Except these moves don't punish MS in the slightest. It punishes end users who are just using their computers and have no say in the policies here.
Not to mention, 5 days certainly is not enough time to do the testing MS needs to do to release a patch. I'd rather just perform a work around (limited rights, removing functionality, etc) than deal with a patch that will cause me further problems.
Im sure his hotfix and one man testing matches MS's extensive testing. Seriously, do you think any company would just release this fix immediately without serious testing?
To be a conspiracy it needs to be accepted by a fringe minority, with little to no evidence, while a majority rejects it, with their own evidence. Again, those things are not conspiracies. They are covert intelligence actions. A conspiracy would be if in fact the moon landings were a hoax or if the Illuminati were running things.
I guess someone could argue that all covert intelligence actions are defacto conspiracies, but that's weak sauce in my opinion and tough to defend.
>Apple would have done this anyway to drive sales.
Oh, I don't know about that. Look at AppleTV. Its stagnated. Now with GoogleTV, we'll probably see Apple throwing dollars at it and trying to get a feature parity with google.
Look at Skype calling over 3G and the dozen or so apps/features that have been rejected and are now approved since Android started making Apple look bad. I doubt this is coincidental.
Look how long it took Apple to get off PowerPC while the rest of the industry was destroying them in benchmarks with C2D or even P4.
The tech industry, regardless of who it is, only really works with competition. Apple is no exception.
>Even if there is a politician who can actually cut spending [I'd trust Ron Paul to do it; but that's about it], my earlier statement holds.
Another Ron Paul nut hoping for some kind of terrible end. Sorry, but the right-wing's constant hysterical screaming of "the end is near unless we all become extreme corportists" wasn't convincing 30 years ago and it isn't convincing today.
Its not fair to call any of those conspiracies theories. If we accept those then anything the CIA does is a conspiracy. Those were either covert or just crimes. I don't think any of those start off with what we consider a conspiracy theory, namely a cause supported by a fringe minority to reveal the truth of an event. There was no fringe community telling us about Watergate for years, for example, it was simply leaked.
>but holy-jumping-jeebus can we get an article with some legitimate [CITATION NEEDED] please.
In the 1980s the US was eager to test the resolve of the Soviet's glasnost policy of open relations with the West. A drunken Caspar Weinberger, the current Secretary of Defense, decided to ask the Soviets to work closely with experimental music artist Brian Eno after reading an article about him in the Post. Brian was supplied with the best drugs Iran/Contra could supply. After months of negotiations and late night stoner brain-storming sessions, Brian finally got the approval for his epic 10,000 year song which is to be broadcast by the Russians. The break from today was simply the start of the chorus.
Shortly after the Soviets got revenge by allowing Yakov Smirfnoff passage into the US and then "losing" his paperwork for return.
Yet when we seen twins and siblings with nearly the same diet we dont see autism. If there was a diet connection it would have been obvious long ago like scurvy and rickets is obvious.
So youre advocating the old bait and switch? "Hey, buy the iphone. It does youtube! Unlimited data!" Now its "DONT USE DATA!" Sorry, but youre a corporate apologist who is doing the bidding of a company that doesnt give two shits about you.
>It would also discourage casual youtube streaming and thus probably improve network speed for everyone.
Wait, what? They market that feature. It comes with a youtube app. Its one of the main purposes of the phone. You're not entitled to a cell tower all your own. I paid to use it too. If I want to watch video I fucking will watch video. If you have connectivity issues then call AT&T.
Christ, that's like saying a gas shortage would be great because less people would be driving and there would be less traffic.
Yes, it is a "cultural thing." In American culture we accept some kind of divine rule of kings for large corporations. We don't boycott or complain. We take the shiny and pay out the nose. Our markets are based on brand identification and our purchasing moves are dictated almost purely by ads and marketing. In other cultures, money has value, and demanding good service for exchange of money is not seen as being 'cheap' or 'crass.'
>The cap makes higher bandwidth applications unaffordable for most users, and will seriously stifle the development of new technologies for mobile device.
This is what I've been saying to the AT&T/Apple cheerleaders. So what if most customers don't hit 2gigs often. Right now we're in the midst of a mobile video revolution and AT&T is doing its best to make sure its never happens. People who stream video or even just audio for extended periods of time are more or less being told to get lost. Who knows whats over the horizon. Perhaps life-blogging 24/7 or mass adoption of mobile video chat.
What really bugs me is the cheapness of this move. The iphone and the ipad are premium devices. Telling customers who have put a couple hundred down and signed contracts for 2 years that they can't use advanced features is mind-boggling. Even worse is the 2gig limit sounds pretty arbitrary to me. Some, perhaps even most, mobile carriers typically have 5gig limits per month. AT&T is doing less than half that. Wow. I'm so glad I'm moving to Sprint/EVO tomorrow.
>I appreciate that ATT is going to sell 2 GB of data, with tethering, for $50.
Wait, what? Data on a Verizon phone is like 30 dollars. Not $60. Its $60 if you have a non-phone like a broadbard card. A lot of Verizon phones can do tethering for free. If anything AT&T is the ripoff here.
>Second, why is Sprint 4G so slow?
Are you kidding. People have been doing speed tests on Sprint/Clear for months and outside of people who are getting zero reception or have bad equipment, we're seeing speeds of 2+ megabits easy, most people getting 3-6mbps with low latency, by cellular standards.
>And they are not cheap either.
The EVO plan with the $10 4G fee is $10 CHEAPER than the equivalent iphone plan. I should know, I've been pricing them out this week because Im thinking of getting rid of my iphone.
Sprint is probably the cheapest carrier right now for smartphones. T-mobile has a good deal if you buy your phone completely (no subsidization) and can get on the lower priced plan.
No, its the 2000s and one of the largest smartphone OSs is iPhone (50 million units sold). Lets not forget their near perfect monopoly on music players, which are little more than smartphones sans phone and are binary compatible with ipod/ipad.
Also, in the 1990s no one made you buy Microsoft. You could always have bought a Mac or run a maturing Linux, like today. Harmful monopolies are funny things. In retrospect they are easy to spot, but when you in the midst of one its easy to justify them.
>They don't have to open up their hardware or software to anyone else, and no court is going to make them.
I dont think anyone is suggesting that, but pointing out Apple's rotten policies is a social good, at least in my book. It keeps the consumers informed and the bad publicity will hurt them enough in the long run. We're pretty much witnessing Steve Jobs circa 1980s all over again. He's going to fight for closed and expensive while his competitors will fight for open and cheap(er). Closed and expensive has early advantages but not much staying power.
>I would wager that Zappa's thirst for this kind of mixing would lead him to the industry standard: Pro Tools [wikipedia.org].
Right. Do we really think techie artists are gravitating towards Linux? Lets not be naive. I don't think Thom Yorke is demanding that all Radiohead stuff be done strictly on OSS software. Outside of extremists and college students, you'll find that people are just practical and use the best tool they can afford for the job.
Yes, but you're waking up from caffeine withdrawal, not sleepiness. If you quit caffeine right now in a week or so you would wake up naturally. That's the point of the study.
>Their 3G network is a finite resource, and a small percentage of users were using huge amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of all.
Other networks simply throttle heavy users past a certain point. Seems to be the best of both worlds. Also, "detriment of all" doesn't make sense. If I'm the only guy on that tower at 2am and that towers dedicated line to the internet is underutilized, how does my usage affect your wife 1,000 miles away? It doesn't. Essentially this is smart network management vs caps. The former is superior while the latter is easier and more profitable.
This is what happens when people say "I just want something that 'works.' Dont make me think." Once you're nice and locked into their product/service, then the whip comes out. I feel sorry for people with brand loyalty. In the end they get screwed pretty badly.
>Of course, this is after I spend a couple of hours updating Windows XP because I hadn't used the thing in two months.
Is the Chrome OS wont need updates? I have an old ubuntu install I boot up every so often and the updates are just as bad, if not worse. Modern OSs require updates. Theyre all moving targets.
I'm also very skeptical of the claims of "I just need a browser!" Every user who told me that or something similar adds "Oh and yahoo chat, and my toolbars, and it must work with this shitty printer/scanner combo, and run this old crap software I've been using since 1998, and quickbooks, etc etc."
>The problem here is assuming that everything must be computerized... for no good reason other than everything must be computerized.
Where is this book and who has it? How long has it been late? Provide a report of all missing books. Provide a report of all late books, fees, and the addresses of the people with the books. Automate mailings for every book late over two weeks. At six weeks send an email out to the librarian. What are our top 100 books this month, this week, this year, this decade? How do we connect up to our inter-library loan?
Database lookups and networking beat going through files and making phone calls any day of the week. Once your library scales past a couple hundred users then you're doing your patrons a disservice by staying with paper-based technology. Not to mention the expensive cost of human labor to keep doing this stuff by hand.
Burn speeds on optical media are pretty slow when compared to the SATA limit. Heck, its slow compared to USB. Read speeds of CD/DVDs is only a couple of megabytes per second average over the whole disk. USB2.0 or Ethernet transports to either flash or spinning disk are at least 10x that.
Optical media is the floppy disk of today. Not sure why we are even still using it. Legacy and retail concerns mostly. External drive storage is cheaper and faster. I can't imagine buying a BD burner for data. I'd rather just put these files on an external USB drive. Here's hoping DRM laden, no skipping ads, HDCP only junk like BD are dead sooner than later.
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>Whatever it takes to damage Microsoft is okay with me.
This doesnt punish MS, it punishes end users and admins. Sadly, this fact doesnt matter to those who are just full of MS hate.
Except these moves don't punish MS in the slightest. It punishes end users who are just using their computers and have no say in the policies here.
Not to mention, 5 days certainly is not enough time to do the testing MS needs to do to release a patch. I'd rather just perform a work around (limited rights, removing functionality, etc) than deal with a patch that will cause me further problems.
Im sure his hotfix and one man testing matches MS's extensive testing. Seriously, do you think any company would just release this fix immediately without serious testing?
Thats because flash isnt using hardware acceleration but VLC is.
To be a conspiracy it needs to be accepted by a fringe minority, with little to no evidence, while a majority rejects it, with their own evidence. Again, those things are not conspiracies. They are covert intelligence actions. A conspiracy would be if in fact the moon landings were a hoax or if the Illuminati were running things.
I guess someone could argue that all covert intelligence actions are defacto conspiracies, but that's weak sauce in my opinion and tough to defend.
>Apple would have done this anyway to drive sales.
Oh, I don't know about that. Look at AppleTV. Its stagnated. Now with GoogleTV, we'll probably see Apple throwing dollars at it and trying to get a feature parity with google.
Look at Skype calling over 3G and the dozen or so apps/features that have been rejected and are now approved since Android started making Apple look bad. I doubt this is coincidental.
Look how long it took Apple to get off PowerPC while the rest of the industry was destroying them in benchmarks with C2D or even P4.
The tech industry, regardless of who it is, only really works with competition. Apple is no exception.
>Even if there is a politician who can actually cut spending [I'd trust Ron Paul to do it; but that's about it], my earlier statement holds.
Another Ron Paul nut hoping for some kind of terrible end. Sorry, but the right-wing's constant hysterical screaming of "the end is near unless we all become extreme corportists" wasn't convincing 30 years ago and it isn't convincing today.
Its not fair to call any of those conspiracies theories. If we accept those then anything the CIA does is a conspiracy. Those were either covert or just crimes. I don't think any of those start off with what we consider a conspiracy theory, namely a cause supported by a fringe minority to reveal the truth of an event. There was no fringe community telling us about Watergate for years, for example, it was simply leaked.
>MS tried the same thing with their "passport" single-sign-on-shopping system back in the dotcom boom days. It didn't work then either.
Now I have 100 different logins. OpenID doesnt seem to be going anywhere either. Err, victory?
>but holy-jumping-jeebus can we get an article with some legitimate [CITATION NEEDED] please.
In the 1980s the US was eager to test the resolve of the Soviet's glasnost policy of open relations with the West. A drunken Caspar Weinberger, the current Secretary of Defense, decided to ask the Soviets to work closely with experimental music artist Brian Eno after reading an article about him in the Post. Brian was supplied with the best drugs Iran/Contra could supply. After months of negotiations and late night stoner brain-storming sessions, Brian finally got the approval for his epic 10,000 year song which is to be broadcast by the Russians. The break from today was simply the start of the chorus.
Shortly after the Soviets got revenge by allowing Yakov Smirfnoff passage into the US and then "losing" his paperwork for return.
Yet when we seen twins and siblings with nearly the same diet we dont see autism. If there was a diet connection it would have been obvious long ago like scurvy and rickets is obvious.
So youre advocating the old bait and switch? "Hey, buy the iphone. It does youtube! Unlimited data!" Now its "DONT USE DATA!" Sorry, but youre a corporate apologist who is doing the bidding of a company that doesnt give two shits about you.
>It would also discourage casual youtube streaming and thus probably improve network speed for everyone.
Wait, what? They market that feature. It comes with a youtube app. Its one of the main purposes of the phone. You're not entitled to a cell tower all your own. I paid to use it too. If I want to watch video I fucking will watch video. If you have connectivity issues then call AT&T.
Christ, that's like saying a gas shortage would be great because less people would be driving and there would be less traffic.
Yes, it is a "cultural thing." In American culture we accept some kind of divine rule of kings for large corporations. We don't boycott or complain. We take the shiny and pay out the nose. Our markets are based on brand identification and our purchasing moves are dictated almost purely by ads and marketing. In other cultures, money has value, and demanding good service for exchange of money is not seen as being 'cheap' or 'crass.'
>The cap makes higher bandwidth applications unaffordable for most users, and will seriously stifle the development of new technologies for mobile device.
This is what I've been saying to the AT&T/Apple cheerleaders. So what if most customers don't hit 2gigs often. Right now we're in the midst of a mobile video revolution and AT&T is doing its best to make sure its never happens. People who stream video or even just audio for extended periods of time are more or less being told to get lost. Who knows whats over the horizon. Perhaps life-blogging 24/7 or mass adoption of mobile video chat.
What really bugs me is the cheapness of this move. The iphone and the ipad are premium devices. Telling customers who have put a couple hundred down and signed contracts for 2 years that they can't use advanced features is mind-boggling. Even worse is the 2gig limit sounds pretty arbitrary to me. Some, perhaps even most, mobile carriers typically have 5gig limits per month. AT&T is doing less than half that. Wow. I'm so glad I'm moving to Sprint/EVO tomorrow.
>I appreciate that ATT is going to sell 2 GB of data, with tethering, for $50.
Wait, what? Data on a Verizon phone is like 30 dollars. Not $60. Its $60 if you have a non-phone like a broadbard card. A lot of Verizon phones can do tethering for free. If anything AT&T is the ripoff here.
>Second, why is Sprint 4G so slow?
Are you kidding. People have been doing speed tests on Sprint/Clear for months and outside of people who are getting zero reception or have bad equipment, we're seeing speeds of 2+ megabits easy, most people getting 3-6mbps with low latency, by cellular standards.
>And they are not cheap either.
The EVO plan with the $10 4G fee is $10 CHEAPER than the equivalent iphone plan. I should know, I've been pricing them out this week because Im thinking of getting rid of my iphone.
Sprint is probably the cheapest carrier right now for smartphones. T-mobile has a good deal if you buy your phone completely (no subsidization) and can get on the lower priced plan.
>This isn't the 90's and Apple isn't MS
No, its the 2000s and one of the largest smartphone OSs is iPhone (50 million units sold). Lets not forget their near perfect monopoly on music players, which are little more than smartphones sans phone and are binary compatible with ipod/ipad.
Also, in the 1990s no one made you buy Microsoft. You could always have bought a Mac or run a maturing Linux, like today. Harmful monopolies are funny things. In retrospect they are easy to spot, but when you in the midst of one its easy to justify them.
>They don't have to open up their hardware or software to anyone else, and no court is going to make them.
I dont think anyone is suggesting that, but pointing out Apple's rotten policies is a social good, at least in my book. It keeps the consumers informed and the bad publicity will hurt them enough in the long run. We're pretty much witnessing Steve Jobs circa 1980s all over again. He's going to fight for closed and expensive while his competitors will fight for open and cheap(er). Closed and expensive has early advantages but not much staying power.
>I would wager that Zappa's thirst for this kind of mixing would lead him to the industry standard: Pro Tools [wikipedia.org].
Right. Do we really think techie artists are gravitating towards Linux? Lets not be naive. I don't think Thom Yorke is demanding that all Radiohead stuff be done strictly on OSS software. Outside of extremists and college students, you'll find that people are just practical and use the best tool they can afford for the job.
Yes, but you're waking up from caffeine withdrawal, not sleepiness. If you quit caffeine right now in a week or so you would wake up naturally. That's the point of the study.
>Their 3G network is a finite resource, and a small percentage of users were using huge amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of all.
Other networks simply throttle heavy users past a certain point. Seems to be the best of both worlds. Also, "detriment of all" doesn't make sense. If I'm the only guy on that tower at 2am and that towers dedicated line to the internet is underutilized, how does my usage affect your wife 1,000 miles away? It doesn't. Essentially this is smart network management vs caps. The former is superior while the latter is easier and more profitable.
This is what happens when people say "I just want something that 'works.' Dont make me think." Once you're nice and locked into their product/service, then the whip comes out. I feel sorry for people with brand loyalty. In the end they get screwed pretty badly.
>Of course, this is after I spend a couple of hours updating Windows XP because I hadn't used the thing in two months.
Is the Chrome OS wont need updates? I have an old ubuntu install I boot up every so often and the updates are just as bad, if not worse. Modern OSs require updates. Theyre all moving targets.
I'm also very skeptical of the claims of "I just need a browser!" Every user who told me that or something similar adds "Oh and yahoo chat, and my toolbars, and it must work with this shitty printer/scanner combo, and run this old crap software I've been using since 1998, and quickbooks, etc etc."
>Do try and pay attention - we're talking an elementary school library here.
Do try to learn how to think. An elementary school can have hundreds of students. The ones in my city do.
>The problem here is assuming that everything must be computerized... for no good reason other than everything must be computerized.
Where is this book and who has it? How long has it been late? Provide a report of all missing books. Provide a report of all late books, fees, and the addresses of the people with the books. Automate mailings for every book late over two weeks. At six weeks send an email out to the librarian. What are our top 100 books this month, this week, this year, this decade? How do we connect up to our inter-library loan?
Database lookups and networking beat going through files and making phone calls any day of the week. Once your library scales past a couple hundred users then you're doing your patrons a disservice by staying with paper-based technology. Not to mention the expensive cost of human labor to keep doing this stuff by hand.
Burn speeds on optical media are pretty slow when compared to the SATA limit. Heck, its slow compared to USB. Read speeds of CD/DVDs is only a couple of megabytes per second average over the whole disk. USB2.0 or Ethernet transports to either flash or spinning disk are at least 10x that.
Optical media is the floppy disk of today. Not sure why we are even still using it. Legacy and retail concerns mostly. External drive storage is cheaper and faster. I can't imagine buying a BD burner for data. I'd rather just put these files on an external USB drive. Here's hoping DRM laden, no skipping ads, HDCP only junk like BD are dead sooner than later.