I don't know what you're using, but it's most certainly not a six year old "Mac Pro", seeing as that was first released in 2006. And if you are on a Power Mac G5, you're going to be left out in the cold shortly as Snow Leopard requires Intel. It will take a while for PPC software to dry up thanks to universal binaries, but your days are numbered. Admittedly, you only need four more years to reach a decade - but those are going to be longer and longer years.
In one of the Terry Pratchet novels, Sam Vimes realizes that the wealthy stay that way because they buy ONE well-built product that lasts, while the poor buy shoddy crap that they have to replace over and over. In his case it was shoes. In your case, it's your computer.
I've seen these things more times than I care to count - either the batteries die, the power jacks break, the case starts to break and crack, the CD/DVD drive dies, etc. The build and component quality on a $300-$400 computer is ABYSMAL - there's simply no way to get quality components, build quality, support, etc in that kind of budget. I'm sure that 15" brick is 1280x800 so it has huge pixels (but it's 15" and bigger is better!), it probably weighs in excess of 6lbs due to the screen size and thick plastic it's made of, has anemic graphics and modest processing power, and is built like shit. And you're likely replacing it every year because of it.
If you're comparing Apple hardware against bargain basement PC it's not going to line up. They're simply not built the same, or with the same components. If you'll notice, Dell, Lenovo, and others offer several lines of computers that have overlapping specs - and they typically have a line with similar specs and components as a Mac - at similar prices. But we've been over that a million times. If you want a $400 computer, you are not getting it from Apple, and never will. I'd like an affordable Tesla. That's also not happening.
I've converted at least a dozen people over the last decade to Macs. While the OS has had a lot to do with it, the high build quality of the hardware has been a MAJOR factor - they simply have not had anywhere near the problems they had on their PC's (Lenovo, Dells, home-built, and Shuttles). Macs aren't perfect and they do break sometimes, but that extra money you're paying IS getting you real value - it's not just the logo. I guarantee if you tried one, within a month you'd be wondering why you didn't sooner.
Of course, that was also due to the fact that you couldn't easily uninstall it - the uninstall options were all disabled, and you had to do some deep mucking in the registry and obscure directories to get rid of it completely.
I assume this can be uninstalled the normal way. I don't like it - so there should be some outrage - but I don't think it's as pernicious as the.Net one.
...how hard is a jailbroken device to maintain over time? I understand the initial process is fairly simple, but with most hacks maintenance and keeping it hacked can be difficult (witness hackintoshes when OS updates come out, Tivos when the kernel is updated, etc). Can anyone comment on how hard it would be for an "average user" to not only set this up, but keep it running over time?
Look, we all know that the DMCA is evil and has been repeatedly abused. This is not one of those cases. The guy was modding consoles for profit. You can go on and on all you like about homebrew, but *you* know, *I* know, and *everyone else* knows that's not why he was doing it. He was doing it so cheap bastards can play copied games. This has nothing to do with your rights. If there was no DMCA, he'd be gotten on other laws - this was just the most convenient one. He's a stupid-ass student criminal, plain and simple. Now, feel free to debate the severity of the sentence - that's legitimate. But defending him as some noble kid who got put down by "the man" just hurts our cause. Pick your battles, people.
And also, stop putting out the crap of "why aren't they working the important cases?". Ever think that some officers/agents are assigned to different areas based on their expertise? And perhaps putting these cops on the homicide or gang squad isn't going to catch a killer or shut down a gang any faster? To put it in terms you'll understand, you don't want the guy who wrote Notepad working on the kernel. Just because you have resources spent on many tasks, does NOT mean that putting them all on a particular task will get that task done any sooner or better. I would have thought technical people would have understood resource allocation better, but the amount of stupid and kneejerk reaction around here really surprises me sometimes.
Ever heard of a thing called "intent"? This guy was modding consoles so people could pirate games. The cop was doing his job ("responding to a disturbance call") and hit a kid who was riding in the street AT NIGHT. It is a shame what happened, but the only thing the cop did wrong was not turn on his lights. Sadly, the only thing the kid did wrong was ride at night. Shit happens, and you don't crucify people for it.
Hey now, don't drag Columbia into this. If anything, it was abundantly clear that mission had NOTHING to do with the ISS - it wasn't even vaguely in the same orbit.
Your other points are good, and are immediately dismissed by this hyperbole.
I stand corrected. The new unibody-style MacBook Pro 17" does indeed support 12.5mm drives. I'm unsure about the 13" and 15", but this is definitely interesting. Thanks for pointing this out!
These are 12.5mm drives. The VAST majority of laptops from the last several years (certainly any new enough to have a SATA interface) only allow for 9.5mm drives. I'm sure there's some Alienware rig that's large enough to take them, but chances are your laptop will not.
This is a marketing stunt to say "we're first", even though it won't be usable for most people.
Right. Call your helpdesk. Because they're going to know fuck-all about the internal gateway server that's misconfigured and so EVERY GODDAMN TIME you need to get at the IP buildsheets you're blocked by these useless fucking warnings. Oh, and telling it to remember the exception completely BLOCKS getting to the site, rather than allows it. There's no security threat whatsoever.
Someone has misconfigured a server, and YOU WILL NEVER FIND THAT PERSON TO TELL THEM. Thus these warnings are completely fucking useless.
It should be noted that iTunes does not encrypt backups by default, but you can enable that with a checkbox in the iPhone preferences. So the real question is - with a PIN set and encryption on, can it still be hacked?
> open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck
Correction: open source projects that are not commercial-supported have a much higher chance of sucking. KHTML was open source for years before Apple took it under its wing and made WebKit for its own ends. Now we've seen an explosion of use/interest in it (Safari, iPhone, Chrome, G1, Palm Pre, etc), whereas when Apple announced WebKit, the near-universal reaction was "KHTML? What's that? Why didn't thy use Gecko?".
Amazing! Not running several additional copies of an operating system with all of the needless overhead involved is faster! Who would have guessed?
Sometimes a virtual machine is far more "solution" than you need. If you really want the same OS with lots of separated services and resource management... then run a single copy of the OS and implement some resource management. Jails are just one example - I find Solaris Containers to be much more elegant. Of course, then you have to be running Solaris...
Amen, Amen, Amen. Ever since the move to a modern codebase (which was desperately needed), Slashdot has been a huge bugfest. What happened to the open source ideal of people being able to jump in and rapidly respond to bugs? And if Slashcode isn't open in this way, then why the hell not?
No, you don't complain in China if you know what's good for you. How many stories do we see every year about prominent protestors being thrown into labor camps?
Take Hong Kong for a recent example of how life in China works. As soon as the transition was complete - Basic Law, Special Administrative Region or not - the newspapers and politicians made fast 180's and self-censored to avoid bringing the wrath of the Chinese government down on them. Are you saying that a majority of people in Hong Kong love communism and the CCP, since there isn't any public protest?
Certainly some of the Chinese people have been indoctrinated by the Communist Party. And some accept it because it "doesn't affect them" (moderate capitalism and "openness" has kept the wealthy people in the cities from complaining). But you'd probably find a lot of them are unhappy with it - although probably for the same reasons we're unhappy with our governments (rampant corruption, bureaucracy, and inattentiveness) than the limitations on their freedom of speech, thought, and lives.
Meanwhile, I was pleasantly surprised to see Mac OS X on 5.1p1. Now that could have dropped this past week with 10.5.7, but it's nice to know that even vendors with perhaps less of a stake in most-current packages are keeping up to date.
Whoever that guy was earlier with 3.9, well o_O indeed.
On the contrary - I'm running Windows 7 Beta on an Eee 901, and it performs at least as well as XP. I've been very surprised and pleased with the performance of Win7 on this machine - it's definitely a major step up from Vista, which I had previously tried and removed. I'm looking forward to upgrading from XP to 7. That's something I never would have said about Vista, and that's good news for Microsoft.
(Of course, my Eee does spend 95% of its time booted into Mac OS X, but that's just showing my true preferences.;-) )
As a current IBMer, mod parent up... IBM is where good products and companies go to die. They have this enormous pool of talented people and excellent products, yet still manage to bury it all under an idiotic, quarterly-results-bottom-line-screw-investment mentality. I've seen small groups in IBM do great things - and then they get noticed, sucked into some larger organization (they're duplicative and we're bigger so we're obviously right!) and any innovation, good ideas, or anything positive at all get swiftly crushed.
Yes, the "video lockout" chip was the same deal as Nintendo and their custom chips in old NES cartridges. It was a response to crap flooding the market - from Chinese knockoffs these days - and such knockoffs even caused damage to the iPods. It's to control their licensing, yes, but how does that really affect you moving forward, other than what hooks up to your iPod is guaranteed to work and be of decent quality? I haven't seen a single example of Apple denying the chip to a company who has requested it, so I don't see the big deal.
The "DRM" here is much more likely tied to the fact that the controls are on the damn headphones, so of course you can't hook up normal headphones. How are you supposed to play/pause/etc? Stupid damn decision in the first place, and one I hope we see reversed on the next generation.
Just because it's called Yellow Dog Linux v6, does NOT mean it's based on Fedora 6. Rather, it's based on the latest RedHat and CentOS code, and is much more similar to an upcoming version 6 of these products.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what you're using, but it's most certainly not a six year old "Mac Pro", seeing as that was first released in 2006. And if you are on a Power Mac G5, you're going to be left out in the cold shortly as Snow Leopard requires Intel. It will take a while for PPC software to dry up thanks to universal binaries, but your days are numbered. Admittedly, you only need four more years to reach a decade - but those are going to be longer and longer years.
In one of the Terry Pratchet novels, Sam Vimes realizes that the wealthy stay that way because they buy ONE well-built product that lasts, while the poor buy shoddy crap that they have to replace over and over. In his case it was shoes. In your case, it's your computer.
I've seen these things more times than I care to count - either the batteries die, the power jacks break, the case starts to break and crack, the CD/DVD drive dies, etc. The build and component quality on a $300-$400 computer is ABYSMAL - there's simply no way to get quality components, build quality, support, etc in that kind of budget. I'm sure that 15" brick is 1280x800 so it has huge pixels (but it's 15" and bigger is better!), it probably weighs in excess of 6lbs due to the screen size and thick plastic it's made of, has anemic graphics and modest processing power, and is built like shit. And you're likely replacing it every year because of it.
If you're comparing Apple hardware against bargain basement PC it's not going to line up. They're simply not built the same, or with the same components. If you'll notice, Dell, Lenovo, and others offer several lines of computers that have overlapping specs - and they typically have a line with similar specs and components as a Mac - at similar prices. But we've been over that a million times. If you want a $400 computer, you are not getting it from Apple, and never will. I'd like an affordable Tesla. That's also not happening.
I've converted at least a dozen people over the last decade to Macs. While the OS has had a lot to do with it, the high build quality of the hardware has been a MAJOR factor - they simply have not had anywhere near the problems they had on their PC's (Lenovo, Dells, home-built, and Shuttles). Macs aren't perfect and they do break sometimes, but that extra money you're paying IS getting you real value - it's not just the logo. I guarantee if you tried one, within a month you'd be wondering why you didn't sooner.
Of course, that was also due to the fact that you couldn't easily uninstall it - the uninstall options were all disabled, and you had to do some deep mucking in the registry and obscure directories to get rid of it completely.
I assume this can be uninstalled the normal way. I don't like it - so there should be some outrage - but I don't think it's as pernicious as the .Net one.
...how hard is a jailbroken device to maintain over time? I understand the initial process is fairly simple, but with most hacks maintenance and keeping it hacked can be difficult (witness hackintoshes when OS updates come out, Tivos when the kernel is updated, etc). Can anyone comment on how hard it would be for an "average user" to not only set this up, but keep it running over time?
And it is especially difficult to get it to stop. You can, but you have to turn off every feature they offer beyond bare DNS.
Of course, they do provide quite good bare DNS, so that's not a terrible thing, but it would be much better if their "helpful" services were opt-in.
Look, we all know that the DMCA is evil and has been repeatedly abused. This is not one of those cases. The guy was modding consoles for profit. You can go on and on all you like about homebrew, but *you* know, *I* know, and *everyone else* knows that's not why he was doing it. He was doing it so cheap bastards can play copied games. This has nothing to do with your rights. If there was no DMCA, he'd be gotten on other laws - this was just the most convenient one. He's a stupid-ass student criminal, plain and simple. Now, feel free to debate the severity of the sentence - that's legitimate. But defending him as some noble kid who got put down by "the man" just hurts our cause. Pick your battles, people.
And also, stop putting out the crap of "why aren't they working the important cases?". Ever think that some officers/agents are assigned to different areas based on their expertise? And perhaps putting these cops on the homicide or gang squad isn't going to catch a killer or shut down a gang any faster? To put it in terms you'll understand, you don't want the guy who wrote Notepad working on the kernel. Just because you have resources spent on many tasks, does NOT mean that putting them all on a particular task will get that task done any sooner or better. I would have thought technical people would have understood resource allocation better, but the amount of stupid and kneejerk reaction around here really surprises me sometimes.
Welcome to Slashdot. I must be old here...
Ever heard of a thing called "intent"? This guy was modding consoles so people could pirate games. The cop was doing his job ("responding to a disturbance call") and hit a kid who was riding in the street AT NIGHT. It is a shame what happened, but the only thing the cop did wrong was not turn on his lights. Sadly, the only thing the kid did wrong was ride at night. Shit happens, and you don't crucify people for it.
> the lives of seven astronauts
Hey now, don't drag Columbia into this. If anything, it was abundantly clear that mission had NOTHING to do with the ISS - it wasn't even vaguely in the same orbit.
Your other points are good, and are immediately dismissed by this hyperbole.
I stand corrected. The new unibody-style MacBook Pro 17" does indeed support 12.5mm drives. I'm unsure about the 13" and 15", but this is definitely interesting. Thanks for pointing this out!
These are 12.5mm drives. The VAST majority of laptops from the last several years (certainly any new enough to have a SATA interface) only allow for 9.5mm drives. I'm sure there's some Alienware rig that's large enough to take them, but chances are your laptop will not.
This is a marketing stunt to say "we're first", even though it won't be usable for most people.
Right. Call your helpdesk. Because they're going to know fuck-all about the internal gateway server that's misconfigured and so EVERY GODDAMN TIME you need to get at the IP buildsheets you're blocked by these useless fucking warnings. Oh, and telling it to remember the exception completely BLOCKS getting to the site, rather than allows it. There's no security threat whatsoever.
Someone has misconfigured a server, and YOU WILL NEVER FIND THAT PERSON TO TELL THEM. Thus these warnings are completely fucking useless.
I'm surprised no one else caught the Endless Eight reference. Lord knows I've been stuck in a time loop week in and week out for the last month...
It should be noted that iTunes does not encrypt backups by default, but you can enable that with a checkbox in the iPhone preferences. So the real question is - with a PIN set and encryption on, can it still be hacked?
And required by Florida law. If they did not, the foreclosure would be vacated.
As usual, it all comes back to Florida.
> open source projects that weren't initiated by a commercial vendor suck
Correction: open source projects that are not commercial-supported have a much higher chance of sucking. KHTML was open source for years before Apple took it under its wing and made WebKit for its own ends. Now we've seen an explosion of use/interest in it (Safari, iPhone, Chrome, G1, Palm Pre, etc), whereas when Apple announced WebKit, the near-universal reaction was "KHTML? What's that? Why didn't thy use Gecko?".
Amazing! Not running several additional copies of an operating system with all of the needless overhead involved is faster! Who would have guessed?
Sometimes a virtual machine is far more "solution" than you need. If you really want the same OS with lots of separated services and resource management... then run a single copy of the OS and implement some resource management. Jails are just one example - I find Solaris Containers to be much more elegant. Of course, then you have to be running Solaris...
Amen, Amen, Amen. Ever since the move to a modern codebase (which was desperately needed), Slashdot has been a huge bugfest. What happened to the open source ideal of people being able to jump in and rapidly respond to bugs? And if Slashcode isn't open in this way, then why the hell not?
No, you don't complain in China if you know what's good for you. How many stories do we see every year about prominent protestors being thrown into labor camps?
Take Hong Kong for a recent example of how life in China works. As soon as the transition was complete - Basic Law, Special Administrative Region or not - the newspapers and politicians made fast 180's and self-censored to avoid bringing the wrath of the Chinese government down on them. Are you saying that a majority of people in Hong Kong love communism and the CCP, since there isn't any public protest?
Certainly some of the Chinese people have been indoctrinated by the Communist Party. And some accept it because it "doesn't affect them" (moderate capitalism and "openness" has kept the wealthy people in the cities from complaining). But you'd probably find a lot of them are unhappy with it - although probably for the same reasons we're unhappy with our governments (rampant corruption, bureaucracy, and inattentiveness) than the limitations on their freedom of speech, thought, and lives.
Meanwhile, I was pleasantly surprised to see Mac OS X on 5.1p1. Now that could have dropped this past week with 10.5.7, but it's nice to know that even vendors with perhaps less of a stake in most-current packages are keeping up to date.
Whoever that guy was earlier with 3.9, well o_O indeed.
>Damien Katz, CouchDB's creator ... worked on Lotus Notes prior to that...
That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
On the contrary - I'm running Windows 7 Beta on an Eee 901, and it performs at least as well as XP. I've been very surprised and pleased with the performance of Win7 on this machine - it's definitely a major step up from Vista, which I had previously tried and removed. I'm looking forward to upgrading from XP to 7. That's something I never would have said about Vista, and that's good news for Microsoft.
(Of course, my Eee does spend 95% of its time booted into Mac OS X, but that's just showing my true preferences. ;-) )
As a current IBMer, mod parent up... IBM is where good products and companies go to die. They have this enormous pool of talented people and excellent products, yet still manage to bury it all under an idiotic, quarterly-results-bottom-line-screw-investment mentality. I've seen small groups in IBM do great things - and then they get noticed, sucked into some larger organization (they're duplicative and we're bigger so we're obviously right!) and any innovation, good ideas, or anything positive at all get swiftly crushed.
Apparently you missed (thankfully) Notes 8, which has already been wrapped in Eclipse...
Yes, the "video lockout" chip was the same deal as Nintendo and their custom chips in old NES cartridges. It was a response to crap flooding the market - from Chinese knockoffs these days - and such knockoffs even caused damage to the iPods. It's to control their licensing, yes, but how does that really affect you moving forward, other than what hooks up to your iPod is guaranteed to work and be of decent quality? I haven't seen a single example of Apple denying the chip to a company who has requested it, so I don't see the big deal.
The "DRM" here is much more likely tied to the fact that the controls are on the damn headphones, so of course you can't hook up normal headphones. How are you supposed to play/pause/etc? Stupid damn decision in the first place, and one I hope we see reversed on the next generation.
Just because it's called Yellow Dog Linux v6, does NOT mean it's based on Fedora 6. Rather, it's based on the latest RedHat and CentOS code, and is much more similar to an upcoming version 6 of these products.