I actually prefer them not to care. It seems in this case email was hijacked and GoDaddy is not supposed to deny the transfer if everything is done properly. It is a real pain in the ass trying to obtain an "utility bill" or other "proof" from $5 / month web service customer when all they want is to get their domain transferred from the previous $15 / month provider (provided of course that the previous ISP who registered the domain was generous enough to put a real owner contact email to whois data...). It *should* be that easy for you average low-cost domain.
If you want your domain provider to "care" - which in this case is that you get personal service and are not just using automation yourself - you pay (actually GoDaddy also offers phone verification option for extra fee...). If you are bankofamerica.com or microsoft.com you should really do take a bit more expensive option - it is not likely that you change your registrar yearly to the cheapest alternative. But if you are a random website (this is first time I heard about css-tricks.com, I really don't know if they are big and famous site on web design field) looking for the cheapest option this is how it should be, because on the other side you have very angry customers complaining that registrars hold their domains hostage; been there in the middle answering to customer on the other side that no, this is not that easy because your registrar requires this and that and I have to bill you by the hour and on the other side having the registrar jump me through obstacle course to transfer ordinary domains by just flagging transfer "suspicious" and everything from first tier customer support is some form of "sorry, I can't do that".
By the way US registrars - identification by utility bill is something we do not do in Europe - the whole concept is strange, so please do not ask me for my clients electricity bill, they most likely can't provide one.
Herded, you mean. Why do you people continue to put up with this crap? And don't try to tell me it's only in the USA. Europe was doing intrusive "screening" long before the USA started: we used to be criticised by Europeans for having "lax security" because we allowed people to get on airplanes without first proving that they were not armed criminals.
Europe has its own problems, to simplify things (hey, isn't that what discussing on Internet is for?) historically it has been that in Europe, you have passports, are required to have a social security number and uniquely identified and once you are cleared you are free to travel. See the Schengen treaty. This of course involves all kinds of nasty stuff of information exchange between authorities but it has been quite non-intrusive - if you have a passport from Schengen country and are not on Interpol/Europol list you have quite a clear passage. Same has been true for "outsiders" entering EU - once you are in and cleared a few basic database checks you are ok to travel without difficulty.
Then enter 9/11 and the security hysteria. Now we have the worst of both worlds - the USA is demanding passanger information from EU (in addition to which it has collected before, plus fingerprinting and photographs) and EU has to implement the intrusive technical measures; visit Schipol, Amsterdam for an example, the nudescanners and extra checks are only for USA-bound flights because USA requires them.
So - we now have the pat-this, register that, screen-your-shoes of USA (where "serial numbering" of people has been and is a great big scary no-no) and the data collecting tradition of Europe (bio-passports, RFID:s, possibility to abuse on global travel databases) combined. If you ask me this is a) a huge money sink and b) a disaster waiting to happen.
Large databases of people ("proving you are not armed criminal") is problematic, yes. Can it be abused, yes. Is it foolproof, no way. Does it prevent cross-border crime (remember, Europe is not as tight union as the USA yet and there are internal treaties inside- and outside EU states), yes, somewhat, and it has to be done, and USA is doing exactly the same but you just have dozens of different data sources because "GUID for people" is scary shit. Combine these approaches and watch the mess boiling...
Aren't the stripped down versions still something like $200?
Not hard to check - direct as a download from Adobe webshop $50 right now (it comes with "50% discount" so "normal" price would be $100, but I really don't know if anyone has to ever pay that much).
I don't have the data but I would guess most sales of these versions come from bundles with digital cameras and printers with a few casual upgraders here and there. I tend to agree with the parent - Adobe doesn't gain much by lowering the price of Photoshop, price really is the perception of quality. Even Microsoft does this with Office - while you can get a "home" or educational license for $99 or so when you know to ask about it (or it comes bundled with purchase of new computer) it is very important to their image that there are the nice boxed double- or triple priced versions on display at store.
Agreed, I'm hunting for a job too and what is not touched by this economy are programmers. Recruiting sites are full of open positions for programming jobs, from starting code monkey to full-fledged designer with project leaders skills.
But you have to be good. I've done last years of my career mainly consulting gigs for a variety of customers (feasibility studies, risk assessments, requirement documents and so on) with the virtualization planning and sysadmin work (both planning and administrative work) on the side and less programming than in the years before.
Guess what I'm doing now?
Refreshing my memory on J2EE, doing exercises at home lab. (I have done integration work on J2EE but not so much that I could call myself an expert.)
I honestly can't see this as a big problem on Microsoft - they have quite a long track record of supporting their tools - even legacy Visual Basic skills can be used today quite effortlessly. Yes, they have had their misses and some tools or even languages (J++ comes to mind from the old days...) have been deprecated quite quickly after a blistering start but take a look around - there are frameworks and languages coming and going everywhere. If you want to bet safely learn C and C++ and code your own supporting libraries. Yes, it sucks when vendors pull plug on technology. But the days of learning Fortran or Visual Basic once and expecting to have guaranteed job for the rest of your life are over (well, if you are a true Fortran or VB genius you can get a nice paying job in maintenance these days...), And the same applies to OSS as well - they are not immune. Projects and languages come and go - yes, in the support side they are at an advantage because if you are a true guru you can dive into the source and support the platform - but I don't see the platform support as a huge issue on Microsoft side either. With right DLLs you can still run Win32 VB applications just fine - yes, the vendor doesn't support those anymore and doesn't develop new features but you still got what you have when you chose the platform.
Can you give examples of Open Source projects (in programming) which Microsoft has tried to emulate and has ended up with barely working and sucking copy?
Silverlight on web had really no big and bright future, it was just a poke on Adobe to steal marketshare on (DRM) video delivery. But those skills learned there are not totally wasted, it is not *that* hard to transform from one Microsoft architecture to another. But if your big bet was Silverlight on browsers (cross-platform/browser) then well, you are out of luck but it did not require a genius to figure that out from the start.
You are right in that yes, it is the price that matters in the group they target. And despite the dodgy fees (they are far from clear but even the big "traditional airlines" do this; last time I booked a flight from lufthansa.com I was required to use PayPal to not have additional "credit card fee" applied to me at checkout...) and these PR stunts their service actually works and they are profitable and you can quite reasonably expect to get you from place a to b at the time they promise to - many cheapo airlines can't meet that; the number of chepo-airlines gone belly up in recent years is quite high.
Ryanair is good if you know what you are getting into. Yes, they charge for everything and you have zero flexibility and you have to deal with second class airport terminals but it is generally cheap and the specials can be a real bargain. So if you are a student or have a little flexibility in when and to where to fly you can have holiday travelling for cheap with them. It is not a business travellers airline though in any way...
It is quite bad, but it is not all due to decline in sales, main reason is that they have largely switched to Asian subcontractors in manufacturing, and design jobs are also not "safe" anymore. Relating to article - Nokia has a reputation of being very demanding customer, ie. requiring advance promises of capacity even before starting negotiations and a policy of basicly dictating subcontractor prices ("for next 2 years you must cut 10% off your prices or we are taking all our business elsewhere"). These thing combined has killed or got into deep trouble a lot of businesses in Finland and the lesson learned is that never trust a single customer if you tend to be alive and profitable in the long term.
So Apple's secret weapon is to monopolize parts so its competitors can't afford them?
I hope the manufacturers are not stupid enough to fall on that one. Many subcontractors learned the hard way in the past 10 years that while getting a firm deal exclusively for something to one customer is nice in short term it can be a deadly blow when time comes to renew the contract and suddenly your only major customer goes for the next (cheaper) offer.
I speak as a Finn and what we have seen Nokia did here when they were the king of the hill in global mobile phone business and bought huge amounts of subcontractor work from companies whose only customer was Nokia. And the survivors who now are still alive are those who did not rely exclusively on Nokia but sought out also other customers.
Completely agree. VMware is expensive, but it is the best game in town.
But competition is catching up and hopefully that drives VMware to rethink their sales tactics and licensing seriously. Because they have now the best technology (tried KVM, Xen and VMware here) and confusing as hell licensing.
From outside it seems like there is an internal competition who invents the most confusing pricing model at VMware and the winner is randomly selected every year.
Please VMware, cut the crap out and focus on technology, money will follow.
Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.
Ummm.... I thought this was a nerd-site, not a site for "what is the best way to do your spreadsheet / home movie authoring / etc.".
What's the harm tinkering with technology, be it dead, buried, cold, still barely breathing or a rising star?
If popularity dictates what your hobbies are we are going to live in a very, very dull world. I don't know what plans for this machine mentioned in the article are - I don't really care if it succeeds or not, but it is news for nerds. Although I agree that Amiga news and what actually has happened regarding commercial products under the Amiga brand have turned almost always in the past 15 years into tragicomic-facepalm-mess.
There are user clubs still for all kinds of legacy systems, even if they have been "dead" for long by all external measurements.
I like very much to game on PS3 and Xbox360. They are wonderful pieces of gaming technology. But I still occasionally fire up my A500 or A1200, hook it up to my TV and play some old goodies (no, emulator doesn't do it) or tinker with the A1200 (how awesome it is with CF flash card as HDD...). And I refuse to be classified as a "crazy nut job". (Typing this on a Mac, a very impressive laptop for this type of thing.)
You can cancel - but do you get to keep the phone? Usually not - so wouldn't that also be a penalty? (having to get a new one, re-configure it, etc.
*If* when selling these "plans" involving the phone marketing was transparent these plans would be broken open, i.e.:
Get a cPhone! Only $y month (24 month contract) (of y the part of the phone is w, plan including gazillion minutes and whatever goodies, you can get out of contract any time by paying the remaining months * w, handset sold separately for q)
But no....that would be too open for telcos and complicated for the average consumer...but guess what, where I live this is how marketing these bundles must be done.
I tend to disagree - maybe my reading habbits are not as high class as yours but I have found a huge collection of scifi in ebooks I like and the price range is from $0 to $10 - yes, sometimes the language is bad and there are basic mistakes such as repetitive language and but structure of sentences. But I don't speak English as my first language so who am I to judge? I get great stories from different authors (and part of them have wrote books about how to self-publish) at a fair price and I really do like them. I don't see how better publishing would add to those stories - yes they are sometimes repeating themselves but isn't the point of reading that your imagination makes up the lack of visuals and your experience maybe very different from mine?
And to make sure - I'm not a cheapskate - I do pay good money for good books. But at the same time, if you can do a great story for $4,99 a piece without a professional editor, should you not be allowed to do it?
This was announced to Dell/EMC customers...what, about a year ago if I remember correctly?
Dell has been pushing their (acquired through company merger) Equallogic series of storage servers for long and nobody saw this as an suprise. But I guess the good relations must go on because EMC has VMware and Dell does not definitely want to be known as diy vendor when it comes to VMware.
Here we basickly have the same rules as in France (tax-funded on-air and billboard time) but we failef miserably the last time becauce the one's with money want to spend their money so that theie is no chance on losing that money. And that tends to lead to royal screwups.
Politicians should not be rockstars. campaign money doesn't make them better - they get them elected. Think about that.
It depends heavily on contry. In my country (Finland, and we where with the Nazi Germany against USSR which is hard for someone to admit) the "Boomers" of 40's, 50's and early 60's heavily depended on the trade to USSR and the war reparations paid to USSR held the economy up. It was not healthy in all aspects and paying for soviet cars with clothing was not very wise it did the trick. And the US has done the same over and over again - look at California, nearly every company there has some ties to military, and military needs cannon fodder.
You haven't been paying attention to the very significant European financial problems that have been going on of late.
To quote a famous European, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
That's what's happening now. Your otherwise righteous anger at the crony corporatism we've seen in the US won't lead to money being magically generated to fund all that OWS folks demand.
And you have not been paying attention to what has caused the financial crisis in Europe - the strong ones such as Germany and France and generally the northen part of the EU are doing if not great at least surviving nicely - it is their banks that loaned money to bubble economies (Spain) and outright fraudalent economies (Greece, with the help os financial institutions from Europe and US). The only socialism there is exists maybe in Greece where every government has promised more pensions, earlier retirement even paid pension to dead people. Here where tax rates are high by southern European or US standards our public economy is just fine, thank you, and we have now higher credit ratings than the United States.
To me, the only way to fix this mess is changing the way people vote. It's a damn difficult proposition; that's why we're in the mess we're in!
Yes it is. And the basic problem is that politicians are nowadays rockstars. The want to catch the 15 second attention span of the voter with a catchy line and very much like to fill stadiums cheering for them. Nobody likes to guy who actually knows his shit and tells people even the not-so-pleasant things straight up. But when it is so much more fun to fall in love with Britney and get a lapdance than study the issues at hand and vote for someone who is exprert in that field that is what we get, the Britneys of politics.
This is inevident when you look at retired politics - they usually express much more mature and balanced views on things than those who need get the votes to be elected.
But we're already very close to the point where we can create life-like animation of humans. Before long, even kiddie pornographers will have access to that technology, and instead of using real kids to act out scenes, they could just do it all on computer, and you won't be able to tell the difference between it and "the real thing". Should that material also be illegal?
I am tempted to say that no, it should not be illegal.
If it is proven that watching that kind of thing makes people to go out and molest children then I have to reconsider. Japan has btw a very long history of cartoon porn which is basicly child pornography but it is legal because it is not produced by filming humans. And it has not yet comdemned them to eternal damnation and there have been no locust attacks (well, one tsunami and nuclear reactor breakdown....).
And remember that the "honest working girl" porn which involves a male and female who are paid to do it in front of the camera was contested in many countries, including the USA and still there are groups trying to ban it. Kiddie porn is not my cup of tea and I would be propably sick watching it even if animated (I have seen the Japanese cartoon stuff and even that is not what I would consider pleasurable entertainment) but then again - I don't particularly like horror movies either and I'm not demanding them to be banned.
"This study evaluated the rape fantasies of female undergraduates (N = 355) using a fantasy checklist that reflected the legal definition of rape and a sexual fantasy log that included systematic prompts and self-ratings. Results indicated that 62% of women have had a rape fantasy, which is somewhat higher than previous estimates."
It is extremely common particularly within women. But it does not mean they actually want to experience rape.
I'm against child porn and producing it very often actually harms the children - they can't defend themselves and it is shamefull and selfish act on part of the producer. On the same take fantasy should not go be punishable, and I have trouble of seeing that if pictures of clothed children used in fantasy actually harm anyone.
I am an admin of moderately loaded mail server cluster (some 500 domains so not that big) and lack of PTR and bad HELO in 99% of situations still means spam. Spam-worms still origin mainly from ddns hosts with no reverse (very shady isps) and generally identify themselves in HELO as "localhost" or by their ip number.
Spam worm writers *still* can't properly write SMTP clients and that is a good thing, makes filtering easier... And yes, because I require rDNS and proper HELO I have had to whitelist some senders because they have an internal server who greets with somedomain.local in HELO (for some reason these tend to be Exchange servers with admins not knowing or able to configure them properly....wonder why).
About Star Wars - if there are no official versions aren't those "fan-edited" versions just upscaled versions from different source (laserdisc, dvd, material supplied to tv network in some sd-format x)? Sure, the quality upscaling done by professionals can be better "HD" than doing the upscaling on your bluray player on-the-fly from DVD at home but it is still not "true hd" and should not be considered as such. It will be HD when Lucasfilm does the transfer from film (they quite likely have done it already but are holding back because of business reasons).
In fact where I live - Finland - our density of population is quite similar to Australia - huge country with people concentrated on a few citites "en masse" and running the network to the non-dense areas is easy and not *that* expensive - if the local land owners don't object to fiber being laid down beside the road, but then you can see who to blame, been there, done that - NIMBY works there too, if everybody agrees fiber is quite easy and even cheap to install. Yeah, cities produce the best revenue per km2 for operators but with current technology getting reasonably priced high bandwidth to even rural areas is not *that* expensive. And paying for an example 2-3 thousand dollars to get the the fiber to your home should be no problem when compared to that that it propably cost a lot less than similar sized apartment in the city - people tend to forget this and bitch and moan how they should get everything with city-prices when the biggest cost - the house itself is haevily cheaper dependeng on location.
20 gigs? For that price? You gotta be kidding me - I get 20 gigs easily in a week just from work (yeah, when you can mount a.iso from your computer to install in vmware and the speed is about equal to actually first upload the image to storage server you get lazy...) and those speeds - it is now 2011, not 2000 when 12/1 Mbps was hot.
Here 100/10, 19,90 euros / month. No caps. Gasoline however costs a crapton and half a year it is freezing and dark but at least connectivity is good and cheap.
You should not judge the system by your experience - when dealing with close relatives people tend to get very emotional. You are not telling how old your grandmother was - yes, she might have had a few more years with chemo and/or surgery but on the other hand she also might have died painfully while receiving those hard treatments.
There are no "death panels" in socialized medicine, but when there is no open tab which pays for everything you have to make priorization. Humanly. And the insurance system doesn't work in this matter - it is not human (got no coverage, get lost) and not efficient (there are too many people keeping up the system vs. actually treating people). Yes - USA has the best medical care in the world - and also one of the most expensive ones when looking at results.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually prefer them not to care. It seems in this case email was hijacked and GoDaddy is not supposed to deny the transfer if everything is done properly. It is a real pain in the ass trying to obtain an "utility bill" or other "proof" from $5 / month web service customer when all they want is to get their domain transferred from the previous $15 / month provider (provided of course that the previous ISP who registered the domain was generous enough to put a real owner contact email to whois data...). It *should* be that easy for you average low-cost domain.
If you want your domain provider to "care" - which in this case is that you get personal service and are not just using automation yourself - you pay (actually GoDaddy also offers phone verification option for extra fee...). If you are bankofamerica.com or microsoft.com you should really do take a bit more expensive option - it is not likely that you change your registrar yearly to the cheapest alternative. But if you are a random website (this is first time I heard about css-tricks.com, I really don't know if they are big and famous site on web design field) looking for the cheapest option this is how it should be, because on the other side you have very angry customers complaining that registrars hold their domains hostage; been there in the middle answering to customer on the other side that no, this is not that easy because your registrar requires this and that and I have to bill you by the hour and on the other side having the registrar jump me through obstacle course to transfer ordinary domains by just flagging transfer "suspicious" and everything from first tier customer support is some form of "sorry, I can't do that".
By the way US registrars - identification by utility bill is something we do not do in Europe - the whole concept is strange, so please do not ask me for my clients electricity bill, they most likely can't provide one.
Herded, you mean. Why do you people continue to put up with this crap? And don't try to tell me it's only in the USA. Europe was doing intrusive "screening" long before the USA started: we used to be criticised by Europeans for having "lax security" because we allowed people to get on airplanes without first proving that they were not armed criminals.
Europe has its own problems, to simplify things (hey, isn't that what discussing on Internet is for?) historically it has been that in Europe, you have passports, are required to have a social security number and uniquely identified and once you are cleared you are free to travel. See the Schengen treaty. This of course involves all kinds of nasty stuff of information exchange between authorities but it has been quite non-intrusive - if you have a passport from Schengen country and are not on Interpol/Europol list you have quite a clear passage. Same has been true for "outsiders" entering EU - once you are in and cleared a few basic database checks you are ok to travel without difficulty.
Then enter 9/11 and the security hysteria. Now we have the worst of both worlds - the USA is demanding passanger information from EU (in addition to which it has collected before, plus fingerprinting and photographs) and EU has to implement the intrusive technical measures; visit Schipol, Amsterdam for an example, the nudescanners and extra checks are only for USA-bound flights because USA requires them.
So - we now have the pat-this, register that, screen-your-shoes of USA (where "serial numbering" of people has been and is a great big scary no-no) and the data collecting tradition of Europe (bio-passports, RFID:s, possibility to abuse on global travel databases) combined. If you ask me this is a) a huge money sink and b) a disaster waiting to happen.
Large databases of people ("proving you are not armed criminal") is problematic, yes. Can it be abused, yes. Is it foolproof, no way. Does it prevent cross-border crime (remember, Europe is not as tight union as the USA yet and there are internal treaties inside- and outside EU states), yes, somewhat, and it has to be done, and USA is doing exactly the same but you just have dozens of different data sources because "GUID for people" is scary shit. Combine these approaches and watch the mess boiling...
Aren't the stripped down versions still something like $200?
Not hard to check - direct as a download from Adobe webshop $50 right now (it comes with "50% discount" so "normal" price would be $100, but I really don't know if anyone has to ever pay that much).
I don't have the data but I would guess most sales of these versions come from bundles with digital cameras and printers with a few casual upgraders here and there. I tend to agree with the parent - Adobe doesn't gain much by lowering the price of Photoshop, price really is the perception of quality. Even Microsoft does this with Office - while you can get a "home" or educational license for $99 or so when you know to ask about it (or it comes bundled with purchase of new computer) it is very important to their image that there are the nice boxed double- or triple priced versions on display at store.
Agreed, I'm hunting for a job too and what is not touched by this economy are programmers. Recruiting sites are full of open positions for programming jobs, from starting code monkey to full-fledged designer with project leaders skills.
But you have to be good. I've done last years of my career mainly consulting gigs for a variety of customers (feasibility studies, risk assessments, requirement documents and so on) with the virtualization planning and sysadmin work (both planning and administrative work) on the side and less programming than in the years before.
Guess what I'm doing now?
Refreshing my memory on J2EE, doing exercises at home lab. (I have done integration work on J2EE but not so much that I could call myself an expert.)
I honestly can't see this as a big problem on Microsoft - they have quite a long track record of supporting their tools - even legacy Visual Basic skills can be used today quite effortlessly. Yes, they have had their misses and some tools or even languages (J++ comes to mind from the old days...) have been deprecated quite quickly after a blistering start but take a look around - there are frameworks and languages coming and going everywhere. If you want to bet safely learn C and C++ and code your own supporting libraries. Yes, it sucks when vendors pull plug on technology. But the days of learning Fortran or Visual Basic once and expecting to have guaranteed job for the rest of your life are over (well, if you are a true Fortran or VB genius you can get a nice paying job in maintenance these days...), And the same applies to OSS as well - they are not immune. Projects and languages come and go - yes, in the support side they are at an advantage because if you are a true guru you can dive into the source and support the platform - but I don't see the platform support as a huge issue on Microsoft side either. With right DLLs you can still run Win32 VB applications just fine - yes, the vendor doesn't support those anymore and doesn't develop new features but you still got what you have when you chose the platform.
Can you give examples of Open Source projects (in programming) which Microsoft has tried to emulate and has ended up with barely working and sucking copy?
Silverlight on web had really no big and bright future, it was just a poke on Adobe to steal marketshare on (DRM) video delivery. But those skills learned there are not totally wasted, it is not *that* hard to transform from one Microsoft architecture to another. But if your big bet was Silverlight on browsers (cross-platform/browser) then well, you are out of luck but it did not require a genius to figure that out from the start.
You are right in that yes, it is the price that matters in the group they target. And despite the dodgy fees (they are far from clear but even the big "traditional airlines" do this; last time I booked a flight from lufthansa.com I was required to use PayPal to not have additional "credit card fee" applied to me at checkout...) and these PR stunts their service actually works and they are profitable and you can quite reasonably expect to get you from place a to b at the time they promise to - many cheapo airlines can't meet that; the number of chepo-airlines gone belly up in recent years is quite high.
Ryanair is good if you know what you are getting into. Yes, they charge for everything and you have zero flexibility and you have to deal with second class airport terminals but it is generally cheap and the specials can be a real bargain. So if you are a student or have a little flexibility in when and to where to fly you can have holiday travelling for cheap with them. It is not a business travellers airline though in any way...
It is quite bad, but it is not all due to decline in sales, main reason is that they have largely switched to Asian subcontractors in manufacturing, and design jobs are also not "safe" anymore. Relating to article - Nokia has a reputation of being very demanding customer, ie. requiring advance promises of capacity even before starting negotiations and a policy of basicly dictating subcontractor prices ("for next 2 years you must cut 10% off your prices or we are taking all our business elsewhere"). These thing combined has killed or got into deep trouble a lot of businesses in Finland and the lesson learned is that never trust a single customer if you tend to be alive and profitable in the long term.
So Apple's secret weapon is to monopolize parts so its competitors can't afford them?
I hope the manufacturers are not stupid enough to fall on that one. Many subcontractors learned the hard way in the past 10 years that while getting a firm deal exclusively for something to one customer is nice in short term it can be a deadly blow when time comes to renew the contract and suddenly your only major customer goes for the next (cheaper) offer.
I speak as a Finn and what we have seen Nokia did here when they were the king of the hill in global mobile phone business and bought huge amounts of subcontractor work from companies whose only customer was Nokia. And the survivors who now are still alive are those who did not rely exclusively on Nokia but sought out also other customers.
Completely agree. VMware is expensive, but it is the best game in town.
But competition is catching up and hopefully that drives VMware to rethink their sales tactics and licensing seriously. Because they have now the best technology (tried KVM, Xen and VMware here) and confusing as hell licensing.
From outside it seems like there is an internal competition who invents the most confusing pricing model at VMware and the winner is randomly selected every year.
Please VMware, cut the crap out and focus on technology, money will follow.
Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.
Ummm.... I thought this was a nerd-site, not a site for "what is the best way to do your spreadsheet / home movie authoring / etc.".
What's the harm tinkering with technology, be it dead, buried, cold, still barely breathing or a rising star?
If popularity dictates what your hobbies are we are going to live in a very, very dull world. I don't know what plans for this machine mentioned in the article are - I don't really care if it succeeds or not, but it is news for nerds. Although I agree that Amiga news and what actually has happened regarding commercial products under the Amiga brand have turned almost always in the past 15 years into tragicomic-facepalm-mess.
There are user clubs still for all kinds of legacy systems, even if they have been "dead" for long by all external measurements.
I like very much to game on PS3 and Xbox360. They are wonderful pieces of gaming technology. But I still occasionally fire up my A500 or A1200, hook it up to my TV and play some old goodies (no, emulator doesn't do it) or tinker with the A1200 (how awesome it is with CF flash card as HDD...). And I refuse to be classified as a "crazy nut job". (Typing this on a Mac, a very impressive laptop for this type of thing.)
You can cancel - but do you get to keep the phone? Usually not - so wouldn't that also be a penalty? (having to get a new one, re-configure it, etc.
*If* when selling these "plans" involving the phone marketing was transparent these plans would be broken open, i.e.:
Get a cPhone! Only $y month (24 month contract)
(of y the part of the phone is w, plan including gazillion minutes and whatever goodies, you can get out of contract any time by paying the remaining months * w, handset sold separately for q)
But no....that would be too open for telcos and complicated for the average consumer...but guess what, where I live this is how marketing these bundles must be done.
I tend to disagree - maybe my reading habbits are not as high class as yours but I have found a huge collection of scifi in ebooks I like and the price range is from $0 to $10 - yes, sometimes the language is bad and there are basic mistakes such as repetitive language and but structure of sentences. But I don't speak English as my first language so who am I to judge? I get great stories from different authors (and part of them have wrote books about how to self-publish) at a fair price and I really do like them. I don't see how better publishing would add to those stories - yes they are sometimes repeating themselves but isn't the point of reading that your imagination makes up the lack of visuals and your experience maybe very different from mine?
And to make sure - I'm not a cheapskate - I do pay good money for good books. But at the same time, if you can do a great story for $4,99 a piece without a professional editor, should you not be allowed to do it?
This was announced to Dell/EMC customers...what, about a year ago if I remember correctly?
Dell has been pushing their (acquired through company merger) Equallogic series of storage servers for long and nobody saw this as an suprise. But I guess the good relations must go on because EMC has VMware and Dell does not definitely want to be known as diy vendor when it comes to VMware.
And this it how should be played.
Here we basickly have the same rules as in France (tax-funded on-air and billboard time) but we failef miserably the last time becauce the one's with money want to spend their money so that theie is no chance on losing that money. And that tends to lead to royal screwups.
Politicians should not be rockstars. campaign money doesn't make them better - they get them elected. Think about that.
It depends heavily on contry. In my country (Finland, and we where with the Nazi Germany against USSR which is hard for someone to admit) the "Boomers" of 40's, 50's and early 60's heavily depended on the trade to USSR and the war reparations paid to USSR held the economy up. It was not healthy in all aspects and paying for soviet cars with clothing was not very wise it did the trick. And the US has done the same over and over again - look at California, nearly every company there has some ties to military, and military needs cannon fodder.
You haven't been paying attention to the very significant European financial problems that have been going on of late.
To quote a famous European, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
That's what's happening now. Your otherwise righteous anger at the crony corporatism we've seen in the US won't lead to money being magically generated to fund all that OWS folks demand.
And you have not been paying attention to what has caused the financial crisis in Europe - the strong ones such as Germany and France and generally the northen part of the EU are doing if not great at least surviving nicely - it is their banks that loaned money to bubble economies (Spain) and outright fraudalent economies (Greece, with the help os financial institutions from Europe and US). The only socialism there is exists maybe in Greece where every government has promised more pensions, earlier retirement even paid pension to dead people. Here where tax rates are high by southern European or US standards our public economy is just fine, thank you, and we have now higher credit ratings than the United States.
To me, the only way to fix this mess is changing the way people vote. It's a damn difficult proposition; that's why we're in the mess we're in!
Yes it is. And the basic problem is that politicians are nowadays rockstars. The want to catch the 15 second attention span of the voter with a catchy line and very much like to fill stadiums cheering for them. Nobody likes to guy who actually knows his shit and tells people even the not-so-pleasant things straight up. But when it is so much more fun to fall in love with Britney and get a lapdance than study the issues at hand and vote for someone who is exprert in that field that is what we get, the Britneys of politics.
This is inevident when you look at retired politics - they usually express much more mature and balanced views on things than those who need get the votes to be elected.
But we're already very close to the point where we can create life-like animation of humans. Before long, even kiddie pornographers will have access to that technology, and instead of using real kids to act out scenes, they could just do it all on computer, and you won't be able to tell the difference between it and "the real thing". Should that material also be illegal?
I am tempted to say that no, it should not be illegal.
If it is proven that watching that kind of thing makes people to go out and molest children then I have to reconsider. Japan has btw a very long history of cartoon porn which is basicly child pornography but it is legal because it is not produced by filming humans. And it has not yet comdemned them to eternal damnation and there have been no locust attacks (well, one tsunami and nuclear reactor breakdown....).
And remember that the "honest working girl" porn which involves a male and female who are paid to do it in front of the camera was contested in many countries, including the USA and still there are groups trying to ban it. Kiddie porn is not my cup of tea and I would be propably sick watching it even if animated (I have seen the Japanese cartoon stuff and even that is not what I would consider pleasurable entertainment) but then again - I don't particularly like horror movies either and I'm not demanding them to be banned.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19085605
"This study evaluated the rape fantasies of female undergraduates (N = 355) using a fantasy checklist that reflected the legal definition of rape and a sexual fantasy log that included systematic prompts and self-ratings. Results indicated that 62% of women have had a rape fantasy, which is somewhat higher than previous estimates."
It is extremely common particularly within women. But it does not mean they actually want to experience rape.
I'm against child porn and producing it very often actually harms the children - they can't defend themselves and it is shamefull and selfish act on part of the producer. On the same take fantasy should not go be punishable, and I have trouble of seeing that if pictures of clothed children used in fantasy actually harm anyone.
I am an admin of moderately loaded mail server cluster (some 500 domains so not that big) and lack of PTR and bad HELO in 99% of situations still means spam. Spam-worms still origin mainly from ddns hosts with no reverse (very shady isps) and generally identify themselves in HELO as "localhost" or by their ip number.
Spam worm writers *still* can't properly write SMTP clients and that is a good thing, makes filtering easier... And yes, because I require rDNS and proper HELO I have had to whitelist some senders because they have an internal server who greets with somedomain.local in HELO (for some reason these tend to be Exchange servers with admins not knowing or able to configure them properly....wonder why).
About Star Wars - if there are no official versions aren't those "fan-edited" versions just upscaled versions from different source (laserdisc, dvd, material supplied to tv network in some sd-format x)? Sure, the quality upscaling done by professionals can be better "HD" than doing the upscaling on your bluray player on-the-fly from DVD at home but it is still not "true hd" and should not be considered as such. It will be HD when Lucasfilm does the transfer from film (they quite likely have done it already but are holding back because of business reasons).
According to Wikipedia the urbanization rate in Australia is 89%.(Finland 85%) So basic land-mass comparison is not giving the right numbers...
And yes - compared to Australia Finland is not huge, but it has ver similar rural areas ans same kinds of problems with high bandwith providing.
In fact where I live - Finland - our density of population is quite similar to Australia - huge country with people concentrated on a few citites "en masse" and running the network to the non-dense areas is easy and not *that* expensive - if the local land owners don't object to fiber being laid down beside the road, but then you can see who to blame, been there, done that - NIMBY works there too, if everybody agrees fiber is quite easy and even cheap to install. Yeah, cities produce the best revenue per km2 for operators but with current technology getting reasonably priced high bandwidth to even rural areas is not *that* expensive. And paying for an example 2-3 thousand dollars to get the the fiber to your home should be no problem when compared to that that it propably cost a lot less than similar sized apartment in the city - people tend to forget this and bitch and moan how they should get everything with city-prices when the biggest cost - the house itself is haevily cheaper dependeng on location.
20 gigs? For that price? You gotta be kidding me - I get 20 gigs easily in a week just from work (yeah, when you can mount a .iso from your computer to install in vmware and the speed is about equal to actually first upload the image to storage server you get lazy...) and those speeds - it is now 2011, not 2000 when 12/1 Mbps was hot.
Here 100/10, 19,90 euros / month. No caps. Gasoline however costs a crapton and half a year it is freezing and dark but at least connectivity is good and cheap.
You should not judge the system by your experience - when dealing with close relatives people tend to get very emotional. You are not telling how old your grandmother was - yes, she might have had a few more years with chemo and/or surgery but on the other hand she also might have died painfully while receiving those hard treatments.
There are no "death panels" in socialized medicine, but when there is no open tab which pays for everything you have to make priorization. Humanly. And the insurance system doesn't work in this matter - it is not human (got no coverage, get lost) and not efficient (there are too many people keeping up the system vs. actually treating people). Yes - USA has the best medical care in the world - and also one of the most expensive ones when looking at results.