[Pressuring users toward subscriptions] is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
How about pay-per-article, think that would work?
It would not work well, except for very high value articles. That's what I was talking about above. The bank charges the merchant a transaction fee for each payment that it processes, typically a constant amount plus a percentage of gross. It's that constant amount that kills microtransaction business models such as pay-per-article. Even Bitcoin has a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC (currently 2.5 cents USD) to discourage "dust spam".
A Bluecoat device will seamlessly MITM any HTTPS for a corporate network.
Provided that Blue Coat's root certificate is trusted on all machines on the corporate network. The root certificate of some random public hotspot is unlikely to be in my certificate store.
It's because viewing one single page on each of ten different sites is not worth a separate $60 per year subscription to each site. This in turn is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
Getting it working, on the other hand, is. A freshly installed copy of GNU/Linux on an ASUS Transformer Book will have broken keyboard, broken Wi-Fi, broken rotation, broken suspend, and broken pretty much everything else.
I suspect most people aren't looking for stuff that specialized, and if you are, you probably have an academic/professional reason to be doing so.
Just trying to rule something out: You didn't mean people should refrain from engaging in the conlang hobby unless they're college students, college faculty, or professional SF writers, did you?
I don't feel like paying extra in ancillary costs just to use a friggin' OS.
Compare the price of a MacBook or System76 laptop to the price of an entry-level Windows laptop, and you'll find that people who don't use Windows are also "paying extra in ancillary costs just to use a friggin' OS." It's just different costs.
You say you need some software that only works on Windows? Well do you need it so much that you're willing to let Microsoft run a keylogger on your PC and send all your personal data, passwords, etc. to MS's servers, for who knows what purpose?
I'm told the PC's owner can dramatically reduce this leakage by turning off CEIP, Cortana, and live tiles. But I imagine that some laptop users do need working Wi-Fi drivers and a working suspend button enough to deal with Windows.
I typical user runs a web browser. That is 90% of your usage right there.
If 100 percent of use is in a browser, you can use a Chromebook. It's just that the remaining 10 percent of use that's not web-based makes a Chromebook a difficult proposition. Install Crouton and your laptop starts begging you to wipe its drive every time you turn it on.
Unless you are playing games you can do pretty much everything on linux.
Or unless you want a small laptop whose hardware just works. My research through Google has led me to believe that anything smaller than 13 inches, other than the 11 inch MacBook Air, has a chipset that's pretty much Windows-only. Five years ago it was better, with thorough Linux support in the popular netbook chipset. But with the demise of netbooks three years ago, Linux-compatible laptop hardware has begun to command a hefty premium.
So what happens when the first seven search results for a particular query end up being sites that "generate a reflexive 'okthxbai'"? This happens to me often when I try to search Google for certain linguistics topics: if it's not on Linguistics Stack Exchange, it's paywall, paywall, paywall. I imagine a long string of paywalled results would make web search engines far less convenient to use.
So order from a vendor that sells Linux pre-installed
I've had a heck of a time finding a vendor that sells subnotebooks with Linux preinstalled, unless it's a Chromebook that begs the user to wipe the drive every time the user turns it on: "OS verification is OFF. Press space to re-enable."
or bite the bullet on hardware you do own and install your favorite distro.
That's the problem: I'm trying to find a replacement for when "hardware [I] do own" dies.
you set up a box running a transparent proxy in your house (running NotWindows(R), natch), force all traffic to go through it
That sounds like setting up a VPN with an endpoint at home. So if I'm connecting through a public hotspot to this VPN, how would I go about ensuring that these Windows services use only the VPN and ignore the direct connection?
Mostly it's a matter of how big of a laptop I can easily fit in a bag that I can carry over my shoulder without the bag figuratively screaming "there's a laptop inside; please mug me".
Essentially all the laptops on the front page of that site are Chromebooks. My problem with Chromebooks is that as I understand it, you need developer mode to run any application other than Google Chrome. And if you have developer mode turned on, then every time you turn the laptop on, it nags you to press space to perform a factory reset. I imagine that this would make it far too easy to accidentally lose everything until I can get back home to my backups. What's the preferred workaround for this?
Why not use a product that doesn't require you to break the law in order to use correctly?
Recommend me such a laptop and I'll try it. Here is a first draft of my requirements:
Screen roughly 10 inches diagonal
Keyboard, whether detachable or not
Working Wi-Fi
Working suspend and resume. Barring this, fast startup and shutdown and a session save feature that includes the contents (not just URLs) of web pages open in tabs so that I can read them while offline on the city bus.
Multi-window window manager, not all maximized all the time
Capable of running GCC, Python, GNU Make, and emulators for retro computers
Warranty service available in the United States
Doesn't require me to break the law in order to use it correctly
Currently I use a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 that shipped with Ubuntu Moblin Remix and currently runs Xubuntu 14.04 LTS. But those have been discontinued by the manufacturer since I bought mine five and a half years ago, and I am trying to keep my options open for replacing it once it dies. A lot of current 10 inch laptops fail the "Working Wi-Fi" and "Working suspend and resume" tests under Linux.
Other than Windows 10, what other operating system is compatible with currently sold 10-inch laptops (including detachable laptop-tablets), including WLAN and suspend? The ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, for example, doesn't appear to work well in Debian (source) or Ubuntu (source).
Or did you mean choosing to do without a laptop entirely?
Did you mean "DNS Servers and Firewalls" in hardware or in software? If you meant in software, then Windows can go around it. If you meant in hardware, then good luck carrying "DNS Servers and Firewalls" with your Windows 10 laptop when you use public Wi-Fi.
Perhaps some of the snobs are producers who wanted to use a particular composition under license, but the composer's estate quoted a prohibitive royalty.
Slashdot Mirror
From WernerCD's answer in the linked page, it's "Search > Settings > Cortana > Off". How is this "beyond most normal users"?
[Pressuring users toward subscriptions] is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
How about pay-per-article, think that would work?
It would not work well, except for very high value articles. That's what I was talking about above. The bank charges the merchant a transaction fee for each payment that it processes, typically a constant amount plus a percentage of gross. It's that constant amount that kills microtransaction business models such as pay-per-article. Even Bitcoin has a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC (currently 2.5 cents USD) to discourage "dust spam".
A Bluecoat device will seamlessly MITM any HTTPS for a corporate network.
Provided that Blue Coat's root certificate is trusted on all machines on the corporate network. The root certificate of some random public hotspot is unlikely to be in my certificate store.
It's because viewing one single page on each of ten different sites is not worth a separate $60 per year subscription to each site. This in turn is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
Installing it is not rocket science.
Getting it working, on the other hand, is. A freshly installed copy of GNU/Linux on an ASUS Transformer Book will have broken keyboard, broken Wi-Fi, broken rotation, broken suspend, and broken pretty much everything else.
I'm guessing my next laptop will be from somewhere like System 76, as PCs rapidly become Windows-only.
If only System76 had something smaller than the 14 inch Lemur...
I suspect most people aren't looking for stuff that specialized, and if you are, you probably have an academic/professional reason to be doing so.
Just trying to rule something out: You didn't mean people should refrain from engaging in the conlang hobby unless they're college students, college faculty, or professional SF writers, did you?
I don't feel like paying extra in ancillary costs just to use a friggin' OS.
Compare the price of a MacBook or System76 laptop to the price of an entry-level Windows laptop, and you'll find that people who don't use Windows are also "paying extra in ancillary costs just to use a friggin' OS." It's just different costs.
You say you need some software that only works on Windows? Well do you need it so much that you're willing to let Microsoft run a keylogger on your PC and send all your personal data, passwords, etc. to MS's servers, for who knows what purpose?
I'm told the PC's owner can dramatically reduce this leakage by turning off CEIP, Cortana, and live tiles. But I imagine that some laptop users do need working Wi-Fi drivers and a working suspend button enough to deal with Windows.
I typical user runs a web browser. That is 90% of your usage right there.
If 100 percent of use is in a browser, you can use a Chromebook. It's just that the remaining 10 percent of use that's not web-based makes a Chromebook a difficult proposition. Install Crouton and your laptop starts begging you to wipe its drive every time you turn it on.
Unless you are playing games you can do pretty much everything on linux.
Or unless you want a small laptop whose hardware just works. My research through Google has led me to believe that anything smaller than 13 inches, other than the 11 inch MacBook Air, has a chipset that's pretty much Windows-only. Five years ago it was better, with thorough Linux support in the popular netbook chipset. But with the demise of netbooks three years ago, Linux-compatible laptop hardware has begun to command a hefty premium.
So what happens when the first seven search results for a particular query end up being sites that "generate a reflexive 'okthxbai'"? This happens to me often when I try to search Google for certain linguistics topics: if it's not on Linguistics Stack Exchange, it's paywall, paywall, paywall. I imagine a long string of paywalled results would make web search engines far less convenient to use.
So order from a vendor that sells Linux pre-installed
I've had a heck of a time finding a vendor that sells subnotebooks with Linux preinstalled, unless it's a Chromebook that begs the user to wipe the drive every time the user turns it on: "OS verification is OFF. Press space to re-enable."
or bite the bullet on hardware you do own and install your favorite distro.
That's the problem: I'm trying to find a replacement for when "hardware [I] do own" dies.
System76 and Dell both sell Linux laptops
Anything smaller than 13 inches?
you set up a box running a transparent proxy in your house (running NotWindows(R), natch), force all traffic to go through it
That sounds like setting up a VPN with an endpoint at home. So if I'm connecting through a public hotspot to this VPN, how would I go about ensuring that these Windows services use only the VPN and ignore the direct connection?
You're that concerned about security yet you use public wifi?
In practice, can anybody but a state break HTTPS and SSH?
Mostly it's a matter of how big of a laptop I can easily fit in a bag that I can carry over my shoulder without the bag figuratively screaming "there's a laptop inside; please mug me".
Essentially all the laptops on the front page of that site are Chromebooks. My problem with Chromebooks is that as I understand it, you need developer mode to run any application other than Google Chrome. And if you have developer mode turned on, then every time you turn the laptop on, it nags you to press space to perform a factory reset. I imagine that this would make it far too easy to accidentally lose everything until I can get back home to my backups. What's the preferred workaround for this?
then buy redhat linux, Debian, Slackware, or a BSD variant.
I tried, but neither Staples nor Best Buy carried laptops with those preinstalled, unless you count OS X on a MacBook Air as "a BSD variant".
Why not use a product that doesn't require you to break the law in order to use correctly?
Recommend me such a laptop and I'll try it. Here is a first draft of my requirements:
Currently I use a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 that shipped with Ubuntu Moblin Remix and currently runs Xubuntu 14.04 LTS. But those have been discontinued by the manufacturer since I bought mine five and a half years ago, and I am trying to keep my options open for replacing it once it dies. A lot of current 10 inch laptops fail the "Working Wi-Fi" and "Working suspend and resume" tests under Linux.
Dad, why are Porn Ads in your Start Menu?
How did you break into my user account?
Run Mac or Linux if you don't like it.
On what make and model of 10.1 inch laptop should I "Run Mac or Linux"? Neither Apple nor System76 offers a 10.1 inch screen size.
Other than Windows 10, what other operating system is compatible with currently sold 10-inch laptops (including detachable laptop-tablets), including WLAN and suspend? The ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, for example, doesn't appear to work well in Debian (source) or Ubuntu (source).
Or did you mean choosing to do without a laptop entirely?
Did you mean "DNS Servers and Firewalls" in hardware or in software? If you meant in software, then Windows can go around it. If you meant in hardware, then good luck carrying "DNS Servers and Firewalls" with your Windows 10 laptop when you use public Wi-Fi.
Improving image quality
Let me put it in concrete terms for you: For a photo, a 400x300 JPEG has higher perceptible image quality than a 200x150 PNG of the same byte size.
No company wants to sell to the poor
One exception I can think of is Walmart, which attracts lower-income customers with everyday low prices and makes it up in efficiency and volume.
Perhaps some of the snobs are producers who wanted to use a particular composition under license, but the composer's estate quoted a prohibitive royalty.