Here is where you miss the point of "out of the box". When your average idiot buys a computer from Dell, Gateway, HP, $RESELLER. He gets it home, opens the box, plugs it in, and lo and behold it WORKS. That is what the phrase means. All Joe Luser knows about Windows is that he buys a computer and turns it on and it WORKS.
But not for long, at least going by how every windows user I know complains to me about either virii or spyware, often looking for some free help.
Of course when they ask me what I use to combat such things I say "Linux" and all they do is go "oh".
Good news! Google has automatically opted you in to this valuable new feature! You can opt out by mucking around inside the about:config screen.
I don't mind google using the feature - it's there so they might as well use it. What I don't like is that there is no user friendly way to disable the feature in firefox. If it was a simple check box to turn on or off I don't most people would care that much - the only argument would be wheter it should be on or off by default, but that would be part of a larger argument involving things like Javscript and cookies.
As it stands, there's a feature in firefox that downloads stuff without your knowledge, it's turned on by default, there's no easy way to turn it off and (I think one of the reasons for all the anger) most people never knew this feature existed.
Second, as someone above mentioned, google only does this for certain searches.
Yes, but what's to stop some other site using prefetch in a malicious way?
I know that there are other ways that a site can do similar malicious things, but why give them extra tools to do malicious things with when there's soo little benefit to prefetch?
For instance the FBI demands the web logs from wethepeople.com. Previously your IP in the logs would mean you viewed the content of the site (although it does not prove it was intentionally) and that probably gets you on an FBI list somewhere as a potential terrorist. Now they can not even establish whether you viewed the content from the logs.
All that means is that they put more people on the 'do not fly' list. After all, you were searching for something that returns wethepeople.com at the top, so you must be up to no good.
So IMHO, stick with MS Terminal Services - it's the best thing out there right now.
leaving aside the fact that poster wants a Linux solution, MS TS isn't even the best solution on Windows - if it was then Citrix would have a serious dent in thier product margins.
Where I work, we looked at TS and compared it to Citrix. Compared to Citrix, TS is just a toy.
I don't think that how NAT changes the way the 'net works (I wouldn't go so far as to call it breaks) is going to be that big a deal for most consumers and it's probably a good thing from an ISP perspective.
Most home users aren't going to be running services and, unless they know what they're doing, probably shouldn't - every exposed service is another line of possible attack and home users generally don't follow the best practices of systems administration. NAT/Router/Firewall boxes (like the Linksys WRT54G) are resonably easy to set up for the few services that a consumer may wish to use.
From the ISP standpoint - again, it's probably a good thing. Having every machine on thier customers home networks as full internet peers would probably increase the amount of support calls, plus it would encourage inbound bandwidth usage. Also, piss poorly administered home servers could lead to the ISP getting blacklisted - ie if 40% of some networks computers are compromiised, it's probably worth it to not accept any email from any computer on that network.
In some ways NAT protects the internet from the home users.
But it's a Channel 5 programme - five (and the rest of the commercial broadcasters) don't get a penny of the licence fee. The BBC (and the licence fee) has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Oh and the program in question - Fifth Gear is a blaitent rip-off of the BBC program Top Gear without Jeromy Clarkson.
It's not a blatent rip off, it is Top Gear. When the BBC cancelled Top Gear five got most of the cast and crew of Top Gear involved in Fifth Gear. When the BBC realized thier mistake they they got Jeremy Clarkson back for a completely new show but with the Top Gear title.
the only difference being: we do not sell the food, we are the food.
I dunno, I would think that a species that has been able to master interstellar spaceflight would have been able to work out how to feed itself without having to conquer inhabited worlds.
[Literalists] are baffled and confused by current society moving too fast for them; not just the pace, but also the pace of change.
This still leaves the problem of why the USA has been the only (supposedly:-)) developed country where this has happened.
Europe got the hard-core green "environmentalist" movement instead. If someone in Europe is against science and looking back to a fictional golden age when everything was stable and pure than they're probably a 'green'. They even try to cast thier anti-science/anti-technology views in 'moral' terms.
I'm not talking about people who give a damn about the environment (in the same way that most people who are christian or musilm aren't fundamentalist christian or muslim) - I'm talking about the very small yet very vocal minority who hate modern society and the science and technology behind it.
I often question just how much these so called greens really care about the environment. When forced to choose between supporting something that would be good for the environment but involve science/technology and something that's actually worse for the environment but not involve sci/tech (or even better eliminate sci/tech) they'll usually go for the latter.
Are they afraid of it just being that much easy to switch to Mac or Linux? MSN search revenues? What outweighs the cost of development and embarrassment of more security problems?
That's pretty much the only reason for the existence of IE. MS only started on IE when people started to notice that with things like HTML the OS would become irrelevent and that non internet based 'Information Services' (like the original MSN) were doomed.
If it wasn't for that fear of the OS becomming irrelevent then there would be no point in MS spending so much money on something that they can never make any money (at least directly) from. It's why IE development stopped dead untill they had competition again - with nothing to fear then why spend money developing it? IE is nothing more than a necessary evil for MS.
Flat-Rate Integrator Model: A subscriber pays a monthly subscription for all the news/content aggregated by a given company (AOL, Yahoo, Google?). Sucks because snooty brand-conscious content providers (NYT, WSJ, etc.) will never join an aggregator -- they will prefer to force people to pay separate subscriptions for separate content sources.
If the aggregators took off, the snooty, brand conscious content providers may be forced to join the aggregators. If the aggregators can offer most of what the "papers" offer (ie, all the newswire stuff), at a substantially cheaper price than the newspapers, than the newspapers will probably not last as seperate subscription services.
They could offer their "added value" as an extra (though probably not that much extra) subscription service on top of the aggie's basic services. For example, imagine you would get basic Yahoo news for, say $5 a month (or if your ISP has a deal with Yahoo, then free as part of your internet connection) that gets all the wire service news, but for an extra $1 a month you get all the output of the NYT or Washington Post, etc and maybe for $5 you could get content from every paper that the aggie has.
Of course, I have doubts about how much of any of this people are actually willing to pay for - the above values are for illustrative purposes only:-).
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said of relying on advertising as the sole revenue stream: "My main concern is that, however we distribute our work, we have to generate the money to pay for it. The advertising model looks appealing now, but do we want our future to depend on that single source of revenue? What happens if advertising goes flat? What happens when somebody develops software to filter out advertising - TiVo for the Web?"
I guess he hasn't heard of adblock then:-)
Thinking about it, maybe adblock and it's ilk could be modified to download the ad in the background but still not display it - that way the advertisers think people are looking at the ads and everybody would be happy.
You do realize that the majority of the of the population are:
1) Protestant 2) Because of 1, have a greater affinty towards the United Kingdom than they do the Catholic south.
If the majority of the population of NI wanted out of the UK, they'd have left the Union already. The reason why NI is still a part of the UK is that the majority of the population are Unionists and not Republicans.
Or are you advocating that the will of the minority should overrule the will of the majority (along with the inevitable ethnic cleansing that would follow)?
There are many good reasons for the BBC not to be funded by direct taxation, chief among them is the huge influence over the BBC's posture and programming which that would give to the government of the day
How is the license fee any different? If a government got really pissed off with the BBC they could change the fee (that way they'd also be saving the voter money). It's still funding controled by the government.
If anything, the BBC has power over the government - if the government start threatening to lower the fee or otherwise screw about with it, the BBC can skew it's news to an even more anti-government stance. The BBC isn't particluarly accountable for it's actions. So a couple of people have lost thier jobs recently for 'accountability' - it's not like the BBC had to worry about getting it's license to broadcast revoked and going out of business like the commercial channels do.
the BBC stations provide a benchmark of quality that the commercial stations have to match and they generally do.
Actually, this is more down to regulation of the commercial stations than it is competition with the BBC. Commercial time and programme quality are regulated by the ITC.
And BBC quality has gone down hill - it's now trying to compete with the commercial channels and not the other way around now (which is something that they are trying to stop in this green paper).
The commercial channels currently have more at stake when it comes to quality TV - if they don't meet thier quota's for 'quality' programmeing than they can loose thier license and go out of business. The BBC has more to win from a drive to the bottom because that way they can say that they are provideing 'popular' shows which justifys the license fee - and it has pretty much worked as other than a light rap on the knuckles about 'not competing with the commercial channels' it looks like the BBC will pretty much continue 'as is' untill at least 2016.
If I am to be taxed for ownership of a PC, with the grounds being that I can use this to access BBC-produced broadcasts, then I better actually had be able to access that content.
Seeing as if you own a TV and are unable to access BBC broadcasts (ie - you live out in the middle of nowhere and want to watch DVDs and Videos) you still have to pay the license fee, why should computer users be any different?
(I'm not saying I agree with switching the license fee over to PCs - I'm against the license fee completly)
I'd like to see the BBC adopt a model such as Mandrake use, i.e. people who like it pay, in order to keep it free for everyone to use.
I recognise the sentiment but I don't think it would work. Personally, as someone in a minority BBC audience in as much as I like comedy, sci-fi and fantasy broadcasting and good documentaries, with no interest in reality TV, soaps and other "dumbed down" TV, if I get a few hours of my programming a week, whether TV or radio, I'm more than happy with paying my TV license for that.
But that's the problem with the BBC - how do you justify spending public money (the licence fee is public money) on programmes that few people want to watch, but also how do you justify spending public money on 'popular' programmes that the commercial channels are just as good at creating?
I think the BBC should be looked at in the same way as libraries, museums and art gallery's are - most people don't use them that much but they're a good thing to have around so you pay for them out of income tax. Think about it - we don't have special taxes for the above, so why should the BBC be any different?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is where you miss the point of "out of the box".
When your average idiot buys a computer from Dell, Gateway, HP, $RESELLER. He gets it home, opens the box, plugs it in, and lo and behold it WORKS. That is what the phrase means. All Joe Luser knows about Windows is that he buys a computer and turns it on and it WORKS.
But not for long, at least going by how every windows user I know complains to me about either virii or spyware, often looking for some free help.
Of course when they ask me what I use to combat such things I say "Linux" and all they do is go "oh".
Tk
In theory you are right, but invariably one side gets a say before the others, and that can influence an all-too naive public.
But in the courtroom, doesn't one side go before the other? Is the side to go first more likely to win?
Good news! Google has automatically opted you in to this valuable new feature! You can opt out by mucking around inside the about:config screen.
I don't mind google using the feature - it's there so they might as well use it. What I don't like is that there is no user friendly way to disable the feature in firefox. If it was a simple check box to turn on or off I don't most people would care that much - the only argument would be wheter it should be on or off by default, but that would be part of a larger argument involving things like Javscript and cookies.
As it stands, there's a feature in firefox that downloads stuff without your knowledge, it's turned on by default, there's no easy way to turn it off and (I think one of the reasons for all the anger) most people never knew this feature existed.
Second, as someone above mentioned, google only does this for certain searches.
Yes, but what's to stop some other site using prefetch in a malicious way?
I know that there are other ways that a site can do similar malicious things, but why give them extra tools to do malicious things with when there's soo little benefit to prefetch?
For instance the FBI demands the web logs from wethepeople.com. Previously your IP in the logs would mean you viewed the content of the site (although it does not prove it was intentionally) and that probably gets you on an FBI list somewhere as a potential terrorist. Now they can not even establish whether you viewed the content from the logs.
All that means is that they put more people on the 'do not fly' list. After all, you were searching for something that returns wethepeople.com at the top, so you must be up to no good.
It's not the speed of google - it's the speed of jumping off google and on to the website "most likely" to be what you're searching for.
So IMHO, stick with MS Terminal Services - it's the best thing out there right now.
leaving aside the fact that poster wants a Linux solution, MS TS isn't even the best solution on Windows - if it was then Citrix would have a serious dent in thier product margins.
Where I work, we looked at TS and compared it to Citrix. Compared to Citrix, TS is just a toy.
I don't think that how NAT changes the way the 'net works (I wouldn't go so far as to call it breaks) is going to be that big a deal for most consumers and it's probably a good thing from an ISP perspective.
Most home users aren't going to be running services and, unless they know what they're doing, probably shouldn't - every exposed service is another line of possible attack and home users generally don't follow the best practices of systems administration. NAT/Router/Firewall boxes (like the Linksys WRT54G) are resonably easy to set up for the few services that a consumer may wish to use.
From the ISP standpoint - again, it's probably a good thing. Having every machine on thier customers home networks as full internet peers would probably increase the amount of support calls, plus it would encourage inbound bandwidth usage. Also, piss poorly administered home servers could lead to the ISP getting blacklisted - ie if 40% of some networks computers are compromiised, it's probably worth it to not accept any email from any computer on that network.
In some ways NAT protects the internet from the home users.
But the OP was implying that all VCRs in the UK needed to be retuned, which was not the case.
But it's a Channel 5 programme - five (and the rest of the commercial broadcasters) don't get a penny of the licence fee. The BBC (and the licence fee) has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Oh and the program in question - Fifth Gear is a blaitent rip-off of the BBC program Top Gear without Jeromy Clarkson.
It's not a blatent rip off, it is Top Gear. When the BBC cancelled Top Gear five got most of the cast and crew of Top Gear involved in Fifth Gear. When the BBC realized thier mistake they they got Jeremy Clarkson back for a completely new show but with the Top Gear title.
the only difference being: we do not sell the food, we are the food.
I dunno, I would think that a species that has been able to master interstellar spaceflight would have been able to work out how to feed itself without having to conquer inhabited worlds.
[Literalists] are baffled and confused by current society moving too fast for them; not just the pace, but also the pace of change.
This still leaves the problem of why the USA has been the only (supposedly:-)) developed country where this has happened.
Europe got the hard-core green "environmentalist" movement instead. If someone in Europe is against science and looking back to a fictional golden age when everything was stable and pure than they're probably a 'green'. They even try to cast thier anti-science/anti-technology views in 'moral' terms.
I'm not talking about people who give a damn about the environment (in the same way that most people who are christian or musilm aren't fundamentalist christian or muslim) - I'm talking about the very small yet very vocal minority who hate modern society and the science and technology behind it.
I often question just how much these so called greens really care about the environment. When forced to choose between supporting something that would be good for the environment but involve science/technology and something that's actually worse for the environment but not involve sci/tech (or even better eliminate sci/tech) they'll usually go for the latter.
Are they afraid of it just being that much easy to switch to Mac or Linux? MSN search revenues? What outweighs the cost of development and embarrassment of more security problems?
That's pretty much the only reason for the existence of IE. MS only started on IE when people started to notice that with things like HTML the OS would become irrelevent and that non internet based 'Information Services' (like the original MSN) were doomed.
If it wasn't for that fear of the OS becomming irrelevent then there would be no point in MS spending so much money on something that they can never make any money (at least directly) from. It's why IE development stopped dead untill they had competition again - with nothing to fear then why spend money developing it? IE is nothing more than a necessary evil for MS.
Flat-Rate Integrator Model: A subscriber pays a monthly subscription for all the news/content aggregated by a given company (AOL, Yahoo, Google?). Sucks because snooty brand-conscious content providers (NYT, WSJ, etc.) will never join an aggregator -- they will prefer to force people to pay separate subscriptions for separate content sources.
:-).
If the aggregators took off, the snooty, brand conscious content providers may be forced to join the aggregators. If the aggregators can offer most of what the "papers" offer (ie, all the newswire stuff), at a substantially cheaper price than the newspapers, than the newspapers will probably not last as seperate subscription services.
They could offer their "added value" as an extra (though probably not that much extra) subscription service on top of the aggie's basic services. For example, imagine you would get basic Yahoo news for, say $5 a month (or if your ISP has a deal with Yahoo, then free as part of your internet connection) that gets all the wire service news, but for an extra $1 a month you get all the output of the NYT or Washington Post, etc and maybe for $5 you could get content from every paper that the aggie has.
Of course, I have doubts about how much of any of this people are actually willing to pay for - the above values are for illustrative purposes only
Isn't that much the same as ad-based, just that most/all the adds come from one company?
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said of relying on advertising as the sole revenue stream: "My main concern is that, however we distribute our work, we have to generate the money to pay for it. The advertising model looks appealing now, but do we want our future to depend on that single source of revenue? What happens if advertising goes flat? What happens when somebody develops software to filter out advertising - TiVo for the Web?"
:-)
I guess he hasn't heard of adblock then
Thinking about it, maybe adblock and it's ilk could be modified to download the ad in the background but still not display it - that way the advertisers think people are looking at the ads and everybody would be happy.
N. Ireland thing really bugs me. Get out already.
You do realize that the majority of the of the population are:
1) Protestant
2) Because of 1, have a greater affinty towards the United Kingdom than they do the Catholic south.
If the majority of the population of NI wanted out of the UK, they'd have left the Union already. The reason why NI is still a part of the UK is that the majority of the population are Unionists and not Republicans.
Or are you advocating that the will of the minority should overrule the will of the majority (along with the inevitable ethnic cleansing that would follow)?
Tk
And now the Evening Standard has started a free "Evening Standard Lite" in the afternoons.
There are many good reasons for the BBC not to be funded by direct taxation, chief among them is the huge influence over the BBC's posture and programming which that would give to the government of the day
How is the license fee any different? If a government got really pissed off with the BBC they could change the fee (that way they'd also be saving the voter money). It's still funding controled by the government.
If anything, the BBC has power over the government - if the government start threatening to lower the fee or otherwise screw about with it, the BBC can skew it's news to an even more anti-government stance. The BBC isn't particluarly accountable for it's actions. So a couple of people have lost thier jobs recently for 'accountability' - it's not like the BBC had to worry about getting it's license to broadcast revoked and going out of business like the commercial channels do.
the BBC stations provide a benchmark of quality that the commercial stations have to match and they generally do.
Actually, this is more down to regulation of the commercial stations than it is competition with the BBC. Commercial time and programme quality are regulated by the ITC.
And BBC quality has gone down hill - it's now trying to compete with the commercial channels and not the other way around now (which is something that they are trying to stop in this green paper).
The commercial channels currently have more at stake when it comes to quality TV - if they don't meet thier quota's for 'quality' programmeing than they can loose thier license and go out of business. The BBC has more to win from a drive to the bottom because that way they can say that they are provideing 'popular' shows which justifys the license fee - and it has pretty much worked as other than a light rap on the knuckles about 'not competing with the commercial channels' it looks like the BBC will pretty much continue 'as is' untill at least 2016.
If I am to be taxed for ownership of a PC, with the grounds being that I can use this to access BBC-produced broadcasts, then I better actually had be able to access that content.
Seeing as if you own a TV and are unable to access BBC broadcasts (ie - you live out in the middle of nowhere and want to watch DVDs and Videos) you still have to pay the license fee, why should computer users be any different?
(I'm not saying I agree with switching the license fee over to PCs - I'm against the license fee completly)
come to think of it when I die why not just pass a 'Death Tax' and shaft me in my grave!
They've already thought of it - it's called inhieritence tax.
I'd like to see the BBC adopt a model such as Mandrake use, i.e. people who like it pay, in order to keep it free for everyone to use.
I recognise the sentiment but I don't think it would work. Personally, as someone in a minority BBC audience in as much as I like comedy, sci-fi and fantasy broadcasting and good documentaries, with no interest in reality TV, soaps and other "dumbed down" TV, if I get a few hours of my programming a week, whether TV or radio, I'm more than happy with paying my TV license for that.
But that's the problem with the BBC - how do you justify spending public money (the licence fee is public money) on programmes that few people want to watch, but also how do you justify spending public money on 'popular' programmes that the commercial channels are just as good at creating?
I think the BBC should be looked at in the same way as libraries, museums and art gallery's are - most people don't use them that much but they're a good thing to have around so you pay for them out of income tax. Think about it - we don't have special taxes for the above, so why should the BBC be any different?
How will laptops be covered?
One would asume the same way portable TVs are covered now.