The publisher themselves often included the security that the O/S did not - things like serial numbers, key generation, and call-home authentication.
I have not been using windows from a while, but I remember there used to be quite a while of keygens (key generator, for those who are born in the 2000's) and cracks (copy protection work-arounds for those born in the 2010's) for every successful windows software (and most crappy ones too). And they were, and still are, making many.
The reason is they are useful high-quality professional software, and in a professional environment you're ok to pay fat cash for good stuff. The problem with Android apps is that they pretend to stuff up a quickly hacked piece of crap, an put commercial in it and also want you to pay for it. This does not work. It would not work in iOS too, but you know, 30% of world population are idiots.
There is one Android app which makes your phone work as a HID over bluetooth, both as mouse and keyboard. However it needs the phone to be rooted in order to work, and I found it to be quite unstable, and severly unpolished.
I abandoned Ubuntu when Unity was foisted on users, moving over to Mint.
Mint 12 was the most unholy mess of a piece of software I have ever tried; and its desktop environment, no matter how they call it, is just a badly patched version of gnome 3.
I apologize for the flame, but I feel that Mint is doing much more harm than good to the Linux world. They funnel away users from real distribution baiting them with a quick remix of Ubuntu; the issue they are actually most accurate to fix are the sponsor referrals.
And, they don't contribute anything back to the community, except for some unstable aesthetic patches for gnome and a couple of wallpapers. They don't even have a proper bug tracker: the answer is report to Ubuntu, let the South Africans do the work, all we do is pre-install the multimedia repository, deprecate dist upgrade and get the cash.
That might be true, but then simple things like full body search of your email from kmail is not possible, since it's highly integrated on the latest versions. Unless you know something that I don't and are willing to share to make this possible?:)
Not that anybody actually ever used kmail anyway. I'll give you a secret hint: you can perfectly well use thunderbird under kde.
To be honest, in 10 years of using KDE (from the late 2.x versions) it never shipped with a high quality mail client. Usable, yes, but not up to par with thunderbird or even to the Opera mail client or, nowadays, gmail.
At $99 for a key, what's to stop malware writers from just buying their own keys?
In order to pay those $99 you have to give your credit card number and identity to microsoft, if it turns out you used it to sign malwre they can send a big guy to your door to kick your arse. Yes you can use a stole credit card. And a fake ID and adress. But they can double check it and have you wait for a couple of weeks just in case your card number is reported stolen.
As always, no security system is prefect, but $99 fee in not the problem. In this case the problem is that Microsoft can apply a discretional choise on what you can run on your PC. It would be much better if and independent authority was in charge of that.
Could somebody, who is hopefully familiar with corporate law, explain how this could possible hold up in court against an antitrust complaint?
It can hold thanks to the fact that the payment is a one-off of 99$. Of course they can always decide to change their pricing policy, but at the moment it is only a symbolic sum, like the 5$ you need to publish on the google app store (or whatever it is called this month)
No matter how anti-Apple you may be, you do have to wonder why there are so many people besides me who are answering this question with "Just buy a Mac."
Eat shit: 10 billions flies cannot all be wrong!
Now seriously, the reason is that all the mac boys just think they are being useful and being original by saying "buy a mac".
This happens while the linux guys are actually working, and the windows men rebooting
At a certain point I was using openSUSE but it was booting a bit slow, so I switched to Kubuntu.Kubuntu started to become an horrible mess, so I used plain Ubuntu for a while. I never got really used to the terrible file dialog, nor to its lack of keyboard shortcuts, but in the end I could get my job done.
Then Unity came. I put it on an USB key and decided it was too much suffering, so I up the update until I decide to try mint 12.
Ok THAT was really an horrible mess, the most bug ridden half backed desktop environment I have ever used. I resisted a couple of month saying that I'll get used and that they'll fix the bugs. Of course they did not, it's much more fun to add cutting edge new features than to make the basic ones (such as switch window) work.
After 8 taskbar crashes in half an hour, instead of renaming for the 5th time the config directory,I started to download the DVD image of openSUSE 12.1. Guess what, it takes a few more seconds to boot than ubuntu, but who cares, nowadays suspend to ram works seamlessly. If I find a bug (I met a few), well, I can report it and the tracker is not full of illiterate teenagers raging and pasting megabytes of irrelevant logs. It does not have all the possible packages in the world in its supported repositories, at least you have a clear distinction between what is going to work and what could break you system: you can always wipe all the packages from RandomRepo and get it back to work. I even had to compile one obscure algebra library myself, which proved to be 10x faster than the precompiled crap on ubuntu.
Maybe in a while I'll grow tired of it again, what's nice of linux is freedom to change without loosing all the music and videos; maybe, as an old school developer, I'm overlooking the importance of system stability and reliability, middle-click paste and ctrl-alt-sysreq over user-friendly javascriptable social-connected desktop environment.
Maybe I had forgotten what made linux attractive to me in the first place: it helps me get my work done, 10x faster than on OsX and 100x than on Windows. As long as your work is not developing desktop themes or surfing the web, I'll suggest you stick to what is stable instead of what is cool.
True, I've had to go ask the (office) neighbours to find out how and underscore is called in French (it's underscore). Then I found out there is wikipedia for that, just go to the english page, and click on the "French" link in the "Languages" column.
Distrowatch doesn't measure install base, just number of page hits. It could just as well be that Mint is harder to use than recent Unity-based Ubuntu releases. Most non-techies don't spend time on OS websites unless something is broken.
I suspect it must be something like this, I've used Mint 12 for a while but it was so unstable that I was forced to move away after a couple of months.
My opinion is that it is the new Mandriva: aiming to be easier to use and shinier than any other distro, the one that will give you what all other distro won't; winding up being an unusable and unmaintainable pile of hacks.
After nVidia caused thousands of users to pay to repair their laptops or replace the computer,
If you had read the furfuraceous article, you would know that nVidia would actually refund the entire cost of the repair to the manufacturer. Only problem, Apple decided it was more fun to screw the customer anyway.
plan will see the elimination of 700 jobs, mostly in North America, as the software-maker changes its focus from software to research and marketing investments in digital strategy
Which means that they plan to fire all their engineers and programmers, stop actually producing anything and instead make money with "marketing" and "digital strategy". I wonder if there will be any adobe in 3 years
You are probably one of the 5 persons in world who have played that puzzle before this slashdot commercial. I wonder if you are the one using chrome, or one of the 2 using IE.
Slashdot Mirror
The publisher themselves often included the security that the O/S did not - things like serial numbers, key generation, and call-home authentication.
I have not been using windows from a while, but I remember there used to be quite a while of keygens (key generator, for those who are born in the 2000's) and cracks (copy protection work-arounds for those born in the 2010's) for every successful windows software (and most crappy ones too). And they were, and still are, making many.
The reason is they are useful high-quality professional software, and in a professional environment you're ok to pay fat cash for good stuff. The problem with Android apps is that they pretend to stuff up a quickly hacked piece of crap, an put commercial in it and also want you to pay for it. This does not work. It would not work in iOS too, but you know, 30% of world population are idiots.
google allows in app purchases via third party platform, apple does not. apple will take the 30% of everything, forever
I don't think Higgs Bosons will catch the interest of the mass market.
I'm confident this will be the year of Higg's Boson Desktop
There is one Android app which makes your phone work as a HID over bluetooth, both as mouse and keyboard. However it needs the phone to be rooted in order to work, and I found it to be quite unstable, and severly unpolished.
But it works.
I abandoned Ubuntu when Unity was foisted on users, moving over to Mint.
Mint 12 was the most unholy mess of a piece of software I have ever tried; and its desktop environment, no matter how they call it, is just a badly patched version of gnome 3.
I apologize for the flame, but I feel that Mint is doing much more harm than good to the Linux world. They funnel away users from real distribution baiting them with a quick remix of Ubuntu; the issue they are actually most accurate to fix are the sponsor referrals.
And, they don't contribute anything back to the community, except for some unstable aesthetic patches for gnome and a couple of wallpapers. They don't even have a proper bug tracker: the answer is report to Ubuntu, let the South Africans do the work, all we do is pre-install the multimedia repository, deprecate dist upgrade and get the cash.
That might be true, but then simple things like full body search of your email from kmail is not possible, since it's highly integrated on the latest versions. Unless you know something that I don't and are willing to share to make this possible? :)
Not that anybody actually ever used kmail anyway. I'll give you a secret hint: you can perfectly well use thunderbird under kde.
To be honest, in 10 years of using KDE (from the late 2.x versions) it never shipped with a high quality mail client. Usable, yes, but not up to par with thunderbird or even to the Opera mail client or, nowadays, gmail.
While KDE is solid and a very good looking GUI, I prefer LXDE as it's got 99% of the features I need and it's quick in my VM.
Ok if you are using a desktop linux environment it in a Virtual Machine, I don't think you qualify as a Linux user; more like a Linux taster.
At $99 for a key, what's to stop malware writers from just buying their own keys?
In order to pay those $99 you have to give your credit card number and identity to microsoft, if it turns out you used it to sign malwre they can send a big guy to your door to kick your arse. Yes you can use a stole credit card. And a fake ID and adress. But they can double check it and have you wait for a couple of weeks just in case your card number is reported stolen.
As always, no security system is prefect, but $99 fee in not the problem. In this case the problem is that Microsoft can apply a discretional choise on what you can run on your PC. It would be much better if and independent authority was in charge of that.
Could somebody, who is hopefully familiar with corporate law, explain how this could possible hold up in court against an antitrust complaint?
It can hold thanks to the fact that the payment is a one-off of 99$. Of course they can always decide to change their pricing policy, but at the moment it is only a symbolic sum, like the 5$ you need to publish on the google app store (or whatever it is called this month)
at is $8 a year for Windows home (unless you buy the family pack, then its just $4) and $14 a year for Windows pro....
For $14 a year, you only buy the box, you do not get any support.
No matter how anti-Apple you may be, you do have to wonder why there are so many people besides me who are answering this question with "Just buy a Mac."
Eat shit: 10 billions flies cannot all be wrong! Now seriously, the reason is that all the mac boys just think they are being useful and being original by saying "buy a mac". This happens while the linux guys are actually working, and the windows men rebooting
At a certain point I was using openSUSE but it was booting a bit slow, so I switched to Kubuntu.Kubuntu started to become an horrible mess, so I used plain Ubuntu for a while. I never got really used to the terrible file dialog, nor to its lack of keyboard shortcuts, but in the end I could get my job done.
Then Unity came. I put it on an USB key and decided it was too much suffering, so I up the update until I decide to try mint 12.
Ok THAT was really an horrible mess, the most bug ridden half backed desktop environment I have ever used. I resisted a couple of month saying that I'll get used and that they'll fix the bugs. Of course they did not, it's much more fun to add cutting edge new features than to make the basic ones (such as switch window) work.
After 8 taskbar crashes in half an hour, instead of renaming for the 5th time the config directory,I started to download the DVD image of openSUSE 12.1. Guess what, it takes a few more seconds to boot than ubuntu, but who cares, nowadays suspend to ram works seamlessly. If I find a bug (I met a few), well, I can report it and the tracker is not full of illiterate teenagers raging and pasting megabytes of irrelevant logs. It does not have all the possible packages in the world in its supported repositories, at least you have a clear distinction between what is going to work and what could break you system: you can always wipe all the packages from RandomRepo and get it back to work. I even had to compile one obscure algebra library myself, which proved to be 10x faster than the precompiled crap on ubuntu.
Maybe in a while I'll grow tired of it again, what's nice of linux is freedom to change without loosing all the music and videos; maybe, as an old school developer, I'm overlooking the importance of system stability and reliability, middle-click paste and ctrl-alt-sysreq over user-friendly javascriptable social-connected desktop environment.
Maybe I had forgotten what made linux attractive to me in the first place: it helps me get my work done, 10x faster than on OsX and 100x than on Windows. As long as your work is not developing desktop themes or surfing the web, I'll suggest you stick to what is stable instead of what is cool.
Windows hasn't been crash prone for more than 10 years.
This is especially true as long as you do not install any third party driver or software on it
There's "linux" - as in "Linux Is Not UniX". It's good enough for "plain ole linux" :-)
Linux as in what? Linux is just Linus Torvalds name, with an X like Unix
True, I've had to go ask the (office) neighbours to find out how and underscore is called in French (it's underscore). Then I found out there is wikipedia for that, just go to the english page, and click on the "French" link in the "Languages" column.
Distrowatch doesn't measure install base, just number of page hits. It could just as well be that Mint is harder to use than recent Unity-based Ubuntu releases. Most non-techies don't spend time on OS websites unless something is broken.
I suspect it must be something like this, I've used Mint 12 for a while but it was so unstable that I was forced to move away after a couple of months.
My opinion is that it is the new Mandriva: aiming to be easier to use and shinier than any other distro, the one that will give you what all other distro won't; winding up being an unusable and unmaintainable pile of hacks.
I think that forcing Windows Phone on him counts as cruel and unusual punishment.
This we will never know, as nobody as ever used a windows phone.
After nVidia caused thousands of users to pay to repair their laptops or replace the computer,
If you had read the furfuraceous article, you would know that nVidia would actually refund the entire cost of the repair to the manufacturer. Only problem, Apple decided it was more fun to screw the customer anyway.
I can't access Netflix as I am running Linux and Silverlight doesn't exist on that.
Silverlight actually exists for Linux (aka Moonlight); I reckon that it works really bad, it's acutally completely useless in general.
If I'm not going to buy it, you're not going to eat in any case
So you're cheap?
Digital media is like love, in that you can give it away without ever running out of it.
So I guess, you are cheap if you don't pay for love
plan will see the elimination of 700 jobs, mostly in North America, as the software-maker changes its focus from software to research and marketing investments in digital strategy
Which means that they plan to fire all their engineers and programmers, stop actually producing anything and instead make money with "marketing" and "digital strategy". I wonder if there will be any adobe in 3 years
"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way" that's the problem with flash, visit www.transformice.com to find out the hard way
Ulrich has had a massive role in producing what may very well be the most widely used C library ever
considered that neither Android nor Ubuntu use it, it is not even the most widely used linux libary
The same goes for Theo. He's managed to produce what may be the most secure pieces of software ever written.
perfectly safe code, that nobody uses, honestly every code is perfectly safe as long as you do not use it
You are probably one of the 5 persons in world who have played that puzzle before this slashdot commercial. I wonder if you are the one using chrome, or one of the 2 using IE.