I've been buying video cards since long before ATI and Nvidia were the only choices. Or before 3D was standard, for that matter. Everything from Trident, to Voodoo, to Matrox. I still remember when Nvidia came along and was a joke compared to anything 3dfx made. Then in the end, Nvidia ended up buying them out. Times change.
So my point still stands. Before Nvidia's huge faulty GPU blunder, when they had a better card for a better price, that's what people should have probably gotten over ATI. Today, if people feel safe buying from Nvidia still, and if Nvidia actually makes a better card, then that's fine too. But trust plays a huge part into a purchase, equally so as bang for buck. Intel and AMD haven't done anything shitty like that to their consumers. Even if Bulldozer is a total failure of a product, at least people know that up front. It's not defective, it's just not up to par.
Once again we see that the top tier Nvidia is priced wayyyy over the top Radeon, but performs way worse.
I don't understand why there's so much brand fanboyism with computers. This would obviously indicate that it makes sense to buy Radeon if you want your money's worth, since this holds true down to the lower performance cards as well. It's basically been this way for years. Yet, oppositely, Intel has been blowing away AMD's processors for a while now, so you get your money's worth by buying in that direction for that particular product. It just makes sense.
Besides, after the way Nvidia shit all over their loyal fans with that GPU debacle, I'll have a hard time trusting them again, as should anyone else. There are still video cards and laptops floating around out there, particularly on Ebay, which are just waiting to die on some unsuspecting second-hand consumer. I'm always having to warn people about buying anything used with Nvidia products in them until they do their research. Not everyone I know was so lucky though, because I still have a perfectly good laptop laying here with just a dead Nvidia graphics chipset in it, which they gave to me out of disgust when it died immediately after their warranty period expired.
Brand loyalty doesn't do you any good if you're in second place. Or worse, when you're stuck with dead equipment. Look at benchmarks, do some research, and buy what's best for the price. That's the point of PCs vs Apple: we can put any brand of product in it for any aspect of operation to achieve the best performance at a good price. It's silly to do anything otherwise.
I think some people have made a bigger deal out of this than need be, because they're implying some kind of malicious intent when there is likely none.
Yes it's a big deal, particularly if a website is passing sensitive information in say an HTTPS GET request, and you're looking at that site on like public wifi or a school network or something where it's easy to snoop on others' traffic. But the intention was to check if their Webzine feature would work with the site (which is an interesting feature, just not one I really use), not harvest your web browsing history. It just wasn't thought through at all. In fact, I would go as far as say that whoever implemented the feature is a bonehead, because the security implications are obvious. They're going to have to take their knocks on this one.
That being said, I love their browser, and one blunder isn't enough to make me throw it to the curb. I don't trust my private data over an insecure network connection to begin with, so this was less of an issue for me (assuming their own servers weren't breached, allowing someone to snoop). I use OpenVPN when I want to do something "important." If I were to want to browse openly though, I'd either clear the cookies first, or I'd just use a separate browser (Opera is usually my alternate) where I'm not logged into anything. That'd be fine for just Googling or Wikipedia searches.
Anyway, they aren't the first company to make a big mistake. They won't be the last.
You know why they're doing this, right? For years, the only thing that has really made Mozilla Corp. any money is their Google partnership. In fact, they got a little greedy over the years because of it, and have really whored Firefox out with lots of changes primarily to lure in people, and rushed out versions to look competitive with other browsers (sometimes even dropping features just to meet unnecessarily rushed release dates), to the point that they turned it into the same bloated mess which was the origin of the product to begin with (breaking away from the bloated Mozilla Suite). And their users noticed, and they complained. Mozilla mostly ignored those people at first, giving this and that bogus reason, until it actually started to affect their dollar signs, so they put some effort towards cleaning up their mess of code a bit.
But the point is, Google has Chrome now. They don't really need to keep Mozilla afloat anymore with partnerships if they took a notion to. So Mozilla is scared of losing their allowance from big daddy Google. Instead, they've gotten in bed with the company which they trained people to hate for years to keep the money coming in.
I know that sounds harsh and trolling, but it's also the sad reality of what Mozilla Corp. has become. They've done a good job of turning their own user base against them so far, to the point that most of the people I know have already dumped it for Opera or Chrome. So let's see how this new partnership works out for what's left of their users.
How long until some Microsoft-hater-fueled group tries to get an injunction against this in somewhere like Europe, where they've had a much easier time pushing Microsoft around? That would hurt all of Microsoft's customers in Europe (aka, the majority of computer users there), because it would essentially eliminate all of Metro and a good portion of the cross-architecture functionality that they're building into the OS.
But hey, who cares about that, as long as you're keeping the playing field even for all of the other commercial operating systems! Except, you know, there aren't any for Microsoft to hurt, remember? OSX already integrates similar technology in its Dashboard widgets (not to mention Microsoft really isn't a threat for the kind of people who would use Apple to begin with.) And Linux isn't really a commercial product for desktop users, but could implement something similar any time they wanted. And let's not forget Chrome OS, the entirety of which IS a web browser, but also free so no competition problem there.
Just wait, somebody will try it, though, and there will be plenty of tech-retarded out there to back them up.
No, you seem to not understand Steve Jobs' role. And how that role was pretty much nothing.
Jonathan Ive's role was designing the iPhone. All of it, essentially, down to the materials that were going to be used to make it look as pretty and shiny as it does. Of course an actual engineering team designed its guts, but they already knew what to put in it.
Jonathan Ive received the award for the iPhone, and for most of the other Apple products, because he actually deserved it. Steve Jobs on the other hand received awards because most other people have no idea how a company works.
I dunno, if you call repackaging existing things with a pretty outside as taking a risk, then there's a lot of really innovative Chinese companies out there.
Don't worry, Jonathan Ive will still be coming up with plenty of new product designs like he always did, still made in the same low-quality Chinese manufacturing plants (by a company which most PC users acknowledge make junk PC parts), and sold by Tim Cook, who has been in charge for almost the last year already anyway.
Some people will miss Jobs for whatever reasons, but the company has already proven that it doesn't really need him around to yell at everybody.
Steve regularly took credit for things which other people did all the time. The people who came up with those things didn't like it very much, either.
The point is, though, many Apple fanatics have thought and continue to think that Steve Jobs was single-handedly responsible for designing most of the products at Apple. When the guy died, it was even more evident how misinformed the average person was. His book, however, can now finally help set things straight. Sure, the average Apple user will likely never read that either, or even comprehend the extent of what it reveals regarding Jobs' influence on actual product design, but the information is at least out there now in the man's own biography. Perhaps it will bring a few peoples' opinions back down to reality.
Jonathan Ive designed almost all of the products Apple is famous for. He designed the iMac, for example. He worked at Apple long before Steve Jobs came back. Only his job position changed around the time of the infamous return. Nice timing, eh?
But the question is, how exactly was the iMac an innovative product? It was literally no different than the beige boxes that came before it. It literally ran the exact same bland, unstable operating system. In no way was it a new product, aside from being inserted into a colorful shell. This is not an exaggeration at all, it's simply the truth.
Eventually OSX came along as well. But again, how was this a new or innovative product? OSX was, quite literally, a recycled operating system. They took an OS which was not very popular when Steve ran NeXT, put a colorful skin on it to mimic the layout of OS9 with a dock, and put it on the shelf for people to buy. They threw away OS9 because that platform had become such a nightmare, but they didn't actually make anything themselves to replace it with.
Jobs was just a salesman. He took bland products which had a new coating of paint and sold them to millions of people. That's the harsh reality of it. He deserves a lot of credit for being able to do that, too. But that's the only credit he truly deserves, because Jonathan Ive existed whether Steve Jobs ever did or not.
I like how he still thought he was an innovator, when he admitted in his own book that another guy came up with the idea for products like the iPhone. That same guy received an award for it. That guy still works for Apple.
Steve Jobs was just the business man who could sell it. This has not only been blatantly obvious from the beginning, but now his own words back it up. So why are we still describing him as an innovator and visionary?
I can however credit him for being a good business man. And that's how he should be remembered. You know, the honest way.
It was a great operating system. I used to dual-boot between Win98SE and the original XP (in the pre-service pack days) on a 200mhz machine with 64MB of ram. 98 had the performance at the time, but XP had this rock-solid feel to it. I used it for development to avoid crashes, and played all my games and stuff over in 98.
But times change. It's not safe to run as administrator anymore, and XP handed that out by default. Doesn't matter how safe you think you are about running potentially bad stuff or opening attachments like in the old days. The vector for attack is the web, and any vulnerabilities your software will offer are going to get taken advantage of sooner or later. Didn't matter if you had IE or Firefox, they were both riddled with holes over the years. Even Opera, the security pro it was, had its share of problems too.
Vista introduced new technology to help with that, but was obviously a P.R. flub, allowing Windows 7 to come in and save the day. 7 is their greatest operating system to date. Granted, I disabled their OSX-wanna-be style of launcher and reverted it to the XP style quick launch icons. But the fact that they left me do that speaks to the configurability Microsoft still offers to people. You won't see Apple letting their users do anything to change the overall appearance like that. Hell, aside from adding a dock, even Apple themselves haven't really changed their appearance from the earliest Macs. Talk about being scared to try anything new.
Anyway, as someone who deals with Linux on a daily basis, and has every personal machine multi-boot to a Linux distro, Win7 is still my primary OS. But XP still set the bar for what I look for in a stable desktop operating system. My main PC can even still boot to XP, because on occasion I need hardware access I can't get in 7 as easily, for interfacing with custom electronics with Windows-based software. I have a feeling many other people will still find it useful for years to come, too.
Playing a video game can be different depending on who's playing it and what they do. Some people might be stuck, want to see an alternate playthrough, or simply be tired of the game and not want to finish it themselves. It's not like a movie, where once you've seen it you don't need to see it again. And when video games are $50+ a pop, nobody wants to dish out money on a game they haven't even seen yet. So I wouldn't be surprised if online playthroughs have a noticeable impact on video game sales, even if a small one.
I once watched an incredibly interesting Let's Play of Jurassic Park: Trespasser, and the guy had a lot of insight into the game development from having talked to others and done research beforehand. Even though it's touted as one of the worst games of all time, I ended up getting it and playing through the whole thing myself. All because of his Let's Play.
Yahtzee took a concept that was funny for a short time, on games that were reasonably bad to begin with, and quickly became boring as soon as he realized he could make money from it. He now reviews pretty much all games negatively purely because that's what made him successful. His commentary went from funny and clever to simply harsh for the sake of being so. His often unjustified criticisms of games potentially have a negative affect on the market in which his reviews are based, especially considering the average fan of his you see these days and how easily influenced they might be. Luckily his popularity is waning.
At least AVGN portrays itself as total entertainment and is full of wacky skits, as opposed to Yahtzee's method of appearing like a legit game review. Nobody's going to let AVGN affect their opinion of something because it's very obviously not a serious review. It's even more likely they'll want to go try it themselves after they see how awful it is, to see if they can do any better at it.
Anyway, point is, once media crosses over into being interactive where user choice affects the experience and outcome, it's just no longer comparable to simply streaming a movie. I can watch a movie trailer of a movie and decide if I want to pay $10-20 to buy it. But I can't play a demo of most games anymore, so I sure as heck aint paying $50 blindly.
I completely agree with the notion, and have been saying so for years. As someone who is a huge technology nerd, having had my hands in everything from programming to electronics and hardware design since the time I was in high school, I still say computers should not be introduced as a tool until the student has long since been taught how to do everything without one. Only then can a computer become a useful tool, speeding up calculations or making papers easier to write, as opposed to them being a crutch for the student to do any of the work to begin with.
I also don't agree with unsupervised internet usage by children, and you know as well as I do that some of the more skilled young people will figure out the way around any of the useless filters out there on any kind of school devices given to them (like all these iPads and laptops they keep dumping on entire schools). There's simply way too much on the internet that they don't need to be exposed to, and porn is far from being the only one of those things. My high school had just begun integrating the internet into their network, and it was all a terrible insecure mess. I found that out just from sitting at a machine in the library glancing over my shoulder on occasion. Imagine if I'd had a school laptop and could access the network/internet from wherever I wanted? Seven years later when my brother went to that school I heard all the tales of how it was apparently just as bad if not worse, which was not good considering the internet was much more prominent by then, and full of way worse things for kids to be looking at than what I would have ever had available when I were there. School IT departments are not the people you want to depend on to ensure your children are safe with technology.
Unfortunately, a lot of this technology dumpage onto schools is far from politicians or local officials wanting to improve education, and more about them doing favors and putting lots of taxpayer dollars into some local overcharging company's pockets. You literally do not need brand new PCs every year/two years in order to teach Word. And the excuse of needing to keep the school's technology budget active to keep from losing it is equally unjustifiable, because you obviously don't need that big of a technology budget every year to begin with when you don't need that many new PCs all the time.
But oh well, the combination of misguided and/or greedy officials messing with the schools is certainly not a new tale. I guess some kid is going to have to end up abducted and murdered due to using Facebook at schools or something before there's any kind of outcry.
I still have a bad mark on my Youtube account from making a short parody video of something once which was flagged as a copyright violation by somebody. The only way to get this off of my record is to send some DMCA formal counter notice to the original owner, which is wayyyy more effort than a lot of the Youtube videos that get marked are worth fooling with, and also requires you to give your real name and everything. Besides, in my case, that person is not only long gone, but obviously is not going to give a crap about me having a bad mark on my account in the first place since I bet they're responsible for it being there.
Youtube makes it way too easy for people to be jerks. They didn't even check the video in my case, or they would have seen it was blatant parody with very little source material. I ended up removing two other videos I had spent a lot of time editing which contained content that could be disputed because I simply can't risk losing my whole account from such bullshit. I can't imagine what kind of crap that people with professional channels must have to deal with on Youtube. And look at how many of them have even had their accounts shut down occasionally from it, even if just temporary. If those people are Youtube partners (which some of them have been), that's costing them money.
And didn't I hear before that some company was filing copyright claims against people for posting video game footage now too? If you go around killing all the Let's Play and video game reviews, then half of Youtube will be gone overnight.
So basically, fuck companies hiding behind the DMCA to protect their image or content or whatever ridiculous excuse they want to use. They only encourage me to want to pirate them out of spite. It's about like what happened to Metallica several years ago. Their music sucks, but a lot of people went and downloaded it for spite to them during the whole Napster debacle. It shows that people tend to react the exact opposite way you want when you start turning into a jerk about something.
My point was that even if this attack was about the people who terrorize younger children, the fact remains that aspects of Anonymous itself still caters in child porn of both varieties. The "jailbait" is just the more commonly acceptable variety to post, probably because they're closer to the ages of some of the people posting it, even if it's just as illegal.
"Jailbait is American English slang for a person who is younger than the legal age of consent for sexual activity, but physically mature enough to be mistaken for an adult and be considered sexually desirable."
I went and read the releases, and it seems that the list had already been tampered with and had names added/removed which were supposedly part of a revenge on former Anon members or something. Even that could bring the credibility into further doubt.
Either way, even if no legal action ever occurs, their child porn havens have been disrupted, even if just temporarily, with light shed on how/where they operate. So I'd still call that a win.
It's important to remember that just because Anonymous takes responsibility for something, it in no way means it's the same collective of individuals responsible for some other action under the name. That's both the advantage and disadvantage to using that umbrella to cover your actions. There was just a news story the other day of Anonymous hacking another police station. Can people find justification for that nearly as easily as shutting down child porn? What stops a judge from charging an individual with every crime ever done under the Anonymous name even if they were only personally responsible for a petty one? And let's not forget that parts of Anonymous are involved in child porn themselves, whether that's 5-year-old girls or "jailbait."
Anyway, the question though is how do police deal with this information, and how does a lawyer prevent it from being thrown out of court due to its questionable origin?
Companies with bad products still don't get it
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The Case For Piracy
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For years, video game developers released demos of nearly every product (or better known as shareware back in the day, encouraging people to spread it around) so that people could try a game out and know whether they liked it. This meant if your product was crap, you very likely weren't going to make any sales. I don't think it's just nostalgia talking when I say that many of the successful games of that period were of top-notch quality from the start.
These days, there's an overwhelming amount of software produced with nothing available for the user to actually see if they like it before throwing money at it. And when we're talking like $50 games, that's kind of outrageous for developers to expect people to blindly dole out. If I pirate a game, and I think it's total crap, then I'm not paying for it. If I had played a demo of that game, I would have come to the same conclusion and they still would have never received my money. Though if I had actually bought this game, what recourse do I have? I can't return it, so I'm screwed, and at best can sell it back to say Gamestop for a fraction of the original cost (which they will then put back on the shelf for $5 less than retail). So while I don't pretend to dismiss the legality of doing this, I certainly don't lose any sleep over saving myself from losing so much money, either.
Sometimes a company builds a good enough reputation that a demo is not entirely necessary, though. I know for a fact that pretty much anything in the Half Life series is going to be excellent, for example. I've never regretted any of the money I spent on them. And yet, ironically, there are demos available for most of Valve's more prominent games. Valve knows how to build customer loyalty, but also leaves the door open to people new to the series. And not only that, they give users a very easy way to purchase the product if they do like it, through Steam.
Other times a good game does show up which has no demo, but yes, if it's a good enough game then it still warrants being bought. And it still warrants my praise of it to others, encouraging them to try it. But at the same time, when I'm convincing somebody of getting a game, it would be a lot better if they had a demo they could try, otherwise they might end up blaming me for spending the money if they don't like it. No demos is just bad for everybody.
Meanwhile, other companies put out garbage, and know they've put out garbage, many times rushed out the door and full of bugs, but they selfishly expect consumers to pay for this without having any idea of what's been dumped upon them until it's too late. And, coincidentally, these seem to be the companies most concerned about piracy, and fill your machine full of broken DRM.
It's similar to record companies, who think putting out autotuned singing over top of music composed on a computer instead of with instruments should just fall off of the shelves, and then they're ready to sue people sharing it when it doesn't sell as well as they wanted, even though it's likely the sharing that's selling it as well as it did to start with.
So, to put it bluntly, with some selfishness of my own: I'm the consumer, and if you want my business, you'll make good products, and let me try them first to see for myself.
But let's not confuse an IP address as being a person. Just because a Skype user is behind an IP doesn't mean the torrent user is the same person. Fortunately (and unfortunately for the media industry) the law, in America at least, is gradually beginning to make that distinction.
The sad fact is that there is a large group of people, primarily conservative America, who will still disregard or dispute even this most basic aspect of the global warming/climate change discussion. The right-wing has made such a strong effort to attack anything which liberals even mildly support that it's become ingrained into the culture for them to simply conclude that it's fake left-wing propaganda. They'll likely only watch one news source, or only conservative sources, and therefore get no outside information on the subject to even begin to use their own brains for comprehending the situation.
While I think corporations played a hand in wanting to avoid emissions legislation that would cost them money, I don't think that's the entire problem, particularly since it mostly only affects this one particular issue. I think their culture has become what it has primarily because the Republican party in power has become so afraid of losing that power that they're building up this impenetrable partisan wall between their followers and everyone else, so that not only do their followers disagree with the opposing viewpoints and candidates, but they despise them. It's to the point where even when they need their followers to believe something different, they themselves have a hard time putting that new message through. Kind of like the select few respectable Republicans who kept trying to lay to rest the rumors about Obama being Muslim, or the birth certificate debacle, and how they were generally ignored since that wasn't the party consensus. Look how long it took for that to settle after the evidence was repeatedly provided and even after the original naysayers accepted it, trying to make the issue disappear due to growing negative public sentiment towards it by that point. Yet you'll still find many in the party who believe it regardless, since it was held onto for so long by so many prominent figures.
Global warming will be the same. Even if they come out with irrefutable evidence that it is also man made, it's become so accepted as liberal propaganda that we're going to have a very hard time passing any sort of legislation to help prevent further damage. That, and you'll have people who are so disgruntled at their long accepted viewpoint being wrong that they won't care enough to show any support. The Republican party and media are going to have to collectively work hard to rewrite this narrative they've created if we ever intend to get anything done.
How sad it will be for future generations to read about the history of this situation. Where not only will humans possibly have caused the climate change, but humans were too stubborn to accept responsibility for it and debated even its existence until it was severely impacting their environment. How stupid we may look. And we'll all be judged for letting it happen, not just one vocal group, because in the end republicans and democrats don't really matter. As should be the case right now.
There's nothing stifling to me about the constitution nor do I know how you got that impression from my comment.
Just because the constitution doesn't say something, however, is no justification for eliminating the service or program. The constitution doesn't say anything about roads, for example, but if government hadn't stepped in, we would have never gotten the interstate system when we did. The constitution didn't say anything about space travel, but if not for the government, we would have never made it to the moon when we did, which also had a political benefit as well. The government's job is to do what the people want. If the majority of people want a federal program, then there's rarely anything in the constitution which says they can't do that.
So we should follow the constitution, sure, but we shouldn't turn into the equivalent of religious zealots about it either and only follow it word for word. The fact that the constitution has a number of amendments following it acknowledges the need for change over time as society moves forward. There was no preconception of commercial air travel or worldwide communication networks back then, so society has to learn how to deal with and govern these things when necessary.
This is why the idea of Ron Paul dragging the country in reverse and destroying pretty much every program which makes the country what it is today a terrible idea. There's a serious need to cut spending, but certainly not in the manner that he suggests. The public generally supports most of the programs Paul suggests cutting as well, so he would have a very hard time actually accomplishing such an agenda unless he himself violated the constitution in attempting to override what the people want.
This is part of the reason why the internet here in America needs to be officially declared as a utility, much like the telephone, so that companies and the government are unable to filter or censor it, or to give certain companies advantages over others in what travels across it.
Seriously, the internet is in 75+% of homes by now. I bet when the telephone was considered a utility, it was still in far fewer homes than that. What's the difference?
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I don't understand what your point is.
I've been buying video cards since long before ATI and Nvidia were the only choices. Or before 3D was standard, for that matter. Everything from Trident, to Voodoo, to Matrox. I still remember when Nvidia came along and was a joke compared to anything 3dfx made. Then in the end, Nvidia ended up buying them out. Times change.
So my point still stands. Before Nvidia's huge faulty GPU blunder, when they had a better card for a better price, that's what people should have probably gotten over ATI. Today, if people feel safe buying from Nvidia still, and if Nvidia actually makes a better card, then that's fine too. But trust plays a huge part into a purchase, equally so as bang for buck. Intel and AMD haven't done anything shitty like that to their consumers. Even if Bulldozer is a total failure of a product, at least people know that up front. It's not defective, it's just not up to par.
You pretty clearly didn't read the cards tested. The Radeon 6990 wasn't on the Ultra page.
Once again we see that the top tier Nvidia is priced wayyyy over the top Radeon, but performs way worse.
I don't understand why there's so much brand fanboyism with computers. This would obviously indicate that it makes sense to buy Radeon if you want your money's worth, since this holds true down to the lower performance cards as well. It's basically been this way for years. Yet, oppositely, Intel has been blowing away AMD's processors for a while now, so you get your money's worth by buying in that direction for that particular product. It just makes sense.
Besides, after the way Nvidia shit all over their loyal fans with that GPU debacle, I'll have a hard time trusting them again, as should anyone else. There are still video cards and laptops floating around out there, particularly on Ebay, which are just waiting to die on some unsuspecting second-hand consumer. I'm always having to warn people about buying anything used with Nvidia products in them until they do their research. Not everyone I know was so lucky though, because I still have a perfectly good laptop laying here with just a dead Nvidia graphics chipset in it, which they gave to me out of disgust when it died immediately after their warranty period expired.
Brand loyalty doesn't do you any good if you're in second place. Or worse, when you're stuck with dead equipment. Look at benchmarks, do some research, and buy what's best for the price. That's the point of PCs vs Apple: we can put any brand of product in it for any aspect of operation to achieve the best performance at a good price. It's silly to do anything otherwise.
I think some people have made a bigger deal out of this than need be, because they're implying some kind of malicious intent when there is likely none.
Yes it's a big deal, particularly if a website is passing sensitive information in say an HTTPS GET request, and you're looking at that site on like public wifi or a school network or something where it's easy to snoop on others' traffic. But the intention was to check if their Webzine feature would work with the site (which is an interesting feature, just not one I really use), not harvest your web browsing history. It just wasn't thought through at all. In fact, I would go as far as say that whoever implemented the feature is a bonehead, because the security implications are obvious. They're going to have to take their knocks on this one.
That being said, I love their browser, and one blunder isn't enough to make me throw it to the curb. I don't trust my private data over an insecure network connection to begin with, so this was less of an issue for me (assuming their own servers weren't breached, allowing someone to snoop). I use OpenVPN when I want to do something "important." If I were to want to browse openly though, I'd either clear the cookies first, or I'd just use a separate browser (Opera is usually my alternate) where I'm not logged into anything. That'd be fine for just Googling or Wikipedia searches.
Anyway, they aren't the first company to make a big mistake. They won't be the last.
You know why they're doing this, right? For years, the only thing that has really made Mozilla Corp. any money is their Google partnership. In fact, they got a little greedy over the years because of it, and have really whored Firefox out with lots of changes primarily to lure in people, and rushed out versions to look competitive with other browsers (sometimes even dropping features just to meet unnecessarily rushed release dates), to the point that they turned it into the same bloated mess which was the origin of the product to begin with (breaking away from the bloated Mozilla Suite). And their users noticed, and they complained. Mozilla mostly ignored those people at first, giving this and that bogus reason, until it actually started to affect their dollar signs, so they put some effort towards cleaning up their mess of code a bit.
But the point is, Google has Chrome now. They don't really need to keep Mozilla afloat anymore with partnerships if they took a notion to. So Mozilla is scared of losing their allowance from big daddy Google. Instead, they've gotten in bed with the company which they trained people to hate for years to keep the money coming in.
I know that sounds harsh and trolling, but it's also the sad reality of what Mozilla Corp. has become. They've done a good job of turning their own user base against them so far, to the point that most of the people I know have already dumped it for Opera or Chrome. So let's see how this new partnership works out for what's left of their users.
How long until some Microsoft-hater-fueled group tries to get an injunction against this in somewhere like Europe, where they've had a much easier time pushing Microsoft around? That would hurt all of Microsoft's customers in Europe (aka, the majority of computer users there), because it would essentially eliminate all of Metro and a good portion of the cross-architecture functionality that they're building into the OS.
But hey, who cares about that, as long as you're keeping the playing field even for all of the other commercial operating systems! Except, you know, there aren't any for Microsoft to hurt, remember? OSX already integrates similar technology in its Dashboard widgets (not to mention Microsoft really isn't a threat for the kind of people who would use Apple to begin with.) And Linux isn't really a commercial product for desktop users, but could implement something similar any time they wanted. And let's not forget Chrome OS, the entirety of which IS a web browser, but also free so no competition problem there.
Just wait, somebody will try it, though, and there will be plenty of tech-retarded out there to back them up.
No, you seem to not understand Steve Jobs' role. And how that role was pretty much nothing.
Jonathan Ive's role was designing the iPhone. All of it, essentially, down to the materials that were going to be used to make it look as pretty and shiny as it does. Of course an actual engineering team designed its guts, but they already knew what to put in it.
Jonathan Ive received the award for the iPhone, and for most of the other Apple products, because he actually deserved it. Steve Jobs on the other hand received awards because most other people have no idea how a company works.
I dunno, if you call repackaging existing things with a pretty outside as taking a risk, then there's a lot of really innovative Chinese companies out there.
Don't worry, Jonathan Ive will still be coming up with plenty of new product designs like he always did, still made in the same low-quality Chinese manufacturing plants (by a company which most PC users acknowledge make junk PC parts), and sold by Tim Cook, who has been in charge for almost the last year already anyway.
Some people will miss Jobs for whatever reasons, but the company has already proven that it doesn't really need him around to yell at everybody.
Steve regularly took credit for things which other people did all the time. The people who came up with those things didn't like it very much, either.
The point is, though, many Apple fanatics have thought and continue to think that Steve Jobs was single-handedly responsible for designing most of the products at Apple. When the guy died, it was even more evident how misinformed the average person was. His book, however, can now finally help set things straight. Sure, the average Apple user will likely never read that either, or even comprehend the extent of what it reveals regarding Jobs' influence on actual product design, but the information is at least out there now in the man's own biography. Perhaps it will bring a few peoples' opinions back down to reality.
Perhaps your Apple history needs some refreshing.
Jonathan Ive designed almost all of the products Apple is famous for. He designed the iMac, for example. He worked at Apple long before Steve Jobs came back. Only his job position changed around the time of the infamous return. Nice timing, eh?
But the question is, how exactly was the iMac an innovative product? It was literally no different than the beige boxes that came before it. It literally ran the exact same bland, unstable operating system. In no way was it a new product, aside from being inserted into a colorful shell. This is not an exaggeration at all, it's simply the truth.
Eventually OSX came along as well. But again, how was this a new or innovative product? OSX was, quite literally, a recycled operating system. They took an OS which was not very popular when Steve ran NeXT, put a colorful skin on it to mimic the layout of OS9 with a dock, and put it on the shelf for people to buy. They threw away OS9 because that platform had become such a nightmare, but they didn't actually make anything themselves to replace it with.
Jobs was just a salesman. He took bland products which had a new coating of paint and sold them to millions of people. That's the harsh reality of it. He deserves a lot of credit for being able to do that, too. But that's the only credit he truly deserves, because Jonathan Ive existed whether Steve Jobs ever did or not.
I like how he still thought he was an innovator, when he admitted in his own book that another guy came up with the idea for products like the iPhone. That same guy received an award for it. That guy still works for Apple.
Steve Jobs was just the business man who could sell it. This has not only been blatantly obvious from the beginning, but now his own words back it up. So why are we still describing him as an innovator and visionary?
I can however credit him for being a good business man. And that's how he should be remembered. You know, the honest way.
It was a great operating system. I used to dual-boot between Win98SE and the original XP (in the pre-service pack days) on a 200mhz machine with 64MB of ram. 98 had the performance at the time, but XP had this rock-solid feel to it. I used it for development to avoid crashes, and played all my games and stuff over in 98.
But times change. It's not safe to run as administrator anymore, and XP handed that out by default. Doesn't matter how safe you think you are about running potentially bad stuff or opening attachments like in the old days. The vector for attack is the web, and any vulnerabilities your software will offer are going to get taken advantage of sooner or later. Didn't matter if you had IE or Firefox, they were both riddled with holes over the years. Even Opera, the security pro it was, had its share of problems too.
Vista introduced new technology to help with that, but was obviously a P.R. flub, allowing Windows 7 to come in and save the day. 7 is their greatest operating system to date. Granted, I disabled their OSX-wanna-be style of launcher and reverted it to the XP style quick launch icons. But the fact that they left me do that speaks to the configurability Microsoft still offers to people. You won't see Apple letting their users do anything to change the overall appearance like that. Hell, aside from adding a dock, even Apple themselves haven't really changed their appearance from the earliest Macs. Talk about being scared to try anything new.
Anyway, as someone who deals with Linux on a daily basis, and has every personal machine multi-boot to a Linux distro, Win7 is still my primary OS. But XP still set the bar for what I look for in a stable desktop operating system. My main PC can even still boot to XP, because on occasion I need hardware access I can't get in 7 as easily, for interfacing with custom electronics with Windows-based software. I have a feeling many other people will still find it useful for years to come, too.
Playing a video game can be different depending on who's playing it and what they do. Some people might be stuck, want to see an alternate playthrough, or simply be tired of the game and not want to finish it themselves. It's not like a movie, where once you've seen it you don't need to see it again. And when video games are $50+ a pop, nobody wants to dish out money on a game they haven't even seen yet. So I wouldn't be surprised if online playthroughs have a noticeable impact on video game sales, even if a small one.
I once watched an incredibly interesting Let's Play of Jurassic Park: Trespasser, and the guy had a lot of insight into the game development from having talked to others and done research beforehand. Even though it's touted as one of the worst games of all time, I ended up getting it and playing through the whole thing myself. All because of his Let's Play.
Yahtzee took a concept that was funny for a short time, on games that were reasonably bad to begin with, and quickly became boring as soon as he realized he could make money from it. He now reviews pretty much all games negatively purely because that's what made him successful. His commentary went from funny and clever to simply harsh for the sake of being so. His often unjustified criticisms of games potentially have a negative affect on the market in which his reviews are based, especially considering the average fan of his you see these days and how easily influenced they might be. Luckily his popularity is waning.
At least AVGN portrays itself as total entertainment and is full of wacky skits, as opposed to Yahtzee's method of appearing like a legit game review. Nobody's going to let AVGN affect their opinion of something because it's very obviously not a serious review. It's even more likely they'll want to go try it themselves after they see how awful it is, to see if they can do any better at it.
Anyway, point is, once media crosses over into being interactive where user choice affects the experience and outcome, it's just no longer comparable to simply streaming a movie. I can watch a movie trailer of a movie and decide if I want to pay $10-20 to buy it. But I can't play a demo of most games anymore, so I sure as heck aint paying $50 blindly.
I completely agree with the notion, and have been saying so for years. As someone who is a huge technology nerd, having had my hands in everything from programming to electronics and hardware design since the time I was in high school, I still say computers should not be introduced as a tool until the student has long since been taught how to do everything without one. Only then can a computer become a useful tool, speeding up calculations or making papers easier to write, as opposed to them being a crutch for the student to do any of the work to begin with.
I also don't agree with unsupervised internet usage by children, and you know as well as I do that some of the more skilled young people will figure out the way around any of the useless filters out there on any kind of school devices given to them (like all these iPads and laptops they keep dumping on entire schools). There's simply way too much on the internet that they don't need to be exposed to, and porn is far from being the only one of those things. My high school had just begun integrating the internet into their network, and it was all a terrible insecure mess. I found that out just from sitting at a machine in the library glancing over my shoulder on occasion. Imagine if I'd had a school laptop and could access the network/internet from wherever I wanted? Seven years later when my brother went to that school I heard all the tales of how it was apparently just as bad if not worse, which was not good considering the internet was much more prominent by then, and full of way worse things for kids to be looking at than what I would have ever had available when I were there. School IT departments are not the people you want to depend on to ensure your children are safe with technology.
Unfortunately, a lot of this technology dumpage onto schools is far from politicians or local officials wanting to improve education, and more about them doing favors and putting lots of taxpayer dollars into some local overcharging company's pockets. You literally do not need brand new PCs every year/two years in order to teach Word. And the excuse of needing to keep the school's technology budget active to keep from losing it is equally unjustifiable, because you obviously don't need that big of a technology budget every year to begin with when you don't need that many new PCs all the time.
But oh well, the combination of misguided and/or greedy officials messing with the schools is certainly not a new tale. I guess some kid is going to have to end up abducted and murdered due to using Facebook at schools or something before there's any kind of outcry.
I still have a bad mark on my Youtube account from making a short parody video of something once which was flagged as a copyright violation by somebody. The only way to get this off of my record is to send some DMCA formal counter notice to the original owner, which is wayyyy more effort than a lot of the Youtube videos that get marked are worth fooling with, and also requires you to give your real name and everything. Besides, in my case, that person is not only long gone, but obviously is not going to give a crap about me having a bad mark on my account in the first place since I bet they're responsible for it being there.
Youtube makes it way too easy for people to be jerks. They didn't even check the video in my case, or they would have seen it was blatant parody with very little source material. I ended up removing two other videos I had spent a lot of time editing which contained content that could be disputed because I simply can't risk losing my whole account from such bullshit. I can't imagine what kind of crap that people with professional channels must have to deal with on Youtube. And look at how many of them have even had their accounts shut down occasionally from it, even if just temporary. If those people are Youtube partners (which some of them have been), that's costing them money.
And didn't I hear before that some company was filing copyright claims against people for posting video game footage now too? If you go around killing all the Let's Play and video game reviews, then half of Youtube will be gone overnight.
So basically, fuck companies hiding behind the DMCA to protect their image or content or whatever ridiculous excuse they want to use. They only encourage me to want to pirate them out of spite. It's about like what happened to Metallica several years ago. Their music sucks, but a lot of people went and downloaded it for spite to them during the whole Napster debacle. It shows that people tend to react the exact opposite way you want when you start turning into a jerk about something.
My point was that even if this attack was about the people who terrorize younger children, the fact remains that aspects of Anonymous itself still caters in child porn of both varieties. The "jailbait" is just the more commonly acceptable variety to post, probably because they're closer to the ages of some of the people posting it, even if it's just as illegal.
"Jailbait is American English slang for a person who is younger than the legal age of consent for sexual activity, but physically mature enough to be mistaken for an adult and be considered sexually desirable."
In other words, usually teens.
I went and read the releases, and it seems that the list had already been tampered with and had names added/removed which were supposedly part of a revenge on former Anon members or something. Even that could bring the credibility into further doubt.
Either way, even if no legal action ever occurs, their child porn havens have been disrupted, even if just temporarily, with light shed on how/where they operate. So I'd still call that a win.
It's important to remember that just because Anonymous takes responsibility for something, it in no way means it's the same collective of individuals responsible for some other action under the name. That's both the advantage and disadvantage to using that umbrella to cover your actions. There was just a news story the other day of Anonymous hacking another police station. Can people find justification for that nearly as easily as shutting down child porn? What stops a judge from charging an individual with every crime ever done under the Anonymous name even if they were only personally responsible for a petty one? And let's not forget that parts of Anonymous are involved in child porn themselves, whether that's 5-year-old girls or "jailbait."
Anyway, the question though is how do police deal with this information, and how does a lawyer prevent it from being thrown out of court due to its questionable origin?
For years, video game developers released demos of nearly every product (or better known as shareware back in the day, encouraging people to spread it around) so that people could try a game out and know whether they liked it. This meant if your product was crap, you very likely weren't going to make any sales. I don't think it's just nostalgia talking when I say that many of the successful games of that period were of top-notch quality from the start.
These days, there's an overwhelming amount of software produced with nothing available for the user to actually see if they like it before throwing money at it. And when we're talking like $50 games, that's kind of outrageous for developers to expect people to blindly dole out. If I pirate a game, and I think it's total crap, then I'm not paying for it. If I had played a demo of that game, I would have come to the same conclusion and they still would have never received my money. Though if I had actually bought this game, what recourse do I have? I can't return it, so I'm screwed, and at best can sell it back to say Gamestop for a fraction of the original cost (which they will then put back on the shelf for $5 less than retail). So while I don't pretend to dismiss the legality of doing this, I certainly don't lose any sleep over saving myself from losing so much money, either.
Sometimes a company builds a good enough reputation that a demo is not entirely necessary, though. I know for a fact that pretty much anything in the Half Life series is going to be excellent, for example. I've never regretted any of the money I spent on them. And yet, ironically, there are demos available for most of Valve's more prominent games. Valve knows how to build customer loyalty, but also leaves the door open to people new to the series. And not only that, they give users a very easy way to purchase the product if they do like it, through Steam.
Other times a good game does show up which has no demo, but yes, if it's a good enough game then it still warrants being bought. And it still warrants my praise of it to others, encouraging them to try it. But at the same time, when I'm convincing somebody of getting a game, it would be a lot better if they had a demo they could try, otherwise they might end up blaming me for spending the money if they don't like it. No demos is just bad for everybody.
Meanwhile, other companies put out garbage, and know they've put out garbage, many times rushed out the door and full of bugs, but they selfishly expect consumers to pay for this without having any idea of what's been dumped upon them until it's too late. And, coincidentally, these seem to be the companies most concerned about piracy, and fill your machine full of broken DRM.
It's similar to record companies, who think putting out autotuned singing over top of music composed on a computer instead of with instruments should just fall off of the shelves, and then they're ready to sue people sharing it when it doesn't sell as well as they wanted, even though it's likely the sharing that's selling it as well as it did to start with.
So, to put it bluntly, with some selfishness of my own: I'm the consumer, and if you want my business, you'll make good products, and let me try them first to see for myself.
But let's not confuse an IP address as being a person. Just because a Skype user is behind an IP doesn't mean the torrent user is the same person. Fortunately (and unfortunately for the media industry) the law, in America at least, is gradually beginning to make that distinction.
The sad fact is that there is a large group of people, primarily conservative America, who will still disregard or dispute even this most basic aspect of the global warming/climate change discussion. The right-wing has made such a strong effort to attack anything which liberals even mildly support that it's become ingrained into the culture for them to simply conclude that it's fake left-wing propaganda. They'll likely only watch one news source, or only conservative sources, and therefore get no outside information on the subject to even begin to use their own brains for comprehending the situation.
While I think corporations played a hand in wanting to avoid emissions legislation that would cost them money, I don't think that's the entire problem, particularly since it mostly only affects this one particular issue. I think their culture has become what it has primarily because the Republican party in power has become so afraid of losing that power that they're building up this impenetrable partisan wall between their followers and everyone else, so that not only do their followers disagree with the opposing viewpoints and candidates, but they despise them. It's to the point where even when they need their followers to believe something different, they themselves have a hard time putting that new message through. Kind of like the select few respectable Republicans who kept trying to lay to rest the rumors about Obama being Muslim, or the birth certificate debacle, and how they were generally ignored since that wasn't the party consensus. Look how long it took for that to settle after the evidence was repeatedly provided and even after the original naysayers accepted it, trying to make the issue disappear due to growing negative public sentiment towards it by that point. Yet you'll still find many in the party who believe it regardless, since it was held onto for so long by so many prominent figures.
Global warming will be the same. Even if they come out with irrefutable evidence that it is also man made, it's become so accepted as liberal propaganda that we're going to have a very hard time passing any sort of legislation to help prevent further damage. That, and you'll have people who are so disgruntled at their long accepted viewpoint being wrong that they won't care enough to show any support. The Republican party and media are going to have to collectively work hard to rewrite this narrative they've created if we ever intend to get anything done.
How sad it will be for future generations to read about the history of this situation. Where not only will humans possibly have caused the climate change, but humans were too stubborn to accept responsibility for it and debated even its existence until it was severely impacting their environment. How stupid we may look. And we'll all be judged for letting it happen, not just one vocal group, because in the end republicans and democrats don't really matter. As should be the case right now.
There's nothing stifling to me about the constitution nor do I know how you got that impression from my comment.
Just because the constitution doesn't say something, however, is no justification for eliminating the service or program. The constitution doesn't say anything about roads, for example, but if government hadn't stepped in, we would have never gotten the interstate system when we did. The constitution didn't say anything about space travel, but if not for the government, we would have never made it to the moon when we did, which also had a political benefit as well. The government's job is to do what the people want. If the majority of people want a federal program, then there's rarely anything in the constitution which says they can't do that.
So we should follow the constitution, sure, but we shouldn't turn into the equivalent of religious zealots about it either and only follow it word for word. The fact that the constitution has a number of amendments following it acknowledges the need for change over time as society moves forward. There was no preconception of commercial air travel or worldwide communication networks back then, so society has to learn how to deal with and govern these things when necessary.
This is why the idea of Ron Paul dragging the country in reverse and destroying pretty much every program which makes the country what it is today a terrible idea. There's a serious need to cut spending, but certainly not in the manner that he suggests. The public generally supports most of the programs Paul suggests cutting as well, so he would have a very hard time actually accomplishing such an agenda unless he himself violated the constitution in attempting to override what the people want.
This is part of the reason why the internet here in America needs to be officially declared as a utility, much like the telephone, so that companies and the government are unable to filter or censor it, or to give certain companies advantages over others in what travels across it.
Seriously, the internet is in 75+% of homes by now. I bet when the telephone was considered a utility, it was still in far fewer homes than that. What's the difference?