As long as all the mainstream consoles right now are using PowerPC cores, they're about as close to PCs as goat cheese is to cows milk.
I'm all for PCs starting to use PowerPC though, if it means running console games on them. I doubt anyone would be too disappointed if they got a PC with a Cell or two in it.
The Kessel Run is George Lucas being an illiterate, uneducated moron. Nothing else.
He wouldn't know what the surviving salesman problem was if it hit him in the head. All he knows is being a geek in the 1950's, his love of old cars, and basing every movie he has ever made off someone else's cinematography and work.
Now, there is a market, and some good movies do come from the reinvention of other peoples' ideas - the homage movie, just like everything Tarantino ever did, but done cleverly or in parody or simply in awe of the originals - but Star Wars definitely wasn't one of them.
It was an awesome movie but not from a writing standpoint. And when George manages to write 3 more movies to tell the back story and invalidates everything he wrote in the original, but doesn't tell the story any better or make any improvements? Come on. Turning The Force into a bloodwork story, making everything Obi-Wan said in the first movie a lie, this is just unforgivable screenplay writing. That a fan can come along and "explain" it away just means George didn't think about it enough.
Unfortunately for you, that may be how DRM works, but the amount of business they lose is absolutely negligible compared to the business they do for people who really don't give a crap.
I've had a Steam Account since it went live and pre-ordered Half-Life 2 plus the entire Valve back catalogue at the time (every HL game and expansion etc.) and got a cute cap and posters and postcards and a soundtrack CD for my trouble.
Years later my Steam account works fine, I'm still buying new games, and no problems so far - not even the problems people reported trying to activate/download HL2 when it was released. This is the benchmark experience for the vast majority of people, and if this is the case with most DRM, then it is unintrusive and therefore perfectly acceptable (and it usually is the case, if you have iTunes and an iPod, you don't care that the tracks are DRM'd until you move to another MP3 player, but the chances of that given iPod brand loyalty are slim to none).
If Valve go bankrupt or Apple go bankrupt and turn off their activation servers or modify iTunes to stop working with your Generation One iPod, you're going to cry, but the chances of that within the workable lifetime of the products - especially as Apple's DRM allows syncing to UNLIMITED number of iPods, so you can just upgrade - is slim to none.
It's really arrogant and kind of narrow-minded to assume that just because you hate DRM, that it should be abolished. It has it's uses - it's no different to a fingerprint reader on a laptop in technology, and people love those. They get to sign in to their system with their fingerprint, and not remember passwords, because they can just swipe the fingerprint for confirmation and automatic filling.. it's convenient for the owner and stops people doing unauthorized things with their laptop.
Remember that signing your mails is also a form of digital rights management. Do you want to stop using GnuPG? Because you're disallowing other people access to your content, that you own and wish to be protected from prying eyes and in the case you actually send something you created that is worth something to you, you're no different to the music industry or movie industry or game industry.
Each to their own. Since it's my job to make sure distros work on hardware we build, I have to try them all, but SUSE has been by far more comfortable in terms of support, features, and ease of use.
Zypper + RPM really is a pleasure. I never liked yum.. RedHat/Fedora and YellowDog are good distros but I do think package management lets them down (along with Fedora's "open-source-only" stance). Ubuntu is pioneering on bundling things users want to use but SUSE really does the same stuff. It's basically a tie between the big 3 (Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora) on which is the "best".
If I was giving a system to my grandmother it'd still be Windows XP/Vista though, none of them are really suitable for people who don't use computers as much as I/we do. Even I stumble over something braindead or frustrating sometimes in Ubuntu and I dread to think where that would go with someone who didn't know their way around a Linux distro.
What if the number of debian-based distros is based on the deficiencies of debian.;)
Bingo:)
I don't know why you focus on yum - it's absolutely terrible. Have you tried zypper in openSUSE? It's faaast, isn't broken like apt and with LZMA compression and delta RPMs, there's really nothing so wrong with RPM anymore from the user side.
Actually I never understood what the problem was with RPM anyway, or why users are so against it. As a developer, I can understand that writing specs and building RPMs is a bitch, but it's really no more difficult than debian's "rules" system. There is far more likelihood of dependency hell with apt than with RPM, too, because of the way dependencies are handled by apt itself (not the.deb packaging format, which is for all intents and purposes, well defined, just not used properly)
As for LSB, it should be hit on the head, and it's little fellow project FHS really needs to go the way of the Dodo. The current standard and the way current distros are built and maintained on that archaic, stupid layout is just redundant. The idea of dumping every app in/bin,/sbin/,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/usr/local/bin,/usr/local/sbin,/opt.. what layout your init scripts need to have and which functionality they need to adopt (this is a real chore considering we are all focussing on booting real fast now, and doing it in shell scripts for LSB compatibility is really not going to work) or whatever FHS/LSB says, along with is really quite retarded.
What we need is an LSB which defines a nicer way of working; Apple had the balls to move with the times, now you get "drop a folder on a system and it's installed" ease of use, directories with names that mean something to real people.. and still it's compatible with 99.9% of applications from the Unix world (and if you use autoconf, cmake, scons or any other build system it doesn't matter what layout you use as they will all pretty much install into the right places on each system anyway)
Without an ABI/API spec as included in LSB you'd have to rebuild your package for every Linux distro but guess what - even with LSB right now and Red Hat and others "conforming" to it, people still build their packages for every different distro, because of the HUGELY varying support inside those distros which aren't defined by LSB. On MacOS X every OS release brings some major new support for some major new functionality; and people rebuild their apps and implement support. And you get to download it for your new OS (it still works on the old one, though, it's really difficult to imagine that someone absolutely destroyed binary compatibility up the line.. but if they did they were due to use some new functionality anyway!)
It just goes to show that Ubuntu being popular has nothing to do with it's packaging system OR anything to do with it being any good as a distribution. Mark Shuttleworth really knows how to market things..
The performance difference between a dedicated swap partition and a swap file (as created by dd or something) is absolutely negligible - within the fractions of a percentage point.
You may actually see slightly better performance because, when dealing with disk accesses on your / partition, the disk has less of the platter to seek to in order to actually write or read blocks back than sweeping potentially right across the disk to another partition.
Since the block cache gets used for files, the only overhead is a couple inode lookups, and if you're using a high performance filesystem like XFS or so, what could possibly be your problem? I've noticed a higher performance hit using ext2 or having ext3 journal all my swap writes (what the hell is the point in that, I wish I knew how to turn off journalling for individual files).
The PS2 CPU is custom made by NEC, not IBM. It's MIPS and the Emotion Engine is just a Voodoo3-class vector graphics chip. It's actually pretty shite when it gets down to it.
As for coding for the Playstation *THREE*, you could do well to go out and get an old Mac G5 (dual core) and start developing on that if you need a desktop box, but it isn't like you can't boot Linux really easily on a PS3 anyway (you can even run Ubuntu if you're that dorky).
You lost your credibility when you said "another lockin tactic" - absolutely none of those are vendor lock-ins except for the PAC fiasco.
They're fucking dumb design decisions, but they're not Microsoft actively trying to make things break on other systems. UNC has been the standard on Windows since before KDE even existed. How is smb:// the proper URI, then? It bloody well isn't.
Oh and I've never ever heard anyone call SMB over TCP "SMBX" - nobody in Microsoft, nobody on the Samba team, nobody in any Windows server environment.
And the GPL is not a shining light here, it's a shower of shit. If Kerberos was GPL it would not have stopped Microsoft from reimplementing it clean-room and THEN embracing and extending it, or perhaps even worse, using some other authentication system which you would have absolutely NO starting point to derive the differences from (at least MS Kerberos is a well known weirdness and you could patch the standard Kerberos server to support it. Thank Bob that Kerberos is open source, but let's not get into the "GPL means it would never have happened this way" fallacy.
There are very few instances where moving from BSD/MIT licensing to GPL actually helps anyone.
It was expensive - I'm damn sure it's not $8 worth - but it was a squirty bottle and they'd run out of the cheap stuff (in non-squirty bottles) at the local supermarket anyway. And besides I was buying air dusters and little lint-free dust wipe thingies and a bunch of other trinkets they just don't sell at supermarkets.. $8 is by the by for the convenience of not spending that driving to yet another supermarket to find a better deal.
I think back and I have spent more on a cup of coffee from time to time..
Isopropyl won't get rid of the mold though, and who knows what else is on the board which is NOT so friendly - someone said here quite rightly that 99% isopropyl will strip wire coatings.
Hence the two. I'd TRY the bleach. Not neat toilet bleach, but something diluted with distilled water, a very weak solution.
The whole point of bleach is that it denatures proteins.. any amount will do that, and it'll kill the mold so it won't grow back on the board after you wash it with isopropyl. And I'd use a weaker solution of isopropyl than 99% just so you're not going to eat away at anything that isn't as resilient as a chip package or the PCB.
Dealing with solvents and corrosive materials always has a risk, but sometimes the benefits outweigh them. He takes a dead board, covered in mold, and gets a clean, mold-free board which has been pretty well cleaned of what he wanted rid of. The chances of it working are better than they were.
If it's 100% clean afterwards and stil doesn't work, hey.. find the receipt and see if you can take it back to the store!
I had to ask the guy at the pharmacy counter and he dragged some from out back. There's no reason for it not to be there, but if it's not on the shelves, ask at the pharamacy counter, and not at the shelf-stackers:)
You can get some pretty good 99% isopropyl from any good pharmacy (ask for it) or computer store (I get mine from Altex, it's $8 a bottle..). While it's good for cleaning things like keyboards (because it'll cut through grease like a hot knife through butter) it does have some nasty side effects like being able to etch the anti-reflective coating off LCD panels, taking the silkscreening off of PCBs etc.:)
It shouldn't really damage tin solder or chip packages but who knows. You're probably better off with distilled water and bleach for mold. Maybe give it a wash with isopropyl afterwards, but use the 50-70% cheap stuff. The idea is that isopropyl is a solvent - therefore things will dissolve in it including all the crud. But too strong a solvent and you'll eat into the PCB and any components that aren't up to it.
There's the problem you get into next year when 7.0, 8.0 comes out and you end up doing something like "please download version 25.2" in the next decade depending on how much you like ramping numbers.
SUSE Linux started at version 4.2 for obvious geeky reasons and I think it even skipped over a couple major version numbers so that "SUSE 6.0" didn't have to try and compete with "RedHat 9.0".
The current theme with software is to give it the number of the year it was made. So your software could be "LabelPrinter 2008" or if you need the minor, "LabelPrinter 2008.1" - I think that works for everyone involved in your company, gives some false sense of security to your customers while letting them know it's not something you hacked out 8 years ago and are foisting on them (even if it is), gives a VERY large number to start from, and at least you will know when the thing was released (if you ask a customer what version they run, and they say 2008.2 and it's 2015 and your support contracts only last for 3 years, you know they can go fish)
This is exactly how it works in Europe, and fucking good for it too. Maybe I will get less spam on my AT&T if they have to pay 3 cents to send it to me. I wish it was more than Verizon doing this..
My only problem with it would be, Twitter mobile updates may go the way of the dodo to Verizon services. And I still pay 20 cents for a text which is a fucking rip off.
Wow, someone actually uses an internet standard email solution and everyone complains. Be happy they actually use IMAP, god damn it. You wouldn't get that from Microsoft.
So it's not done over SSL or TLS, that's unfortunate, but this isn't a bug, it's a lack of a feature. Who's going to be snooping your email traffic from an iPhone anyway? It's encrypted up to the point it gets out of the cell network, and if you're using WPA for your WiFi connection if you're near a decent access point, and someone would have to really work hard to actually get at your data.
God forbid the billions of SMTP servers transmitting your mail around the world (personally I use Google Apps so I get to use TLS to send my mail to them, but it will go out from Google to whatever other server in plaintext) too.
This state of affairs is incredible! I mean.. what is the world coming to? Excuse me while I slit my wrists..
I've never had or even seen anyone having their laptop searched. They only do it if they feel you are being incredibly suspicious in the first place.. what these criteria are, we don't know (and won't ever know..) but it's safe to assume that 99.999% of people take their laptops through without incident, unless you're going through Newark, in which case you don't need to be under any suspicion.
After reading that news story I actually made sure all the stuff I had in my luggage when I came through Newark this August was ACTUALLY there (I just dumped it on a shelf and didn't bother to even untangle the cables) and it was so maybe I just missed him.
Right, and the public are meant to form their own opinions, not read it on the internet, especially not on Jimbo's Big Book Of Untruth. I was trying to point out that it would matter only if financial advisers that I relied on were doing that.
What does it matter what the proles think? Remember, thinking is doubleplusungood.
I didn't call the agency criminals, the summary did.
My view on society is that it ticks over just fine as it is.
It's nothing you can really reconsider this way or that way or change it one way or the other. If this company decided to change some Wikipedia articles, then let's consider that if someone actually reading Wikipedia made financial decisions based on it, then this person is as far as anyone else is concerned, a fucking idiot
I would be more annoyed, if at all affected in any way whatsoever, that my financial adviser thinks Wikipedia is a great way to look for things to fill my portfolio.
If you mean I have absolutely no qualms in getting paid for my work, then you're right.
Selling out? Well, you would have to be doing something that involved changing your morals and sensibilities in order to get paid.
Personally, I have absolutely NO personal remit to open up the source of any software I write which does not include any existing open source code. I fully believe that if this guy chose the BSD license then he is absolutely within his rights to do all that stuff he wants to do.
That he has a crisis of conscience in doing it? Well, sucks to be him, but I wouldn't be asking Slashdot in this scenario.
You goddamn hippies can go stew if you think at ANY point someone closing their source code (as enshrined in copyright law *AND* the text of the GNU GPL up to and including version 3, therefore taking into account "copyleft" too) and taking a job writing that or any other code is "selling out".
Slashdot Mirror
As long as all the mainstream consoles right now are using PowerPC cores, they're about as close to PCs as goat cheese is to cows milk.
I'm all for PCs starting to use PowerPC though, if it means running console games on them. I doubt anyone would be too disappointed if they got a PC with a Cell or two in it.
The Kessel Run is George Lucas being an illiterate, uneducated moron. Nothing else.
He wouldn't know what the surviving salesman problem was if it hit him in the head. All he knows is being a geek in the 1950's, his love of old cars, and basing every movie he has ever made off someone else's cinematography and work.
Now, there is a market, and some good movies do come from the reinvention of other peoples' ideas - the homage movie, just like everything Tarantino ever did, but done cleverly or in parody or simply in awe of the originals - but Star Wars definitely wasn't one of them.
It was an awesome movie but not from a writing standpoint. And when George manages to write 3 more movies to tell the back story and invalidates everything he wrote in the original, but doesn't tell the story any better or make any improvements? Come on. Turning The Force into a bloodwork story, making everything Obi-Wan said in the first movie a lie, this is just unforgivable screenplay writing. That a fan can come along and "explain" it away just means George didn't think about it enough.
Nice one, now you can go back to hugging that tree.
Unfortunately for you, that may be how DRM works, but the amount of business they lose is absolutely negligible compared to the business they do for people who really don't give a crap.
I've had a Steam Account since it went live and pre-ordered Half-Life 2 plus the entire Valve back catalogue at the time (every HL game and expansion etc.) and got a cute cap and posters and postcards and a soundtrack CD for my trouble.
Years later my Steam account works fine, I'm still buying new games, and no problems so far - not even the problems people reported trying to activate/download HL2 when it was released. This is the benchmark experience for the vast majority of people, and if this is the case with most DRM, then it is unintrusive and therefore perfectly acceptable (and it usually is the case, if you have iTunes and an iPod, you don't care that the tracks are DRM'd until you move to another MP3 player, but the chances of that given iPod brand loyalty are slim to none).
If Valve go bankrupt or Apple go bankrupt and turn off their activation servers or modify iTunes to stop working with your Generation One iPod, you're going to cry, but the chances of that within the workable lifetime of the products - especially as Apple's DRM allows syncing to UNLIMITED number of iPods, so you can just upgrade - is slim to none.
It's really arrogant and kind of narrow-minded to assume that just because you hate DRM, that it should be abolished. It has it's uses - it's no different to a fingerprint reader on a laptop in technology, and people love those. They get to sign in to their system with their fingerprint, and not remember passwords, because they can just swipe the fingerprint for confirmation and automatic filling.. it's convenient for the owner and stops people doing unauthorized things with their laptop.
Remember that signing your mails is also a form of digital rights management. Do you want to stop using GnuPG? Because you're disallowing other people access to your content, that you own and wish to be protected from prying eyes and in the case you actually send something you created that is worth something to you, you're no different to the music industry or movie industry or game industry.
How'd he post to Slashdot then?
Each to their own. Since it's my job to make sure distros work on hardware we build, I have to try them all, but SUSE has been by far more comfortable in terms of support, features, and ease of use.
Zypper + RPM really is a pleasure. I never liked yum.. RedHat/Fedora and YellowDog are good distros but I do think package management lets them down (along with Fedora's "open-source-only" stance). Ubuntu is pioneering on bundling things users want to use but SUSE really does the same stuff. It's basically a tie between the big 3 (Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora) on which is the "best".
If I was giving a system to my grandmother it'd still be Windows XP/Vista though, none of them are really suitable for people who don't use computers as much as I/we do. Even I stumble over something braindead or frustrating sometimes in Ubuntu and I dread to think where that would go with someone who didn't know their way around a Linux distro.
It does mean you need to give a couple more reasons than "it's popular" and "it doesn't use RPM" to actually qualify it as being better.
I really don't see anything in Ubuntu that I don't also see in SuSE 6 months before or Fedora 6 months later.
Bingo :)
I don't know why you focus on yum - it's absolutely terrible. Have you tried zypper in openSUSE? It's faaast, isn't broken like apt and with LZMA compression and delta RPMs, there's really nothing so wrong with RPM anymore from the user side.
Actually I never understood what the problem was with RPM anyway, or why users are so against it. As a developer, I can understand that writing specs and building RPMs is a bitch, but it's really no more difficult than debian's "rules" system. There is far more likelihood of dependency hell with apt than with RPM, too, because of the way dependencies are handled by apt itself (not the .deb packaging format, which is for all intents and purposes, well defined, just not used properly)
As for LSB, it should be hit on the head, and it's little fellow project FHS really needs to go the way of the Dodo. The current standard and the way current distros are built and maintained on that archaic, stupid layout is just redundant. The idea of dumping every app in /bin, /sbin/, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, /opt.. what layout your init scripts need to have and which functionality they need to adopt (this is a real chore considering we are all focussing on booting real fast now, and doing it in shell scripts for LSB compatibility is really not going to work) or whatever FHS/LSB says, along with is really quite retarded.
What we need is an LSB which defines a nicer way of working; Apple had the balls to move with the times, now you get "drop a folder on a system and it's installed" ease of use, directories with names that mean something to real people.. and still it's compatible with 99.9% of applications from the Unix world (and if you use autoconf, cmake, scons or any other build system it doesn't matter what layout you use as they will all pretty much install into the right places on each system anyway)
Without an ABI/API spec as included in LSB you'd have to rebuild your package for every Linux distro but guess what - even with LSB right now and Red Hat and others "conforming" to it, people still build their packages for every different distro, because of the HUGELY varying support inside those distros which aren't defined by LSB. On MacOS X every OS release brings some major new support for some major new functionality; and people rebuild their apps and implement support. And you get to download it for your new OS (it still works on the old one, though, it's really difficult to imagine that someone absolutely destroyed binary compatibility up the line.. but if they did they were due to use some new functionality anyway!)
It took off like a rocket and then Intel dumped it for an RPM-based distro.
Go figure.
It just goes to show that Ubuntu being popular has nothing to do with it's packaging system OR anything to do with it being any good as a distribution. Mark Shuttleworth really knows how to market things..
Mod parent up even more :D
The performance difference between a dedicated swap partition and a swap file (as created by dd or something) is absolutely negligible - within the fractions of a percentage point.
You may actually see slightly better performance because, when dealing with disk accesses on your / partition, the disk has less of the platter to seek to in order to actually write or read blocks back than sweeping potentially right across the disk to another partition.
Since the block cache gets used for files, the only overhead is a couple inode lookups, and if you're using a high performance filesystem like XFS or so, what could possibly be your problem? I've noticed a higher performance hit using ext2 or having ext3 journal all my swap writes (what the hell is the point in that, I wish I knew how to turn off journalling for individual files).
The PS2 CPU is custom made by NEC, not IBM. It's MIPS and the Emotion Engine is just a Voodoo3-class vector graphics chip. It's actually pretty shite when it gets down to it.
As for coding for the Playstation *THREE*, you could do well to go out and get an old Mac G5 (dual core) and start developing on that if you need a desktop box, but it isn't like you can't boot Linux really easily on a PS3 anyway (you can even run Ubuntu if you're that dorky).
You lost your credibility when you said "another lockin tactic" - absolutely none of those are vendor lock-ins except for the PAC fiasco.
They're fucking dumb design decisions, but they're not Microsoft actively trying to make things break on other systems. UNC has been the standard on Windows since before KDE even existed. How is smb:// the proper URI, then? It bloody well isn't.
Oh and I've never ever heard anyone call SMB over TCP "SMBX" - nobody in Microsoft, nobody on the Samba team, nobody in any Windows server environment.
And the GPL is not a shining light here, it's a shower of shit. If Kerberos was GPL it would not have stopped Microsoft from reimplementing it clean-room and THEN embracing and extending it, or perhaps even worse, using some other authentication system which you would have absolutely NO starting point to derive the differences from (at least MS Kerberos is a well known weirdness and you could patch the standard Kerberos server to support it. Thank Bob that Kerberos is open source, but let's not get into the "GPL means it would never have happened this way" fallacy.
There are very few instances where moving from BSD/MIT licensing to GPL actually helps anyone.
It's a 500ml bottle of "MG Chemicals Isopropyl Alcohol 99.953% Pure anhydrous". Yummy. And it has a squirty thing on it.
http://www.mgchemicals.com/products/824.html
It was expensive - I'm damn sure it's not $8 worth - but it was a squirty bottle and they'd run out of the cheap stuff (in non-squirty bottles) at the local supermarket anyway. And besides I was buying air dusters and little lint-free dust wipe thingies and a bunch of other trinkets they just don't sell at supermarkets.. $8 is by the by for the convenience of not spending that driving to yet another supermarket to find a better deal.
I think back and I have spent more on a cup of coffee from time to time..
Right, like you don't have those on electronics anyway.
As long as you're using a weak solution you won't be doing as much damage to the electronics as you are to the mold.
Isopropyl won't get rid of the mold though, and who knows what else is on the board which is NOT so friendly - someone said here quite rightly that 99% isopropyl will strip wire coatings.
Hence the two. I'd TRY the bleach. Not neat toilet bleach, but something diluted with distilled water, a very weak solution.
The whole point of bleach is that it denatures proteins.. any amount will do that, and it'll kill the mold so it won't grow back on the board after you wash it with isopropyl. And I'd use a weaker solution of isopropyl than 99% just so you're not going to eat away at anything that isn't as resilient as a chip package or the PCB.
Dealing with solvents and corrosive materials always has a risk, but sometimes the benefits outweigh them. He takes a dead board, covered in mold, and gets a clean, mold-free board which has been pretty well cleaned of what he wanted rid of. The chances of it working are better than they were.
If it's 100% clean afterwards and stil doesn't work, hey.. find the receipt and see if you can take it back to the store!
Some stores aren't as good as Safeway :)
I had to ask the guy at the pharmacy counter and he dragged some from out back. There's no reason for it not to be there, but if it's not on the shelves, ask at the pharamacy counter, and not at the shelf-stackers :)
You can get some pretty good 99% isopropyl from any good pharmacy (ask for it) or computer store (I get mine from Altex, it's $8 a bottle..). While it's good for cleaning things like keyboards (because it'll cut through grease like a hot knife through butter) it does have some nasty side effects like being able to etch the anti-reflective coating off LCD panels, taking the silkscreening off of PCBs etc. :)
It shouldn't really damage tin solder or chip packages but who knows. You're probably better off with distilled water and bleach for mold. Maybe give it a wash with isopropyl afterwards, but use the 50-70% cheap stuff. The idea is that isopropyl is a solvent - therefore things will dissolve in it including all the crud. But too strong a solvent and you'll eat into the PCB and any components that aren't up to it.
There's the problem you get into next year when 7.0, 8.0 comes out and you end up doing something like "please download version 25.2" in the next decade depending on how much you like ramping numbers.
SUSE Linux started at version 4.2 for obvious geeky reasons and I think it even skipped over a couple major version numbers so that "SUSE 6.0" didn't have to try and compete with "RedHat 9.0".
The current theme with software is to give it the number of the year it was made. So your software could be "LabelPrinter 2008" or if you need the minor, "LabelPrinter 2008.1" - I think that works for everyone involved in your company, gives some false sense of security to your customers while letting them know it's not something you hacked out 8 years ago and are foisting on them (even if it is), gives a VERY large number to start from, and at least you will know when the thing was released (if you ask a customer what version they run, and they say 2008.2 and it's 2015 and your support contracts only last for 3 years, you know they can go fish)
This is exactly how it works in Europe, and fucking good for it too. Maybe I will get less spam on my AT&T if they have to pay 3 cents to send it to me. I wish it was more than Verizon doing this..
My only problem with it would be, Twitter mobile updates may go the way of the dodo to Verizon services. And I still pay 20 cents for a text which is a fucking rip off.
Doesn't that basically come under the category "they don't give a shit about security, so who cares?"
Wow, someone actually uses an internet standard email solution and everyone complains. Be happy they actually use IMAP, god damn it. You wouldn't get that from Microsoft.
So it's not done over SSL or TLS, that's unfortunate, but this isn't a bug, it's a lack of a feature. Who's going to be snooping your email traffic from an iPhone anyway? It's encrypted up to the point it gets out of the cell network, and if you're using WPA for your WiFi connection if you're near a decent access point, and someone would have to really work hard to actually get at your data.
God forbid the billions of SMTP servers transmitting your mail around the world (personally I use Google Apps so I get to use TLS to send my mail to them, but it will go out from Google to whatever other server in plaintext) too.
This state of affairs is incredible! I mean.. what is the world coming to? Excuse me while I slit my wrists..
You're paranoid.
I've never had or even seen anyone having their laptop searched. They only do it if they feel you are being incredibly suspicious in the first place.. what these criteria are, we don't know (and won't ever know..) but it's safe to assume that 99.999% of people take their laptops through without incident, unless you're going through Newark, in which case you don't need to be under any suspicion.
After reading that news story I actually made sure all the stuff I had in my luggage when I came through Newark this August was ACTUALLY there (I just dumped it on a shelf and didn't bother to even untangle the cables) and it was so maybe I just missed him.
All in all, I'd be more worried about theft, or even the aircraft not plummeting from the sky because you have wireless turned on in-flight, than privacy.
Right, and the public are meant to form their own opinions, not read it on the internet, especially not on Jimbo's Big Book Of Untruth. I was trying to point out that it would matter only if financial advisers that I relied on were doing that.
What does it matter what the proles think? Remember, thinking is doubleplusungood.
I didn't call the agency criminals, the summary did.
My view on society is that it ticks over just fine as it is.
It's nothing you can really reconsider this way or that way or change it one way or the other. If this company decided to change some Wikipedia articles, then let's consider that if someone actually reading Wikipedia made financial decisions based on it, then this person is as far as anyone else is concerned, a fucking idiot
I would be more annoyed, if at all affected in any way whatsoever, that my financial adviser thinks Wikipedia is a great way to look for things to fill my portfolio.
If you mean I have absolutely no qualms in getting paid for my work, then you're right.
Selling out? Well, you would have to be doing something that involved changing your morals and sensibilities in order to get paid.
Personally, I have absolutely NO personal remit to open up the source of any software I write which does not include any existing open source code. I fully believe that if this guy chose the BSD license then he is absolutely within his rights to do all that stuff he wants to do.
That he has a crisis of conscience in doing it? Well, sucks to be him, but I wouldn't be asking Slashdot in this scenario.
You goddamn hippies can go stew if you think at ANY point someone closing their source code (as enshrined in copyright law *AND* the text of the GNU GPL up to and including version 3, therefore taking into account "copyleft" too) and taking a job writing that or any other code is "selling out".