BT still owns the all the backbone connectivity and makes obscene profits on it.
Supposedly, though, the quid pro quo for BT inheriting a near-monopoly from the old, state-funded infrastructure is that they are under a Universal Service Obligation that requires them to provide telephone serviced to all, and not to cherry pick.
Unfortunately, this only applies to Plain Old Telephone Services - and extending it to Broadband would vastly increase the cost...
...will find out what the "A" stands for when three people access their photos and they get slashdotted (along with everybody else on their ADSL circuit, probably).
<joke>
OMG! OMG! Opera is leveraging their dominant position in the web browser market to unfairly compete with Apache! Why does everybody whine when Microsoft does this and Opera gets away scot free?
</joke>
Yes, you're right. I just said that this argument makes more sense to me than for instance the banana
Please tell me that link is a joke. It must be, I mean, the guy even points out that the banana:
"Has a point at top for ease of entry"
Indeed. I'm sure there was a Commandment against that!
However, the banana argument is "better" than yours - which just picks one isolated factoid - in the (limited) sense that it does exemplify a more general observation that needs explaining: lots of fruit seem to be suspiciously well "packaged" as food. Of course, evolution does explain how that could happen (all the better to get your seeds spread by helpful animals) and our banana-abusing friend simply ignores that.
It is difficult to envision evolution working if you don't have a handle on the timescale involved (last second before midnight on New Year's Eve and all that). What are the odds that our Musaphilic friend also believes that the Earth was created in 4004BC?
PS: I was going to point out that the purported "intelligent designer" didn't do a very good job on coconuts (a bugger to open and liable to brain people standing underneath trees) and those nice appetizing looking belladonna berries - but then I thought about those ruddy blister packs that memory cards and stuff came in, which mucks up that analogy:-)
Now why do we have unique identifiers that also allows us to be tracked easily?
Why does a bullet have a pattern of scratches on it that sometimes* allows it to be tracked back to the gun that fired it? Nobody designed that in - its just an unintended consequence of being unable to make two gun barrels absolutely identical that happens to have a practical upshot.
(* Maybe not quite so unerringly as on CSI, but...)
Well, regular flu (esp. real flu rather than just a bad common cold) may not be the black death, but its still not something you'd wish on someone - especially if they're not in otherwise rude health - and even regular outbreaks put a huge strain on healthcare provision.
So a new strain, which people may have no defenses against and isn't stopped by the usual annual vaccine given to vulnerable groups is nothing to be complacent about - especially in the early stages when you don't know how bad it is going to be.
Unfortunately, our moronic media has no middle gears and can't deliver the message "nothing to be complacent about - here is some information" without escalating it to "OMG! ITS THE END OF THE WORLD!!!".
So if MacOS X with Safari becomes more popular then Windows with IE, should they be also sued?
If MacOS X ever becomes the dominant desktop operating system (not quite the same as "as popular as Windows") then yes, maybe Apple would have to change some of their policies - but they've got a long way to go first.
The EU and others have already had a few sniffs at them re. iTunes - but their strong position in the media player market is nothing compared to the PC/Windows monoculture.
Apple = Free Pass
Linux (every flavor) = Free Pass
As others have pointed out, that's because Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the field desktop operating systems and that has now been tested in court
As for Linux, I count about a dozen different web-browsers on offer in the Ubuntu distribution. - and all the EU required of MS was to offer a choice, not to unbundle IE.
However, I am inclined to agree that 1994 is on the phone and wants its problem back.
Designed for non-technical users for who, for some strange reason, are scared off by instructions like "add the wsfgl-public repository to your apt.conf file and then apt-get update; apt-get install wsfgl-1.27.15.2-stable".
Not designed by anybody who believes that synaptic is a solution to (1).
Has useful descriptions of packages (hint: "wsfgl-main is a metapackage which installs the latest stable builds of of wsfgl-server, wsfgl-client and libwsfgl" is only useful for a given value of "useful").
Has some sort of minimum standards to ensure that the software on it is complete, likely to work on your system and actually likely to be useful to the target users of the app store.
Includes all the features such as reviews, ratings, top 10s, screenshots which seem to be working for other App Stores.
Maybe, even, includes premium applications that you pay for Nobody ever said you couldn't charge for open source binaries - if you don't want to pay, the tarball is over there.
Doesn't purport to replace the traditional repository for techie people doing techie things.
Probably (I'm afraid) has a Windows version.
Is called something as close as possible to "App Store" as trademarks will permit. Maybe some user-testing of names to see if they recognise it as an "app store". Anybody whinging about the use of the word "Store" or picking nits about the meaning of "free" should be given a can of Jolt and a pizza and politely left to get on with coding.
There must be more fart applications than in the current repositories.
Of course, Ubuntu has gone partly down that line with their two-tier package manager, but they need a bit of the hoopla.
(PS: the name "wsfgl" is fictitious and any resemblence to any product of the same or similar name is purely coincidental. PPS: I know that libwsfgl was split into libwsfgl-core and libwsfgl-x11 with the 1.26.14 release for all non-PPC architectures, but Granny does not need to know that, thanks!)
This means there is no way I would run OpenOffice.org or KMail on it.
Then you're missing the point of the "smartbook" idea: they're a better way of running the sort of custom-designed applications you see on the iPhone/Android rather than a worse way of running [Open]Office.
That aspect of the original EEE whithered on the vine somewhat in favour of the netbook as a small, cheap but fully capable PC laptop.
Unfortunately, the netbook makers saw Linux as a way of getting a cheap off-the-peg operating system, in which they rapidly lost intrest when MS made them a better offer, and there's been no real development of original applications for netbooks.
Android, at least, represents a group with a commitment to producing a platform tailored for small devices and an established bank of original applications.
BTW, why I need Android (roughly saying, a limited Linux) on my netbook if there is a regular Linux?..
Well, it means that you'll be running a GUI designed to run on low-powered computers with very small touch screens, and have access to an App Store full of apps designed to run on low-powered computers with small touch screens.
With a regular Linux - you won't. You'll be running a full-strength GUI with maybe a small-screen-friendly launcher grafted on and applications designed for full-strength PCs. If you're really, really lucky someone will have checked that all the crucial configuration dialogues actually fit on the screen - although, by now, it will only be enthusiastically supporting the higher-end Netbooks with larger screens and faster processors.
Of course, as someone with a 6-digit slashdot ID, you may want a tiny netbook as a SSH terminal for logging into servers, want to play with Python scripts in the bath, go wardriving on a pushbike or persue other nerdly dreams. In that case then, no, This Is Not For You (and you'd probably run Xfce and know how to tweak xorg.conf to do proper screen panning anyway).
However, on this one, battery life looks like a big FAIL & I'm not sure basic clamshell is a good design for a touch screen.
If they win this lawsuit, they're setting a dangerous precedent - anyone who at any stage has certified a system as secure becomes responsible for its ongoing security
No, to win, they will presumably have to prove that their systems weren't compliant at the time of the audit. All the TFA says is that the later investigation showed non-compliance - it gives no indication as to the nature of this problem.
Say I inspect your security, claiming to be an expert, and a few weeks later you have a breach. If, after the inspection, someone re-set a password to something lame and/or left it on a post-it than don't blame me. If, however, it turns out that your wireless router doesn't support encryption - something that's unlikely to have changed since the inspection - then I haven't done a very good job, so why on earth should I not share the liability?
It also depends what level of expertise is expected from customer and inspector: in some cases the inspector will just be independently verifying what the customer should already know, in other cases the inspector could reasonably be expected to act as an expert: If I'm designing cellphones then I should have a ruddy good idea of whether my product meets FCC standards; If I run a small business and pay an accountant to check my tax returns then I expect them to know a darn site more about tax law than me.
Humptey Dumptey Syndrome Alert!
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 1
In wine, vintage is just the term for the age of a wine
...and yet when referring to anything other than wine in inevitably means old. I mean, you wouldn't refer to "Portal" as a "vintage" game or "The Dark Knight" as a "vintage" movie, would you? I guess, in computer years, 2001 is old.
If you think words mean precisely what you intend them to mean then don't come over all surprised when people misunderstand you.
How about bringing their pay down in line with the pay of others (engineers and scientists) that do analysis of a similar level of difficulty?
...because a big wad of money is the only thing that can convince anybody with half a that high finance is interesting and any more worthy of research than (say) looking for mystical patterns in lottery numbers?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with some impressive and impenetrable mathematical diversion that makes a pyramid scheme sound like responsible investment.
Because, lets face it: if you tell your bosses that the way to make money is to identify emerging new products, inventions or resources, invest in them and then wait a few years for the payoff, you'll rapidly be cast aside in favour of the guy that successfully dresses up "make $$$$$$$$ in just 7 days using my magic system!!!!" into corporate-speak. And just like the schmucks who reply to those get-rich-quick newspaper ads, they won't stop and think "hang on - if this guy has a failsafe formula for printing money, why is he telling me about it, instead of coining it in himself?"
Apple are really being dumb by sticking with their own hardware, imho.
<irony>Yes, especially after Steve Jobs' attempt to sell NeXTStep as an alternate OS was such a resounding success, not forgettimg how people queued up to buy BeOS and the way 99% of desktop users switched to Linux ages ago. Apple were so successful in the 1990s when they were selling dull beige boxes and licensing MacOS 9 to third parties - but since Jobs came back and got them selling cool hardware again hardly anybody has heard of them.</irony>
Since Apple seem to be doing very nicely, thank you, when Windows has ground every other alternative platform under its wheels, then maybe, just maybe they have their strategy about right?
Even Linux has managed that, so Apple definitely could.
Linux has an army of programmers working free-of-charge, badgering hardware manufacturers for data and writing drivers, and buying a compatible wireless adapter, graphics card or TV tuner is still a lottery - and even if it does work it usually requires techie fiddling to get it working. Windows has a huge advantage in that all component manufacturers are effectively obliged to ensure that their products play nicely with it.
Trouble is, when the typical slashdotter* installs any operating system on generic hardware, they happily deal with all manner of niggling glitches and incompatibilities each of which would be a brick wall to a muggle. Apple's target market includes a huge number of people who sipmply would not have the confidence to use any OS other than the one pre-installed on their computer.
(* This would include the people who every single fracking time tell users to run explorer and click on "setup.exe" because they simply cannot expand their world view to include people who (a) think "Windows Explorer" means "Internet Explorer" and/or (b) haven't turned off extension hiding)
For example, I have used Unix in one form or another for 25 years. I do most of my work from the command line.
...and therefore you're probably quite willing and capable of installing whatever distro you like.
As a techie, odds are, that the first thing you'll do with a new PC is zap the hard drive and re-install everything the way you want anyway.
The only benefit to such people of getting a machine with Linux pre-installed is some assurance that maybe, just maybe, the supplier has the nous to only use components with reasonable Linux support.
Couldn't reconcile your comment with my memory so I did some brief research: looks like here in the UK, "V" and "V: The Final Battle" were combined into one miniseries just called "V".
"Awesome" and "Cheesy" are not mutually exclusive. It was good fun at the time...
Come on, though: premise ripped directly from "Childhood's End" but dumbed down to alien lizards in rubber human masks, subtle-as-a-brick Nazi allegories (ISTR the Visitor's banner was distinctly swastika-y) and the guy from "Nightmare on Elm Street" as the token comic-relief "good" alien? Deus ex Machina happy ending?
CHEESE!!!
The odd PG moment does not prevent the formation of curds!
The special hell of shacking up with 28-29 year olds?
Yes, but the characters she plays are supposed to be teenagers. Convincingly so in Firefly - in Terminator, not so much...
Plus, River was supposed to be a very vulnerable young person with serious mental health issues. Anybody trying to take carnal advantage of her would have received a very stern lecture from the Shepherd as their bloody remains were being gathered up....
My personal theory is that it would be a Kindle-sized iPhone,
I'd put my money on that, too: I've found the iPod Touch a lot more usable as a web/email/games appliance than a netbook - one with a 20-30% larger screen would be killer.
like a basic word-processing app.
Maybe, not even that: if its packaged as a "tablet PC" then punters would expect handwriting recognition and an office suite. If, however, its positioned as an "iPod Max" then why would you expect to write more than a brief email message on it?
That's the problem with netbooks: they look like PCs, quack like PCs and you can do office work on them, but only if you're really, really desperate.
The iPod Touch is something that you can grab, wake up almost instantly to check your email, look at the news headlines and check the TV schedules. If your email requires more than a twitter-esque reply then you go and wake up the proper PC. The only snag is the current screen is a tad too small for web browsing - although with the slick pan and zoom its still better than a first-gen netbook with an airline-surplus screen.
Slashdot Mirror
BT still owns the all the backbone connectivity and makes obscene profits on it.
Supposedly, though, the quid pro quo for BT inheriting a near-monopoly from the old, state-funded infrastructure is that they are under a Universal Service Obligation that requires them to provide telephone serviced to all, and not to cherry pick.
Unfortunately, this only applies to Plain Old Telephone Services - and extending it to Broadband would vastly increase the cost...
...will find out what the "A" stands for when three people access their photos and they get slashdotted (along with everybody else on their ADSL circuit, probably).
I'm sure all seven Opera users will be thrilled.
<joke>
OMG! OMG! Opera is leveraging their dominant position in the web browser market to unfairly compete with Apache! Why does everybody whine when Microsoft does this and Opera gets away scot free?
</joke>
I'm pretty sure you never tried asking them "So who do I make this check out to?".
...the Car Assurance Support Helpline of course. Just the initials will do.
Ack!! go back to the "The Register"
But I didn't even mention Paris Hilton!!!
Anyway - what's so "Ack!" about those potato chips with ridges to hold extra flavoring?
Yes, you're right. I just said that this argument makes more sense to me than for instance the banana
Please tell me that link is a joke. It must be, I mean, the guy even points out that the banana:
"Has a point at top for ease of entry"
Indeed. I'm sure there was a Commandment against that!
However, the banana argument is "better" than yours - which just picks one isolated factoid - in the (limited) sense that it does exemplify a more general observation that needs explaining: lots of fruit seem to be suspiciously well "packaged" as food. Of course, evolution does explain how that could happen (all the better to get your seeds spread by helpful animals) and our banana-abusing friend simply ignores that.
It is difficult to envision evolution working if you don't have a handle on the timescale involved (last second before midnight on New Year's Eve and all that). What are the odds that our Musaphilic friend also believes that the Earth was created in 4004BC?
PS: I was going to point out that the purported "intelligent designer" didn't do a very good job on coconuts (a bugger to open and liable to brain people standing underneath trees) and those nice appetizing looking belladonna berries - but then I thought about those ruddy blister packs that memory cards and stuff came in, which mucks up that analogy :-)
Now why do we have unique identifiers that also allows us to be tracked easily?
Why does a bullet have a pattern of scratches on it that sometimes* allows it to be tracked back to the gun that fired it? Nobody designed that in - its just an unintended consequence of being unable to make two gun barrels absolutely identical that happens to have a practical upshot.
(* Maybe not quite so unerringly as on CSI, but...)
Why the panic?
(Snip)
We've all had worse diseases than this.
Well, regular flu (esp. real flu rather than just a bad common cold) may not be the black death, but its still not something you'd wish on someone - especially if they're not in otherwise rude health - and even regular outbreaks put a huge strain on healthcare provision.
So a new strain, which people may have no defenses against and isn't stopped by the usual annual vaccine given to vulnerable groups is nothing to be complacent about - especially in the early stages when you don't know how bad it is going to be.
Unfortunately, our moronic media has no middle gears and can't deliver the message "nothing to be complacent about - here is some information" without escalating it to "OMG! ITS THE END OF THE WORLD!!!".
Sorry.
I'll get my coat.
So if MacOS X with Safari becomes more popular then Windows with IE, should they be also sued?
If MacOS X ever becomes the dominant desktop operating system (not quite the same as "as popular as Windows") then yes, maybe Apple would have to change some of their policies - but they've got a long way to go first.
The EU and others have already had a few sniffs at them re. iTunes - but their strong position in the media player market is nothing compared to the PC/Windows monoculture.
Apple = Free Pass Linux (every flavor) = Free Pass
As others have pointed out, that's because Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the field desktop operating systems and that has now been tested in court
As for Linux, I count about a dozen different web-browsers on offer in the Ubuntu distribution. - and all the EU required of MS was to offer a choice, not to unbundle IE.
However, I am inclined to agree that 1994 is on the phone and wants its problem back.
Kind of like a repository?
Hopefully with some critical differences:
Of course, Ubuntu has gone partly down that line with their two-tier package manager, but they need a bit of the hoopla.
(PS: the name "wsfgl" is fictitious and any resemblence to any product of the same or similar name is purely coincidental. PPS: I know that libwsfgl was split into libwsfgl-core and libwsfgl-x11 with the 1.26.14 release for all non-PPC architectures, but Granny does not need to know that, thanks!)
Then you're missing the point of the "smartbook" idea: they're a better way of running the sort of custom-designed applications you see on the iPhone/Android rather than a worse way of running [Open]Office.
That aspect of the original EEE whithered on the vine somewhat in favour of the netbook as a small, cheap but fully capable PC laptop.
Unfortunately, the netbook makers saw Linux as a way of getting a cheap off-the-peg operating system, in which they rapidly lost intrest when MS made them a better offer, and there's been no real development of original applications for netbooks.
Android, at least, represents a group with a commitment to producing a platform tailored for small devices and an established bank of original applications.
BTW, why I need Android (roughly saying, a limited Linux) on my netbook if there is a regular Linux?..
Well, it means that you'll be running a GUI designed to run on low-powered computers with very small touch screens, and have access to an App Store full of apps designed to run on low-powered computers with small touch screens.
With a regular Linux - you won't. You'll be running a full-strength GUI with maybe a small-screen-friendly launcher grafted on and applications designed for full-strength PCs. If you're really, really lucky someone will have checked that all the crucial configuration dialogues actually fit on the screen - although, by now, it will only be enthusiastically supporting the higher-end Netbooks with larger screens and faster processors.
Of course, as someone with a 6-digit slashdot ID, you may want a tiny netbook as a SSH terminal for logging into servers, want to play with Python scripts in the bath, go wardriving on a pushbike or persue other nerdly dreams. In that case then, no, This Is Not For You (and you'd probably run Xfce and know how to tweak xorg.conf to do proper screen panning anyway).
However, on this one, battery life looks like a big FAIL & I'm not sure basic clamshell is a good design for a touch screen.
...or trained to sniff and bark at anybody, in response to a subtle command, that their handler fancied searching.
Hey, its what I'd do!
If they win this lawsuit, they're setting a dangerous precedent - anyone who at any stage has certified a system as secure becomes responsible for its ongoing security
No, to win, they will presumably have to prove that their systems weren't compliant at the time of the audit. All the TFA says is that the later investigation showed non-compliance - it gives no indication as to the nature of this problem.
Say I inspect your security, claiming to be an expert, and a few weeks later you have a breach. If, after the inspection, someone re-set a password to something lame and/or left it on a post-it than don't blame me. If, however, it turns out that your wireless router doesn't support encryption - something that's unlikely to have changed since the inspection - then I haven't done a very good job, so why on earth should I not share the liability?
It also depends what level of expertise is expected from customer and inspector: in some cases the inspector will just be independently verifying what the customer should already know, in other cases the inspector could reasonably be expected to act as an expert: If I'm designing cellphones then I should have a ruddy good idea of whether my product meets FCC standards; If I run a small business and pay an accountant to check my tax returns then I expect them to know a darn site more about tax law than me.
In wine, vintage is just the term for the age of a wine
...and yet when referring to anything other than wine in inevitably means old. I mean, you wouldn't refer to "Portal" as a "vintage" game or "The Dark Knight" as a "vintage" movie, would you? I guess, in computer years, 2001 is old.
If you think words mean precisely what you intend them to mean then don't come over all surprised when people misunderstand you.
Incandescent lamps fail because the hot filament sputters off metal,
...along with any fancy high-efficiency nano-scale surface created by this laser treatment.
Oh well.
How about bringing their pay down in line with the pay of others (engineers and scientists) that do analysis of a similar level of difficulty?
...because a big wad of money is the only thing that can convince anybody with half a that high finance is interesting and any more worthy of research than (say) looking for mystical patterns in lottery numbers?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with some impressive and impenetrable mathematical diversion that makes a pyramid scheme sound like responsible investment.
Because, lets face it: if you tell your bosses that the way to make money is to identify emerging new products, inventions or resources, invest in them and then wait a few years for the payoff, you'll rapidly be cast aside in favour of the guy that successfully dresses up "make $$$$$$$$ in just 7 days using my magic system!!!!" into corporate-speak. And just like the schmucks who reply to those get-rich-quick newspaper ads, they won't stop and think "hang on - if this guy has a failsafe formula for printing money, why is he telling me about it, instead of coining it in himself?"
Apple are really being dumb by sticking with their own hardware, imho.
<irony>Yes, especially after Steve Jobs' attempt to sell NeXTStep as an alternate OS was such a resounding success, not forgettimg how people queued up to buy BeOS and the way 99% of desktop users switched to Linux ages ago. Apple were so successful in the 1990s when they were selling dull beige boxes and licensing MacOS 9 to third parties - but since Jobs came back and got them selling cool hardware again hardly anybody has heard of them.</irony>
Since Apple seem to be doing very nicely, thank you, when Windows has ground every other alternative platform under its wheels, then maybe, just maybe they have their strategy about right?
Even Linux has managed that, so Apple definitely could.
Linux has an army of programmers working free-of-charge, badgering hardware manufacturers for data and writing drivers, and buying a compatible wireless adapter, graphics card or TV tuner is still a lottery - and even if it does work it usually requires techie fiddling to get it working. Windows has a huge advantage in that all component manufacturers are effectively obliged to ensure that their products play nicely with it.
Trouble is, when the typical slashdotter* installs any operating system on generic hardware, they happily deal with all manner of niggling glitches and incompatibilities each of which would be a brick wall to a muggle. Apple's target market includes a huge number of people who sipmply would not have the confidence to use any OS other than the one pre-installed on their computer.
(* This would include the people who every single fracking time tell users to run explorer and click on "setup.exe" because they simply cannot expand their world view to include people who (a) think "Windows Explorer" means "Internet Explorer" and/or (b) haven't turned off extension hiding)
For example, I have used Unix in one form or another for 25 years. I do most of my work from the command line.
...and therefore you're probably quite willing and capable of installing whatever distro you like.
As a techie, odds are, that the first thing you'll do with a new PC is zap the hard drive and re-install everything the way you want anyway.
The only benefit to such people of getting a machine with Linux pre-installed is some assurance that maybe, just maybe, the supplier has the nous to only use components with reasonable Linux support.
The original mini-series had no such ending.
Couldn't reconcile your comment with my memory so I did some brief research: looks like here in the UK, "V" and "V: The Final Battle" were combined into one miniseries just called "V".
"Awesome" and "Cheesy" are not mutually exclusive. It was good fun at the time...
Come on, though: premise ripped directly from "Childhood's End" but dumbed down to alien lizards in rubber human masks, subtle-as-a-brick Nazi allegories (ISTR the Visitor's banner was distinctly swastika-y) and the guy from "Nightmare on Elm Street" as the token comic-relief "good" alien? Deus ex Machina happy ending?
CHEESE!!!
The odd PG moment does not prevent the formation of curds!
The special hell of shacking up with 28-29 year olds?
Yes, but the characters she plays are supposed to be teenagers. Convincingly so in Firefly - in Terminator, not so much...
Plus, River was supposed to be a very vulnerable young person with serious mental health issues. Anybody trying to take carnal advantage of her would have received a very stern lecture from the Shepherd as their bloody remains were being gathered up....
My personal theory is that it would be a Kindle-sized iPhone,
I'd put my money on that, too: I've found the iPod Touch a lot more usable as a web/email/games appliance than a netbook - one with a 20-30% larger screen would be killer.
like a basic word-processing app.
Maybe, not even that: if its packaged as a "tablet PC" then punters would expect handwriting recognition and an office suite. If, however, its positioned as an "iPod Max" then why would you expect to write more than a brief email message on it?
That's the problem with netbooks: they look like PCs, quack like PCs and you can do office work on them, but only if you're really, really desperate.
The iPod Touch is something that you can grab, wake up almost instantly to check your email, look at the news headlines and check the TV schedules. If your email requires more than a twitter-esque reply then you go and wake up the proper PC. The only snag is the current screen is a tad too small for web browsing - although with the slick pan and zoom its still better than a first-gen netbook with an airline-surplus screen.