Why couldn't they have just made it user serviceable for RAM?
Apple's target audiences are switchers, and believe it or not, mostly novice to "experienced but has never undone the case screw on their PC" users.
You're not Apple's main target audience. Just because you're buying one doesn't mean you're the target audience. Repeat after me. "I am not the target audience." Neither are the people who whined the video card can't be changed, or you can't put in more than 1GB of ram, or it doesn't have a G5, etc. Apple targets specific markets and usually does very well in them. Apple will sell every Mac Mini they can make, virtually guaranteed.
Furthermore, a slashdot user talking about being nervous about using a screwdriver to pop a latch on a case strikes me as pretty absurd. Turn in your slashdot membership- NOW.
Oh come on. Not many people have enough photos and MP3s to fill even 10GB nevermind 120GB or 160GB
With 5-8MP consumer cameras these days? With miniDV camcorders all over the place? Games taking 1-2GB? 40GB being the mid-level iPod? Are you joking? Garageband takes up 1GB, iDVD 2, the rest of the system about 2GB or so. Nevermind that to operate efficiently, you need about 20% free disk space no matter what the filesystem to keep things from getting badly fragmented.
Future space explorers may apply a "spray-on" second skin, an organic, biodegradable layer offering protection in extremely dusty planetary environments. Incorporated into the second skin will be electrically actuated artificial muscle fibers to enhance human strength and stamina.
ooooooKay then. I suppose this has been dreamed up by the same people who envisioned "Nuclear cars", jetpacks, tube-elevators, practically sentient computers, and ray guns?
Seriously- what qualifies some of these people to talk about the future of space ANYTHING? For 40 years, they've been mostly getting it wrong, and doing not much better than playing the part of scifi authors.
Why does the "Tech-Blog" have no author and read exactly like a corporate press release, trying to cram down my throat why I NEED this keyboard?
It's probably some of the most blatant advertising copy I've read in quite a while. At least have some subtlety to get your product "reviewed" by one of the tech magazines or something...
The best part was that they determined afterwards that most people answer their phones, don't screen survey calls, etc. Do they live in some kind of alternate reality?
That said, I see several reasons for the results- a)people not understanding the questions (such as responding to "have you used the internet" as if it was actually "do you have internet access at home"...people do this all the time) b)lying to fit in ("Oh sure, I have the Intraweb! Yeah, I know how to use it!"), or c)lying just to fuck with the results (like we used to do in high school with the anonymous drug surveys. "PCP?" "Oh no, I prefer cocaine, that PCP stuff will fuck you up." "You're both full of it, I like Speed"...is a sample of the lunchtime conversation on survey-day).
Mobileread.com is reporting that wireless power recharging of mobile devices may become commercially available by the end of this year.
You mean like my 10 year old shaver and 15 year old electric tooth brush?
Gee whiz, replacing a wall-wart with something ten times larger and more obnoxious to try and pack. Oh boy!
I suspect their grand plan is to make these places omnipresent- hotels, airplane lunch trays/armwrests etc....but it's a classic chicken/egg problem. What manufacturer will bother licensing something like this for their device if there's nowhere to charge it...and what airline/hotel/airport will spend the money to buy and install these plates if there are no devices to use them?
The older iPods, especially the Mini, have been rightfully criticized for being somewhat deficient in bass, and although the bigger players have flat frequency response, they have trouble sustaining big bass notes."
I had a 3rd gen, now I have a 4th gen. Both drove my Grado SR-60 headphones (think Radar from Mash) just fine. In fact- they do a noticeably better job driving them at low frequency than my Powerbook.
Any problems with low frequency response probably have something to do with the fact that, despite the Steve Reality Distortion Field, you cannot get good low-frequency response in a tiny little earplug. You can put marketspeak on your website till the cows come home about Neodymium magnets make 'em better- they're still just tiny earplug speakers.
If you want OpenOffice on OS X, help make one of the NATIVE ports more popular by using it
Bah, silly developer. This is good- any true MacOS X developer who actually tries out OpenOffice under X11 will, after his or her face has stopped twitching enough that they can see again, look for some alternative and find NeoOffice and start helping purely out of motivation to let OpenOffice under X11 die a fast death:-)
So much for the firewire ports on set-top boxes that let you connect a MythTV (or other roll-it-yourself PVR).
It looks very much like a PCMCIA card, but something tells me that none of the interface specs/protocol will be made public. God forbid consumers or third party companies deliver solutions.
Sounds like a way to keep only the "cool kids" from playing in the sandbox more than anything else.
Seriously, why is Dynamism charging $820 for a PDA that costs a couple hundred dollars, which they've essentially just shipped from a Japanese wholesaler, and which they've switched keycaps on?
How much of that $300-400 in profit goes to Slashdot for pushing their overpriced products?
My favoured platform though is Mac OS X. There's a whole list of platforms in the FAQ, but Mac isn't amongst them.
So my questions are is Mac OS X supported, and if so are there any plans to make a Mac OS X.pkg installation file?
7.x compiles right out of the box- in fact, Apple's Remote Desktop system actually installs and uses PostgreSQL for all its data storage (client system data and whatnot; ARD can collect a lot of per-system data). Very slick.
There are a number of independent projects that want to create replication add-ons, like pgreplication [postgresql.org] and the older, more academic Postgres-R, but that's not really production quality so far.
Well, the gig was up after everyone figured out that Postgres-R was just Postgres with a big muffler and wing.
if Rick Berman were to show up on my porch selling Star Trek cookies, I think I'd still slam the door in his face.
I know everyone loves to bash Berman, but to be honest, the problem isn't him. Rather, after twenty seasons of Star Trek, pretty much every plot had already been exhausted. If you think he was the first to recycle material, well- how many times did the crew get "trapped" in a holodeck world in ST:TNG?
There's a reason many call it Soap In Space. It's been formulaic and recycled for almost twenty years. The real problem is that the whole ST formula has completely worn out to the extent that no Vulcan sexiness will bring it back.
That's not easy- that's foolish. What if you discover a file is corrupt/missing AFTER you do one of your backups?
There's a reason incremental backups have been around for two plus decades, and "update the difference between two drives with rsync" is not "incremental".
If you were going to reply and say "oh, but I only do it every X weeks", well- you'll now loose weeks of work if you loose a file/drive.
Google is recognized as the global leader in innovative search technology.
Too bad it still can't handle mailing list archives worth a damn. Search for Linux and Blender, and you'll get an email about Blender with the word "Linux" in one of the "Next by [thread] [author] [date]" links. Useless.
Too bad they're regularly taken to task by "optimization" companies (have been for years). Thanks- I'll pick Teoma as my "most innovative" search engine.
I flat-out laughed when Page said this during their ABC News People of the Year interview:
"We have kind of a mantra of 'don't be evil,' which is to do the best things that we know how for our users, for our customers and for everyone. So, if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing."
Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?
Yesterday in Massachusetts, a snow plow operator, too dumb to know his truck had GPS, exposed himself to a woman at a coffee shop
Last year the state switched from logbooks to these devices. For weeks (and I do mean weeks) snowplow operators bitched about it to any news crew that would point a camera at them. They said most of them had not received training on their use (true), the snow in the air/on the truck, and cab design would often block the signal from reaching the unit and cause it to not record miles that had been plowed (also true.) What nobody was willing to say was that it ALSO recorded every coffee break that truck operator Bob reported previously as "down that country lane over there". Most of the legitimate complaints were addressed with training by the state and redesigned brackets to hold the units to keep them on the dash and in a good position.
Every snow plow operator in the country was following along and knew all about these devices well before the first flake dropped last year. Hell, MA truck operators threatened to strike. It was a BIG deal.
As much as we make fun of the computer knowledge of our governments, they finally seem to be on the right track. You must have some of these guys in your pocket to really have a chance. Can you trust them? Probably not completely... but if they bring you some knowledge, skills, and some of the most damaging players, then it's worth it.
Um...you do realize they're blackmailing him, right?
Honestly, I can't decide if being blackmailed is better or worse than him rotting in jail. We don't let people off the hook for robbing convenience stores "for fun" or "for the challenge", unless they're insane enough that they don't understand it's wrong (in which case, they go to a mental institution, not jail) and people intelligent enough to do the hacking are intelligent enough to understand breaking into something that doesn't belong to you is wrong; anything else is just creative ass-covering by hackers and their lawyers.
In case you hadn't figured it out by now, I'm not a Mitnick fanboy, which I know isn't very popular even today...
All the largest portions of stock are owned by company executives and wealthy investors.
Neither, actually- the largest chunks of stock, in most public companies are owned by investment companies, funds, etc. NOT private investors.
Even a modest investment fund makes a person with a couple million look like a pauper. When companies do things for "shareholders", they're doing it for "the investment companies which want to see dividends and stock price increases or they vote to fire executive management, or sell their shares".
Investment banking isn't magic because you make the right buy/sell decisions; it's in large part due to you being big enough to be a Big Fish and influence company direction. HOW you influence company direction is what makes your investment successful. Do it right, stock goes up, you make money. Screw the company over, you loose your investment.
This is also why sinking share prices make executives and companies as a whole very vulnerable. Not only can they be fired, but a hostile company can go around talking to corporate investors and offer to buy their shares in the other company. Let's say Fund A is not happy with the way WidgetTech is performing; EvilWidget comes along sniffing blood after seeing the stock drop, and offers to buy their shares. EvilWidget does so to Funds B, C, D, E and F. A, C, E, and F all do. B, D, and private investors suddenly find themselves meeting EvilWidget at the next shareholder's meeting, introduced to them as the new majority stockholder. EvilWidget happens to have proposed a merger just prior (where WidgetTech execs told them to go fuck themselves because they were offering pennies on the dollar), and the shareholders (majority- EvilWidget) vote to mandate the officers accept (officers in a corporation "serve at the pleasure of the board"). That, in a nutshell and oversimplified, is a hostile takeover.
PCs are just not truly "hackable" by the average hobbiest anymore.
Bullshit. They've never been easier; you're dismissing USB, serial, and parallel ports, along with I2C, among other things. All are quite easy to interface with (probably the easiest is parallel, since you can use it as 8+ digital IO lines...with suitable current draw protection of course!)
I would counter that the development of inexpensive microprocessor systems like the Basic STAMP, the Rabbit, etc which usually have (or come with) libraries to talk to other stuff have made interfacing things easier than before. No hard-coding in assembly that routine to do serial to your Apple IIe.
No, REAL nerds have workstations that came from the FACTORY with blinky lights for everything!
(old HP workstations has memory bank, cpu heartbeat, network, etc indicators on the front bezel. Also, the BeBox had LED cpu graphs up the side. Let's not forget the Cray units with the big red LED boards showing memory status...)
Oh, and an aside- I imagine a Beowulf cluster of these would be necessary to read a webpage.
Oh yeah I guess Polly boy has something to put on his resume now as if someone else was going to steal his glory and get away with it.
A couple years ago I identified that a worm was geting past a lot of virus software simply because it had CF/LF's at the end of each line instead of just CFs; they looked identical, but they were not, and virus software was missing the new "strain".
I emailed a well-known head of a well-known security mailing list, who just so happens to work for a private security firm. He congradulated me, thanked me for finding it. The next day- I found an article where he was interviewed and said "I found..." and then pretty much word for word what I wrote in my email.
I was fucking pissed. The guy stole credit for my discovery, and I began to see why he was such an "expert" in the field.
I understand EXACTLY where this guy is coming from.
Surely a bath in some sort of sealant post production would eliminate this problem? Finding a way not to seal up the connection points would be a challenge, though.
It's called "conformal coating", and many PCBs already have it.
Masking isn't even remotely a challenge- it's used extensively. Many PCBs are 'wave' soldered, which means a wave is set up in a solder tank, and the peak of the wave barely makes contact with the board from side to side.
The federal system has a half dozen people dealing with it specifically. All these people are doing this full time.
ONLY 6 people in the entire federal government are working on electronic filing? Are you fucking kidding me? No wonder it's a disaster and has gone absolutely nowhere in almost a decade. Can we hire another dozen or two, and crank out a java-based program by next year please? I mean shit, we spend a billion every few days in Iraq, what's a million to make life easier for half the country with PCs and an internet connection?
The knowledge is quite specialized
Would you mind telling me why "how to do" something 240 million people are required to do, is "quite specialized" knowledge?
What's the incentive for the government to push for something like this?
Surveys show people on average can end up spending 40 hours or more on preparing their taxes over a course of weeks. That's a pathetic waste of time.
How about the loss of revenue by mistakes from taxpayers? Cost of sending them "you fucked up your calculations" letters in the mail, etc? I know I wouldn't resent the whole process nearly as much if it was just simpler.
they'd be taking business away from companies
Aha- there we are...the truth of the matter comes out...an entire industry is threatened, and not just tax software companies- tax accountants and attorneys too...even though they represent an insignificant number of jobs, we need to complicate an entire nation's tax code and processes to keep them employed?
Did it occur to you that the federal government could directly employ these experts and programmers to produce a free program? There's no need for TurboTax, Quicken, etc to even exist.
In light of what has recently taken place, we are going to be making some major changes. We are first going to be migrating to and creating a new forum for all the users. The tracker will keep running but we will make some changes. We will disable the ability to integrate torrent information in the forum. However, we will also enable RSS accessibility. There will be other major changes - possibly even moving to a new tracker system. The system we have now is very functional but I'm certain you all can see some deliquencies which not only reside in our tracker but in just about any other tracker on the Internet. We have been working on most of these changes already but have decided to implement them sooner than anticipated.
Huuuuh? That's like saying "because it is snowing today, I will not wash my socks, but I will turn up the volume on the stereo". Am I missing something here?
I also love the general tone of "we're being good guys and complying with the developer's wishes!" What a bunch of shit- these people distribute pirated software, hello!
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's target audiences are switchers, and believe it or not, mostly novice to "experienced but has never undone the case screw on their PC" users.
You're not Apple's main target audience. Just because you're buying one doesn't mean you're the target audience. Repeat after me. "I am not the target audience." Neither are the people who whined the video card can't be changed, or you can't put in more than 1GB of ram, or it doesn't have a G5, etc. Apple targets specific markets and usually does very well in them. Apple will sell every Mac Mini they can make, virtually guaranteed.
Furthermore, a slashdot user talking about being nervous about using a screwdriver to pop a latch on a case strikes me as pretty absurd. Turn in your slashdot membership- NOW.
Oh come on. Not many people have enough photos and MP3s to fill even 10GB nevermind 120GB or 160GB
With 5-8MP consumer cameras these days? With miniDV camcorders all over the place? Games taking 1-2GB? 40GB being the mid-level iPod? Are you joking? Garageband takes up 1GB, iDVD 2, the rest of the system about 2GB or so. Nevermind that to operate efficiently, you need about 20% free disk space no matter what the filesystem to keep things from getting badly fragmented.
ooooooKay then. I suppose this has been dreamed up by the same people who envisioned "Nuclear cars", jetpacks, tube-elevators, practically sentient computers, and ray guns?
Seriously- what qualifies some of these people to talk about the future of space ANYTHING? For 40 years, they've been mostly getting it wrong, and doing not much better than playing the part of scifi authors.
Why does the "Tech-Blog" have no author and read exactly like a corporate press release, trying to cram down my throat why I NEED this keyboard?
It's probably some of the most blatant advertising copy I've read in quite a while. At least have some subtlety to get your product "reviewed" by one of the tech magazines or something...
What do you expect from an organization that did a telephone survey to determine the effectiveness of telephone surveys?
The best part was that they determined afterwards that most people answer their phones, don't screen survey calls, etc. Do they live in some kind of alternate reality?
That said, I see several reasons for the results- a)people not understanding the questions (such as responding to "have you used the internet" as if it was actually "do you have internet access at home"...people do this all the time) b)lying to fit in ("Oh sure, I have the Intraweb! Yeah, I know how to use it!"), or c)lying just to fuck with the results (like we used to do in high school with the anonymous drug surveys. "PCP?" "Oh no, I prefer cocaine, that PCP stuff will fuck you up." "You're both full of it, I like Speed"...is a sample of the lunchtime conversation on survey-day).
You mean like my 10 year old shaver and 15 year old electric tooth brush?
Gee whiz, replacing a wall-wart with something ten times larger and more obnoxious to try and pack. Oh boy!
I suspect their grand plan is to make these places omnipresent- hotels, airplane lunch trays/armwrests etc....but it's a classic chicken/egg problem. What manufacturer will bother licensing something like this for their device if there's nowhere to charge it...and what airline/hotel/airport will spend the money to buy and install these plates if there are no devices to use them?
I had a 3rd gen, now I have a 4th gen. Both drove my Grado SR-60 headphones (think Radar from Mash) just fine. In fact- they do a noticeably better job driving them at low frequency than my Powerbook.
Any problems with low frequency response probably have something to do with the fact that, despite the Steve Reality Distortion Field, you cannot get good low-frequency response in a tiny little earplug. You can put marketspeak on your website till the cows come home about Neodymium magnets make 'em better- they're still just tiny earplug speakers.
Bah, silly developer. This is good- any true MacOS X developer who actually tries out OpenOffice under X11 will, after his or her face has stopped twitching enough that they can see again, look for some alternative and find NeoOffice and start helping purely out of motivation to let OpenOffice under X11 die a fast death :-)
So much for the firewire ports on set-top boxes that let you connect a MythTV (or other roll-it-yourself PVR).
It looks very much like a PCMCIA card, but something tells me that none of the interface specs/protocol will be made public. God forbid consumers or third party companies deliver solutions.
Sounds like a way to keep only the "cool kids" from playing in the sandbox more than anything else.
I believe the phrase for this is, "When all else fails, lower your standards".
Seriously, why is Dynamism charging $820 for a PDA that costs a couple hundred dollars, which they've essentially just shipped from a Japanese wholesaler, and which they've switched keycaps on?
How much of that $300-400 in profit goes to Slashdot for pushing their overpriced products?
7.x compiles right out of the box- in fact, Apple's Remote Desktop system actually installs and uses PostgreSQL for all its data storage (client system data and whatnot; ARD can collect a lot of per-system data). Very slick.
Well, the gig was up after everyone figured out that Postgres-R was just Postgres with a big muffler and wing.
I know everyone loves to bash Berman, but to be honest, the problem isn't him. Rather, after twenty seasons of Star Trek, pretty much every plot had already been exhausted. If you think he was the first to recycle material, well- how many times did the crew get "trapped" in a holodeck world in ST:TNG?
There's a reason many call it Soap In Space. It's been formulaic and recycled for almost twenty years. The real problem is that the whole ST formula has completely worn out to the extent that no Vulcan sexiness will bring it back.
There's a reason incremental backups have been around for two plus decades, and "update the difference between two drives with rsync" is not "incremental".
If you were going to reply and say "oh, but I only do it every X weeks", well- you'll now loose weeks of work if you loose a file/drive.
Maybe then they'd start asking questions. Instead, they're given a nice whitewash where nothing is out of place.
Google is recognized as the global leader in innovative search technology.
Too bad it still can't handle mailing list archives worth a damn. Search for Linux and Blender, and you'll get an email about Blender with the word "Linux" in one of the "Next by [thread] [author] [date]" links. Useless.
Too bad they're regularly taken to task by "optimization" companies (have been for years). Thanks- I'll pick Teoma as my "most innovative" search engine.
I flat-out laughed when Page said this during their ABC News People of the Year interview:
"We have kind of a mantra of 'don't be evil,' which is to do the best things that we know how for our users, for our customers and for everyone. So, if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing."
Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?
Last year the state switched from logbooks to these devices. For weeks (and I do mean weeks) snowplow operators bitched about it to any news crew that would point a camera at them. They said most of them had not received training on their use (true), the snow in the air/on the truck, and cab design would often block the signal from reaching the unit and cause it to not record miles that had been plowed (also true.) What nobody was willing to say was that it ALSO recorded every coffee break that truck operator Bob reported previously as "down that country lane over there". Most of the legitimate complaints were addressed with training by the state and redesigned brackets to hold the units to keep them on the dash and in a good position.
Every snow plow operator in the country was following along and knew all about these devices well before the first flake dropped last year. Hell, MA truck operators threatened to strike. It was a BIG deal.
Um...you do realize they're blackmailing him, right?
Honestly, I can't decide if being blackmailed is better or worse than him rotting in jail. We don't let people off the hook for robbing convenience stores "for fun" or "for the challenge", unless they're insane enough that they don't understand it's wrong (in which case, they go to a mental institution, not jail) and people intelligent enough to do the hacking are intelligent enough to understand breaking into something that doesn't belong to you is wrong; anything else is just creative ass-covering by hackers and their lawyers.
In case you hadn't figured it out by now, I'm not a Mitnick fanboy, which I know isn't very popular even today...
Neither, actually- the largest chunks of stock, in most public companies are owned by investment companies, funds, etc. NOT private investors.
Even a modest investment fund makes a person with a couple million look like a pauper. When companies do things for "shareholders", they're doing it for "the investment companies which want to see dividends and stock price increases or they vote to fire executive management, or sell their shares".
Investment banking isn't magic because you make the right buy/sell decisions; it's in large part due to you being big enough to be a Big Fish and influence company direction. HOW you influence company direction is what makes your investment successful. Do it right, stock goes up, you make money. Screw the company over, you loose your investment.
This is also why sinking share prices make executives and companies as a whole very vulnerable. Not only can they be fired, but a hostile company can go around talking to corporate investors and offer to buy their shares in the other company. Let's say Fund A is not happy with the way WidgetTech is performing; EvilWidget comes along sniffing blood after seeing the stock drop, and offers to buy their shares. EvilWidget does so to Funds B, C, D, E and F. A, C, E, and F all do. B, D, and private investors suddenly find themselves meeting EvilWidget at the next shareholder's meeting, introduced to them as the new majority stockholder. EvilWidget happens to have proposed a merger just prior (where WidgetTech execs told them to go fuck themselves because they were offering pennies on the dollar), and the shareholders (majority- EvilWidget) vote to mandate the officers accept (officers in a corporation "serve at the pleasure of the board"). That, in a nutshell and oversimplified, is a hostile takeover.
Bullshit. They've never been easier; you're dismissing USB, serial, and parallel ports, along with I2C, among other things. All are quite easy to interface with (probably the easiest is parallel, since you can use it as 8+ digital IO lines...with suitable current draw protection of course!)
I would counter that the development of inexpensive microprocessor systems like the Basic STAMP, the Rabbit, etc which usually have (or come with) libraries to talk to other stuff have made interfacing things easier than before. No hard-coding in assembly that routine to do serial to your Apple IIe.
No, REAL nerds have workstations that came from the FACTORY with blinky lights for everything!
(old HP workstations has memory bank, cpu heartbeat, network, etc indicators on the front bezel. Also, the BeBox had LED cpu graphs up the side. Let's not forget the Cray units with the big red LED boards showing memory status...)
Oh, and an aside- I imagine a Beowulf cluster of these would be necessary to read a webpage.
A couple years ago I identified that a worm was geting past a lot of virus software simply because it had CF/LF's at the end of each line instead of just CFs; they looked identical, but they were not, and virus software was missing the new "strain".
I emailed a well-known head of a well-known security mailing list, who just so happens to work for a private security firm. He congradulated me, thanked me for finding it. The next day- I found an article where he was interviewed and said "I found..." and then pretty much word for word what I wrote in my email.
I was fucking pissed. The guy stole credit for my discovery, and I began to see why he was such an "expert" in the field.
I understand EXACTLY where this guy is coming from.
It's called "conformal coating", and many PCBs already have it.
Masking isn't even remotely a challenge- it's used extensively. Many PCBs are 'wave' soldered, which means a wave is set up in a solder tank, and the peak of the wave barely makes contact with the board from side to side.
ONLY 6 people in the entire federal government are working on electronic filing? Are you fucking kidding me? No wonder it's a disaster and has gone absolutely nowhere in almost a decade. Can we hire another dozen or two, and crank out a java-based program by next year please? I mean shit, we spend a billion every few days in Iraq, what's a million to make life easier for half the country with PCs and an internet connection?
The knowledge is quite specialized
Would you mind telling me why "how to do" something 240 million people are required to do, is "quite specialized" knowledge?
What's the incentive for the government to push for something like this?
Surveys show people on average can end up spending 40 hours or more on preparing their taxes over a course of weeks. That's a pathetic waste of time.
How about the loss of revenue by mistakes from taxpayers? Cost of sending them "you fucked up your calculations" letters in the mail, etc? I know I wouldn't resent the whole process nearly as much if it was just simpler.
they'd be taking business away from companies
Aha- there we are...the truth of the matter comes out...an entire industry is threatened, and not just tax software companies- tax accountants and attorneys too...even though they represent an insignificant number of jobs, we need to complicate an entire nation's tax code and processes to keep them employed?
Did it occur to you that the federal government could directly employ these experts and programmers to produce a free program? There's no need for TurboTax, Quicken, etc to even exist.
From the news page of the site in question:
In light of what has recently taken place, we are going to be making some major changes. We are first going to be migrating to and creating a new forum for all the users. The tracker will keep running but we will make some changes. We will disable the ability to integrate torrent information in the forum. However, we will also enable RSS accessibility. There will be other major changes - possibly even moving to a new tracker system. The system we have now is very functional but I'm certain you all can see some deliquencies which not only reside in our tracker but in just about any other tracker on the Internet. We have been working on most of these changes already but have decided to implement them sooner than anticipated.
Huuuuh? That's like saying "because it is snowing today, I will not wash my socks, but I will turn up the volume on the stereo". Am I missing something here?
I also love the general tone of "we're being good guys and complying with the developer's wishes!" What a bunch of shit- these people distribute pirated software, hello!