a suburban wasteland, with streets after streets filled with nothing, where there is nothing to do, to see, to experience and even worth noting. It's a vast waste of space where those who live in it are forced to live in a bubble, void of any community experience and a sense of belonging. It's a place where people risk to be prisoners in their own homes and, to have the change to escape their prison, they must have a car and able to drive it for long periods of time, through a labyrinth of empty suburban roads where everything is dull and looks the same and then through a soulless interstate. That, Marie of Romania, is a place that is designed to suck the life out of you and leave you alone with your miserable life, and incidentally that's exactly one of the points that Christopher Hawthorne made regarding Apple's project.
You failed to understand what has been said. There is absolutely no problem with seeing green when looking out of an office's window. The problem which has been pointed out is that this sort of "let's build an isolated compound in the middle of nowhere" attitude to urban planning and architecture forces the people to dissociate themselves with their community and also the world. This forces people to live in a bubble which comprises of their home, their car and their office. This is an incentive to sociopathy and the lack of a meaningful personal life. Haven't you ever heard of the heavy toll that the dreaded commute takes on anyone? And there's also the economical problem that this causes on everyone, by relying on personal transportation and long, saturated public highways to be able to drive between home and work.
This problem has been recognized in decades, if not over a century. A solution has already been widely recognized and publicized, in the form of the Athens Charter. Yes, it is possible to have a metropolitan area that lets people "look out their windows and see grass, trees, and other natural things." So, why insist on this sort of plan which has a known profound negative impact on society?
You don't know what you are talking about, and you reasoning is simplistic. A metropolitan area doesn't necessarily mean a "concrete jungle". See the Athens Charter to start to understand how a metropolitan area can and does improve the lives of those who experience it, as no mindless, unorganized urban sprawl can, no matter how many trees are planted. Only the poorly designed urban areas, or those who lack any rational organization, which is pretty much the case of every major US city, tend to take the shape of a sort of shanty town with skyscrapers. Cities such as Paris, Brasilia and Curitiba were built following a rational urban plan, and they aren't the "concrete jungle" which you mentioned. In fact, cities only take the shape of unorganized, unlivable "concrete jungles" if shiny new buildings are mindlessly accepted by town councils due to their shininess and in spite of any negative influence they have on the environment, economy and community.
And here you are, criticizing someone else's work although you clearly don't have a clue on what you are talking about. This is the definition of hypocrisy.
Or maybe it is just an office building and the product is defined by the corporate culture and people who presumably explore the community beyond work and home.
To a layman an office building may be "just an office building", but that doesn't mean that it is true and that the design of a building doesn't have social and psychological impact on those who experience the building and interact with it. It does, and it has a deeper impact on our everyday lives than we, particularly the laymen, are able to recognize, at least at first sight. There is a reason why architecture is more demanding and requires a lot more technical know-how than what is expected from mere designers and even civil engineers. Just for a glimpse, take Kevin Lynch's take on a city's mental map, and try to understand the importance of being able to define a space where you can explicitly shape those mental maps to provide a better living experience to those who use it.
Here's an odd coincidence: the Secure Digital High Capacity standard also has a theoretically support capacity of up to 2 TB (2048 GB). Sure, we can't get SD cards with more than 32GB capacity but... it theoretically supports up to 2 TB of data, just as this magic USB thumb drive.
So, if we add a USB interface and a theoretical capacity of up to 2TB, what do we actually get? Well, a regular, plain old USB thumb drive, such as those which we've been purchasing for the past... decade?//capcha was subtle. what a coincidence.
I don't see how the article represents a defence on the looters, and I bet neither can you. And if you do care for a free and open society and if you do have any respect for a justice system that is fair and just then you wouldn't oppose a totalitarian action which consists on nothing more than a brigade of police censors being employed to jail those who post "'really inflammatory" and "inaccurate" messages. That's something we expect from oppressive bastards in China, North Korea, Iran and other hellholes void of any human rights. If you don't want to add the UK to that list then you should do better than criticize those who complain that the cops are violating basic human rights for the sake of "order" and "stability".
I don't understand how you can start a post claiming that I am wrong and then proceed to make the exact same points that I made. i suggest you read my post and after understanding what I've wrote post a followup.
If you believe that alphatel compared apples to apples then you demonstrate you don't have a grasp on what you are talking about, which you demonstrate quite well in the rest of your post. If you did grasp the subject, you would understand that anonymity means just that: lack of accountability regarding one's statements. To put it more precisely, and to underline what you failed to understand, anonymity means that you (or anyone) can say anything without having to worry that someone who dislikes what you (or anyone) just said can punish you from saying precisely that. And that is a direct attack on the core of any society which likes to portray itself as being free.
As an example, you complained that some people on the internet are "complete pricks" and that they only say that because they "aren't accountable for their blathering". The thing is, who are you to judge who is a "prick" and what amounts to "blathering"? Are you aware that you, by making this sort of comment, can be seen by someone as being a "prick" who is "blathering" on the internet? And what if those who see you as a "prick" who "blathers" on the internet decide that you should be made accountable for your "blathering"? And what if that "blathering" is a swift ass kicking to teach you some manners? That is very possible if you aren't anonymous.
It has become very clear that those who defend the elimination of any anonymity are either completely oblivious to the consequences of what they are advocating or itching to oppress those who happen to say things that they don't personally approve. Advocating the elimination of anonymity represents a threat to everyone, and those who defend that they want you to lose your anonymity are in fact defending that "I want to know where you and your loved ones live, because if you say something I dislike you will hear from me". And this is terribly frightening, and has absolutely no place in a free society.
So, please think things through. It is a lot better to have some internet tough guy acting like a prick onilne then having a deranged psycho knocking on your door because he frowned upon your statement on (politics|religion). And this is exactly what you are defending with your poorly thought-through ideas.
#1, "building your own" misses the entire point of using a cloud service. The whole idea is that I don't have to build my own infrastructure - I just sign up and use theirs.
First of all, this "cloud" idiocy is nothing more than marketing speak to fool idiots into believing that a corporation providing web-services through their is something new and, more astonishingly, something desireable.
Regarding your claim, it is nonsense. The whole idea of using a web-service is to access some service through a network. A web service is always a web service, no matter who owns the hardware or who pays to run things. Therefore, it is obvious that "the whole idea" of using a web service is not to mindlessly use some third-party service without questioning the consequences or costs. Instead, the whole idea of using a web service is to benefit from a service provided through a network. Nothing more, nothing less.
Therefore, if someone happens to have an old computer taking up space somewhere and if that person happens to need to host files on a server which is connected to a network then, instead of relying on a third-party to provide that service, that person can very well set up their own personal server and provide the service that he needs. And the best part is that by doing it that person is no longer bound to a mutable contract which no one really knows what it states but guarantees privacy breeches and can, in practice, benefit from a limit-less service. If you don't see the point in this then you are clueless to the implications of the choice you are advocating.
changing to another provider or buying a piece of sync software is not building your own.
Although changing to another provider is not "building your own", installing a server on your own hardware so that you yourself are able to provide your own unlimited, customized service does in fact mean that you are building your own service. And if you don't believe it is then try to mention it in any conversation, and see how you would refer to it as "my own service" instead of "dropbox's service".
In this context, installing a third-party application can be a DIY approach. After all, dropbox is nothing more than a set of servers somewhere that you can access by downloading a specialized client. If you happen to set up your very own personal server by installing software written by a third-party so that it provides essentially the same services as dropbox then that is in fact something you did it on your own. That is, instead of relying on a third-party service you built your server yourself. Hence, the DIY.
To put it in another way, if you write software by making calls to an API then your software will fit the DIY criteria. The same goes with building some electronics by using components made by a third-party. You don't need to build everything from scratch to be considered DIY.
You may not buy cars with a top speed of 30 miles per hour but you do have to obey speed limits. Where I live the top speed that someone can drive at is 120km/h. Meanwhile, my car can drive faster than that, but it won't and there isn't any foreseeable circumstance where it would. This means that if you buy a car specifically because it can go over 180km/h but the fastest you will ever drive it in the car's life cycle is 120km/h then... you are an idiot who blew all your money on a feature that you will never take advantage from.
This also applies to today's processors. If you need a computer and you end up doing only mundane things such as run office applications, browse the web, communicate and watch videos then if you spend tons of money on a small super-computer that means that you are an idiot who blew all your money on a feature that you will never take any advantage from. Instead, you can spend a fraction of your budget on a system which is anaemic by comparison and you will never know the difference, and keep a huge wad of cash (which you had to work for) to spend on something else. Or even, god forbid, take some free time from work to do anything you'd like.
Who in their right mind expected that if you give anyone full control over a lucrative resource and then tell them not to use it although you have absolutely no power to enforce your demand that they would respect your request? I mean, not even your kids respect anything you say that goes against their will if there isn't a consequence for their infraction.
What it actually means is that bug fixes and improvements will be possible as long as someone is willing to work on them. Even if the hardware is around, just like AMD, someone has to be willing to do the coding
If you take a look at the xorg's mailing list you will find out that drivers for ancient relatively rare graphics cards such as the Matrox 400 line are still being developed and maintained. So, I don't believe that no one will be interested in getting involved in this sort of project.
The issue of performance is, by the passing of each day, becoming increasingly irrelevant with the exception of very small niche areas. Meanwhile, for the past half a dozen years the processing power of any low/mid-end desktop processor is quite capable of providing more than enough processing power to take care of any computing need that any regular person may have. Browsing video clips online, browsing social network sites, handling office applications and communications are well-taken care by any processor. There is a reason why the people paid to push hardware and hardware reviews were forced to develop specialized programs to perform artificial, outlandish tests to be used as benchmarks on today's hardware: because the software which people do use doesn't even come near taxing the current hardware.
If there is any doubt then just take a look at the market for desktop workstations: there isn't one. People who need computing power simply pick whatever hardware is already on any shelf on any generic electronics store, install their software and run it. I mean, years ago people paid thousands of euros for a workstation with multiple processors so that they could use CAD software and even specialized number crunching such as those employed in structural analysis programs, and even then the hardware was maxed out. Nowadays, you place the very same CAD software on a sub-500 euros laptop and everything runs smoothly. And finite element method software? In today's low/mid-end hardware it's possible to solve large systems of linear equations with over 30 thousand degrees of freedom in less than a minute, and in software which is single-threaded.
So, again, performance has become largely irrelevant. Without marketing and fanboyism, if someone is faced with the choice of spending either 1000 euros or 200 euros on a processor and the only difference that they will notice is, say, that some task, when run on the 1000 euro processor, takes 2m0s to complete instead of 2m15s, no one in their right mind would spend an extra 800 euros just to get that sort of benefit.
I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off. Being open also means that it will be able to provide support for this Radeon graphics cards in other platforms besides the officially sanctioned ones, such as Windows and Linux. Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that. Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project.
And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
The Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) was devised as a way to keep a strategic asset, the ability to produce food without depending on foreign powers, in spite of any economic pressure that could force farmers to abandon farming altogether and therefore squander the food production potential of the EU members. This is mainly achieved by a series of agricultural subsidies devised to keep farms afloat even when their production, in today's market, is far more expensive than any import food, particularly in the third world.
Knowing this, reducing CAP subsidies so that the money is directed elsewhere represents the destruction of europe's agricultural potential and the abandon of europe's objective of being self-dependent in terms of food production. Although investing in science and technology is always a good thing, doing it at the expense of being able to guarantee europe's basic needs isn't a smart move. It's literally betting the farm on the expectation that a boom in tertiary and quaternary industries will be enough to compensate the dependence on third-world countries, some of whom are run by despots, for the ability to get a meal. Just to put it in perspective, just think of a OPEC formed to control europe's food imports, and imagine the effect of a speculation attack on the price of food. It would be suicide.
And I don't even mention the lobbying for the agroindustry.
So no, don't expect this shift to occur. The CAP subsidies will keep on being directed to the farmers and science will be forced to get it's funding from somewhere else.
Firefox's usage share has been slowly declining since quite some time. They introduced the rather universally hated moron-bar, and paid no attention to the feedback.
Are you referring to the awesomebar and how you can tweak it to do stuff such as.... turning it off?
I guess that moron-bar is a good name for it, though. After all, only a moron bitches about it after all this time and still has no clue about how he can simply turn it off.
Then they introduced the unwelcome changes in the UI with Firefox 4, and paid no attention to the feedback.
Can you provide, like, even a single example to back up any of your bullshit claims? The only UI issue which was a major hindrance was the removal of Firefox's status bar, due to it being used to present the user with the target link. Yet, although the status bar has been removed, Firefox now presents an unobtrusive, quasi-statusbar widget as a popup that shows the target link without hogging up precious screen real estate. And, as one of the people who bitched about Firefox4's absense of a status bar, I find this option to be superior than the regular old obstructive status bar. This, to put it in small terms so that morons can understand, represents a considerable improvement over the old statusbar design.
So, what exactly do you see as "unwelcome changes"? Can you at least provide a single example to back up any of your bitching?
Here I sit with firefox 5.0 chugging along, which I upgraded from firefox 4, and once I look at the Add-ons manager I get a notice that Clear Fields 4.0.3 has been disabled for being incompatible with Firefox 5, and that it isn't available for Firefox 5.0. And besides this plugin I only happen to use Adblock and noscript.
So, contrary to what you imply, if there are plugins which were in fact broken then it becomes clear that you are the one who don't have a clue about what you are talking about.
What strikes me as odd in that astonishing comment is that, without the stock option (which was instrumental in keeping those same brilliant people employed at that company), what else is there to "win"? The paycheck, which everyone can easily get from any company, or only the shaft which they are giving to their loyal employees? In fact, thanks to this dick move, does anyone believe that working for skype, or any company which private equity firm Silver Lake comes close to, is now something to dream about? Obviously not. They just demonstrated that skype managers are filled with contempt regarding their employees and that private equity firm Silver Lake is there just to screw even their mothers if it makes them a penny richer.
Another thing that strikes me as odd is that, according to the public statement, one of the reasons they did that is to stop employees from leaving their job. This is terribly insulting, even to the most hardcore neoliberal capitalist out there. This is sociopathy. They are actually stealing their employees income with the expectation that if they are poor enough they will be forced to stay in a job they hate because, being so poorly paid, if they quit their job they will face the risk of bankruptcy. Talk about grade-A psychopaths.
Granted, you need an internet connection and you need to setup a computer to connect to your IP, but you already can stream video from your cell phone to an undisclosed computer somewhere in the internet.
The reason why nobody cried when separate math coprocessors disappeared was because not only math coprocessors didn't disappeared but also separate math coprocessors didn't disappeared also.
Back in those days, you needed a math coprocessor because more often than not the CPU didn't offered any support for basic features such as floating point arithmetic, which happens to be of fundamental importance. Yet, even when providing that support directly on the CPU and even providing vectorized versions of it became a standard feature, you still have a considerable number of people spending ungodly amounts of money on separate math coprocessors which are more commonly known as.... graphics cards. If there is any doubt that a graphics card is nothing more than a glorified math coprocessor then learning about OpenCL and CUDA should be enough to dispel this myth. And you know what? Nowadays people spend more money on those graphics co-processors than in CPUs.
Now, I don't know how the majority of the people you know decide to lead their life, but what I know is that I do believe that if someone decides to take away their ability to switch graphics card or even in some cases install multiple graphics cards on a computer. then they will proverbially cry. Or at the very least be extremely pissed. Adding to this, in the consumer standpoint the ability to choose and the ability to upgrade their graphics cards is one of the things that still make desktop computers as relevant as always. Just because nowadays we have practically disposable computers just lying around, such as cheap netbooks, and just because people purchase those portable computers to do other trivial stuff such as communicating and browsing simple sites it doesn't mean that everyone suddenly stopped needing a graphics card which can be upgraded.
I believe that rsync is able to cover most of dropbox's features, if not all. By using rsync you aren't bound to any service provider or even internet access. You may not have the flashy web interface and flashy android/desktop client but it is somewhat trivial to implement a front-end to rsync that abstracts all implementation details. If you wish to have some sort of history log then you can always set your clients to implement some form of incremental backup of your repository.
Slashdot Mirror
So, just because a single "generic laptop" was sold with a crap GigE card then no one should be able to get such a connection?
It looks like a desperate attempt to bullshit their clients into believing that they want what they really want but the ISPs don't want to provide, and instead what they really want is what the ISPs is already providing. It's the "640kb is enough for everyone" shtick, but bullshittier.
If you believe that the need to design spaces which are able to provide, among other benefits, a healthy (mentally speaking) and comfortable living experience is akin to "prostitutes in the street" then you are both a clueless idiot and needlessly rude. Meanwhile, if you don't understand this and you would like to understand then there is a simple exercise you can do on your own, which is to pull out a sheet of paper, think about the place you live in and just draw a simple diagram of what parts of that place are meaningful to you. If you end up covering some km of urban area with only a couple of scribbles then you live in a place that isn't that good to live in.
I am a civil engineer, mind you, and although I (and other civil engineers) know more about technical such as how to design proper public sanitation networks, structural systems and even the building processes, knowing how to properly define spaces and to adequately plan the urban space are entirely different beasts. That's the job for an architect, and they tend to do it very well.
Have you actually looked at the map you've linked? It's a suburban wasteland, with streets after streets filled with nothing, where there is nothing to do, to see, to experience and even worth noting. It's a vast waste of space where those who live in it are forced to live in a bubble, void of any community experience and a sense of belonging. It's a place where people risk to be prisoners in their own homes and, to have the change to escape their prison, they must have a car and able to drive it for long periods of time, through a labyrinth of empty suburban roads where everything is dull and looks the same and then through a soulless interstate. That, Marie of Romania, is a place that is designed to suck the life out of you and leave you alone with your miserable life, and incidentally that's exactly one of the points that Christopher Hawthorne made regarding Apple's project.
You failed to understand what has been said. There is absolutely no problem with seeing green when looking out of an office's window. The problem which has been pointed out is that this sort of "let's build an isolated compound in the middle of nowhere" attitude to urban planning and architecture forces the people to dissociate themselves with their community and also the world. This forces people to live in a bubble which comprises of their home, their car and their office. This is an incentive to sociopathy and the lack of a meaningful personal life. Haven't you ever heard of the heavy toll that the dreaded commute takes on anyone? And there's also the economical problem that this causes on everyone, by relying on personal transportation and long, saturated public highways to be able to drive between home and work.
This problem has been recognized in decades, if not over a century. A solution has already been widely recognized and publicized, in the form of the Athens Charter. Yes, it is possible to have a metropolitan area that lets people "look out their windows and see grass, trees, and other natural things." So, why insist on this sort of plan which has a known profound negative impact on society?
You don't know what you are talking about, and you reasoning is simplistic. A metropolitan area doesn't necessarily mean a "concrete jungle". See the Athens Charter to start to understand how a metropolitan area can and does improve the lives of those who experience it, as no mindless, unorganized urban sprawl can, no matter how many trees are planted. Only the poorly designed urban areas, or those who lack any rational organization, which is pretty much the case of every major US city, tend to take the shape of a sort of shanty town with skyscrapers. Cities such as Paris, Brasilia and Curitiba were built following a rational urban plan, and they aren't the "concrete jungle" which you mentioned. In fact, cities only take the shape of unorganized, unlivable "concrete jungles" if shiny new buildings are mindlessly accepted by town councils due to their shininess and in spite of any negative influence they have on the environment, economy and community.
And here you are, criticizing someone else's work although you clearly don't have a clue on what you are talking about. This is the definition of hypocrisy.
To a layman an office building may be "just an office building", but that doesn't mean that it is true and that the design of a building doesn't have social and psychological impact on those who experience the building and interact with it. It does, and it has a deeper impact on our everyday lives than we, particularly the laymen, are able to recognize, at least at first sight. There is a reason why architecture is more demanding and requires a lot more technical know-how than what is expected from mere designers and even civil engineers. Just for a glimpse, take Kevin Lynch's take on a city's mental map, and try to understand the importance of being able to define a space where you can explicitly shape those mental maps to provide a better living experience to those who use it.
Here's an odd coincidence: the Secure Digital High Capacity standard also has a theoretically support capacity of up to 2 TB (2048 GB). Sure, we can't get SD cards with more than 32GB capacity but... it theoretically supports up to 2 TB of data, just as this magic USB thumb drive.
So, if we add a USB interface and a theoretical capacity of up to 2TB, what do we actually get? Well, a regular, plain old USB thumb drive, such as those which we've been purchasing for the past... decade? //capcha was subtle. what a coincidence.
I don't see how the article represents a defence on the looters, and I bet neither can you. And if you do care for a free and open society and if you do have any respect for a justice system that is fair and just then you wouldn't oppose a totalitarian action which consists on nothing more than a brigade of police censors being employed to jail those who post "'really inflammatory" and "inaccurate" messages. That's something we expect from oppressive bastards in China, North Korea, Iran and other hellholes void of any human rights. If you don't want to add the UK to that list then you should do better than criticize those who complain that the cops are violating basic human rights for the sake of "order" and "stability".
I don't understand how you can start a post claiming that I am wrong and then proceed to make the exact same points that I made. i suggest you read my post and after understanding what I've wrote post a followup.
If you believe that alphatel compared apples to apples then you demonstrate you don't have a grasp on what you are talking about, which you demonstrate quite well in the rest of your post. If you did grasp the subject, you would understand that anonymity means just that: lack of accountability regarding one's statements. To put it more precisely, and to underline what you failed to understand, anonymity means that you (or anyone) can say anything without having to worry that someone who dislikes what you (or anyone) just said can punish you from saying precisely that. And that is a direct attack on the core of any society which likes to portray itself as being free.
As an example, you complained that some people on the internet are "complete pricks" and that they only say that because they "aren't accountable for their blathering". The thing is, who are you to judge who is a "prick" and what amounts to "blathering"? Are you aware that you, by making this sort of comment, can be seen by someone as being a "prick" who is "blathering" on the internet? And what if those who see you as a "prick" who "blathers" on the internet decide that you should be made accountable for your "blathering"? And what if that "blathering" is a swift ass kicking to teach you some manners? That is very possible if you aren't anonymous.
It has become very clear that those who defend the elimination of any anonymity are either completely oblivious to the consequences of what they are advocating or itching to oppress those who happen to say things that they don't personally approve. Advocating the elimination of anonymity represents a threat to everyone, and those who defend that they want you to lose your anonymity are in fact defending that "I want to know where you and your loved ones live, because if you say something I dislike you will hear from me". And this is terribly frightening, and has absolutely no place in a free society.
So, please think things through. It is a lot better to have some internet tough guy acting like a prick onilne then having a deranged psycho knocking on your door because he frowned upon your statement on (politics|religion). And this is exactly what you are defending with your poorly thought-through ideas.
First of all, this "cloud" idiocy is nothing more than marketing speak to fool idiots into believing that a corporation providing web-services through their is something new and, more astonishingly, something desireable.
Regarding your claim, it is nonsense. The whole idea of using a web-service is to access some service through a network. A web service is always a web service, no matter who owns the hardware or who pays to run things. Therefore, it is obvious that "the whole idea" of using a web service is not to mindlessly use some third-party service without questioning the consequences or costs. Instead, the whole idea of using a web service is to benefit from a service provided through a network. Nothing more, nothing less.
Therefore, if someone happens to have an old computer taking up space somewhere and if that person happens to need to host files on a server which is connected to a network then, instead of relying on a third-party to provide that service, that person can very well set up their own personal server and provide the service that he needs. And the best part is that by doing it that person is no longer bound to a mutable contract which no one really knows what it states but guarantees privacy breeches and can, in practice, benefit from a limit-less service. If you don't see the point in this then you are clueless to the implications of the choice you are advocating.
Although changing to another provider is not "building your own", installing a server on your own hardware so that you yourself are able to provide your own unlimited, customized service does in fact mean that you are building your own service. And if you don't believe it is then try to mention it in any conversation, and see how you would refer to it as "my own service" instead of "dropbox's service".
In this context, installing a third-party application can be a DIY approach. After all, dropbox is nothing more than a set of servers somewhere that you can access by downloading a specialized client. If you happen to set up your very own personal server by installing software written by a third-party so that it provides essentially the same services as dropbox then that is in fact something you did it on your own. That is, instead of relying on a third-party service you built your server yourself. Hence, the DIY.
To put it in another way, if you write software by making calls to an API then your software will fit the DIY criteria. The same goes with building some electronics by using components made by a third-party. You don't need to build everything from scratch to be considered DIY.
You may not buy cars with a top speed of 30 miles per hour but you do have to obey speed limits. Where I live the top speed that someone can drive at is 120km/h. Meanwhile, my car can drive faster than that, but it won't and there isn't any foreseeable circumstance where it would. This means that if you buy a car specifically because it can go over 180km/h but the fastest you will ever drive it in the car's life cycle is 120km/h then... you are an idiot who blew all your money on a feature that you will never take advantage from.
This also applies to today's processors. If you need a computer and you end up doing only mundane things such as run office applications, browse the web, communicate and watch videos then if you spend tons of money on a small super-computer that means that you are an idiot who blew all your money on a feature that you will never take any advantage from. Instead, you can spend a fraction of your budget on a system which is anaemic by comparison and you will never know the difference, and keep a huge wad of cash (which you had to work for) to spend on something else. Or even, god forbid, take some free time from work to do anything you'd like.
Who in their right mind expected that if you give anyone full control over a lucrative resource and then tell them not to use it although you have absolutely no power to enforce your demand that they would respect your request? I mean, not even your kids respect anything you say that goes against their will if there isn't a consequence for their infraction.
If you take a look at the xorg's mailing list you will find out that drivers for ancient relatively rare graphics cards such as the Matrox 400 line are still being developed and maintained. So, I don't believe that no one will be interested in getting involved in this sort of project.
The issue of performance is, by the passing of each day, becoming increasingly irrelevant with the exception of very small niche areas. Meanwhile, for the past half a dozen years the processing power of any low/mid-end desktop processor is quite capable of providing more than enough processing power to take care of any computing need that any regular person may have. Browsing video clips online, browsing social network sites, handling office applications and communications are well-taken care by any processor. There is a reason why the people paid to push hardware and hardware reviews were forced to develop specialized programs to perform artificial, outlandish tests to be used as benchmarks on today's hardware: because the software which people do use doesn't even come near taxing the current hardware.
If there is any doubt then just take a look at the market for desktop workstations: there isn't one. People who need computing power simply pick whatever hardware is already on any shelf on any generic electronics store, install their software and run it. I mean, years ago people paid thousands of euros for a workstation with multiple processors so that they could use CAD software and even specialized number crunching such as those employed in structural analysis programs, and even then the hardware was maxed out. Nowadays, you place the very same CAD software on a sub-500 euros laptop and everything runs smoothly. And finite element method software? In today's low/mid-end hardware it's possible to solve large systems of linear equations with over 30 thousand degrees of freedom in less than a minute, and in software which is single-threaded.
So, again, performance has become largely irrelevant. Without marketing and fanboyism, if someone is faced with the choice of spending either 1000 euros or 200 euros on a processor and the only difference that they will notice is, say, that some task, when run on the 1000 euro processor, takes 2m0s to complete instead of 2m15s, no one in their right mind would spend an extra 800 euros just to get that sort of benefit.
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off. Being open also means that it will be able to provide support for this Radeon graphics cards in other platforms besides the officially sanctioned ones, such as Windows and Linux. Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that. Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project.
And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
The Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) was devised as a way to keep a strategic asset, the ability to produce food without depending on foreign powers, in spite of any economic pressure that could force farmers to abandon farming altogether and therefore squander the food production potential of the EU members. This is mainly achieved by a series of agricultural subsidies devised to keep farms afloat even when their production, in today's market, is far more expensive than any import food, particularly in the third world.
Knowing this, reducing CAP subsidies so that the money is directed elsewhere represents the destruction of europe's agricultural potential and the abandon of europe's objective of being self-dependent in terms of food production. Although investing in science and technology is always a good thing, doing it at the expense of being able to guarantee europe's basic needs isn't a smart move. It's literally betting the farm on the expectation that a boom in tertiary and quaternary industries will be enough to compensate the dependence on third-world countries, some of whom are run by despots, for the ability to get a meal. Just to put it in perspective, just think of a OPEC formed to control europe's food imports, and imagine the effect of a speculation attack on the price of food. It would be suicide.
And I don't even mention the lobbying for the agroindustry.
So no, don't expect this shift to occur. The CAP subsidies will keep on being directed to the farmers and science will be forced to get it's funding from somewhere else.
Are you referring to the awesomebar and how you can tweak it to do stuff such as.... turning it off?
I guess that moron-bar is a good name for it, though. After all, only a moron bitches about it after all this time and still has no clue about how he can simply turn it off.
Can you provide, like, even a single example to back up any of your bullshit claims? The only UI issue which was a major hindrance was the removal of Firefox's status bar, due to it being used to present the user with the target link. Yet, although the status bar has been removed, Firefox now presents an unobtrusive, quasi-statusbar widget as a popup that shows the target link without hogging up precious screen real estate. And, as one of the people who bitched about Firefox4's absense of a status bar, I find this option to be superior than the regular old obstructive status bar. This, to put it in small terms so that morons can understand, represents a considerable improvement over the old statusbar design.
So, what exactly do you see as "unwelcome changes"? Can you at least provide a single example to back up any of your bitching?
Here I sit with firefox 5.0 chugging along, which I upgraded from firefox 4, and once I look at the Add-ons manager I get a notice that Clear Fields 4.0.3 has been disabled for being incompatible with Firefox 5, and that it isn't available for Firefox 5.0. And besides this plugin I only happen to use Adblock and noscript.
So, contrary to what you imply, if there are plugins which were in fact broken then it becomes clear that you are the one who don't have a clue about what you are talking about.
Damn fanbois, they don't acknowledge reality.
What strikes me as odd in that astonishing comment is that, without the stock option (which was instrumental in keeping those same brilliant people employed at that company), what else is there to "win"? The paycheck, which everyone can easily get from any company, or only the shaft which they are giving to their loyal employees? In fact, thanks to this dick move, does anyone believe that working for skype, or any company which private equity firm Silver Lake comes close to, is now something to dream about? Obviously not. They just demonstrated that skype managers are filled with contempt regarding their employees and that private equity firm Silver Lake is there just to screw even their mothers if it makes them a penny richer.
Another thing that strikes me as odd is that, according to the public statement, one of the reasons they did that is to stop employees from leaving their job. This is terribly insulting, even to the most hardcore neoliberal capitalist out there. This is sociopathy. They are actually stealing their employees income with the expectation that if they are poor enough they will be forced to stay in a job they hate because, being so poorly paid, if they quit their job they will face the risk of bankruptcy. Talk about grade-A psychopaths.
There is already an app for that. An android app, that is.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.pas.webcam&feature=search_result
Granted, you need an internet connection and you need to setup a computer to connect to your IP, but you already can stream video from your cell phone to an undisclosed computer somewhere in the internet.
The reason why nobody cried when separate math coprocessors disappeared was because not only math coprocessors didn't disappeared but also separate math coprocessors didn't disappeared also.
Back in those days, you needed a math coprocessor because more often than not the CPU didn't offered any support for basic features such as floating point arithmetic, which happens to be of fundamental importance. Yet, even when providing that support directly on the CPU and even providing vectorized versions of it became a standard feature, you still have a considerable number of people spending ungodly amounts of money on separate math coprocessors which are more commonly known as.... graphics cards. If there is any doubt that a graphics card is nothing more than a glorified math coprocessor then learning about OpenCL and CUDA should be enough to dispel this myth. And you know what? Nowadays people spend more money on those graphics co-processors than in CPUs.
Now, I don't know how the majority of the people you know decide to lead their life, but what I know is that I do believe that if someone decides to take away their ability to switch graphics card or even in some cases install multiple graphics cards on a computer. then they will proverbially cry. Or at the very least be extremely pissed. Adding to this, in the consumer standpoint the ability to choose and the ability to upgrade their graphics cards is one of the things that still make desktop computers as relevant as always. Just because nowadays we have practically disposable computers just lying around, such as cheap netbooks, and just because people purchase those portable computers to do other trivial stuff such as communicating and browsing simple sites it doesn't mean that everyone suddenly stopped needing a graphics card which can be upgraded.
I believe that rsync is able to cover most of dropbox's features, if not all. By using rsync you aren't bound to any service provider or even internet access. You may not have the flashy web interface and flashy android/desktop client but it is somewhat trivial to implement a front-end to rsync that abstracts all implementation details. If you wish to have some sort of history log then you can always set your clients to implement some form of incremental backup of your repository.