Oil is a non-renewable resource and will peak and only become more and more expensive. Considering this is projected to happen in my lifetime I would say, that yes, this is a crisis. Cutting back, sane power settings, and renewables are really the only place to go from here until someone gets fusion going cheaply.
>The real solution to this problem is for Comcast, and every other ISP to invest more into infrastructure.
Comcast's residential pricing in Chicago is 59 dollars plus a 5 dollar modem rental (this is accurate as of today, as I just called and ordered). This is 64 dollars a month and because its residential its capped at 250gigs. Comcast's 6mbps (w 12mbps burst) Business class service is 59.99, with no cap, and includes the modem rental. The only difference is that they make you sign a 12month contract.
So enterprising Comcast users should just switch to business class, pay less, and enjoy their torrents. The cap is there to make them move to business service and because the business internet market is so much more competitive than residential the price is LESS than residential. Funny eh? They have the infrastructure, but they know AT&T service is so horrible and Uverse is only in select neighborhoods that they can charge what AT&T charges for Uverse Max. I tried getting Uverse today only to hear "You cant get it without video service" and then after practically yelling at the CSR I got them to talk to their manager to tell me that "Yes, we'll reluctantly sell you internet." And because I have DSL with them I first need to cancel it then call them back once its disconnected. So we're looking at several days of no internet. Just incredible. AT&T's incompetence is stunning. I gave up and called Comcast after some research.
What we need is more competitors and better competitors. I suspect they have the infrastructure. If you read dslreports forums on business comcast, you'll find a lot of happy people with high speeds, no caps, and normal pings. As is, the duopoly thats common in most American cities isnt working. I really dont have a dog in this fight. I just needed something faster than my 1.5mbps DSL line (cant increase because of distance to CO) and wanted the best price for my bandwidth dollar.
For those interested, Comcast business has 14/2 for 89.99 a month. I might get that and split it with other tenants in my condo via the Cat-5 run in all the units.
>This "announcement" reads a lot like a snake-oil advertisement.
Why is this snake oil? Look at modern CPUs and all their power saving functions like speedstep. They make complete sense and save quite a bit of energy.
Now look at your typical ethernet switch. Each port eats up like 5+ watts. Yes, watts, not mW. So you're looking at quite a bit of power usage here to maintain a network connection for 100mbps or 1gbps and to maintain the spec of 100 meters. Well, most computers rarely need that full bandwidth or need the power to maintain a 100 meter run. The idea with greening the datacenter is to write an ethernet spec that dials down the power as needed, like speedstep.
Another idea is to use the cold winter air to help with cooling as opposed to just running the AC at 100% like you do in summer.
Thats not snake oil, those are good ideas, and considering that we're in the middle of energy crisis (not enough uranium to switch to all nuclear and not enough oil for cheap prices) its probably a good time to start proposing this stuff.
WTF? Wanting to be a rockstar is like wanting to be a GD? Haha right. A rockstar is a millionaire who tours the world. A GD is the sad looking guy in your office who shares a loft with 5 other artists in a bad part of town.
Dont just lump a bunch of games together and say "See, these are all the same."
>Those jobs that Macs do particularily well...
Its software, not magic. It runs on an OS. Photoshop runs just fine on my XP machine. Nothing magical happens when it runs on OSX. Well, your wallet gets lighter.
>Apple enters the market with their own device, which has a bunch of features that may or may not have been seen in other devices, but on the whole is a very well integrated package. Somehow, they saw a way to make the product work.
This really shows a lack of knowledge of Apple's history.
1. The Newton. Palm made this work. Not Apple. Later on Apple copied the Treo format (phone + PDA) Palm made popular and merged it with a virtual keyboard.
2. Apple Pippin. Failed game/multimedia console. Nintendo64 and PS2 got it right.
3. Power Mac G4 Cube. Failed on the market. Infamous for cracking case. Now, there's no shortage of small cube PCs. The PC world got this right.
4. Apple QuickTake. Failed digital camera. Everyone gets this right.
5. Macintosh TV. Failed TV/PC combo. Now TV is just a PCI card away or done with steaming/downloading.
6. Apple's "Hockey Puck" USB Mouse. No one gets this right because its such a bad idea.
7. eMate. Low cost Newton based PC. OLPC and others get this right.
Apple tries a lot of things and they fail more often than they succeed. The idea that theyre the ones who can fix the tablet market is a bit of stretch. Heck, I like tablets, but I understand their limitations, especially in regards to keyboards/inputs. Perhaps it will have something like the iwheel.
>They are the people who have the jobs Cubible Joe wish he could have (and are obviously successful enough at it to afford apple products).
Ive seen the "envy" argument so many times its baffling. An Apple computer isnt a 100,000 car or a million dollar home. Its as affordable as any higher end PC. I think this stinks of the 'faux riche' attitude many young middle class people suffer from and leads to heavy credit card debt and collapsing mortgages.
As far as "Joe Cubicle" wishing he was a graphic designer? Err, what grounds do you have to make that statement? Im in IT and I dont want to work in art or advertising. All the GDs I have worked with made less money than me and were constantly stressed about deadlines and the whims of the marketing directors/bosses who dont know what they want. They all seemed more than a bit miserable. No one envied them. Maybe you do. Perhaps you should stop projecting and go to art school and buy a bunch of Apple products.
I have netflix and most of the streaming selection are B movies that studios dont care about. They are still very much protecting their bigger productions. Im sure "more streaming choices" is stuff like Encino Man 4 or White Chicks 3.
I dont know if more of these types of movies are helping. If anything it lowers the signal to noise ratio and makes people want to give up on streaming. Ive come pretty close to canceling over that. Im sure Im not the only one.
Do people even buy movies? Your typical WB movie is a mild distraction over the weekend. Its not fine art. Its not something you ever need to watch more than once. Without the spectacle of the big screen, the allure of fresh popcorn, and THX sound, its really not much else. Its like TV. Entertainment for the lowest common denominator. Watch it once and forget it about. This is why people gravitate towards rentals and on demand.
What great gems does WB think we're all going to rush out to buy? I just went to their website and heres a list of the items they are showcasing:
The Book of Eli, Terminator Salvation, The Hangover, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Valentine's Day, Final Destination 3D, Whiteout, Sherlock Holmes, Gossip Girl, The Invention of Lying.
Wow, I want to see maybe one of those and only in the theater. The idea of owning any of that is pretty silly. WB, your products are a commodity. Theyre chewing gum. We chew them for a short while and we spit them out. Get on the rental bandwagon and give up your fight to sell me 30 dollar bluray discs of your junk.
I doubt its because of security soley. Its the BES management features that really sell it. Centralized policies, remote wipes, etc. Security is only part of that. The BB system relies on your pumping your mail to Ontario and BB's getting it from Ontario. Its not a direct connection to the BES server in your enterprise. So any outtage in Ontario means an outtage for you. Not sure how good of an idea that is, especially since Android and other Activesync phones connect straight to your mail server just like any email client, and not through BB's proxies, which can be compromised. Sure they use end to end security but how feasible are MITM attacks?
I could see Google or Microsoft reproducing some of these features for corporate customers. That would pretty much kill the BB. For every thing the BB does well it does 5 other things badly.
>Generally speaking, people who commit violent acts in the name of religion are ignoring the teachings of the religion they claim to follow (e.g. the Crusades).
Christianity, like all religions, advocate violence more they they condemn it. The entire Bible is almost nothing but war stories, murder, and god sanctioned murder. Your willful ignorance is far from convincing.
>If religion were magically erased from existence, these people would just find some other excuse for violence.
In some cases, yes, but you cannot deny that hate is taught by religion. The hate of others and the specialness of the religious group is taught in almost all religions. Few religions have any tolerance for gays, different religious people, atheists, women who want equality, etc.
Not to mention, a lot of these terrorists are mentally ill bottom feeders who are being used by the religious elites to bomb their targets. Without religion these people would be wandering aimless or better yet, in some kind of institution. Better that than being indoctrinated about how one must kill infidels.
Turns out the power elite use religion for their own goals. Corrupt middle east governments blame their domestic problems on Christian and Jewish foreigners instead of addressing these issues properly. Corrupt Western government use the religion card to cow voters and to appeal to the bigotry of the masses. If there was no religion then they would be forced to be accountable for their governments.
Some of us are still trying to imagine no religion. The idea that it would make no different isnt convincing in the slightest. A secular philosophy that fulfills the needs of these people could change the world.
Portable Truecrypt has problems. The user will import their private key or at least have it somewhere they can get to it or use conventional cryptography. So there's a lot of security vulnerabilities right there. Oh, forgot to delete your private key? Now Im cracking the conventional encryption that protects it. TrueCrypt portable requierd admin privs:
Also note that, as regards personal privacy, in most cases, it is not safe to work with sensitive data under systems where you do not have administrator privileges, because the administrator can easily capture and copy the sensitive data, including the passwords and keys.
However, users without administrator privileges cannot encrypt/format partitions, cannot create NTFS volumes, cannot install/uninstall TrueCrypt, cannot change passwords/keyfiles for TrueCrypt partitions/devices, cannot backup/restore headers of TrueCrypt partitions/devices, and they cannot run TrueCrypt in portable mode.
The idea with these drives is that the app can be run from the drive itself, so no extra software or training is needed. No key management. So that really just leaves us conventional cryptography, not public/private key. The problem of having security on your USB drive that gets plugged into various computers that you might not have control over and may be running trojans is tough to solve. Application level encryption is probably the best way to go but it requires standard installs and trust of the host computer.
Youre better off just carrying a netbook or other trusted security device with an encrypted drive and sharing the files via conventional methods with the host without giving the host all your data - email, ftp, web, plaintext transfers, etc.
>For a guy that is supposed to be a step ahead tech-wise, apparently he doesn't understand that people want a portable device that is easy to read.
Early in the computer revolution, the idea of a centralized application on dedicated hardware was popular. People envisioned computers that just ran word processors or just ran whatever stand alone application. For a little while this worked but it turns out what people want is to be able to break away from expensive dedicated hardware and just run software on a commodity machine.
Whats going on now is that people are just asking "Why must I pay $400 dollars, cant I just run this on my laptop?"
Unfortunately for nutty McFuturist, Amazon has already beaten him to the punch. You can read a Kindle book on a Kindle, on an ipod/iphone, or on a PC. I suspect the Nook will be doing this soon. Essentially, these companies are just competing on DRM formats. Not much else.
Dont run it automatically. Have the default be JS off and a nice scary warning box about JS and how you should only enable it if you are certain this is a safe PDF. Sure, its not a perfect solution but its better than just having it on by default and running vulnerabilities at double-click.
Not to mention, when I shut it off under Preferences - KEEP IT OFF. If its off in preferences, it helpfully reminds the user than its off and offers to re-enable it via the prompt. What the hell is Adobe thinking?
While I'm at it how about updates to the reader that arent 40-150 megabytes big or an updater that actually works. Right now, sane people should be considering Reader are very serious security vulnerability and migrating off the platform. Adobe has shown nothing but contempt for even basic security.
No, by the time they went to clones, that damage was already done. The Mac was this very expensive solution that didnt do much more than a PC that cost $1,000 less. They couldnt compete and decided to sell clones.
>I have an iPhone, and it's a wonderful device, but as soon as my contract runs out (maybe sooner), I'll be moving to a different platform, and this is exactly why.
Same here. Im leaning towards an android phone bought without subsidy and getting on T-mobile's non-subsidized plan for 59.99 unlimited text/data and 500 minutes. Thats about 30 dollars less a month than the equivalent plan on ATT and Im only going to pay an extra 200 dollars down, which pays for itself in less than one year.
>They give a good song and dance about how closed the device is being about the "user experience," but the simple truth is that they don't want competition from other sources.
Turns out history was right: There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Turns out centralization from an unaccountable group leads to abuse. Apple is just a thug in the market and with its controlled devices, its helping no one but its bottom line.
>What would a potential employer think when, upon googling your name, they learn that you're so good at hiding malicious code that you won a contest for it.
Thats a pretty lousy line of reasoning and probably responsible for all the mediocrity out there in the computer world. Heck, what if your employer found out you were in the military and fought? Do you want to hire the guy who shot at Iraqis with a 50 caliber machine gun? Or the guy who wrote an ad blocking program? Or the guy who wrote a cover letter well enough to fool you into interviewing him?
Yes, you do because all these things are signs of courage and intelligence. Once you start filtering anyone with any background in anything controversial, powerful, different, or mildly questionable then you can pretty much guarantee yourself a staff of dim bulbs and products that do miserably in the market.
This is also why I think its so hard for smart people to be in politics. The electorate is so scared of anything that deviates from the mainstream that we only vote in conformist 'never rock the boat' overly-religious men, who turn out to be good at not cheating on their wives and going to church but not so good at governing and coming up with and implementing good solutions for the public good.
>The Battlefield & Call of Duty games hold exactly 0 interest to me
Err, these games are practically high fantasy. Being shot by a whole clip of ammo and running away is on par with casting fireball with an elf mage. Perhaps you are refering to the Project Reality mod for BF2?
Im not so sure about that. Ive been beta testing Life 2010 for a while now. Some highlights:
1. Get born. 2. Realize that school really just teaches you to work within a system and provides structure as your parents have no idea what else to do with you. 3. Realize your parents dont know what they are doing and many of the things they expose you to are wrong or at least unhealthy (religion, quack medicines, conspiracy theories, political biases). 4. Have some first embarrassing and demoralizing attempts at mating. 5. Goto college, go in debt, to hopefully learn something and maybe land a job that pays entry-level wages. 6. Advance in life a bit, fail a few times, consider suicide and marriage a few times. 7. Avoid drafts, wars, and extreme ideologies. Worry about getting diseases or dying in a car crash. 8. Complain about things - especially the government. Being factual is optional and somewhat frowned upon. 9. Have you own children - goto step 1 or continue to retirement.
Slashdot Mirror
Oil is a non-renewable resource and will peak and only become more and more expensive. Considering this is projected to happen in my lifetime I would say, that yes, this is a crisis. Cutting back, sane power settings, and renewables are really the only place to go from here until someone gets fusion going cheaply.
>The real solution to this problem is for Comcast, and every other ISP to invest more into infrastructure.
Comcast's residential pricing in Chicago is 59 dollars plus a 5 dollar modem rental (this is accurate as of today, as I just called and ordered). This is 64 dollars a month and because its residential its capped at 250gigs. Comcast's 6mbps (w 12mbps burst) Business class service is 59.99, with no cap, and includes the modem rental. The only difference is that they make you sign a 12month contract.
So enterprising Comcast users should just switch to business class, pay less, and enjoy their torrents. The cap is there to make them move to business service and because the business internet market is so much more competitive than residential the price is LESS than residential. Funny eh? They have the infrastructure, but they know AT&T service is so horrible and Uverse is only in select neighborhoods that they can charge what AT&T charges for Uverse Max. I tried getting Uverse today only to hear "You cant get it without video service" and then after practically yelling at the CSR I got them to talk to their manager to tell me that "Yes, we'll reluctantly sell you internet." And because I have DSL with them I first need to cancel it then call them back once its disconnected. So we're looking at several days of no internet. Just incredible. AT&T's incompetence is stunning. I gave up and called Comcast after some research.
What we need is more competitors and better competitors. I suspect they have the infrastructure. If you read dslreports forums on business comcast, you'll find a lot of happy people with high speeds, no caps, and normal pings. As is, the duopoly thats common in most American cities isnt working. I really dont have a dog in this fight. I just needed something faster than my 1.5mbps DSL line (cant increase because of distance to CO) and wanted the best price for my bandwidth dollar.
For those interested, Comcast business has 14/2 for 89.99 a month. I might get that and split it with other tenants in my condo via the Cat-5 run in all the units.
>This "announcement" reads a lot like a snake-oil advertisement.
Why is this snake oil? Look at modern CPUs and all their power saving functions like speedstep. They make complete sense and save quite a bit of energy.
Now look at your typical ethernet switch. Each port eats up like 5+ watts. Yes, watts, not mW. So you're looking at quite a bit of power usage here to maintain a network connection for 100mbps or 1gbps and to maintain the spec of 100 meters. Well, most computers rarely need that full bandwidth or need the power to maintain a 100 meter run. The idea with greening the datacenter is to write an ethernet spec that dials down the power as needed, like speedstep.
Another idea is to use the cold winter air to help with cooling as opposed to just running the AC at 100% like you do in summer.
Thats not snake oil, those are good ideas, and considering that we're in the middle of energy crisis (not enough uranium to switch to all nuclear and not enough oil for cheap prices) its probably a good time to start proposing this stuff.
Yes, and the sales of the bedazzler are pretty impressive too, but something tells me people arent envious of bedazzing cell phones.
Not to mention there is a difference between drawing and design. Not to mention a difference between all those things and fine art.
Look, no one is playing "Designer Hero" like Guitar Hero. People arent clamoring to match colors to a palette. Its sad you cant accept this fact.
WTF? Wanting to be a rockstar is like wanting to be a GD? Haha right. A rockstar is a millionaire who tours the world. A GD is the sad looking guy in your office who shares a loft with 5 other artists in a bad part of town.
Dont just lump a bunch of games together and say "See, these are all the same."
>Those jobs that Macs do particularily well...
Its software, not magic. It runs on an OS. Photoshop runs just fine on my XP machine. Nothing magical happens when it runs on OSX. Well, your wallet gets lighter.
>Apple enters the market with their own device, which has a bunch of features that may or may not have been seen in other devices, but on the whole is a very well integrated package. Somehow, they saw a way to make the product work.
This really shows a lack of knowledge of Apple's history.
1. The Newton. Palm made this work. Not Apple. Later on Apple copied the Treo format (phone + PDA) Palm made popular and merged it with a virtual keyboard.
2. Apple Pippin. Failed game/multimedia console. Nintendo64 and PS2 got it right.
3. Power Mac G4 Cube. Failed on the market. Infamous for cracking case. Now, there's no shortage of small cube PCs. The PC world got this right.
4. Apple QuickTake. Failed digital camera. Everyone gets this right.
5. Macintosh TV. Failed TV/PC combo. Now TV is just a PCI card away or done with steaming/downloading.
6. Apple's "Hockey Puck" USB Mouse. No one gets this right because its such a bad idea.
7. eMate. Low cost Newton based PC. OLPC and others get this right.
Apple tries a lot of things and they fail more often than they succeed. The idea that theyre the ones who can fix the tablet market is a bit of stretch. Heck, I like tablets, but I understand their limitations, especially in regards to keyboards/inputs. Perhaps it will have something like the iwheel.
>They are the people who have the jobs Cubible Joe wish he could have (and are obviously successful enough at it to afford apple products).
Ive seen the "envy" argument so many times its baffling. An Apple computer isnt a 100,000 car or a million dollar home. Its as affordable as any higher end PC. I think this stinks of the 'faux riche' attitude many young middle class people suffer from and leads to heavy credit card debt and collapsing mortgages.
As far as "Joe Cubicle" wishing he was a graphic designer? Err, what grounds do you have to make that statement? Im in IT and I dont want to work in art or advertising. All the GDs I have worked with made less money than me and were constantly stressed about deadlines and the whims of the marketing directors/bosses who dont know what they want. They all seemed more than a bit miserable. No one envied them. Maybe you do. Perhaps you should stop projecting and go to art school and buy a bunch of Apple products.
I have netflix and most of the streaming selection are B movies that studios dont care about. They are still very much protecting their bigger productions. Im sure "more streaming choices" is stuff like Encino Man 4 or White Chicks 3.
I dont know if more of these types of movies are helping. If anything it lowers the signal to noise ratio and makes people want to give up on streaming. Ive come pretty close to canceling over that. Im sure Im not the only one.
Do people even buy movies? Your typical WB movie is a mild distraction over the weekend. Its not fine art. Its not something you ever need to watch more than once. Without the spectacle of the big screen, the allure of fresh popcorn, and THX sound, its really not much else. Its like TV. Entertainment for the lowest common denominator. Watch it once and forget it about. This is why people gravitate towards rentals and on demand.
What great gems does WB think we're all going to rush out to buy? I just went to their website and heres a list of the items they are showcasing:
The Book of Eli, Terminator Salvation, The Hangover, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Valentine's Day, Final Destination 3D, Whiteout, Sherlock Holmes, Gossip Girl, The Invention of Lying.
Wow, I want to see maybe one of those and only in the theater. The idea of owning any of that is pretty silly. WB, your products are a commodity. Theyre chewing gum. We chew them for a short while and we spit them out. Get on the rental bandwagon and give up your fight to sell me 30 dollar bluray discs of your junk.
Just like in linux, if you want something close to standardization then learn the command line. netsh.exe examples here:
http://www.petri.co.il/configure_tcp_ip_from_cmd.htm
I doubt its because of security soley. Its the BES management features that really sell it. Centralized policies, remote wipes, etc. Security is only part of that. The BB system relies on your pumping your mail to Ontario and BB's getting it from Ontario. Its not a direct connection to the BES server in your enterprise. So any outtage in Ontario means an outtage for you. Not sure how good of an idea that is, especially since Android and other Activesync phones connect straight to your mail server just like any email client, and not through BB's proxies, which can be compromised. Sure they use end to end security but how feasible are MITM attacks?
I could see Google or Microsoft reproducing some of these features for corporate customers. That would pretty much kill the BB. For every thing the BB does well it does 5 other things badly.
>Generally speaking, people who commit violent acts in the name of religion are ignoring the teachings of the religion they claim to follow (e.g. the Crusades).
Christianity, like all religions, advocate violence more they they condemn it. The entire Bible is almost nothing but war stories, murder, and god sanctioned murder. Your willful ignorance is far from convincing.
>If religion were magically erased from existence, these people would just find some other excuse for violence.
In some cases, yes, but you cannot deny that hate is taught by religion. The hate of others and the specialness of the religious group is taught in almost all religions. Few religions have any tolerance for gays, different religious people, atheists, women who want equality, etc.
Not to mention, a lot of these terrorists are mentally ill bottom feeders who are being used by the religious elites to bomb their targets. Without religion these people would be wandering aimless or better yet, in some kind of institution. Better that than being indoctrinated about how one must kill infidels.
Turns out the power elite use religion for their own goals. Corrupt middle east governments blame their domestic problems on Christian and Jewish foreigners instead of addressing these issues properly. Corrupt Western government use the religion card to cow voters and to appeal to the bigotry of the masses. If there was no religion then they would be forced to be accountable for their governments.
Some of us are still trying to imagine no religion. The idea that it would make no different isnt convincing in the slightest. A secular philosophy that fulfills the needs of these people could change the world.
>Ermm... what is application level encryption?
That means its handled on an application by application basis and managed by the application opening in. 7zip password files, rar, etc.
Portable Truecrypt has problems. The user will import their private key or at least have it somewhere they can get to it or use conventional cryptography. So there's a lot of security vulnerabilities right there. Oh, forgot to delete your private key? Now Im cracking the conventional encryption that protects it. TrueCrypt portable requierd admin privs:
The idea with these drives is that the app can be run from the drive itself, so no extra software or training is needed. No key management. So that really just leaves us conventional cryptography, not public/private key. The problem of having security on your USB drive that gets plugged into various computers that you might not have control over and may be running trojans is tough to solve. Application level encryption is probably the best way to go but it requires standard installs and trust of the host computer.
Youre better off just carrying a netbook or other trusted security device with an encrypted drive and sharing the files via conventional methods with the host without giving the host all your data - email, ftp, web, plaintext transfers, etc.
>For a guy that is supposed to be a step ahead tech-wise, apparently he doesn't understand that people want a portable device that is easy to read.
Early in the computer revolution, the idea of a centralized application on dedicated hardware was popular. People envisioned computers that just ran word processors or just ran whatever stand alone application. For a little while this worked but it turns out what people want is to be able to break away from expensive dedicated hardware and just run software on a commodity machine.
Whats going on now is that people are just asking "Why must I pay $400 dollars, cant I just run this on my laptop?"
Unfortunately for nutty McFuturist, Amazon has already beaten him to the punch. You can read a Kindle book on a Kindle, on an ipod/iphone, or on a PC. I suspect the Nook will be doing this soon. Essentially, these companies are just competing on DRM formats. Not much else.
Dont run it automatically. Have the default be JS off and a nice scary warning box about JS and how you should only enable it if you are certain this is a safe PDF. Sure, its not a perfect solution but its better than just having it on by default and running vulnerabilities at double-click.
Not to mention, when I shut it off under Preferences - KEEP IT OFF. If its off in preferences, it helpfully reminds the user than its off and offers to re-enable it via the prompt. What the hell is Adobe thinking?
While I'm at it how about updates to the reader that arent 40-150 megabytes big or an updater that actually works. Right now, sane people should be considering Reader are very serious security vulnerability and migrating off the platform. Adobe has shown nothing but contempt for even basic security.
No, by the time they went to clones, that damage was already done. The Mac was this very expensive solution that didnt do much more than a PC that cost $1,000 less. They couldnt compete and decided to sell clones.
>I have an iPhone, and it's a wonderful device, but as soon as my contract runs out (maybe sooner), I'll be moving to a different platform, and this is exactly why.
Same here. Im leaning towards an android phone bought without subsidy and getting on T-mobile's non-subsidized plan for 59.99 unlimited text/data and 500 minutes. Thats about 30 dollars less a month than the equivalent plan on ATT and Im only going to pay an extra 200 dollars down, which pays for itself in less than one year.
>They give a good song and dance about how closed the device is being about the "user experience," but the simple truth is that they don't want competition from other sources.
Turns out history was right: There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Turns out centralization from an unaccountable group leads to abuse. Apple is just a thug in the market and with its controlled devices, its helping no one but its bottom line.
By US standards going to war on a whim isnt rocking the boat. Implementing universal heatlhcare or socialized higher education is.
>What would a potential employer think when, upon googling your name, they learn that you're so good at hiding malicious code that you won a contest for it.
Thats a pretty lousy line of reasoning and probably responsible for all the mediocrity out there in the computer world. Heck, what if your employer found out you were in the military and fought? Do you want to hire the guy who shot at Iraqis with a 50 caliber machine gun? Or the guy who wrote an ad blocking program? Or the guy who wrote a cover letter well enough to fool you into interviewing him?
Yes, you do because all these things are signs of courage and intelligence. Once you start filtering anyone with any background in anything controversial, powerful, different, or mildly questionable then you can pretty much guarantee yourself a staff of dim bulbs and products that do miserably in the market.
This is also why I think its so hard for smart people to be in politics. The electorate is so scared of anything that deviates from the mainstream that we only vote in conformist 'never rock the boat' overly-religious men, who turn out to be good at not cheating on their wives and going to church but not so good at governing and coming up with and implementing good solutions for the public good.
Step 0 - Learn what satire is.
Relax dude, not everything is an attack on your values.
>The Battlefield & Call of Duty games hold exactly 0 interest to me
Err, these games are practically high fantasy. Being shot by a whole clip of ammo and running away is on par with casting fireball with an elf mage. Perhaps you are refering to the Project Reality mod for BF2?
http://www.realitymod.com/features.html
Im not so sure about that. Ive been beta testing Life 2010 for a while now. Some highlights:
1. Get born.
2. Realize that school really just teaches you to work within a system and provides structure as your parents have no idea what else to do with you.
3. Realize your parents dont know what they are doing and many of the things they expose you to are wrong or at least unhealthy (religion, quack medicines, conspiracy theories, political biases).
4. Have some first embarrassing and demoralizing attempts at mating.
5. Goto college, go in debt, to hopefully learn something and maybe land a job that pays entry-level wages.
6. Advance in life a bit, fail a few times, consider suicide and marriage a few times.
7. Avoid drafts, wars, and extreme ideologies. Worry about getting diseases or dying in a car crash.
8. Complain about things - especially the government. Being factual is optional and somewhat frowned upon.
9. Have you own children - goto step 1 or continue to retirement.