Or the far more likely, They license H.264 already, they have a user base that use FF and want them to continue to use windows as their preference by ensuring they have the maximum capabilities. FFS why do the tin foil hat wearers have to come out at everything they do. This is a pretty obvious move by them that makes both business and technical sense and has nothing to do with the shit your spouting. It is all about keeping their dominate hold on the OS regardless of browser choice.
It doesn't have to be malware, A well thought out backdoor could be as simple a single byte buffer overflow or a combination of many other minor code defects that would allow a knowledgable person to use them as a backdoor. So it is possible even if you found the code it would still be questionable whether it was just a bug or intentional malevelance.
ummm Microsoft are one of the few companies left that DON'T do never ending public betas to the world, I think Google is who you are thinking of. The majority of MS products go through many betas of which you are lucky if one comes out as a public beta and even then it is usually only the mass market ones which actually are likely to geniunely get good info from a public beta.
It didn't fly over my head, was just trying to add some facts to it:-). Yes the Asussie government is trying to screw people over on privacy, but to be honest we have no one to blame but ourselves, people sold out to the labor government to get the NBN even though it meant leaving the labor nazi's in power to further remove our rights.
In the Aussie government you have no rights to privacy for what you do on government computers (rightly so), everything from your internet access to your email and instant messages (if they allow it) can be monitored and read. Internet Access is provided as a means to assist in doing your job and internet access policies nearly always explicitly state that the internet access is for use for specific government business related to your job. However most are at least lenient enough to let you check news, weather and a few other sites. They are being paid by the tax payers to do a job not to socialise on the web.
The reason the ATO is so high on the list has nothing to do with behaviour of its staff (at least there behaviour is no worse than any other departments staff) and everything to do with how strictly they enforce the rules. As someone that works with many of the agencies in Aus the enforcement ranges from ATO's strict handling of the issue to many other departments that do nothing at all or hand out warning for all but the worst breaches, hell I worked at one that specifically told me to disable logging as if they logged the traffic they would have to do something about it and they didn't have the policy's in place to handle the legal issues that would arise at the time.
Why?:) I know. meme. It's just, I've built a couple Beowulf clusters for fun, and didn't have an application written to use MPI (or any of the alphabet soup of protocols), so it was just an exercise, not for any practical use. It's not like most of us are crunching numbers hard enough to need one, and it won't help out playing games or even building kernels.
I'd like to see a 1k core machine on my desktop, but that's beyond the practical limits of any software currently available. Linux can only go to 256 cores. Windows 2008 tops out at 64. But hey, if they did come to market, I know who would be first to support all those cores, and it doesn't come from Redmond (or their offshore outsourced developers).
ummm no. Windows 2008 can handle 64 SOCKETS, it currently scales to 256 cores
hate to break it to ya, but 8% is not exorbitant. That is a pretty average rate, the very low rates experienced elsewhere are because of economies that are in the toilet. In Aus we basically skipped the GFC despite the labor government doing its best to sink us, 7-8% interest rates are what we have now and they are likely to go up from here.
of course they had a plan of how to use them. Just the majority found them unwieldy and awkward for most of the work items they used them for, an example would be the citrix client and the horrible onscreen keyboard, it simply drove people batshit trying to get stuff done. Basically managers their thought they would be a good improvement to productivity for many of the remote based users that aren't terribly good with computers to begin with, turns out they were wrong, that's why they only bought 30 so they can test before doing a major rollout.
I was given to understand that the reason the Ipad hasn't succeeded in a business environment is because the Windows based Tablet already dominates that market. I know the local hospital purchased a ton of tablets recently when they underwent a huge remodeling.
Except that's not what the article or the summary say. It is about how the iPad is supplanting those traditional tablets.
It isn't the first time the article has been full of shit. I work in 2 government departments, they bought a stack of ipad's with the assumption that the intitial trial would lead to full scale rollout and do as the article suggested. It took all of about 3 weeks before most of the 30 trial ipads been returned to IT (think the number stands at 22 returned) and they went back to laptops/tablets. The Ipad is nice but it just isn't a good work tool, it is something for entertainment.
To Joe Blow the SD card in question is completely inaccessible, even soldered in on some models in others it is under the board itself and requires considerable effort to even find it let alone replace it. There is no way the average person will mistakenly replace the SD card in question.
The SD card in question is not supposed to be a removable peice of the device. some phones even have it soldered in. Others have labels on it saying removing it voids your warranty. It may be an SD card but in this case it is the equivalent to prying a chip off the board and replacing it with your own and being pissed that it didn't work.
not sure what your expectations are. Are you aware of how the government will request the data? I have dealt with a few requests, hint it won't be there problem to retrieve it from your storage. They will present you with a subpoena for specific data, you can't just hand over the lot and say, "here ya go you find it", besides which you could then find yourself in breach of all sorts of other laws for providing more information than was requested.
your still increasing your own costs just to spite the government. Nothing wrong with spiting them, but doing it out of your own pocket with a method that is not in the slightest way going to bother the government is hardly a success.
Costing yourself many times the amount to get a fraction of it back as a tax writeoff is hardly fighting back. That's like shooting yourself in the leg to protest the poor medical health system in order to put more pressure on the system.
I think samsung coped enough abuse with there proprietary connectors that they have now mostly gone to micro USB as well. Though I still have my blackjack II, love the phone but I would like to bitch slap samsung sooo hard for the fucking proprietary connector.
And just about everything in your list is massively exaggerated. My young sister and brother are both happily playing right now and none of the problems you listed appear to exist with maybe the exception of some of the voice commands can be iffy
MS have made agreements with various partners to also deliver BPOS, they are not the only possible people to buy from at all. Just from my dealings around this I know that at least CSC is a possible option. They also have various options around private clouds which can be run by the client rather than by the vendor (unlike google).
This doesn't break the rules at all, anyone can fullfill the tender, even google. Tenders can and regularly do specify what technology must be used for many reasons from required compatibility to bakeoffs already having taken place before the tender. The tender is to determine WHO does the work, not what tech is used.
Why would you mod an Xbox for homebrew software? it is pointless as they let you do it for free anyway, just download the XNA studio for the 360. The only purpose of the mod is backup/pirated games and NO the mod to the rom firmware does not suddenly permit homebrew disks, the disks still need to be signed they just don't need to be authentic.
In this case jailbreak is not fine. He wasn't jailbreaking the Xbox, he was charging people to mod it to play backups/pirated media. Jailbreaking is generally accepted as removing device enforced limits on what 3rd party software can run. The mod he was using still will not allow homebrew or other non approved software to work.
No he didn't modify his own property, he is selling the service of modifying everyone elses property, ie he is profiting from it, that is usually where the line is drawn, he has gone from screwing around at home to a commercial entity.
I think there is a pretty major difference to jailbreaking your phone so you can install whatever apps you like compared to someone selling Xbox 360 mods to allow you to run pirated games. why would anyone think an exemption for jailbreaking your phone would be related to this is anyones guess.
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Or the far more likely, They license H.264 already, they have a user base that use FF and want them to continue to use windows as their preference by ensuring they have the maximum capabilities. FFS why do the tin foil hat wearers have to come out at everything they do. This is a pretty obvious move by them that makes both business and technical sense and has nothing to do with the shit your spouting. It is all about keeping their dominate hold on the OS regardless of browser choice.
It doesn't have to be malware, A well thought out backdoor could be as simple a single byte buffer overflow or a combination of many other minor code defects that would allow a knowledgable person to use them as a backdoor. So it is possible even if you found the code it would still be questionable whether it was just a bug or intentional malevelance.
ummm Microsoft are one of the few companies left that DON'T do never ending public betas to the world, I think Google is who you are thinking of. The majority of MS products go through many betas of which you are lucky if one comes out as a public beta and even then it is usually only the mass market ones which actually are likely to geniunely get good info from a public beta.
It didn't fly over my head, was just trying to add some facts to it :-). Yes the Asussie government is trying to screw people over on privacy, but to be honest we have no one to blame but ourselves, people sold out to the labor government to get the NBN even though it meant leaving the labor nazi's in power to further remove our rights.
In the Aussie government you have no rights to privacy for what you do on government computers (rightly so), everything from your internet access to your email and instant messages (if they allow it) can be monitored and read. Internet Access is provided as a means to assist in doing your job and internet access policies nearly always explicitly state that the internet access is for use for specific government business related to your job. However most are at least lenient enough to let you check news, weather and a few other sites. They are being paid by the tax payers to do a job not to socialise on the web.
The reason the ATO is so high on the list has nothing to do with behaviour of its staff (at least there behaviour is no worse than any other departments staff) and everything to do with how strictly they enforce the rules. As someone that works with many of the agencies in Aus the enforcement ranges from ATO's strict handling of the issue to many other departments that do nothing at all or hand out warning for all but the worst breaches, hell I worked at one that specifically told me to disable logging as if they logged the traffic they would have to do something about it and they didn't have the policy's in place to handle the legal issues that would arise at the time.
Why? :) I know. meme. It's just, I've built a couple Beowulf clusters for fun, and didn't have an application written to use MPI (or any of the alphabet soup of protocols), so it was just an exercise, not for any practical use. It's not like most of us are crunching numbers hard enough to need one, and it won't help out playing games or even building kernels.
I'd like to see a 1k core machine on my desktop, but that's beyond the practical limits of any software currently available. Linux can only go to 256 cores. Windows 2008 tops out at 64. But hey, if they did come to market, I know who would be first to support all those cores, and it doesn't come from Redmond (or their offshore outsourced developers).
ummm no. Windows 2008 can handle 64 SOCKETS, it currently scales to 256 cores
hate to break it to ya, but 8% is not exorbitant. That is a pretty average rate, the very low rates experienced elsewhere are because of economies that are in the toilet. In Aus we basically skipped the GFC despite the labor government doing its best to sink us, 7-8% interest rates are what we have now and they are likely to go up from here.
not sure about google, but Microsoft Ireland has over 1000 staff, they are certainly not just a shell company there.
of course they had a plan of how to use them. Just the majority found them unwieldy and awkward for most of the work items they used them for, an example would be the citrix client and the horrible onscreen keyboard, it simply drove people batshit trying to get stuff done. Basically managers their thought they would be a good improvement to productivity for many of the remote based users that aren't terribly good with computers to begin with, turns out they were wrong, that's why they only bought 30 so they can test before doing a major rollout.
I was given to understand that the reason the Ipad hasn't succeeded in a business environment is because the Windows based Tablet already dominates that market. I know the local hospital purchased a ton of tablets recently when they underwent a huge remodeling.
Except that's not what the article or the summary say. It is about how the iPad is supplanting those traditional tablets.
It isn't the first time the article has been full of shit. I work in 2 government departments, they bought a stack of ipad's with the assumption that the intitial trial would lead to full scale rollout and do as the article suggested. It took all of about 3 weeks before most of the 30 trial ipads been returned to IT (think the number stands at 22 returned) and they went back to laptops/tablets. The Ipad is nice but it just isn't a good work tool, it is something for entertainment.
To Joe Blow the SD card in question is completely inaccessible, even soldered in on some models in others it is under the board itself and requires considerable effort to even find it let alone replace it. There is no way the average person will mistakenly replace the SD card in question.
The SD card in question is not supposed to be a removable peice of the device. some phones even have it soldered in. Others have labels on it saying removing it voids your warranty. It may be an SD card but in this case it is the equivalent to prying a chip off the board and replacing it with your own and being pissed that it didn't work.
not sure what your expectations are. Are you aware of how the government will request the data? I have dealt with a few requests, hint it won't be there problem to retrieve it from your storage. They will present you with a subpoena for specific data, you can't just hand over the lot and say, "here ya go you find it", besides which you could then find yourself in breach of all sorts of other laws for providing more information than was requested.
your still increasing your own costs just to spite the government. Nothing wrong with spiting them, but doing it out of your own pocket with a method that is not in the slightest way going to bother the government is hardly a success.
Costing yourself many times the amount to get a fraction of it back as a tax writeoff is hardly fighting back. That's like shooting yourself in the leg to protest the poor medical health system in order to put more pressure on the system.
I think samsung coped enough abuse with there proprietary connectors that they have now mostly gone to micro USB as well. Though I still have my blackjack II, love the phone but I would like to bitch slap samsung sooo hard for the fucking proprietary connector.
And just about everything in your list is massively exaggerated. My young sister and brother are both happily playing right now and none of the problems you listed appear to exist with maybe the exception of some of the voice commands can be iffy
MS have made agreements with various partners to also deliver BPOS, they are not the only possible people to buy from at all. Just from my dealings around this I know that at least CSC is a possible option. They also have various options around private clouds which can be run by the client rather than by the vendor (unlike google).
This doesn't break the rules at all, anyone can fullfill the tender, even google. Tenders can and regularly do specify what technology must be used for many reasons from required compatibility to bakeoffs already having taken place before the tender. The tender is to determine WHO does the work, not what tech is used.
Why would you mod an Xbox for homebrew software? it is pointless as they let you do it for free anyway, just download the XNA studio for the 360. The only purpose of the mod is backup/pirated games and NO the mod to the rom firmware does not suddenly permit homebrew disks, the disks still need to be signed they just don't need to be authentic.
He was modding the DVD-ROM from what I read, that means no homebrew, the game/software must be MS signed.
In this case jailbreak is not fine. He wasn't jailbreaking the Xbox, he was charging people to mod it to play backups/pirated media. Jailbreaking is generally accepted as removing device enforced limits on what 3rd party software can run. The mod he was using still will not allow homebrew or other non approved software to work.
No he didn't modify his own property, he is selling the service of modifying everyone elses property, ie he is profiting from it, that is usually where the line is drawn, he has gone from screwing around at home to a commercial entity.
I think there is a pretty major difference to jailbreaking your phone so you can install whatever apps you like compared to someone selling Xbox 360 mods to allow you to run pirated games. why would anyone think an exemption for jailbreaking your phone would be related to this is anyones guess.