I can't help but wonder, if the.NET plugin was actually hard to install, would we be seeing complaints about how Microsoft is leaving Firefox users out in the cold by not supporting the full.NET experience in Firefox.
They should have just posted the plugin on the firefox plugins webpage. It would then be just as easy to install as any other extension.
Earlier this week the first 4G base station was installed in central Stockholm.
LTE is not 4G, it's not fast enough. Peak download rates for LTE are around 330 Mbit/sec. 4G requires 1Gbit/sec down for stationary targets. LTE Advanced should be 4G.
Personally I don't like seeing things that I can not see reproducing on their own.
The world is full of things you cannot see reproducing on their own. Your skin is crawling with them. They are in your intestines, reproducing. They are on your mouse, keyboard, monitor. They are on that sandwich you just ate.
There are music stores available on other devices as well. By selling CD's you're solving the wrong problem. Don't sell CD's to people who can't buy music wirelessly, Get wireless music downloads to people who don't already have that option.
Digital downloads are a bit difficult to sell at a concert. (...) then you have to hope they actually bother to go make the purchase when they get home.
Uuh.. you know it's 2009, right ? You can whip out your iPhone, start up iTunes and buy and download the album right there, on the spot. You don't even have to wait in line at the stall that sells the CD's.
Try browsing slashdot on an iPhone, it's horrible. Almost everywhere you press triggers some kind of javascript. Viewport keeps moving to the top of the page, etc.
$31 for pressed CDs ? That's pretty darn cheap if you are going to be doing small runs.
Sure, but why bother with physical media at all ? I imagine the margins are even better on digital distribution as there are no costs for pressing the CD's and printing the covers.
Buying content on physical media is/so/ last century.
Protect Soldiers who under orders committed torture from retaliation
I agree with your first point, but IMHO soldiers who committed torture do not deserve protection. They could and should have refused to execute their orders.
Another option would be to use UnionFS, have a small write partition for the data and union it with the normal read-only filesystem. If anything breaks just clean out the writable partion and you have a clean system again.
Why do I have to buy movies again if I already own the DVD ? What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?
Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ? Or am I buying a physical object that I'm free to do with as I please ?
The first doctor also thought that I had it and scheduled me for surgery. However, the surgeon said to wait for a while.
That's the thing that bugs me the most about the whole medical pseudo-science. They just try something and hope it works, they never actually try to get to the bottom of it and find the real problem. High blood pressure ? Here, have some medication that artificially lowers it. They don't bother to find out WHY it's high and correct that.
It's a good thing these guys didn't go into the programming business because I bet they would be awful at debugging.
UAC has got the whole security thing backwards. It has the computer asking "Am I allowed to do this ?". Of course you are as far as I am concerned, I just told you to do that!
Who buys a safe that asks a potential thief if you really want it to open ? A safe must only open to authorized personel, and those people have to prove they are authorized by entering a code. Same goes for UAC, you're asking the same person who's possibly trying to do harm if (s)he is allowed.
The question every sane OS is asking it's users when doing something dangerous is: "Are YOU allowed to do this ? Please prove so by entering the admin/root password".
What is the security team at Microsoft smoking, and where can I get some ?
The difference between loaning a book and "loaning" an MP3 is that once you'd "loaned" your buddy a song, he has complete access to it whenever he wants. More importantly, he has complete parallel access to it with you.
Indeed, and this is completely different from a physical object like a book. The problem is trying to apply an economic model to a situation where it doesn't apply. Prices of physical objects are more or less determined by supply and demand. For this to work the object in question has to be scarce. Digital data isn't. Once it's created, there is an endless supply of it. Supply and demand doesn't work here. Trying to create artificial scarcity through DRM is solving the wrong problem. Don't try to make a product fit your business model, adapt your business model to the actual product.
Even worse, in trying to make the 'new' work exactly like the old they are actually trying to destroy some of the properties that make the 'new' more exiting and desirable.
Only one high-speed Internet provider offers service in many areas of the United States (home of Slashdot). This means choosing a high-speed Internet provider is like choosing any other public utility such as your power or water provider.
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
Where I live (small city in the Netherlands), I can choose from dozens of ISP's, there's also at least 10 different power companies to choose from. Also, it's always possible to move to an area where there are more or better ISP's to choose from.
That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.
An 'unlimited' internet connection at an affordable price may look like a good deal but if you knew in advance it was actually limited in some way you might have chosen another provider with a better offer. Now at least you know what you're getting for your money and you can make a fair comparison between different providers.
This improves transparency and thus competition and ultimately benefits the consumer.
Does anyone know of a Windows Mobile device that matches the iPhone in web surfing? I'd love to hear about it.
There isn't any, opera on WM is pretty good, WebKit on S60 is pretty good, but none is as usable as Safari on iPhone.
I do software development for mobile phones for a living, we have hundreds of different phones for testing purposes. None of them comes even close to the iPhone.
As for Moto and Samsung, they make really, really crappy devices. Motorola devices are just underpowered, and most API's aren't accesible by 3rd party developers. Samsung devices are full of bugs, one even weirder than another. For example: on certain Samsung devices only odd attempts at opening a socket connection work (1st try succeeds, 2nd fails, 3rd succeeds), on some the bluetooth stack is broken (you can do a scan, you can connect, but you cannot detect a disconnect, your read will block forever without an exception). The list goes on and on and on.
Also, not one of Samsungs devices seems to be running the same software as any other model, some bugs appear on several devices, but every single device has it's own combination of bugs and strange behaviour.
Apple's phone and SDK may not be perfect, but it's way better than anything on any other platform, including.NET compact framework.
Just be glad we have a standard that we can work from.
No, that's exactly the problem, we now have a standard that we can't work from. It's completely unusable and shouldn't have been accepted as a standard.
Over here (the netherlands) lots of people use direct debit. It's safe and convenient and it doesn't give anyone unlimited access to anything. If you give permission for a regular direct debit to a company you can at any time cancel this with your bank, you can also undo an automatic withdrawal (within a timeframe of 2 weeks after the withdrawal iirc), no questions asked.
Also, people rarely use creditcards here, everyone uses direct debit cards, which are secured with a PIN code. Cheques are not used any more. If you need to transfer some money to someone you usually transfer it directly from your account to theirs.
What the hell does that have to do with anything ? I didn't RTFA but it sounds like the problem is that they said that ALL parts of the Internet are accessible via the iPhone... not "all but flash and java"... which has nothing to do with "essential vs. non-essential", what-so-ever. Sounds like a simple case of false advertising to me.
So should iPhone also include SilverLight, Yahoo! toolbar, Comet Cursor's, BonziBuddy and loads of other crappy 3rd party plugins ?
Flash is NOT part of the browser, it's a 3rd party plugin and so is Java. Who decides which plugins should be installed before it can be called the 'whole internet' ?
By not expecting email to be private means that your email provider is allowed to do anything it wants with the information.
I'm a bit divided about this subject. On the one hand I think that you should be able to expect some privacy in your email conversations. On the other hand I think you're kind of naive to let the privacy of a mail conversation depend solely on the willingness of others to not look at it.
The government, not just the US but any government, cannot be trusted, simply because they're just a bunch of people. The only way to have a reasonable expectancy of privacy is to enforce it yourself by using insane amounts of encryption. e.g. encrypt a message in AES, 3DES, 32768 bit RSA, and ROT13 for good measure, then stenographically encode the message in a photograph. etc. etc.
Laws guaranteeing privacy in email are great, but they don't actually give you 100% certainty that your email will be private.
Slashdot Mirror
They should have just posted the plugin on the firefox plugins webpage. It would then be just as easy to install as any other extension.
LTE is not 4G, it's not fast enough. Peak download rates for LTE are around 330 Mbit/sec. 4G requires 1Gbit/sec down for stationary targets. LTE Advanced should be 4G.
The world is full of things you cannot see reproducing on their own. Your skin is crawling with them. They are in your intestines, reproducing. They are on your mouse, keyboard, monitor. They are on that sandwich you just ate.
There is no escape!
There are music stores available on other devices as well. By selling CD's you're solving the wrong problem. Don't sell CD's to people who can't buy music wirelessly, Get wireless music downloads to people who don't already have that option.
Uuh.. you know it's 2009, right ? You can whip out your iPhone, start up iTunes and buy and download the album right there, on the spot. You don't even have to wait in line at the stall that sells the CD's.
Try browsing slashdot on an iPhone, it's horrible. Almost everywhere you press triggers some kind of javascript. Viewport keeps moving to the top of the page, etc.
Sure, but why bother with physical media at all ? I imagine the margins are even better on digital distribution as there are no costs for pressing the CD's and printing the covers.
Buying content on physical media is /so/ last century.
Not only Pages, TextEdit (Apple's WordPad/Notepad equivalent) also has this.
So Office 2010 can render text as pretty as Apple's most basic text editor. All I can say is: about farking time!
Mabye he passed them up.
I agree with your first point, but IMHO soldiers who committed torture do not deserve protection. They could and should have refused to execute their orders.
Another option would be to use UnionFS, have a small write partition for the data and union it with the normal read-only filesystem. If anything breaks just clean out the writable partion and you have a clean system again.
Why do I have to buy movies again if I already own the DVD ? What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?
Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ? Or am I buying a physical object that I'm free to do with as I please ?
If only something like that came with the OS that would be so convenient.
That's the thing that bugs me the most about the whole medical pseudo-science. They just try something and hope it works, they never actually try to get to the bottom of it and find the real problem. High blood pressure ? Here, have some medication that artificially lowers it. They don't bother to find out WHY it's high and correct that.
It's a good thing these guys didn't go into the programming business because I bet they would be awful at debugging.
Why don't you cancel the contract then ? Over here (netherlands) the customer can immediately end his contract if the terms are changed.
This.
UAC has got the whole security thing backwards. It has the computer asking "Am I allowed to do this ?". Of course you are as far as I am concerned, I just told you to do that!
Who buys a safe that asks a potential thief if you really want it to open ? A safe must only open to authorized personel, and those people have to prove they are authorized by entering a code. Same goes for UAC, you're asking the same person who's possibly trying to do harm if (s)he is allowed.
The question every sane OS is asking it's users when doing something dangerous is: "Are YOU allowed to do this ? Please prove so by entering the admin/root password".
What is the security team at Microsoft smoking, and where can I get some ?
Indeed, and this is completely different from a physical object like a book. The problem is trying to apply an economic model to a situation where it doesn't apply. Prices of physical objects are more or less determined by supply and demand. For this to work the object in question has to be scarce. Digital data isn't. Once it's created, there is an endless supply of it. Supply and demand doesn't work here. Trying to create artificial scarcity through DRM is solving the wrong problem. Don't try to make a product fit your business model, adapt your business model to the actual product.
Even worse, in trying to make the 'new' work exactly like the old they are actually trying to destroy some of the properties that make the 'new' more exiting and desirable.
That's the whole point, you're not allowed to do that.
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
Where I live (small city in the Netherlands), I can choose from dozens of ISP's, there's also at least 10 different power companies to choose from. Also, it's always possible to move to an area where there are more or better ISP's to choose from.
That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.
An 'unlimited' internet connection at an affordable price may look like a good deal but if you knew in advance it was actually limited in some way you might have chosen another provider with a better offer. Now at least you know what you're getting for your money and you can make a fair comparison between different providers.
This improves transparency and thus competition and ultimately benefits the consumer.
Does anyone know of a Windows Mobile device that matches the iPhone in web surfing? I'd love to hear about it.
There isn't any, opera on WM is pretty good, WebKit on S60 is pretty good, but none is as usable as Safari on iPhone.
I do software development for mobile phones for a living, we have hundreds of different phones for testing purposes. None of them comes even close to the iPhone.
As for Moto and Samsung, they make really, really crappy devices. Motorola devices are just underpowered, and most API's aren't accesible by 3rd party developers. Samsung devices are full of bugs, one even weirder than another. For example: on certain Samsung devices only odd attempts at opening a socket connection work (1st try succeeds, 2nd fails, 3rd succeeds), on some the bluetooth stack is broken (you can do a scan, you can connect, but you cannot detect a disconnect, your read will block forever without an exception). The list goes on and on and on.
Also, not one of Samsungs devices seems to be running the same software as any other model, some bugs appear on several devices, but every single device has it's own combination of bugs and strange behaviour.
Apple's phone and SDK may not be perfect, but it's way better than anything on any other platform, including .NET compact framework.
No, that's exactly the problem, we now have a standard that we can't work from. It's completely unusable and shouldn't have been accepted as a standard.
Over here (the netherlands) lots of people use direct debit. It's safe and convenient and it doesn't give anyone unlimited access to anything. If you give permission for a regular direct debit to a company you can at any time cancel this with your bank, you can also undo an automatic withdrawal (within a timeframe of 2 weeks after the withdrawal iirc), no questions asked.
Also, people rarely use creditcards here, everyone uses direct debit cards, which are secured with a PIN code. Cheques are not used any more. If you need to transfer some money to someone you usually transfer it directly from your account to theirs.
So should iPhone also include SilverLight, Yahoo! toolbar, Comet Cursor's, BonziBuddy and loads of other crappy 3rd party plugins ?
Flash is NOT part of the browser, it's a 3rd party plugin and so is Java. Who decides which plugins should be installed before it can be called the 'whole internet' ?
I'm a bit divided about this subject. On the one hand I think that you should be able to expect some privacy in your email conversations. On the other hand I think you're kind of naive to let the privacy of a mail conversation depend solely on the willingness of others to not look at it.
The government, not just the US but any government, cannot be trusted, simply because they're just a bunch of people. The only way to have a reasonable expectancy of privacy is to enforce it yourself by using insane amounts of encryption. e.g. encrypt a message in AES, 3DES, 32768 bit RSA, and ROT13 for good measure, then stenographically encode the message in a photograph. etc. etc.
Laws guaranteeing privacy in email are great, but they don't actually give you 100% certainty that your email will be private.