Most of the cell phone contracts I've seen explicitly write it into the contract that if your connection is terminated through your own actions, you're still on the hook for the cash.
Actually, Windows 7 wasn't that big a change. Most of the UI improvements from XP to 7 actually debuted in Vista.
The biggest differences are it was slimmed down to run reasonably well and the hardware had caught up with the requirements of the OS.
Quite why Microsoft thought it wise to release an OS that required a faster PC than the basic machines on the market at the time is something that shall remain forever a mystery.
The sort of person you see applying for that and getting it is the sort of person who has testicles so big they cart them around in a wheelbarrow. The sort who you see on The Apprentice and want to punch in the face because they can't stop going on about how wonderful they are.
Their actual ability may not be even remotely correlated with this.
Exactly - I've seen perfectly stable Windows systems.
I have a strong suspicion that a large number of the "problems" associated with Windows have got less to do with the platform and more to do with the sheer number of incompetent morons it seems to attract like moths to a lightbulb. Put similarly skilled people to work on a Linux platform, and I'm sure you'd see similar results.
But I do actually see some logic here. The big thing about Apple is "it JFW", and the big benefit with Apple packaging Flash and Java is that while it may be a little behind, you automagically get updates as part of the OS updates. So it makes sense for Apple to continue to package Flash and Java, otherwise we'd wind up with a similar mess on OS X to what we have on Windows with every damn application running its own little daemon to check for updates.
The App Store provides a mechanism for third-party developers to hook in and provide all their updates through a single UI. Apple don't have to do it. So it makes sense for Apple to stop doing the work for companies like Oracle and Adobe. Now, while app developers aren't allowed to depend on other applications in order to be accepted, could someone who's actually bothered to read the conditions confirm if is there any reason why Java or Flash couldn't be provided through the app store?
Assuming that such reason does not exist, who'll offer me odds on Flash and Java being made available as apps within a couple of months of the apps store debut?
You can't do a secure erase on any media if you do it one file at a time. How do you know that the file has always been in its present location on disk? When did you last defragment the disk? How about the application you're using - when it saves, does it write out a whole new file? Does it store temporary data on the disk? Has the memory your application uses been paged out to a swap file?
Two years ago or if you're buying the cheapest, nastiest SSDs on the market, maybe. But anything half-decent will have a write speed which may not be quite as quick but could never be described as "a LOT slower" than the read speed.
There's no single individual thing, I'd say it's more "death by a thousand cuts" - for the basic stuff you describe it's fine, as soon as you want to do anything unusual you find yourself locked in a battle with the computer. It should be possible, Windows and Mac users have been doing it for years and the software does exist on Linux - but it's beta quality at best.
Five years ago, the definition of anything unusual included things like graphics tablets, wireless and multi-monitor support. Today wireless and multi-monitor is a lot better (helped in no small part by the fork of the XFree86 project and a number of wireless chipset manufacturers releasing open-source drivers). I don't think the problem is hardware so much as it used to be, but I'd be interested in Linux as a business desktop and it fails horribly there. Not through any shortcoming of Linux itself, but because the great majority of businesses depend on at least one - frequently several - moderately specialist pieces of software which simply don't have F/OSS equivalents of any description available, let alone F/OSS equivalents worth a damn.
There's no F/OSS payroll package and nor is there likely to be - every country has such differing payroll legislation, it's as dull as dishwater and it doesn't scratch a developers' itch. Ditto accounting packages, ditto CRM. (And don't point me at vTiger - it is the most poorly-conceived pile of horseshit I have ever encountered. And I've encountered some serious horseshit.)
Looking at your average Linux distribution, I'd say the average geek - certainly anyone who's prepared to use Linux on the desktop for any extended period of time - is some sort of masochist.
Either that or they really have zero appreciation for not having to battle the damn computer. Which beats the hell out of me, but there you go...
Unless they've blocked the iPad from playing MP3s, how exactly does it know the difference between one ripped from a CD and one downloaded from a shady site?
Don't even need anything that complicated - at least one DBE I can think of of will let you put TODAY or TODAY-N into a date field and automagically do the calculations for you.
Without providing some data, and no way to "prove innocence" which is more the standard with this law, it could be some time (in jail) before posting a defense in front of a judge.
This part is very true - while as a society we have the idea of "innocent until proven guilty", if you're remanded in custody for some time awaiting trial then when you get out, your life is likely to be severely fucked. It's entirely possible you'll have lost your job, your house may have been repossessed if any other wage earners in the household don't earn enough between them to pay the mortgage and you'll have to explain to any potential employer that the reason you have a big gap in your CV is that you were in custody for something you were subsequently found not guilty for.
I wonder if anyone's ever looked into the impact this sort of thing has?
Purely out of curiosity, I know it's been possible for a while to use virtual hosting in conjunction with HTTPS but is it common?
Reason I ask is that even with HTTPS, you'd still know that somebody was regularly hitting up an IP address that corresponded with the secure website of a known-"undesirable" (be it terrorism, kiddie porn or whatever the witch-of-the-month subject is) organisation. On its own it may not be enough to secure a conviction, but it could very well be enough to secure search warrants, start looking at people they're emailing, that sort of stuff.
The Act itself actually has a number of defenses, which aren't really discussed in the Wikipedia article.
IANAL, but if you could provide evidence to demonstrate that you genuinely did change your keys that frequently, you'd probably be OK.
Of course, I'd ask why you're keeping email encrypted that you can no longer decrypt - and if I'd ask it you can be more-or-less guaranteed that the prosecution would make a huge deal out of that.
Yesterday's interview with John Sculley compared Sony with Apple, and I think was quite appropriate here.
Apple think about the experience as a whole and work their way down to the components that are necessary to deliver that experience. Sony start with getting the components and build that up to an experience.
Which worked fine back when we were using analogue or mostly-analogue products for home entertainment. I include CD players in this list because 99 times out of 100, they go from digital to analogue using discrete electronics quite early on in the process of listening to them.
It doesn't work so well when we're using essentially embedded computers to provide it all.
I didn't say they'd drop compatibility with the old format. Simply that in my theoretical scenario, the default save format for Office would become ".docx2" (or whatever you want to call it).
It's doing this sort of thing has kept people upgrading - nobody minds asking for a document to be re-sent in the older format once or twice, but it starts to get silly after a few times. Shortly after that, people upgrade.
If Oracle were to put together a team of absolute superstars - I mean real development gurus - and head them up with the best project manager they can find - and give them just one task - "Make OpenOffice import and export seamlessly to Microsoft Office formats, including all scripting and macros", it still wouldn't be better.
For one, Microsoft would suddenly start to find patents they could sue Oracle for infringing.
For another, the next version of Office would change things, drastically. There'd be an Office XML format "version 2", and it'd make version 1 look like a paragon of well-thought out design.
For a third, by the time such a feature made it into the stable version of OpenOffice, the two things I've just listed would have already happened. Twice.
Like it or not, we live in a world where people want to share information digitally, and that sharing has to work. Microsoft's rules say you do this by running an office suite on your PC that saves files to a known format and you collaborate by sharing those files in some form - be it through Sharepoint or, if you're more old-fashioned, by email attachment and storing on a fileserver. Thing is, if you play to those rules you're more or less guaranteed to lose. This is why Google Docs doesn't and it's why Microsoft are frightened of Google. Google are playing to their rules and Microsoft haven't had to compete on someone else's terms in a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the cell phone contracts I've seen explicitly write it into the contract that if your connection is terminated through your own actions, you're still on the hook for the cash.
Call me intuitive if you will but I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe - just maybe - you're not really a top exec at HP.
Actually, Windows 7 wasn't that big a change. Most of the UI improvements from XP to 7 actually debuted in Vista.
The biggest differences are it was slimmed down to run reasonably well and the hardware had caught up with the requirements of the OS.
Quite why Microsoft thought it wise to release an OS that required a faster PC than the basic machines on the market at the time is something that shall remain forever a mystery.
The sort of person you see applying for that and getting it is the sort of person who has testicles so big they cart them around in a wheelbarrow. The sort who you see on The Apprentice and want to punch in the face because they can't stop going on about how wonderful they are.
Their actual ability may not be even remotely correlated with this.
Wouldn't be too difficult to recognise the text "YESTERDAY" and "TOMORROW" and implement them as today(+|-)1.
The point is, there is no need to re-invent the date calculation wheel. Which is a remarkably easy wheel to mess up.
Exactly - I've seen perfectly stable Windows systems.
I have a strong suspicion that a large number of the "problems" associated with Windows have got less to do with the platform and more to do with the sheer number of incompetent morons it seems to attract like moths to a lightbulb. Put similarly skilled people to work on a Linux platform, and I'm sure you'd see similar results.
OK, short term you're looking at a PITA.
But I do actually see some logic here. The big thing about Apple is "it JFW", and the big benefit with Apple packaging Flash and Java is that while it may be a little behind, you automagically get updates as part of the OS updates. So it makes sense for Apple to continue to package Flash and Java, otherwise we'd wind up with a similar mess on OS X to what we have on Windows with every damn application running its own little daemon to check for updates.
The App Store provides a mechanism for third-party developers to hook in and provide all their updates through a single UI. Apple don't have to do it. So it makes sense for Apple to stop doing the work for companies like Oracle and Adobe. Now, while app developers aren't allowed to depend on other applications in order to be accepted, could someone who's actually bothered to read the conditions confirm if is there any reason why Java or Flash couldn't be provided through the app store?
Assuming that such reason does not exist, who'll offer me odds on Flash and Java being made available as apps within a couple of months of the apps store debut?
You can't do a secure erase on any media if you do it one file at a time. How do you know that the file has always been in its present location on disk? When did you last defragment the disk? How about the application you're using - when it saves, does it write out a whole new file? Does it store temporary data on the disk? Has the memory your application uses been paged out to a swap file?
Two years ago or if you're buying the cheapest, nastiest SSDs on the market, maybe. But anything half-decent will have a write speed which may not be quite as quick but could never be described as "a LOT slower" than the read speed.
There's no single individual thing, I'd say it's more "death by a thousand cuts" - for the basic stuff you describe it's fine, as soon as you want to do anything unusual you find yourself locked in a battle with the computer. It should be possible, Windows and Mac users have been doing it for years and the software does exist on Linux - but it's beta quality at best.
Five years ago, the definition of anything unusual included things like graphics tablets, wireless and multi-monitor support. Today wireless and multi-monitor is a lot better (helped in no small part by the fork of the XFree86 project and a number of wireless chipset manufacturers releasing open-source drivers). I don't think the problem is hardware so much as it used to be, but I'd be interested in Linux as a business desktop and it fails horribly there. Not through any shortcoming of Linux itself, but because the great majority of businesses depend on at least one - frequently several - moderately specialist pieces of software which simply don't have F/OSS equivalents of any description available, let alone F/OSS equivalents worth a damn.
There's no F/OSS payroll package and nor is there likely to be - every country has such differing payroll legislation, it's as dull as dishwater and it doesn't scratch a developers' itch. Ditto accounting packages, ditto CRM. (And don't point me at vTiger - it is the most poorly-conceived pile of horseshit I have ever encountered. And I've encountered some serious horseshit.)
Looking at your average Linux distribution, I'd say the average geek - certainly anyone who's prepared to use Linux on the desktop for any extended period of time - is some sort of masochist.
Either that or they really have zero appreciation for not having to battle the damn computer. Which beats the hell out of me, but there you go...
Probably because they are using X11 under other Unixes, and it means there's only one windowing system to support other than Windows.
Unless they've blocked the iPad from playing MP3s, how exactly does it know the difference between one ripped from a CD and one downloaded from a shady site?
And exactly when was the last time Apple built hardware for the cost-conscious consumer?
Like all Apple hardware, it's aimed at people who appreciate the design and damn the price.
Stonehenge would never have been under copyright, the idea didn't exist 4,000 years ago.
sorry, meant DBMS. Too early in the morning....
Don't even need anything that complicated - at least one DBE I can think of of will let you put TODAY or TODAY-N into a date field and automagically do the calculations for you.
Without providing some data, and no way to "prove innocence" which is more the standard with this law, it could be some time (in jail) before posting a defense in front of a judge.
This part is very true - while as a society we have the idea of "innocent until proven guilty", if you're remanded in custody for some time awaiting trial then when you get out, your life is likely to be severely fucked. It's entirely possible you'll have lost your job, your house may have been repossessed if any other wage earners in the household don't earn enough between them to pay the mortgage and you'll have to explain to any potential employer that the reason you have a big gap in your CV is that you were in custody for something you were subsequently found not guilty for.
I wonder if anyone's ever looked into the impact this sort of thing has?
Purely out of curiosity, I know it's been possible for a while to use virtual hosting in conjunction with HTTPS but is it common?
Reason I ask is that even with HTTPS, you'd still know that somebody was regularly hitting up an IP address that corresponded with the secure website of a known-"undesirable" (be it terrorism, kiddie porn or whatever the witch-of-the-month subject is) organisation. On its own it may not be enough to secure a conviction, but it could very well be enough to secure search warrants, start looking at people they're emailing, that sort of stuff.
The Act itself actually has a number of defenses, which aren't really discussed in the Wikipedia article.
IANAL, but if you could provide evidence to demonstrate that you genuinely did change your keys that frequently, you'd probably be OK.
Of course, I'd ask why you're keeping email encrypted that you can no longer decrypt - and if I'd ask it you can be more-or-less guaranteed that the prosecution would make a huge deal out of that.
OS X is still UNIX.
So is iOS.
(But FWIW I don't see the App store becoming the only way to get software onto your Mac).
Erm.... actually, I think they could probably do this in the US as well.
Four letters for you: DMCA.
Yesterday's interview with John Sculley compared Sony with Apple, and I think was quite appropriate here.
Apple think about the experience as a whole and work their way down to the components that are necessary to deliver that experience. Sony start with getting the components and build that up to an experience.
Which worked fine back when we were using analogue or mostly-analogue products for home entertainment. I include CD players in this list because 99 times out of 100, they go from digital to analogue using discrete electronics quite early on in the process of listening to them.
It doesn't work so well when we're using essentially embedded computers to provide it all.
I didn't say they'd drop compatibility with the old format. Simply that in my theoretical scenario, the default save format for Office would become ".docx2" (or whatever you want to call it).
It's doing this sort of thing has kept people upgrading - nobody minds asking for a document to be re-sent in the older format once or twice, but it starts to get silly after a few times. Shortly after that, people upgrade.
It's never going to be better.
Seriously.
If Oracle were to put together a team of absolute superstars - I mean real development gurus - and head them up with the best project manager they can find - and give them just one task - "Make OpenOffice import and export seamlessly to Microsoft Office formats, including all scripting and macros", it still wouldn't be better.
For one, Microsoft would suddenly start to find patents they could sue Oracle for infringing.
For another, the next version of Office would change things, drastically. There'd be an Office XML format "version 2", and it'd make version 1 look like a paragon of well-thought out design.
For a third, by the time such a feature made it into the stable version of OpenOffice, the two things I've just listed would have already happened. Twice.
Like it or not, we live in a world where people want to share information digitally, and that sharing has to work. Microsoft's rules say you do this by running an office suite on your PC that saves files to a known format and you collaborate by sharing those files in some form - be it through Sharepoint or, if you're more old-fashioned, by email attachment and storing on a fileserver. Thing is, if you play to those rules you're more or less guaranteed to lose. This is why Google Docs doesn't and it's why Microsoft are frightened of Google. Google are playing to their rules and Microsoft haven't had to compete on someone else's terms in a very long time.