So you create a working configuration, and you script it.
This is not your neighborhood club's web site. This is Google. I'm sure they have the resources at hand to do configuration management on their DNS servers. So, once it's set up, you just need to renew the registrar's DS records appropriately. You need to communicate with your registrar regularly, anyway, to keep your zone from expiring. Unless you want your cloud to fall down like a Microsoft cloud.
Greater complexity is usually greater risk, but we already know that not having DNSSEC is risky. DNSSEC was invented to eliminate certain types of risks.
C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone.
I didn't study technology because I wanted to be satisfied with the status quo. Right now, you cannot eat your cake and still have it, but what if you could?
I upgraded my phone because I wanted greater functionality. (Actually, I upgraded because I wanted the very cheap monthly plans on Republic Wireless.) I now have to plug my phone in every night instead of two to three times a week. The Moto X already has compromised specs to get very good battery life, and I only ran out of battery once after doing a 2-hour Google Hangout with video. I would not mind staying with this amount of power, but increasing battery life even more.
Actually, I tried it in extreme form. I no longer install the Flash player plugin. I'm fed up with the updater.
And what I found was that most YouTube videos don't work in HTML5. So I use Firefox for my main browsing and Google Chrome for interacting with Google web sites.
If Google ends up with a distorted view of browser use statistics, that's their fault.
A failure to get DNSSEC right could take down the domain for hours without an easy way to recover.
What are you talking about? DNS does that, anyway.
DNSSEC records are distributed and expire just like any other record. Make a mistake deploying DNSSEC, then just fix it, and eventually the bad records will expire and the new ones will take over. The major issue I see is that the TLD registrar needs to hold DS records for your key, so now your registrar needs to do NS, DS, and glue records.
Worst case scenario, you lose the secure entry point keys. So, you use some out-of-band management interface to change the DS records in the TLD. That's slightly worse than without DNSSEC, because you could mess up your zone all you want without involving the TLD administrator. But the bad DS records expire, the new ones take over, you're back in business.
For a company the size of Google, they'll probably want the SEP keys to be held in a HSM. Maybe they'll put all their private keys in a bunch of HSMs. You can have more than 1 DS record, so they can distribute their HSMs as widely as they want. There's no good reason why Google can't do DNSSEC.
I see this attitude all the time with managers. It's like a mantra:
If it's not broke, don't fix it.
It's blocking IPv6, it's blocking DNSSEC, it's blocking RPKI, it's blocking Windows XP retirements. There are a lot of improvements that are stymied because change is considered more scary than just living with the problem.
But it is broke. Computers are hugely complex and buggy. We need the upgrade treadmill just to stay ahead of threats to our computing. Computers are incredibly malleable, and collectively we need major changes. I would be seriously depressed if our current state became the pinnacle of computing.
If you can't put it on a billboard as a feature, they're not interested because it costs money without generating more users.
Seems a bit disturbing that "We help prevent your connection to Google from being hijacked by identity thieves" isn't considered a feature.
They can't do this unilaterally.
RPKI and DNSSEC are important, but they won't work if the resource or domain owner doesn't use them. For example, Google's public DNS service performs DNSSEC validation, but Google's own DNS zones are unsigned and do not validate using DNSSEC. Even with automation, DNSSEC increases the administrative burden of running a domain, so I see why they don't, but I don't excuse them.
If you go back all the way to the beginning of Gates's career, then it should be obvious that he is no friend to freedom, and he never has been.
In the beginning, there was no open source movement, because all software was open source. Computers were so difficult and non-standard, that software was one-off for each machine, and everybody shared everything just to get the darn things to work. Gates was born into the economic elite (his father was a lawyer and his mother was a rich civic busybody), and he brought elite paternalism into computing. The software we run is only by his permission, and we should all pay him for the privilege of improving and distributing it.
Wozniak came from a different mindset. His father was an engineer, and he learned the morality of engineers. He wrote the first BASIC for Apple, but licensed Microsoft's BASIC for later models. When somebody at Apple wrote MacBasic, Bill Gates had the gall to cancel it and not release a decent Basic for the Mac. So, Wozniak experienced Gates's ruthlessness, but he's too nice to say anything about it.
As for us, asshole Feinstein look at us as if we are peons, slaves for the elites, that we do not have any right to enjoy the protection granted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and that we ought to be stripped of everything, and kow-tow to her and her kinds.
I sometimes wonder how monsters like Feinstein get any votes at all while the likes of Feingold can lose to a climate change denier. We have only ourselves to blame.
I think humans are defective. Democracy works fine for small governments, like a village. It's problematic for a political unit so big that you can't travel from one end to another without special arrangements, like California, the 12th largest economy in the world. Democracy is a terrible idea for a country as large as the United States. It's better than any other idea we've tried so far, but there are just too many voices demanding too much attention for it to work well.
So, humans simplify. Most people stick to the 2 parties that they hear about the most. The media talk about the 2 parties that pay them the most. The major party candidates listen to the donors who donate the most. Larry Lessig hopes that campaign finance reform will fix democracy, but humans still need simplified choices.
I think humans can't reasonably manage something as large as the United States. The federal government needs to be scaled way down, or the United States split up, so more local decisions can be made about local issues. But, again, humans are defective, and for example people in New York are personally offended at the local education decisions made in Texas, so the federal government just keeps growing.
There are options from most of the carriers. I'm doing the Republic Wireless $10 unlimited talk and text, but with no data. Having a 4G phone with no data sucks, but the price is compelling, and I should be able to add a prorated data plan for the times when I expect I do need it. Having WiFi calls when I'm at a place with no cell reception is also nice. However, counting the phone, my bill is higher than if I had been able to keep my dumbphone on somebody's T-mobile family plan.
Ting is a great choice for Sprint, Airvoice is a great choice for AT&T, PagePlus is decent for Verizon.
One interesting option is FreedomPop, but they seem to be in beta. Earlier versions of FreedomPop phones had poor performance and very poor voice quality, but they're supposedly improving. It would be interesting to see if they go anywhere with that.
I am 99% sure they used to offer a $5 copy of Windows 8, if you owned a copy of Windows 7 or XP or something.
But I guess if not many people caught this deal, and it is gone now, it is sort of irrelevant.
It was not $5. It was $40 for Windows 8 Pro. I would have upgraded my entire fleet of Vista computers to Windows 8 if it were $5, but I just settled for the XP computers.
I'm betting that when Vista runs out of extended support in 2017, either Microsoft will have come out with another OS, those computers will have become so painfully obsolete that they've been replaced, or I'll just install some Linux on them.
Looks like they're talking about a crippled nuclear plant. Like that poor OS was hit by a mag 9 earthquake and a huge tsunami!
The magnitude 9 earthquake was Windows Rot. The tsunami was Code Red, Nimbda, and their many pals. And the reactor core is melting through the containment vessel, the Microsoft Support Lifecycle. Everybody better evacuate, and leave the OS to people with the protective suits and dosimeters, that is, air gaps or extremely restrictive firewalls.
Last year, I upgraded the OS on my last Windows XP computers to Windows 8.1. Same machines, new OS. Windows 8.1 boots up dramatically faster than Windows XP, does basic stuff more smoothly and more prettily, and crucially is still supported. It's not perfect (understatement of the year) but it works better than Windows XP, and even Windows 7 is a better choice for a PC in the current environment.
Why should one private company have the right to unilaterally declare this kind of planned obsolescence?
Because they made it?
You and the other responses to JDG1980 have missed the point.
Electrolux made my vacuum cleaner, but once I bought it they have no right to it. I can buy my vacuum bags and filters from Electrolux, or I can get clones of them from other manufacturers. With advances in 3D printing, I may even be able to replace parts of the machine itself without involving Electrolux.
It's not so with "intellectual property." I can't simply hire somebody else to support my Windows XP when Microsoft chooses not to. I have to get it from Microsoft itself, and Microsoft charges punitive rates to support Windows XP. You can't actually buy Windows. What you buy is a license to use Windows, with all the contractual limitations that Microsoft can apply.
This is a violation of intuitive, common sense concepts of buying. I have software, I should be able to give my friend a copy of it. Microsoft says each person will individually pay Microsoft for it. The conflict goes back all the way to the beginning of Microsoft, when people shared copies of Microsoft BASIC with each other. Bill Gates disapproved.
Why do you need to "talk to them in HD" when almost *none* of the current machines can even display it?
I'm wondering: How much more bandwidth would be available if the ISPs could detect your hardware (say, 1280x860 or some other ridiculously low res) and not send you the 25000x12000 video, but a converted 1280x860.
Just because you bought the bargain-basement Lenovo doesn't mean I'm still using such a pathetically obsolete resolution. Also, basically everybody has a 1080p TV by now. "HD video call" doesn't necessarily mean "PC."
The ISPs aren't supposed to be modifying videos. Many video applications do detect resolutions and available bandwidth, and adjust their encodings appropriately.
You want off-site backup? There's these things called *sneakers*.... 'nuff said.
You disregard the entire history of humanity and backups. Some OCD people will keep backups manually, but large-scale backups won't happen unless it's automatic and unobtrusive.
i'm sure you and your precious data have a special relationship. other than some photos, and some documents in dropbox, i don't have any data to back up
i'm sure your porn and torrents you rarely watch are precious to you, but you are probably a digital hoarder that just collects this stuff just to have it. porn is free in the cloud and its all the same. wipe it and just watch it from the cloud
I can make unflattering assumptions about you, too, but I don't think that's a satisfying use of my time right now.
My friends have lots of pictures and videos of their kids. I certainly hope I don't find those on pornography sites.
I feel this is more about the fact that people have to pay for the service and it is expensive. Not the fact that it is slow. I see a lot of post about how the government should get involved to make it faster and cheaper. Yet I see none offering a solution to the problems with laying thousands of miles of cables (fiber, copper, coax, etc) with all the associated hardware that makes it all work and cost and manpower to maintain that equipment while also serving the customers needs at a better price than what is currently offered. It all has to be paid for......
Yeah, living in the woods, you expect to pay extra for communications of every sort.
My problem is that I'm living in a semi-major city, next to Silicon Valley, with a minor Internet Exchange right in the city and several major exchanges not far away, and it would cost me $80/month for 50/10 cable service. Meanwhile, in South Korea, 100Mbps service would cost maybe $31/month.
As TFA points out, faster and cheaper Internet is possible. It's just not done in most of the US for various reasons.
Well, lucky you, living in a city blessed by Google Fiber.
In the rest of the country, the Internet is generally slow. It doesn't matter if it's liberal or conservative. The government isn't forcing competition, and the government isn't taking the lead on building infrastructure, so the cable and phone companies invest way less on fast Internet than in almost every other industrial country.
Even in Silicon Valley, with its dense urbanization, left-leaning politics, and large population of knowledge workers, most of Silicon Valley has pathetic options for broadband. It's either AT&T, slow and expensive DSL, or Comcast, fast and very expensive cable.
Though, Kessler has a bit of a point with regulations. As you would expect, some of the knowledge workers in Silicon Valley have been trying to get fast and affordable Internet into the area. My current favorite is Sonic.net, but I'm keeping Monkeybrains in mind in case I move into range. It's been extremely slow going. Even AT&T is having problems, getting the permits necessary for their faster-but-still-slow U-verse upgrades.
i'm 40 and have seen the internet grow up and settle for the cheaper plans. i'm at 20/2 now
why do i need to pay for super fast internet?
The point is that the super fast Internet is way too expensive. You're fine with 20/2 now, but if you could have 100/100 for the same price, would you stick with 20/2?
Not everything is publish-subscribe. I want to be able to set up storage boxes in friends' houses or the cloud or whatever, so I can have off-site backups of my data. I want to be able to play with various decentralized communications programs. Some people your age are starting to have grandkids. It would be nice to talk to them in HD, like those science fictions of the 21st Century were saying we would be able to do.
Don't worry about what you'd use the bandwidth for. If you have bandwidth, eventually you'll find a use for it.
When I can buy a PC without Windows, without my supplier feeling pressured to include Windows on it, and the machine costs less...
It's not about being pressured, the supplier can put so much crapware on your Windows computer that they can more than make up the cost of a Windows license.
It's more than that. A boutique vendor can pay the $200 or whatever for a 1-shot OEM license of Windows 8.1, and charge it back to the customer, but the large vendors are in a relentless price war. They need the volume discount. I'm not sure about now, but back in the day an OEM wouldn't qualify for the volume discount unless every PC they sold ran only Windows. So, sell every PC for $100 more, or just do Microsoft everything. Your choice. No pressure.
In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have.
Ah, yes. The government grants copyright monopolies to software companies, and that's a 'failure of free market capitalism'.
It's not the copyright monopoly that makes me especially upset about Microsoft. It's the OEM contracts that forbid alternative operating systems. Those are a failure of free-market capitalism because large OEMs needed Microsoft so they could sell PCs to a majority market, but then Microsoft used the secret contracts to force the OEMs to use Microsoft software for all PCs they sold. Technically, they're free to take Microsoft's contract or leave it, but economically it's suicide for a large PC vendor not to sell Windows. Long after alternative desktops have withered and died, besides MacOS, only now are we seeing timid development of alternatives, such as the Dell Ubuntu Developer Edition laptops and the HP Android desktops.
There are other free-market violations, too. Microsoft abuses the patent system with terrible patents and paid lobbying to prevent reforms. Microsoft abuses the standards system with terrible standards and paid patsies. Microsoft abuses the media with terrible publications and paid shills. Microsoft is fully in support of the DMCA and DRM, of totalitarianism and censorship. Microsoft is an evil company.
So today MS is not perfect. But we can conclude their products are
1. More standard compliant
2. More reliable
3. Better quality
4. MS is innovating more and copying less
5. Competitors now exist
There are still enough reasons to hate Microsoft. I generally try to avoid Microsoft products, but Microsoft still impacts me in various ways:
Abuse of patents. Not only shaking down Android and other embedded Linux companies, but lobbying against patent reform that would reduce the effectiveness of their warchest of dubious quality.
Abuse of standards bodies. OOXML is better than doc/xls/ppt, but it's not an actual standard like ODF is. Microsoft really messed up the ISO, there, for short-term financial interests.
DRM. After suffering a string of failed DRM schemes, Microsoft (with Google) is pushing DRM into web standards.
Totalitarianism. Microsoft is okay with it. Again, short-term financial interests win over any principles of human dignity.
Marketing. Microsoft has absolutely bonkers product names. It makes understanding their stuff more challenging.
Licensing. At heart, Microsoft makes money on preventing people from helping each other. They need to go to Microsoft to get their software properly developed and properly licensed.
Microsoft hate is not just about products. It's about the whole system. Microsoft is harmful and evil.
A famious trial like say O.J. Simpson or Trayvon Martin ending with guilty verdict where they were CONVICTED but the judge then gave them a $1 fine and let them go free and they never had to admit wrong doing on their part...
O.J. Simpson and George Zimmerman were acquitted. Not guilty.
Their circumstances were really different. O.J. Simpson certainly acted very strangely, starting with the chase in the white Bronco, but he could afford very good lawyers. After a farcically broadcasted trial they managed to reach a not-guilty verdict. Then, in a much shorter trial, O.J. was found to be liable for his ex-wife's death. I think I don't want to understand that logic.
George Zimmerman was on the phone with 911 when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. There's no need to find Trayvon's real killer. The question was whether it could be proven that George was not acting in self-defense. They couldn't prove it, so he was found not guilty of murder.
I don't know whether George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, but I haven't been convinced that he should be punished for it. I certainly don't like the mainstream media's attempts to bait the US into a race war.
'I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome OS or Mobile Safari in iOS.
The browser bundling argument was always the lamest attack on MS. No other computing vendor has been forced to bend over like MS to provide browser alternatives. Nobody ever complained that Notepad and Wordpad were anti-competetive either.
People latch onto the browser thing because that's the only charge that managed to stick all the way through to a conviction. Microsoft certainly is guilty of much more, but a lot of the actions that generate hate are either not explicitly illegal, or nobody is correctly positioned to sue because of them.
The Windows monopoly was the real problem. I especially hate how Microsoft required OEMs to pay for Windows for every computer, and required computers with Windows not to boot another OS. (Linked Byte.com column is now here.) Gassee tried offering BeOS for free, and nobody would take him up on it, because the Windows monopoly was so complete. Eventually, the BeOS shareholders got a return on their investment, but I would have preferred to have a better operating system in the market.
When Internet Explorer 6 was released, it was a nice browser. Like Safari 7 is a nice browser now. It could have spurred other browser makers in healthy competition. Instead, monopoly secure, Microsoft disbanded the IE team. IE 6 became a curse word.
Other parts of Microsoft are still curses on the industry. This is why we hate Microsoft.
It's possible to agree with some of Palin's statements without wishing for McCain and her to be elected.
Personally, I think the Tea Party was the only positive outcome of the 2008 election. It has made the Republican Party that much more interesting, and I'm hoping that the new extremism in Congress will decrease voter apathy.
Then Vote For Change already! As long as people vote for the 2 incumbent parties, nothing will improve.
We have, what, 57% voter turnout? There's all sorts of math you could say about that. I notice that if just half of those non-voters vote for a third-party, and some of the party-voters vote third-party, they could make a third-party candidate win.
Of course, that won't happen, because the non-voters have roughly the same voting opinions as the voters, and because they all get their voting opinion from the mainstream media: The only "serious" candidates are the candidates who can afford the ads on mainstream media.
I say the US is doomed. I just don't know the how or when of the collapse.
Slashdot Mirror
So you create a working configuration, and you script it.
This is not your neighborhood club's web site. This is Google. I'm sure they have the resources at hand to do configuration management on their DNS servers. So, once it's set up, you just need to renew the registrar's DS records appropriately. You need to communicate with your registrar regularly, anyway, to keep your zone from expiring. Unless you want your cloud to fall down like a Microsoft cloud.
Greater complexity is usually greater risk, but we already know that not having DNSSEC is risky. DNSSEC was invented to eliminate certain types of risks.
C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone.
I didn't study technology because I wanted to be satisfied with the status quo. Right now, you cannot eat your cake and still have it, but what if you could?
I upgraded my phone because I wanted greater functionality. (Actually, I upgraded because I wanted the very cheap monthly plans on Republic Wireless.) I now have to plug my phone in every night instead of two to three times a week. The Moto X already has compromised specs to get very good battery life, and I only ran out of battery once after doing a 2-hour Google Hangout with video. I would not mind staying with this amount of power, but increasing battery life even more.
Have you tried enabling it ?:
http://youtube.com/html5
It has been improving, but only very slowly.
Yes, I tried it.
Actually, I tried it in extreme form. I no longer install the Flash player plugin. I'm fed up with the updater.
And what I found was that most YouTube videos don't work in HTML5. So I use Firefox for my main browsing and Google Chrome for interacting with Google web sites.
If Google ends up with a distorted view of browser use statistics, that's their fault.
A failure to get DNSSEC right could take down the domain for hours without an easy way to recover.
What are you talking about? DNS does that, anyway.
DNSSEC records are distributed and expire just like any other record. Make a mistake deploying DNSSEC, then just fix it, and eventually the bad records will expire and the new ones will take over. The major issue I see is that the TLD registrar needs to hold DS records for your key, so now your registrar needs to do NS, DS, and glue records.
Worst case scenario, you lose the secure entry point keys. So, you use some out-of-band management interface to change the DS records in the TLD. That's slightly worse than without DNSSEC, because you could mess up your zone all you want without involving the TLD administrator. But the bad DS records expire, the new ones take over, you're back in business.
For a company the size of Google, they'll probably want the SEP keys to be held in a HSM. Maybe they'll put all their private keys in a bunch of HSMs. You can have more than 1 DS record, so they can distribute their HSMs as widely as they want. There's no good reason why Google can't do DNSSEC.
I see this attitude all the time with managers. It's like a mantra:
It's blocking IPv6, it's blocking DNSSEC, it's blocking RPKI, it's blocking Windows XP retirements. There are a lot of improvements that are stymied because change is considered more scary than just living with the problem.
But it is broke. Computers are hugely complex and buggy. We need the upgrade treadmill just to stay ahead of threats to our computing. Computers are incredibly malleable, and collectively we need major changes. I would be seriously depressed if our current state became the pinnacle of computing.
If you can't put it on a billboard as a feature, they're not interested because it costs money without generating more users.
Seems a bit disturbing that "We help prevent your connection to Google from being hijacked by identity thieves" isn't considered a feature.
They can't do this unilaterally.
RPKI and DNSSEC are important, but they won't work if the resource or domain owner doesn't use them. For example, Google's public DNS service performs DNSSEC validation, but Google's own DNS zones are unsigned and do not validate using DNSSEC. Even with automation, DNSSEC increases the administrative burden of running a domain, so I see why they don't, but I don't excuse them.
If you go back all the way to the beginning of Gates's career, then it should be obvious that he is no friend to freedom, and he never has been.
In the beginning, there was no open source movement, because all software was open source. Computers were so difficult and non-standard, that software was one-off for each machine, and everybody shared everything just to get the darn things to work. Gates was born into the economic elite (his father was a lawyer and his mother was a rich civic busybody), and he brought elite paternalism into computing. The software we run is only by his permission, and we should all pay him for the privilege of improving and distributing it.
Wozniak came from a different mindset. His father was an engineer, and he learned the morality of engineers. He wrote the first BASIC for Apple, but licensed Microsoft's BASIC for later models. When somebody at Apple wrote MacBasic, Bill Gates had the gall to cancel it and not release a decent Basic for the Mac. So, Wozniak experienced Gates's ruthlessness, but he's too nice to say anything about it.
As for us, asshole Feinstein look at us as if we are peons, slaves for the elites, that we do not have any right to enjoy the protection granted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and that we ought to be stripped of everything, and kow-tow to her and her kinds.
I sometimes wonder how monsters like Feinstein get any votes at all while the likes of Feingold can lose to a climate change denier. We have only ourselves to blame.
I didn't vote for her. I voted for somebody else. Yet Feinstein was just, in 2012, reelected with the most votes any senator has ever received, ever.
I think humans are defective. Democracy works fine for small governments, like a village. It's problematic for a political unit so big that you can't travel from one end to another without special arrangements, like California, the 12th largest economy in the world. Democracy is a terrible idea for a country as large as the United States. It's better than any other idea we've tried so far, but there are just too many voices demanding too much attention for it to work well.
So, humans simplify. Most people stick to the 2 parties that they hear about the most. The media talk about the 2 parties that pay them the most. The major party candidates listen to the donors who donate the most. Larry Lessig hopes that campaign finance reform will fix democracy, but humans still need simplified choices.
I think humans can't reasonably manage something as large as the United States. The federal government needs to be scaled way down, or the United States split up, so more local decisions can be made about local issues. But, again, humans are defective, and for example people in New York are personally offended at the local education decisions made in Texas, so the federal government just keeps growing.
There are options from most of the carriers. I'm doing the Republic Wireless $10 unlimited talk and text, but with no data. Having a 4G phone with no data sucks, but the price is compelling, and I should be able to add a prorated data plan for the times when I expect I do need it. Having WiFi calls when I'm at a place with no cell reception is also nice. However, counting the phone, my bill is higher than if I had been able to keep my dumbphone on somebody's T-mobile family plan.
Ting is a great choice for Sprint, Airvoice is a great choice for AT&T, PagePlus is decent for Verizon.
One interesting option is FreedomPop, but they seem to be in beta. Earlier versions of FreedomPop phones had poor performance and very poor voice quality, but they're supposedly improving. It would be interesting to see if they go anywhere with that.
I am 99% sure they used to offer a $5 copy of Windows 8, if you owned a copy of Windows 7 or XP or something.
But I guess if not many people caught this deal, and it is gone now, it is sort of irrelevant.
It was not $5. It was $40 for Windows 8 Pro. I would have upgraded my entire fleet of Vista computers to Windows 8 if it were $5, but I just settled for the XP computers.
I'm betting that when Vista runs out of extended support in 2017, either Microsoft will have come out with another OS, those computers will have become so painfully obsolete that they've been replaced, or I'll just install some Linux on them.
the decrepit operating system
Looks like they're talking about a crippled nuclear plant. Like that poor OS was hit by a mag 9 earthquake and a huge tsunami!
The magnitude 9 earthquake was Windows Rot. The tsunami was Code Red, Nimbda, and their many pals. And the reactor core is melting through the containment vessel, the Microsoft Support Lifecycle. Everybody better evacuate, and leave the OS to people with the protective suits and dosimeters, that is, air gaps or extremely restrictive firewalls.
Last year, I upgraded the OS on my last Windows XP computers to Windows 8.1. Same machines, new OS. Windows 8.1 boots up dramatically faster than Windows XP, does basic stuff more smoothly and more prettily, and crucially is still supported. It's not perfect (understatement of the year) but it works better than Windows XP, and even Windows 7 is a better choice for a PC in the current environment.
Why should one private company have the right to unilaterally declare this kind of planned obsolescence?
Because they made it?
You and the other responses to JDG1980 have missed the point.
Electrolux made my vacuum cleaner, but once I bought it they have no right to it. I can buy my vacuum bags and filters from Electrolux, or I can get clones of them from other manufacturers. With advances in 3D printing, I may even be able to replace parts of the machine itself without involving Electrolux.
It's not so with "intellectual property." I can't simply hire somebody else to support my Windows XP when Microsoft chooses not to. I have to get it from Microsoft itself, and Microsoft charges punitive rates to support Windows XP. You can't actually buy Windows. What you buy is a license to use Windows, with all the contractual limitations that Microsoft can apply.
This is a violation of intuitive, common sense concepts of buying. I have software, I should be able to give my friend a copy of it. Microsoft says each person will individually pay Microsoft for it. The conflict goes back all the way to the beginning of Microsoft, when people shared copies of Microsoft BASIC with each other. Bill Gates disapproved.
The disastrous end of Windows XP just proves that free software is the only long-term practical software.
My friends have lots of pictures and videos of their kids.
Ahhh.... So you're one of those.... People who think it's more important to create a record of life than to actually live it.
You're missing out on a lot. I feel bad for you.
I can make unflattering assumptions about you, too, but I don't think that's a satisfying use of my time.
By the way, both alen and bonehead's assumptions are false.
Why do you need to "talk to them in HD" when almost *none* of the current machines can even display it?
I'm wondering: How much more bandwidth would be available if the ISPs could detect your hardware (say, 1280x860 or some other ridiculously low res) and not send you the 25000x12000 video, but a converted 1280x860.
Just because you bought the bargain-basement Lenovo doesn't mean I'm still using such a pathetically obsolete resolution. Also, basically everybody has a 1080p TV by now. "HD video call" doesn't necessarily mean "PC."
The ISPs aren't supposed to be modifying videos. Many video applications do detect resolutions and available bandwidth, and adjust their encodings appropriately.
You want off-site backup? There's these things called *sneakers* .... 'nuff said.
You disregard the entire history of humanity and backups. Some OCD people will keep backups manually, but large-scale backups won't happen unless it's automatic and unobtrusive.
i'm sure you and your precious data have a special relationship. other than some photos, and some documents in dropbox, i don't have any data to back up
i'm sure your porn and torrents you rarely watch are precious to you, but you are probably a digital hoarder that just collects this stuff just to have it. porn is free in the cloud and its all the same. wipe it and just watch it from the cloud
I can make unflattering assumptions about you, too, but I don't think that's a satisfying use of my time right now.
My friends have lots of pictures and videos of their kids. I certainly hope I don't find those on pornography sites.
I feel this is more about the fact that people have to pay for the service and it is expensive. Not the fact that it is slow. I see a lot of post about how the government should get involved to make it faster and cheaper. Yet I see none offering a solution to the problems with laying thousands of miles of cables (fiber, copper, coax, etc) with all the associated hardware that makes it all work and cost and manpower to maintain that equipment while also serving the customers needs at a better price than what is currently offered. It all has to be paid for......
Yeah, living in the woods, you expect to pay extra for communications of every sort.
My problem is that I'm living in a semi-major city, next to Silicon Valley, with a minor Internet Exchange right in the city and several major exchanges not far away, and it would cost me $80/month for 50/10 cable service. Meanwhile, in South Korea, 100Mbps service would cost maybe $31/month.
As TFA points out, faster and cheaper Internet is possible. It's just not done in most of the US for various reasons.
Well, lucky you, living in a city blessed by Google Fiber.
In the rest of the country, the Internet is generally slow. It doesn't matter if it's liberal or conservative. The government isn't forcing competition, and the government isn't taking the lead on building infrastructure, so the cable and phone companies invest way less on fast Internet than in almost every other industrial country.
Even in Silicon Valley, with its dense urbanization, left-leaning politics, and large population of knowledge workers, most of Silicon Valley has pathetic options for broadband. It's either AT&T, slow and expensive DSL, or Comcast, fast and very expensive cable.
Though, Kessler has a bit of a point with regulations. As you would expect, some of the knowledge workers in Silicon Valley have been trying to get fast and affordable Internet into the area. My current favorite is Sonic.net, but I'm keeping Monkeybrains in mind in case I move into range. It's been extremely slow going. Even AT&T is having problems, getting the permits necessary for their faster-but-still-slow U-verse upgrades.
i'm 40 and have seen the internet grow up and settle for the cheaper plans. i'm at 20/2 now
why do i need to pay for super fast internet?
The point is that the super fast Internet is way too expensive. You're fine with 20/2 now, but if you could have 100/100 for the same price, would you stick with 20/2?
Not everything is publish-subscribe. I want to be able to set up storage boxes in friends' houses or the cloud or whatever, so I can have off-site backups of my data. I want to be able to play with various decentralized communications programs. Some people your age are starting to have grandkids. It would be nice to talk to them in HD, like those science fictions of the 21st Century were saying we would be able to do.
Don't worry about what you'd use the bandwidth for. If you have bandwidth, eventually you'll find a use for it.
It's not about being pressured, the supplier can put so much crapware on your Windows computer that they can more than make up the cost of a Windows license.
It's more than that. A boutique vendor can pay the $200 or whatever for a 1-shot OEM license of Windows 8.1, and charge it back to the customer, but the large vendors are in a relentless price war. They need the volume discount. I'm not sure about now, but back in the day an OEM wouldn't qualify for the volume discount unless every PC they sold ran only Windows. So, sell every PC for $100 more, or just do Microsoft everything. Your choice. No pressure.
In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have.
Ah, yes. The government grants copyright monopolies to software companies, and that's a 'failure of free market capitalism'.
It's not the copyright monopoly that makes me especially upset about Microsoft. It's the OEM contracts that forbid alternative operating systems. Those are a failure of free-market capitalism because large OEMs needed Microsoft so they could sell PCs to a majority market, but then Microsoft used the secret contracts to force the OEMs to use Microsoft software for all PCs they sold. Technically, they're free to take Microsoft's contract or leave it, but economically it's suicide for a large PC vendor not to sell Windows. Long after alternative desktops have withered and died, besides MacOS, only now are we seeing timid development of alternatives, such as the Dell Ubuntu Developer Edition laptops and the HP Android desktops.
There are other free-market violations, too. Microsoft abuses the patent system with terrible patents and paid lobbying to prevent reforms. Microsoft abuses the standards system with terrible standards and paid patsies. Microsoft abuses the media with terrible publications and paid shills. Microsoft is fully in support of the DMCA and DRM, of totalitarianism and censorship. Microsoft is an evil company.
So today MS is not perfect. But we can conclude their products are
1. More standard compliant
2. More reliable
3. Better quality
4. MS is innovating more and copying less
5. Competitors now exist
There are still enough reasons to hate Microsoft. I generally try to avoid Microsoft products, but Microsoft still impacts me in various ways:
Microsoft hate is not just about products. It's about the whole system. Microsoft is harmful and evil.
A famious trial like say O.J. Simpson or Trayvon Martin ending with guilty verdict where they were CONVICTED but the judge then gave them a $1 fine and let them go free and they never had to admit wrong doing on their part...
O.J. Simpson and George Zimmerman were acquitted. Not guilty.
Their circumstances were really different. O.J. Simpson certainly acted very strangely, starting with the chase in the white Bronco, but he could afford very good lawyers. After a farcically broadcasted trial they managed to reach a not-guilty verdict. Then, in a much shorter trial, O.J. was found to be liable for his ex-wife's death. I think I don't want to understand that logic.
George Zimmerman was on the phone with 911 when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. There's no need to find Trayvon's real killer. The question was whether it could be proven that George was not acting in self-defense. They couldn't prove it, so he was found not guilty of murder.
I don't know whether George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, but I haven't been convinced that he should be punished for it. I certainly don't like the mainstream media's attempts to bait the US into a race war.
'I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome OS or Mobile Safari in iOS.
The browser bundling argument was always the lamest attack on MS. No other computing vendor has been forced to bend over like MS to provide browser alternatives. Nobody ever complained that Notepad and Wordpad were anti-competetive either.
People latch onto the browser thing because that's the only charge that managed to stick all the way through to a conviction. Microsoft certainly is guilty of much more, but a lot of the actions that generate hate are either not explicitly illegal, or nobody is correctly positioned to sue because of them.
The Windows monopoly was the real problem. I especially hate how Microsoft required OEMs to pay for Windows for every computer, and required computers with Windows not to boot another OS. (Linked Byte.com column is now here.) Gassee tried offering BeOS for free, and nobody would take him up on it, because the Windows monopoly was so complete. Eventually, the BeOS shareholders got a return on their investment, but I would have preferred to have a better operating system in the market.
When Internet Explorer 6 was released, it was a nice browser. Like Safari 7 is a nice browser now. It could have spurred other browser makers in healthy competition. Instead, monopoly secure, Microsoft disbanded the IE team. IE 6 became a curse word.
Other parts of Microsoft are still curses on the industry. This is why we hate Microsoft.
It's possible to agree with some of Palin's statements without wishing for McCain and her to be elected.
Personally, I think the Tea Party was the only positive outcome of the 2008 election. It has made the Republican Party that much more interesting, and I'm hoping that the new extremism in Congress will decrease voter apathy.
Then Vote For Change already! As long as people vote for the 2 incumbent parties, nothing will improve.
We have, what, 57% voter turnout? There's all sorts of math you could say about that. I notice that if just half of those non-voters vote for a third-party, and some of the party-voters vote third-party, they could make a third-party candidate win.
Of course, that won't happen, because the non-voters have roughly the same voting opinions as the voters, and because they all get their voting opinion from the mainstream media: The only "serious" candidates are the candidates who can afford the ads on mainstream media.
I say the US is doomed. I just don't know the how or when of the collapse.