They get a 30% share? that's nuts. It's a shame that their hardware is such a social status symbol for so many people. Dictator Jobs certainly has a nice scam going on.
Not really. Computer hardware (which frequently has something like a 5% gross profit margin for the retailer) is the anomaly; most retail simply does not work with margins like that. There's a reason so many smaller bricks & mortar computer shops have closed down and the remaining big stores push things like extended warranties and ludicrously overpriced cables - it's the only way they can make any money.
The issue is when things like the following happen:
- You set up a company which sells some sort of product (let's say it's eBooks) for use on smartphones and tablets. 70% of your customers use the iPhone or the iPad so you put together an app which such customers can use; this app hooks into your website to sell further ebooks. Your agreement with the publishers gives you, say, 25-30% margin on that based on a typical retail price.
- 6-12 months later, Apple announce a few changes:
1. With effect from the end of the month, you're not allowed to have your app hook into your website to sell products. It will be dropped from the app store and won't be reinstated until such time as you remove the link to your website.
2. You are allowed to sell your product through Apple's store, which will allow you to sell eBooks. Apple will take a 30% cut. (This means you now have to raise your prices by 43% in order to make the same amount of money. But you can't because of point 3 which I'm coming to).
3. Those publishers you negotiated with to sell eBooks? Apple's also been negotiating with them. Not only that, Apple don't have to care about Apple taking a 30% cut. Your eBook is going to appear on the iPhone right next to the exact same thing sold by Apple directly only your version's going to be 43% more expensive.
This has already happened to at least one business.
The dual PSU is an issue, but the mini's are so small and cheap enough why wouldn't you just be running several and have hot failover to the working ones?
They actually seem like really good server systems to me.
Hot failover is damn difficult. If your application doesn't support it (which many don't), your only realistic option today is to virtualise it and set up some sort of mechanism to shut down the (failed) virtual server and swap everything over to the hot spare - which usually implies shared storage of some sort.
There are ways to try and work around this with Linux and DRBD but AFAIK no distribution has yet done this in a reasonably neat fashion - you'd have to lash so much together by hand there's a very good chance you'd wind up with something less reliable than a single server on its own.
In the FAQ, which details specifics about importing, editing, media management, export and purchase, Apple's tried to make one thing clear: some of the missing features will return with future software updates.
Indeed, Apple may be as inclined due to this backlash to reverse itself with OSX Lion as it was with Final Cut Pro. It's entirely reasonable to project that missing server features may make their return to the Sever Admin panel or as stand-alone add-ons.
If there is one thing I've learned over the years, it's that promises of "Jam tomorrow!" are next to useless.
You or I have precisely zero idea of Apple's internal roadmap and even less idea of what issues are driving the decisions that form that roadmap, and future functionality can be changed at the drop of a hat. The same is true for more-or-less any IT vendor. Until such time as the product is released, it doesn't exist.
Apple already use Samba 3 (albeit a fairly ancient version) in Snow Leopard. You wouldn't get AD support without Samba 4 (which is still in alpha and has been for years).
And it makes sense that they did so, for a number of reasons:
1. The day the XServe was discontinued it was obvious that Apple weren't interested in the server market. Come on, they proposed the Mac Mini as an alternative. 2. Some of the removed functionality (I'm thinking particularly the Windows integration) depended on F/OSS projects which haven't seen dramatic functionality improvements in many years. Come on, PDC functionality? What year is this, 1999? Vista onward won't even join a Samba PDC-based domain unless you hack the registry; Samba 4 is still years away. 3. Most of the other aspects of removed functionality I don't see a huge deal with. I don't really see the benefit to a GUI for your database administration unless you also provide a GUI for setting up the application(s) that will talk to it; most printers these days can be purchased with inbuilt networking and putting a print server between such a printer and your workstations seldom makes sense, your'e just adding something to go wrong; the "printer pool" functionality in CUPS is something I've always thought was a bit of a "Look, gran!" function. IMV, the few organisations that would be likely to use this would be very unlikely to use OS X server to do so.
Apple had a choice: either stop focusing on the business server market altogether, cut some of the excessive functionality and target the burgeoning home/micro business server market or invest a small fortune in OS X Server (and, in some cases, the underlying software) to bring it kicking and screaming into parity with Windows Server.
But without the hardware, souping up OS X server in this way makes little sense.
But that's the thing... Don't you have the feeling this is just a manipulation from your politicians, aimed at distracting you (the public) from other, more important problems? Milly Downler who was murdered in 2002, and since then (almost) everybody has learned to protect his/her mailbox with a password. Why are we still talking about the Murdoch family? The real culprits are the public servants who let themselves corrupted too easily, and they are leading the show.
I don't believe her mailbox was hacked because of a default password.
The reason I don't believe this is as far as I'm aware (please correct me if I am wrong), UK mobile phone providers have never let you get your voicemail from anything other than the mobile phone the voicemail relates to unless a non-default password is set - but at the same time, if you ARE accessing it from the mobile phone (well, more accurately the SIM) it relates to, you don't get prompted for a password. I'm pretty sure this has been the case since before 2002.
Which leaves two alternatives:
1. They were bruteforcing the password. But many people never set up a password on their voicemail because you don't need to if you only ever collect your voicemail using the mobile phone it relates to; therefore for a lot of people this would never work. Even if I'm wrong, this is an extremely good way of drawing attention to yourself - something that the journalist(s) managed to avoid doing for many years. 2. They were either bribing or tricking phone company staff into enabling remote access to voicemails.
There seems to be a perception - and it's not limited to/., I've seen it all over the place - that as soon as you're running a business that's turning over, say, £10 million per year, you're automatically going to be making an enormous income yourself and could theoretically sell the business and retire inside a couple of years.
Truth is that in many businesses, a £10 million turnover realistically equates to about £500,000 net profit. Which sounds fantastic but it's only about 5% - a few percent out on your arithmetic, a few big expenses you didn't expect or a few clients that you have trouble getting to pay up and that business isn't making a profit any more, it's making a stonking great loss.
I was using printers as an example; there were plenty of other issues. You've got to bear in mind this was 2005; VPNs (as a remotely-connecting desktop user), USB thumb drives and multi-monitor support are the biggest that immediately spring to mind. I know for a fact that USB thumb drives are much better supported today, but back then most desktop environments had dire support for unmounting removable media - I had to write my own script that would deal with it and put an icon on the desktop. I managed to get decent multimonitor support working but I had to keep my xfree86 config file and take it with me if I ever changed distribution because I could never find a distribution that had a config tool that worked.
These are all tiny little things for the most part, as I say, but they took up an inordinate amount of time.
AFAICT, while most of the niggling issues that bothered me at the time are long gone, the fundamental point - that if you want to do anything remotely clever you're likely to encounter lots of tiny little annoyances that take up an inordinate amount of time - hasn't. They're just different issues;)
I didn't (and still don't) see the point in using Linux if the first thing you're going to do is spend time looking for commercial solutions to every little problem that comes up; it doesn't take many £29.99 problems before it's just as cheap to say "forget it" and make your next computer a mac, particularly if the existing machine's getting on in years anyway. It's an operating system, not a religion - it has one purpose to its existence and that's to get the hell out of the way so I can do something useful.
Oh, these things all worked in basic terms, that wasn't the issue. But you don't buy a fancy photo printer that is sold with the ability to print on CDs and right to the edge of the paper for fun.
Those features - minor though they are - simply did not exist on Linux at the time. The "print on CDs" feature was only implemented by sheer chance when someone pointed out that Epson had re-used a well-known command to instruct the printer to load the CD tray.
Upshot: Yes, you can get basic functionality on Linux quite easily. But, as I said, if you want to use the flashier features you soon become a poorly-tested corner case where nothing really works properly.
That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense?
This was a few years ago, and TBH it wasn't the polish of the desktop environment itself that pushed me. It was the fact that (at the time at least) it didn't take very much work to turn yourself into a corner case that was poorly supported and even more poorly tested. Multi-monitor support was dire, if I bought a modern inkjet printer I'd typically have to wait 6-12 months for it to get good support (which is a PITA when your average inkjet is only on the market for 12 months or so). There was no single event that pushed me, it was more a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of thing that eventually led to me saying "Enough! If I'm going to battle with a desktop OS, I'm going to be paid for it!"
Next computer is going to be from that company from Cupertino
I did the same thing about six years ago. Frankly, even then it was obvious that F/OSS on the desktop was going to be in a constant catch-up with Microsoft (who themselves are frequently in a catch-up with Apple) - and I was no longer prepared to spend ages messing around because the Latest Greatest Distro has so many bugs (however minor) that I have to spend hours fighting with it.
Most of the big record labels claim to have back catalogs (still under copyright) on the order of millions, if not tens of millions of records; remember this includes all the album filler tracks that were never released as singles and if you didn't buy the album, you've never heard of; it includes specific genres that don't tend to be top ten hits but nevertheless did at some point get published, music by artists that got signed by some small company that's owned by the huge conglomerate but never really achieved anything, music that was recorded fifty years ago and has never even been released on CD. I daresay most of those millions of records will never see the light of day again, but they're still under copyright.
There's the obvious homages, of course, but on more than one occasion an artist has been sued for plagiarism only to swear blind that they never heard of the song they're accused of ripping off.
Not necessarily. For any given song by an independent songwriter, I suspect the incumbent music publishers will be able to dig up an older song that the songwriter is likely to have heard back in grade school. For example, after it was discovered that George Harrison had accidentally reused four measures from "He's So Fine" in his song "My Sweet Lord", Harrison lost a lawsuit for roughly a million dollars. Yet Lady Gaga gets away with reusing much more of that: four measures from "Waterfalls" and six from "Express Yourself" in "Born This Way".
There's no need to suspect, it's a dead cert.
I can't find the actual paper (I'm sure someone else will find it...), but someone's done the arithmetic based on the back catalogue of the major record labels, the number of different musical notes (and hence possible permutations of (IIRC) 7 notes, the minimum number held by many courts to constitute "infringement"), the various rules that must be applied so you wind up with something that sounds good and the upshot is it is mathematically impossible to create a wholly original piece of music. You're guaranteed to match something that already exists, the best you can hope for is it'll be sufficiently buried in the music that nobody will notice.
No judge is going to throw out legally binding coverage. If Sony violated their insurance coverage that would be amazing.
I'd be more surprised if Sony haven't violated their insurance coverage. As others have already said, virtually any insurance policy for any sort of risk - whether it's for your car, your home, your professional indemnity - includes a clause which essentially says that you're meant to take reasonable steps to minimise the risk of a claim happening in the first place.
It's entirely possible that a company the size of Sony might have been able to negotiate a special policy rather than getting stuck with the "take it or leave it" wording you or I would get, but I'd be surprised if the insurer would omit such a clause. IANAL, but in theory all the insurance company has to do is wheel out a few experts to testify that this many breaches suggest systemic negligence at a high level rather than one rogue department and Sony are stuck.
I reckon Anonymous could turn out to be the modern Internet's worst enemy.
Before you flame me, hear me out.
Historically, first-world politicians have not really understood the Internet. What they have understood is that while it's a fantastically useful tool, it has aspects that (to society as a whole) are less desirable. Child porn is the obvious one that gets banded about fairly regularly, but by regularly hacking high-profile targets, Anonymous are practically guaranteeing that national security will also wind up on the political radar.
Many on/. will say "Well then, the likes of NATO should hire someone better to secure their networks" - and while there may be some logic to that, I can see a lot of politicians suggesting a rather different solution - one involving censorship and tracking people online. We pretend that the Internet is immune to much of this, but China, Iran and Tunisia have proven that this is not true.
What we have here is the technological equivalent of a bunch of kids causing a great deal of disturbance in their school lunch hall - and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it dealt with using the age-old technique of "If we can't figure out who the troublemakers are, we'll instigate a bunch of new rules which inconvenience everyone."
So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem. There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.
Two problems there:
- First, you haven't solved the complete problem. Specifically, you haven't dealt with the wide range of tape formats with dubious or no inter-compatability. I haven't tested interop issues between different LTO drives - there shouldn't be any but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were.
- tar(1) is a great solution to the "I need to back up one server" problem. It's a dire solution to the "I need to back up 50 servers and they're all going to the same tape robot" problem - sure you can script a lot of it away, but IME the majority of such scripts wind up being lashed together in a hurry and provide a poor solution when far better solutions already exist.
I would suggest your best bet is probably something like Amanda or Bacula. IIRC Amanda actually uses tar to lay the data to tape; Bacula doesn't but it does use an open format and have a thriving (not to mention very helpful) community and the main author has set up a company to offer commercial support if you can't wait for the community to help.
You'd think they worked out that suing people hasn't worked by now.
When the industry starts giving people what they want - DRM-free stuff they can 'own' and use whichever way they like, at a reasonable price - then piracy will go down.
(Please note that I make no comment as to whether or not you're right, I'm simply commenting on why anyone might continue down this path long after it appears to everyone else that they're fantastically misguided).
It is hard to admit your own mistakes.
It is very hard to admit your own mistakes when you've been making them for so long that they've almost come to define you.
It is fantastically hard to admit to mistakes when you've got a socking great organisation set up to perpetuating them. At this stage, even if the man at the top knows that he's on the wrong course, a significant percentage of the people he's working with won't accept that.
If you've got a system anything like ours in New Zealand, the government buys the drugs in mega-bulk and gets it for pennies on the dollar.
I don't know - you take the prescription to a chemist who's got nothing to do with the NHS except they fill prescriptions. Certainly the British National Formulary lists the price of all prescription drugs, though I have no idea if there's some sort of discount versus the "normal" wholesale price.
On the larger scale -- "$COUNTRY implements a mandatory helmet law, do head injuries among cyclists go up or down?" -- bicycle helmets either have no measurable effect or do more harm than good.
I've heard this one once or twice, but I haven't yet seen a citation. Do you have one?
I wonder. What percent of the *actual* cost does $40/month cover? What pays for the rest of it? And what would a 5-minute wart spray cost in your country?
I can't speak for the GP, but here in the UK the NHS doesn't have a great many funding sources. Obviously they are paid for with taxes (the actual amount that goes to healthcare isn't specifically itemised in our tax), but the NHS also carries out some private procedures for medical insurance companies and charges them - I don't know how much profit they make from this.
Pros:
- If I'm sick, I don't have to worry about paying for healthcare. - I have no idea how much of my money goes to healthcare but there is no earthly way it's anywhere near the $1400/month someone earlier on said their employer was paying. The NHS is almost certainly considerably cheaper per patient than the US system. - I'm not banned from taking out private medical insurance (I don't know where Americans get this idea that socialised healthcare immediately means a ban on private healthcare) - lots of people do. There's not a great deal of benefit for really serious illness - you'll generally be seen quite quickly for that under the NHS. - Prescriptions are a fixed cost per-item (about £8, IIRC). If the item costs £1, the NHS is making a stonking profit; if it costs £50 it's making a stonking loss.
Cons:
- If I have a condition which is uncomfortable but not so serious that my health is really threatened unless it's seen to FAST and it cannot be dealt with by my GP, it can take a long time to get sorted. I'd have to visit my GP who would refer me to a specialist (maybe several weeks wait), I'd spend about 5 minutes with a specialist who would order more tests (another 6 weeks), once I'd had those tests I'd get another visit to the specialist who would discuss what, if anything, they showed (another 6 weeks wait). If necessary, the specialist will book me in for a procedure of some sort (another 6 weeks). It could easily be 4-6 months, and that assumes the specialist finds something they can do after the first round of tests. They may not, in which case I may have more tests and returns to the specialist to look forward to. This is the sort of thing people pay private health insurance to avoid.
But that said, and seeing how PPC emulation actually works on x86? Err, yeah, not really seeing it happen, at least not very efficiently.
As a rule of thumb that's pretty accurate for emulation in general. The only reason Apple were able to get away with it is because by the time they moved to x86 CPUs, the PowerPCs they had been using were falling seriously behind - even then there was apparently a slight performance penalty to running things under Rosetta on the first x86-based macs.
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They get a 30% share? that's nuts. It's a shame that their hardware is such a social status symbol for so many people. Dictator Jobs certainly has a nice scam going on.
Not really. Computer hardware (which frequently has something like a 5% gross profit margin for the retailer) is the anomaly; most retail simply does not work with margins like that. There's a reason so many smaller bricks & mortar computer shops have closed down and the remaining big stores push things like extended warranties and ludicrously overpriced cables - it's the only way they can make any money.
The issue is when things like the following happen:
- You set up a company which sells some sort of product (let's say it's eBooks) for use on smartphones and tablets. 70% of your customers use the iPhone or the iPad so you put together an app which such customers can use; this app hooks into your website to sell further ebooks. Your agreement with the publishers gives you, say, 25-30% margin on that based on a typical retail price.
- 6-12 months later, Apple announce a few changes:
1. With effect from the end of the month, you're not allowed to have your app hook into your website to sell products. It will be dropped from the app store and won't be reinstated until such time as you remove the link to your website.
2. You are allowed to sell your product through Apple's store, which will allow you to sell eBooks. Apple will take a 30% cut. (This means you now have to raise your prices by 43% in order to make the same amount of money. But you can't because of point 3 which I'm coming to).
3. Those publishers you negotiated with to sell eBooks? Apple's also been negotiating with them. Not only that, Apple don't have to care about Apple taking a 30% cut. Your eBook is going to appear on the iPhone right next to the exact same thing sold by Apple directly only your version's going to be 43% more expensive.
This has already happened to at least one business.
The dual PSU is an issue, but the mini's are so small and cheap enough why wouldn't you just be running several and have hot failover to the working ones?
They actually seem like really good server systems to me.
Hot failover is damn difficult. If your application doesn't support it (which many don't), your only realistic option today is to virtualise it and set up some sort of mechanism to shut down the (failed) virtual server and swap everything over to the hot spare - which usually implies shared storage of some sort.
There are ways to try and work around this with Linux and DRBD but AFAIK no distribution has yet done this in a reasonably neat fashion - you'd have to lash so much together by hand there's a very good chance you'd wind up with something less reliable than a single server on its own.
In the FAQ, which details specifics about importing, editing, media management, export and purchase, Apple's tried to make one thing clear: some of the missing features will return with future software updates.
Indeed, Apple may be as inclined due to this backlash to reverse itself with OSX Lion as it was with Final Cut Pro. It's entirely reasonable to project that missing server features may make their return to the Sever Admin panel or as stand-alone add-ons.
If there is one thing I've learned over the years, it's that promises of "Jam tomorrow!" are next to useless.
You or I have precisely zero idea of Apple's internal roadmap and even less idea of what issues are driving the decisions that form that roadmap, and future functionality can be changed at the drop of a hat. The same is true for more-or-less any IT vendor. Until such time as the product is released, it doesn't exist.
IIRC 10.4 hadn't had much in the way of updates for some time before 10.6 was released.
Apple already use Samba 3 (albeit a fairly ancient version) in Snow Leopard. You wouldn't get AD support without Samba 4 (which is still in alpha and has been for years).
?
IIRC time machine was never supported under SMB.
That's true of plain Lion without the Server addon; if your NAS vendor won't provide a firmware upgrade you're SOL.
This is why I chose a NAS unit from a vendor with a habit of providing software upgrades for some time after the original unit was discontinued.
And it makes sense that they did so, for a number of reasons:
1. The day the XServe was discontinued it was obvious that Apple weren't interested in the server market. Come on, they proposed the Mac Mini as an alternative.
2. Some of the removed functionality (I'm thinking particularly the Windows integration) depended on F/OSS projects which haven't seen dramatic functionality improvements in many years. Come on, PDC functionality? What year is this, 1999? Vista onward won't even join a Samba PDC-based domain unless you hack the registry; Samba 4 is still years away.
3. Most of the other aspects of removed functionality I don't see a huge deal with. I don't really see the benefit to a GUI for your database administration unless you also provide a GUI for setting up the application(s) that will talk to it; most printers these days can be purchased with inbuilt networking and putting a print server between such a printer and your workstations seldom makes sense, your'e just adding something to go wrong; the "printer pool" functionality in CUPS is something I've always thought was a bit of a "Look, gran!" function. IMV, the few organisations that would be likely to use this would be very unlikely to use OS X server to do so.
Apple had a choice: either stop focusing on the business server market altogether, cut some of the excessive functionality and target the burgeoning home/micro business server market or invest a small fortune in OS X Server (and, in some cases, the underlying software) to bring it kicking and screaming into parity with Windows Server.
But without the hardware, souping up OS X server in this way makes little sense.
But that's the thing... Don't you have the feeling this is just a manipulation from your politicians, aimed at distracting you (the public) from other, more important problems? Milly Downler who was murdered in 2002, and since then (almost) everybody has learned to protect his/her mailbox with a password. Why are we still talking about the Murdoch family? The real culprits are the public servants who let themselves corrupted too easily, and they are leading the show.
I don't believe her mailbox was hacked because of a default password.
The reason I don't believe this is as far as I'm aware (please correct me if I am wrong), UK mobile phone providers have never let you get your voicemail from anything other than the mobile phone the voicemail relates to unless a non-default password is set - but at the same time, if you ARE accessing it from the mobile phone (well, more accurately the SIM) it relates to, you don't get prompted for a password. I'm pretty sure this has been the case since before 2002.
Which leaves two alternatives:
1. They were bruteforcing the password. But many people never set up a password on their voicemail because you don't need to if you only ever collect your voicemail using the mobile phone it relates to; therefore for a lot of people this would never work. Even if I'm wrong, this is an extremely good way of drawing attention to yourself - something that the journalist(s) managed to avoid doing for many years.
2. They were either bribing or tricking phone company staff into enabling remote access to voicemails.
This.
There seems to be a perception - and it's not limited to /., I've seen it all over the place - that as soon as you're running a business that's turning over, say, £10 million per year, you're automatically going to be making an enormous income yourself and could theoretically sell the business and retire inside a couple of years.
Truth is that in many businesses, a £10 million turnover realistically equates to about £500,000 net profit. Which sounds fantastic but it's only about 5% - a few percent out on your arithmetic, a few big expenses you didn't expect or a few clients that you have trouble getting to pay up and that business isn't making a profit any more, it's making a stonking great loss.
I was using printers as an example; there were plenty of other issues. You've got to bear in mind this was 2005; VPNs (as a remotely-connecting desktop user), USB thumb drives and multi-monitor support are the biggest that immediately spring to mind. I know for a fact that USB thumb drives are much better supported today, but back then most desktop environments had dire support for unmounting removable media - I had to write my own script that would deal with it and put an icon on the desktop. I managed to get decent multimonitor support working but I had to keep my xfree86 config file and take it with me if I ever changed distribution because I could never find a distribution that had a config tool that worked.
These are all tiny little things for the most part, as I say, but they took up an inordinate amount of time.
AFAICT, while most of the niggling issues that bothered me at the time are long gone, the fundamental point - that if you want to do anything remotely clever you're likely to encounter lots of tiny little annoyances that take up an inordinate amount of time - hasn't. They're just different issues ;)
I didn't (and still don't) see the point in using Linux if the first thing you're going to do is spend time looking for commercial solutions to every little problem that comes up; it doesn't take many £29.99 problems before it's just as cheap to say "forget it" and make your next computer a mac, particularly if the existing machine's getting on in years anyway. It's an operating system, not a religion - it has one purpose to its existence and that's to get the hell out of the way so I can do something useful.
Oh, these things all worked in basic terms, that wasn't the issue. But you don't buy a fancy photo printer that is sold with the ability to print on CDs and right to the edge of the paper for fun.
Those features - minor though they are - simply did not exist on Linux at the time. The "print on CDs" feature was only implemented by sheer chance when someone pointed out that Epson had re-used a well-known command to instruct the printer to load the CD tray.
Upshot: Yes, you can get basic functionality on Linux quite easily. But, as I said, if you want to use the flashier features you soon become a poorly-tested corner case where nothing really works properly.
That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense?
This was a few years ago, and TBH it wasn't the polish of the desktop environment itself that pushed me. It was the fact that (at the time at least) it didn't take very much work to turn yourself into a corner case that was poorly supported and even more poorly tested. Multi-monitor support was dire, if I bought a modern inkjet printer I'd typically have to wait 6-12 months for it to get good support (which is a PITA when your average inkjet is only on the market for 12 months or so). There was no single event that pushed me, it was more a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of thing that eventually led to me saying "Enough! If I'm going to battle with a desktop OS, I'm going to be paid for it!"
YMMV and all that.
Next computer is going to be from that company from Cupertino
I did the same thing about six years ago. Frankly, even then it was obvious that F/OSS on the desktop was going to be in a constant catch-up with Microsoft (who themselves are frequently in a catch-up with Apple) - and I was no longer prepared to spend ages messing around because the Latest Greatest Distro has so many bugs (however minor) that I have to spend hours fighting with it.
That's more or less the size of it.
Most of the big record labels claim to have back catalogs (still under copyright) on the order of millions, if not tens of millions of records; remember this includes all the album filler tracks that were never released as singles and if you didn't buy the album, you've never heard of; it includes specific genres that don't tend to be top ten hits but nevertheless did at some point get published, music by artists that got signed by some small company that's owned by the huge conglomerate but never really achieved anything, music that was recorded fifty years ago and has never even been released on CD. I daresay most of those millions of records will never see the light of day again, but they're still under copyright.
There's the obvious homages, of course, but on more than one occasion an artist has been sued for plagiarism only to swear blind that they never heard of the song they're accused of ripping off.
Not necessarily. For any given song by an independent songwriter, I suspect the incumbent music publishers will be able to dig up an older song that the songwriter is likely to have heard back in grade school. For example, after it was discovered that George Harrison had accidentally reused four measures from "He's So Fine" in his song "My Sweet Lord", Harrison lost a lawsuit for roughly a million dollars. Yet Lady Gaga gets away with reusing much more of that: four measures from "Waterfalls" and six from "Express Yourself" in "Born This Way".
There's no need to suspect, it's a dead cert.
I can't find the actual paper (I'm sure someone else will find it...), but someone's done the arithmetic based on the back catalogue of the major record labels, the number of different musical notes (and hence possible permutations of (IIRC) 7 notes, the minimum number held by many courts to constitute "infringement"), the various rules that must be applied so you wind up with something that sounds good and the upshot is it is mathematically impossible to create a wholly original piece of music. You're guaranteed to match something that already exists, the best you can hope for is it'll be sufficiently buried in the music that nobody will notice.
No judge is going to throw out legally binding coverage. If Sony violated their insurance coverage that would be amazing.
I'd be more surprised if Sony haven't violated their insurance coverage. As others have already said, virtually any insurance policy for any sort of risk - whether it's for your car, your home, your professional indemnity - includes a clause which essentially says that you're meant to take reasonable steps to minimise the risk of a claim happening in the first place.
It's entirely possible that a company the size of Sony might have been able to negotiate a special policy rather than getting stuck with the "take it or leave it" wording you or I would get, but I'd be surprised if the insurer would omit such a clause. IANAL, but in theory all the insurance company has to do is wheel out a few experts to testify that this many breaches suggest systemic negligence at a high level rather than one rogue department and Sony are stuck.
I reckon Anonymous could turn out to be the modern Internet's worst enemy.
Before you flame me, hear me out.
Historically, first-world politicians have not really understood the Internet. What they have understood is that while it's a fantastically useful tool, it has aspects that (to society as a whole) are less desirable. Child porn is the obvious one that gets banded about fairly regularly, but by regularly hacking high-profile targets, Anonymous are practically guaranteeing that national security will also wind up on the political radar.
Many on /. will say "Well then, the likes of NATO should hire someone better to secure their networks" - and while there may be some logic to that, I can see a lot of politicians suggesting a rather different solution - one involving censorship and tracking people online. We pretend that the Internet is immune to much of this, but China, Iran and Tunisia have proven that this is not true.
What we have here is the technological equivalent of a bunch of kids causing a great deal of disturbance in their school lunch hall - and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it dealt with using the age-old technique of "If we can't figure out who the troublemakers are, we'll instigate a bunch of new rules which inconvenience everyone."
So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem.
There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.
Two problems there:
- First, you haven't solved the complete problem. Specifically, you haven't dealt with the wide range of tape formats with dubious or no inter-compatability. I haven't tested interop issues between different LTO drives - there shouldn't be any but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were.
- tar(1) is a great solution to the "I need to back up one server" problem. It's a dire solution to the "I need to back up 50 servers and they're all going to the same tape robot" problem - sure you can script a lot of it away, but IME the majority of such scripts wind up being lashed together in a hurry and provide a poor solution when far better solutions already exist.
I would suggest your best bet is probably something like Amanda or Bacula. IIRC Amanda actually uses tar to lay the data to tape; Bacula doesn't but it does use an open format and have a thriving (not to mention very helpful) community and the main author has set up a company to offer commercial support if you can't wait for the community to help.
You'd think they worked out that suing people hasn't worked by now.
When the industry starts giving people what they want - DRM-free stuff they can 'own' and use whichever way they like, at a reasonable price - then piracy will go down.
(Please note that I make no comment as to whether or not you're right, I'm simply commenting on why anyone might continue down this path long after it appears to everyone else that they're fantastically misguided).
It is hard to admit your own mistakes.
It is very hard to admit your own mistakes when you've been making them for so long that they've almost come to define you.
It is fantastically hard to admit to mistakes when you've got a socking great organisation set up to perpetuating them. At this stage, even if the man at the top knows that he's on the wrong course, a significant percentage of the people he's working with won't accept that.
If you've got a system anything like ours in New Zealand, the government buys the drugs in mega-bulk and gets it for pennies on the dollar.
I don't know - you take the prescription to a chemist who's got nothing to do with the NHS except they fill prescriptions. Certainly the British National Formulary lists the price of all prescription drugs, though I have no idea if there's some sort of discount versus the "normal" wholesale price.
On the larger scale -- "$COUNTRY implements a mandatory helmet law, do head injuries among cyclists go up or down?" -- bicycle helmets either have no measurable effect or do more harm than good.
I've heard this one once or twice, but I haven't yet seen a citation. Do you have one?
I wonder. What percent of the *actual* cost does $40/month cover? What pays for the rest of it? And what would a 5-minute wart spray cost in your country?
I can't speak for the GP, but here in the UK the NHS doesn't have a great many funding sources. Obviously they are paid for with taxes (the actual amount that goes to healthcare isn't specifically itemised in our tax), but the NHS also carries out some private procedures for medical insurance companies and charges them - I don't know how much profit they make from this.
Pros:
- If I'm sick, I don't have to worry about paying for healthcare.
- I have no idea how much of my money goes to healthcare but there is no earthly way it's anywhere near the $1400/month someone earlier on said their employer was paying. The NHS is almost certainly considerably cheaper per patient than the US system.
- I'm not banned from taking out private medical insurance (I don't know where Americans get this idea that socialised healthcare immediately means a ban on private healthcare) - lots of people do. There's not a great deal of benefit for really serious illness - you'll generally be seen quite quickly for that under the NHS.
- Prescriptions are a fixed cost per-item (about £8, IIRC). If the item costs £1, the NHS is making a stonking profit; if it costs £50 it's making a stonking loss.
Cons:
- If I have a condition which is uncomfortable but not so serious that my health is really threatened unless it's seen to FAST and it cannot be dealt with by my GP, it can take a long time to get sorted. I'd have to visit my GP who would refer me to a specialist (maybe several weeks wait), I'd spend about 5 minutes with a specialist who would order more tests (another 6 weeks), once I'd had those tests I'd get another visit to the specialist who would discuss what, if anything, they showed (another 6 weeks wait). If necessary, the specialist will book me in for a procedure of some sort (another 6 weeks). It could easily be 4-6 months, and that assumes the specialist finds something they can do after the first round of tests. They may not, in which case I may have more tests and returns to the specialist to look forward to. This is the sort of thing people pay private health insurance to avoid.
Sure Linux has been doing that already for years, but it was designed that way -- Windows wasn't.
Didn't Linus Torvalds himself essentially say that Linux would probably never run on a non-x86 processor?
But that said, and seeing how PPC emulation actually works on x86? Err, yeah, not really seeing it happen, at least not very efficiently.
As a rule of thumb that's pretty accurate for emulation in general. The only reason Apple were able to get away with it is because by the time they moved to x86 CPUs, the PowerPCs they had been using were falling seriously behind - even then there was apparently a slight performance penalty to running things under Rosetta on the first x86-based macs.