But it's Constitutionality will only be in question provided the Supreme Court doesn't get reloaded with goofy right wing judges like Antonin Scalia whose judgment only serves to cover his hunting buddy Dick Cheney's behind.
And just to add to that, when you have to count Joe Lieberman as the deciding vote in what makes you a "majority", you're not a majority no matter how you look at it. There's still a lot of other DLC Dems that run in Republican leaning states that roll over whenever the phrase "national security" is uttered. Even if they didn't personally get a kickback from one of the telecoms being protected.
Yep. Times are tough here. We can't even afford those fancy "Sea King" cellophane envelopes like they have in China to wrap our software. We have to write the torrent link on a post it and hand it to the guy after he gives us a five dollar bill. No, really.
You seem to forget that Windows isn't cheap at all. Have you ever purchased a site license?
The real people against the wall are lazy Windows admins, or companies that understaff their IT department (or hire idiots with little formal education or experience on the dime). No one will ever take out insurance against this stuff, and if someone tries to sell it, they may well be the scum behind the ransomware to begin with. What companies will do is force all their IT people to get MS certs, because managers and execs do exactly what Microsoft tells them to do. Microsoft tells you to pay ungodly amounts for certifications, that's what they do.
Okay, so the commercials literally brag that they'll put a million down if your ID gets stolen (and that does imply that if their service can be hacked, there's no way they'd know if YOUR information hasn't already been swiped...and if it was, all they'd say is that "it must have been stolen BEFORE you signed up"), and you're bringing "tort reform" (which is right-winger code for "laws to prevent people from suing companies that rip them off") into it?
Prove to me that the service does what it says. Even IF you're not broadcasting your SSN. What if a person writes their SSN down on a check and drops it somewhere? This service is supposed to prevent that person's info from being stolen, and that's why people sign up for it and pay for it.
It has nothing to do with girth and body fat, and everything to do with actual dietary consumption and metabolism. A high energy person with a higher metabolism will eat a whole lot more food than one with a lower metabolism. Just because a person is overweight doesn't necessarily mean that the person eats more than one meal a day...they simply tend to store fat more efficiently than someone who burns through it inefficiently.
You also have to take into account the effects of the actual diet...if a person is overweight from a diet of mostly bread products, vs. a person overweight from eating a lot of pizza, bacon, etc., the latter person's diet would contribute greater to global warming as a result of the length of the food chain and resulting pollution it takes to produce meat vs. wheat products, etc. And a skinny person with a high metabolism, they'd be the absolute worst of all. They'd eat and eat, and wastefully lose their calories instead of carrying them around and prolonging the next meal.
Hold a conference for only its security people? I mean, it sure looks like employees outnumber the actual guests there, and I suspect the guests are Microsoft contractors or employees of Microsoft Gold Partners that were forced to go by their boss. People actually WANT to attend Black Hat.
A beard is not the correct measuring stick for computer languages. It's the size and girth of the double chin that is. Self conscious folks grow the beards to cover up that double chin...being more self conscious has no bearing on the quality of the programming language, or else we'd all have much cleaner desks and enjoy wearing suits. Therefore, it is ALL about the double chin.
Seriously, if you're "religious" about unit testing and mock objects, then you really need to revise the way you live your life.
It's just a good habit to get into, if you take it seriously and don't just create tests that test silly little things like "is my text box centered where I slapped it on the form with gui form tool" type of stuff. That's kind of the point he's trying to make, that you program intelligently in the first place to avoid having an insane amount of redundant tests to pass each time you build.
I've been doing literate programming (well, as close as you can with C and its derivative languages) for a long time now. I've watched XP coders take that literacy and chop it all up because "it didn't look pretty enough". The idea with making something literate is to make it so clear that you can reduce the total numbers of tests needed to make that code pass to only ones that test the actual expected outputs of that function. That's something that intelligent coders who don't just follow the Agile rulebook, but apply it effectively, can do. I don't know how many times I'd see a piece of code that did one simple task, had one test to test the output of that test, then another coder drops 3 more tests because they "didn't feel comfortable with only one" without specifying WHY. That is how you get into having redundant tests that muck up your test infrastructure.
Enough said really, why should everything strive to be GPL compatible?
When I write an app for a mobile device and I want to release it as open source, but NOT free source (where you essentially have to renounce your name from something you put real work into), I like to use a standard license agreement that most are familiar with, like the GPL. People click through those things and don't read them...if you use some proprietary thing like Apple apparently did, then you get into the mess that you see right here. When you use a standard, you don't have to be a lawyer and you're not trying to throw a curveball at your users.
Make your desktop manager. Seriously, there's a market for a desktop manager where all applications are bound to an elaborate set of keystrokes, and if you mess up and get the keys out of sequence, an image of Denis Leary pops up out of the desktop and glares at you like you're an idiot. If you fail a login to your encrypted volume, your background turns into a graphical sound wave representation of Sam Kinison screaming. In fact, I think a considerable amount of that is going into the next Emacs rev.
Desktop managers are designed and made for people who can't use command lines and want something graphically cute. They are designed by people whose minds work in ways that most real engineers can't fully understand. They are designed by the same folks that really want their computer to match the color scheme of the rest of their office, as well as reflect the color that they best associate themselves with.
That's funny you'd bring that up, because it's having the opposite effect on the overwhelming majority of people.
I went out on a get out the vote effort last weekend. I've been a registered Independent my entire life and proud of it, and this election got me to actually switch over and support the Democrats. The guy I was paired off with told me he'd been an Independent since the last time he voted...which was for George McGovern. I talked to some other folks, and it was by and large the same deal.
As for Schiller's argument that Hillary is this, and Obama is that...that is purely from the perspective of the media. Both candidates have fairly equivalent legislative experience...Clinton 8 years, Obama 10. The major difference is that one of them has been a household name for a lot longer, and it has a double edged effect of making that one more polarizing but more generally a known quantity. Personally, I like it when my candidate has been working at the state level more recently...when you're in Washington, you just create legislation and you rarely ever see the repercussions of that legislation. When you live in the district where your laws take effect and have to drive to work every morning, there's no possible way you can ignore the effects of that legislation. Having one Washington insider after another running for Congress for the past 30 years (with the exception of a few VERY inexperienced and unqualified "outsiders"...like George W. Bush), THAT is the kind of stuff, from my experience, that turns most independents away from their faith in the process.
In the past, I've worked in teams with smaller companies where we hired a high school kid to run black box test cases all day. It's not glamorous work by any stretch of the imagination, but you get to work with the team and see how things work. There usually are companies out there with tightly budgeted projects that would be eager to have someone with some technical knowledge come in and work for free, and if they're impressed enough with you, they might give you a good reference or even bring you back in later on.
Nope. It's highly doubtful that Edison had even heard of Martinville or his recordings. After all, most folks had no idea about anything he did even in modern times. However, with Microsoft, it's simple...some developer gets hired, uses a software tool or data structure he likes. He tells his colleagues about it. Then someone at Microsoft gets the idea of patenting it.
If you created an application, sold it, got rich and famous, then after your death it turned out that someone had written a similar app that was almost as good but the author couldn't get it working completely and scrapped it...THAT would be a good comparison.
However, there is a considerable difference between a script kiddie looking for a chunk of code that performs a particular task then copying and pasting it in and someone looking for an api reference or examples to see if they're maybe not thinking of doing something in a totally back-asswards way.
But hey, it sounds like a better soundbite when you talk about shitting a quarter.
It's interesting to me, maybe, that this approach is real similar sounding to Vista or XP Embedded. The only thing that makes those "embedded" is that you can add and remove components and slim down the OS, as well as build it with only the drivers you need to run your system. You can kind of do all of this stuff right now with XPe and add/remove OS chunks through Configuration Manager (essentially, MS's package manager that does updates, remote installs, pxe/OS image install stuff, and a bunch of other probably easily security hole-exploitable things). Then again,/.'rs would rather comment on poor grammar, so I should just pipe down now.
There's a downside for some of us as well when it comes to targeted advertising. I don't know how many times I get hit with advertising for things that I've just gone and ranted about them. Some stupid bot parsed out a couple keywords then slammed me with a bunch of ads for the same stuff that I just ranted on about.
I like untargeted advertising. There's a much greater chance that at random, I'd click a link for something interesting (well, I don't, but other folks apparently do) than I would for something that instantly pisses me off just by glancing at it.
I've left a number of companies that I didn't feel the need to bash to other folks. I just didn't feel like it was a good fit, and didn't feel a lot of confidence in what I was working on/not enough career growth. The one or two companies I left for more negative reasons, THOSE I sometimes complain about and use as examples of management systems I don't want to work under.
That said, I think it's more possible that the author surveyed 20 or 30 people who have worked with Apple at some point, and cherry picked the handful that complained the most, and from that, took the complaints that back up the author's opinion and used those. But I've never worked for Apple, so I have no clue as to whether that would be true.
Taxpayers complain about having to foot the bill for millions of dollars of research in something where the actual value to those taxpayers isn't properly explained to them. Government legislators get elected by promising to cut "pork barrel spending" to programs like NASA. Budgets get slashed, partisan hacks/beancounters get put into management positions at NASA. Quality assurance budgets get cut. Software quality goes down.
There you go. You can't have something that you don't want to pay for.
What it really comes down to is how polished the developer tools are. I've written professional apps for about 5 different mobile operating systems so far, and I can tell you that it's not so much in the languages and OS that it uses, but in how refined the tools are.
Right now, I don't like the Android emulator one bit. It's not an emulator. It's a marketing demo that pretends to be a phone, and tries to comfort me by adding "developer tools" as an option. An emulator is supposed to be able to run a ROM image of the OS taken from a machine. If the Google people put the OS on a piece of hardware and dump an image, THAT is what I want for testing my apps. Not some fake toy app for salespeople to be wowed by. I should be able to right click on the thing and load another ROM, save a ROM, and encapsulate a ROM for testing. Palm did that with their original emulator, and while it had lousy network support (I believe you could get a third party app called Mocha PPP that fixed that), it was easily my favorite mobile OS emulator for development that I've worked with. The Windows Mobile emulator is great for debugging and communication, but is crippled in a zillion other stupid ways. I disliked the Symbian and Brew emulators I've used as well, and most of the Java emulators out there have been equally bad. Folks always forget about how important emulation is, they just think that we can just buy a dozen phones and test on all of them. THAT is why homebrew apps don't get made, and those are the kinds of apps that build the entire economy around your OS.
The development environment needs to provide extensive command line support for automated scripting along with a system that makes it brain dead simple to debug and build apps. I don't honestly care if I'm writing an app in Java, C#, or C...I just want an IDE that lets me hit a simple, easy to remember control sequence that builds, debugs, runs, checks code into the repository, whatever. I don't want something that barks at me because it wants me to do things IT'S way, I want it to be flexible enough to do things MY way.
If Android can't deliver this, and a whole lot more, it's going to be only one of many mobile Linux OSs currently hitting the market. Everyone and their mom is releasing mobile Linux OSs. Like we saw on the desktop, it doesn't matter if the big corporations (like Novell) are backing you.
Ever heard of enhanced write filtering? When you make lots of frequent writes to flash, I would assume that companies that distribute or manufacture flash memory would definitely want to try REALLY hard disprove any negatives with the media. You don't have many problems with Linux in regards to this...but if you're running XP Embedded, you can trash flash memory as it constantly writes data out to the registry and the like.
Then, there's composite or VGA, if your TV has the ports. S-Video cables are relatively cheap (though the ultrashielded gold plated cables can cost a bit) and work with most TVs out there today. Adding that functionality to a small fileserver with a TV card is a pretty fun, quick project, though depending on the codec you use for movies, you may wish to put a stout processor and plenty of RAM in the box.
But yes, until we've got a stouter network backbone in the US, physical media is going to be around. Though I know a couple people who work with Netflix streaming media's tech callcenter, and they do get plenty of business RIGHT NOW. So it's up to how much you want to pay for broadband...I'll advise you to stay away from Comcast connections though if you want to do streaming media, at least until real Net Neutrality legislation is passed.
As in, among the only politicians with a realistic chance for success (Ron Paul would actually be better served running as a Libertarian...there's no way the Republican party would ever make him their nominee, even if it meant losing the election. To them it is about a core set of ideals, and Paul challenges those ideals).
Obama is pro-Net Neutrality, has stated that he plans to roll out legislation to build up the US's network infrastructure (especially in regards to rural areas and isolated towns), and has sponsored legislation to create a federal website that allows taxpayers to actually see where their tax dollars are going. Ignore all the sloganeering and emotional stuff, clear all the marketing jargon away, and look at Obama's Illinois legislative record and his platform, and you'll see a lot of sponsored bills and goals that a lot of us geeks can agree with. (I'm partial to the 233 health care related bills...as a software development contractor, we just don't make as much as we used to. But when you take 3-4 month projects, getting your boss to pony up for health care is a rare thing).
Except, when Palm was about to release the Foleo, it was widely slammed by the media and the project was cancelled. Aka, the "Fooleo".
However, when Asus makes practically the same thing, someone decided to actually praise it. If this thing actually sells, THAT would be (ironic|amazing|hilarious).
I'll agree with you there that it's a threat to Microsoft...and probably not a threat to Ubuntu at all.
I've noticed that the old farts who have been using Windows or Unix for their entire careers seem to think that Fedora/Red Hat, because it's been around for awhile and well-known, is "better". It IS technically applying closed source rules to open source projects, but what the heck. They're also usually the ones that have the most pull with management, and if it gets them to adopt Linux instead of Windows Vista, then that's all the better.
However, if I'm using Ubuntu, and I like it fine, I'm not going to switch just because Fedora looks slightly better or whatever. It may siphon off a few of those aforementioned "late switcher" types though from the group switching over to making Linux their primary OS. Then again, they probably would have switched to Fedora anyway.
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But it's Constitutionality will only be in question provided the Supreme Court doesn't get reloaded with goofy right wing judges like Antonin Scalia whose judgment only serves to cover his hunting buddy Dick Cheney's behind.
And just to add to that, when you have to count Joe Lieberman as the deciding vote in what makes you a "majority", you're not a majority no matter how you look at it. There's still a lot of other DLC Dems that run in Republican leaning states that roll over whenever the phrase "national security" is uttered. Even if they didn't personally get a kickback from one of the telecoms being protected.
Yep. Times are tough here. We can't even afford those fancy "Sea King" cellophane envelopes like they have in China to wrap our software. We have to write the torrent link on a post it and hand it to the guy after he gives us a five dollar bill. No, really.
You seem to forget that Windows isn't cheap at all. Have you ever purchased a site license?
The real people against the wall are lazy Windows admins, or companies that understaff their IT department (or hire idiots with little formal education or experience on the dime). No one will ever take out insurance against this stuff, and if someone tries to sell it, they may well be the scum behind the ransomware to begin with. What companies will do is force all their IT people to get MS certs, because managers and execs do exactly what Microsoft tells them to do. Microsoft tells you to pay ungodly amounts for certifications, that's what they do.
Okay, so the commercials literally brag that they'll put a million down if your ID gets stolen (and that does imply that if their service can be hacked, there's no way they'd know if YOUR information hasn't already been swiped...and if it was, all they'd say is that "it must have been stolen BEFORE you signed up"), and you're bringing "tort reform" (which is right-winger code for "laws to prevent people from suing companies that rip them off") into it?
Prove to me that the service does what it says. Even IF you're not broadcasting your SSN. What if a person writes their SSN down on a check and drops it somewhere? This service is supposed to prevent that person's info from being stolen, and that's why people sign up for it and pay for it.
It has nothing to do with girth and body fat, and everything to do with actual dietary consumption and metabolism. A high energy person with a higher metabolism will eat a whole lot more food than one with a lower metabolism. Just because a person is overweight doesn't necessarily mean that the person eats more than one meal a day...they simply tend to store fat more efficiently than someone who burns through it inefficiently.
You also have to take into account the effects of the actual diet...if a person is overweight from a diet of mostly bread products, vs. a person overweight from eating a lot of pizza, bacon, etc., the latter person's diet would contribute greater to global warming as a result of the length of the food chain and resulting pollution it takes to produce meat vs. wheat products, etc. And a skinny person with a high metabolism, they'd be the absolute worst of all. They'd eat and eat, and wastefully lose their calories instead of carrying them around and prolonging the next meal.
Hold a conference for only its security people? I mean, it sure looks like employees outnumber the actual guests there, and I suspect the guests are Microsoft contractors or employees of Microsoft Gold Partners that were forced to go by their boss. People actually WANT to attend Black Hat.
A beard is not the correct measuring stick for computer languages. It's the size and girth of the double chin that is. Self conscious folks grow the beards to cover up that double chin...being more self conscious has no bearing on the quality of the programming language, or else we'd all have much cleaner desks and enjoy wearing suits. Therefore, it is ALL about the double chin.
Seriously, if you're "religious" about unit testing and mock objects, then you really need to revise the way you live your life.
It's just a good habit to get into, if you take it seriously and don't just create tests that test silly little things like "is my text box centered where I slapped it on the form with gui form tool" type of stuff. That's kind of the point he's trying to make, that you program intelligently in the first place to avoid having an insane amount of redundant tests to pass each time you build.
I've been doing literate programming (well, as close as you can with C and its derivative languages) for a long time now. I've watched XP coders take that literacy and chop it all up because "it didn't look pretty enough". The idea with making something literate is to make it so clear that you can reduce the total numbers of tests needed to make that code pass to only ones that test the actual expected outputs of that function. That's something that intelligent coders who don't just follow the Agile rulebook, but apply it effectively, can do. I don't know how many times I'd see a piece of code that did one simple task, had one test to test the output of that test, then another coder drops 3 more tests because they "didn't feel comfortable with only one" without specifying WHY. That is how you get into having redundant tests that muck up your test infrastructure.
When I write an app for a mobile device and I want to release it as open source, but NOT free source (where you essentially have to renounce your name from something you put real work into), I like to use a standard license agreement that most are familiar with, like the GPL. People click through those things and don't read them...if you use some proprietary thing like Apple apparently did, then you get into the mess that you see right here. When you use a standard, you don't have to be a lawyer and you're not trying to throw a curveball at your users.
Make your desktop manager. Seriously, there's a market for a desktop manager where all applications are bound to an elaborate set of keystrokes, and if you mess up and get the keys out of sequence, an image of Denis Leary pops up out of the desktop and glares at you like you're an idiot. If you fail a login to your encrypted volume, your background turns into a graphical sound wave representation of Sam Kinison screaming. In fact, I think a considerable amount of that is going into the next Emacs rev.
Desktop managers are designed and made for people who can't use command lines and want something graphically cute. They are designed by people whose minds work in ways that most real engineers can't fully understand. They are designed by the same folks that really want their computer to match the color scheme of the rest of their office, as well as reflect the color that they best associate themselves with.
That's funny you'd bring that up, because it's having the opposite effect on the overwhelming majority of people.
I went out on a get out the vote effort last weekend. I've been a registered Independent my entire life and proud of it, and this election got me to actually switch over and support the Democrats. The guy I was paired off with told me he'd been an Independent since the last time he voted...which was for George McGovern. I talked to some other folks, and it was by and large the same deal.
As for Schiller's argument that Hillary is this, and Obama is that...that is purely from the perspective of the media. Both candidates have fairly equivalent legislative experience...Clinton 8 years, Obama 10. The major difference is that one of them has been a household name for a lot longer, and it has a double edged effect of making that one more polarizing but more generally a known quantity. Personally, I like it when my candidate has been working at the state level more recently...when you're in Washington, you just create legislation and you rarely ever see the repercussions of that legislation. When you live in the district where your laws take effect and have to drive to work every morning, there's no possible way you can ignore the effects of that legislation. Having one Washington insider after another running for Congress for the past 30 years (with the exception of a few VERY inexperienced and unqualified "outsiders"...like George W. Bush), THAT is the kind of stuff, from my experience, that turns most independents away from their faith in the process.
In the past, I've worked in teams with smaller companies where we hired a high school kid to run black box test cases all day. It's not glamorous work by any stretch of the imagination, but you get to work with the team and see how things work. There usually are companies out there with tightly budgeted projects that would be eager to have someone with some technical knowledge come in and work for free, and if they're impressed enough with you, they might give you a good reference or even bring you back in later on.
"Microsoft?"
Nope. It's highly doubtful that Edison had even heard of Martinville or his recordings. After all, most folks had no idea about anything he did even in modern times. However, with Microsoft, it's simple...some developer gets hired, uses a software tool or data structure he likes. He tells his colleagues about it. Then someone at Microsoft gets the idea of patenting it.
If you created an application, sold it, got rich and famous, then after your death it turned out that someone had written a similar app that was almost as good but the author couldn't get it working completely and scrapped it...THAT would be a good comparison.
However, there is a considerable difference between a script kiddie looking for a chunk of code that performs a particular task then copying and pasting it in and someone looking for an api reference or examples to see if they're maybe not thinking of doing something in a totally back-asswards way.
But hey, it sounds like a better soundbite when you talk about shitting a quarter.
It's interesting to me, maybe, that this approach is real similar sounding to Vista or XP Embedded. The only thing that makes those "embedded" is that you can add and remove components and slim down the OS, as well as build it with only the drivers you need to run your system. You can kind of do all of this stuff right now with XPe and add/remove OS chunks through Configuration Manager (essentially, MS's package manager that does updates, remote installs, pxe/OS image install stuff, and a bunch of other probably easily security hole-exploitable things). Then again, /.'rs would rather comment on poor grammar, so I should just pipe down now.
There's a downside for some of us as well when it comes to targeted advertising. I don't know how many times I get hit with advertising for things that I've just gone and ranted about them. Some stupid bot parsed out a couple keywords then slammed me with a bunch of ads for the same stuff that I just ranted on about.
I like untargeted advertising. There's a much greater chance that at random, I'd click a link for something interesting (well, I don't, but other folks apparently do) than I would for something that instantly pisses me off just by glancing at it.
I've left a number of companies that I didn't feel the need to bash to other folks. I just didn't feel like it was a good fit, and didn't feel a lot of confidence in what I was working on/not enough career growth. The one or two companies I left for more negative reasons, THOSE I sometimes complain about and use as examples of management systems I don't want to work under.
That said, I think it's more possible that the author surveyed 20 or 30 people who have worked with Apple at some point, and cherry picked the handful that complained the most, and from that, took the complaints that back up the author's opinion and used those. But I've never worked for Apple, so I have no clue as to whether that would be true.
Taxpayers complain about having to foot the bill for millions of dollars of research in something where the actual value to those taxpayers isn't properly explained to them. Government legislators get elected by promising to cut "pork barrel spending" to programs like NASA. Budgets get slashed, partisan hacks/beancounters get put into management positions at NASA. Quality assurance budgets get cut. Software quality goes down.
There you go. You can't have something that you don't want to pay for.
What it really comes down to is how polished the developer tools are. I've written professional apps for about 5 different mobile operating systems so far, and I can tell you that it's not so much in the languages and OS that it uses, but in how refined the tools are.
Right now, I don't like the Android emulator one bit. It's not an emulator. It's a marketing demo that pretends to be a phone, and tries to comfort me by adding "developer tools" as an option. An emulator is supposed to be able to run a ROM image of the OS taken from a machine. If the Google people put the OS on a piece of hardware and dump an image, THAT is what I want for testing my apps. Not some fake toy app for salespeople to be wowed by. I should be able to right click on the thing and load another ROM, save a ROM, and encapsulate a ROM for testing. Palm did that with their original emulator, and while it had lousy network support (I believe you could get a third party app called Mocha PPP that fixed that), it was easily my favorite mobile OS emulator for development that I've worked with. The Windows Mobile emulator is great for debugging and communication, but is crippled in a zillion other stupid ways. I disliked the Symbian and Brew emulators I've used as well, and most of the Java emulators out there have been equally bad. Folks always forget about how important emulation is, they just think that we can just buy a dozen phones and test on all of them. THAT is why homebrew apps don't get made, and those are the kinds of apps that build the entire economy around your OS.
The development environment needs to provide extensive command line support for automated scripting along with a system that makes it brain dead simple to debug and build apps. I don't honestly care if I'm writing an app in Java, C#, or C...I just want an IDE that lets me hit a simple, easy to remember control sequence that builds, debugs, runs, checks code into the repository, whatever. I don't want something that barks at me because it wants me to do things IT'S way, I want it to be flexible enough to do things MY way.
If Android can't deliver this, and a whole lot more, it's going to be only one of many mobile Linux OSs currently hitting the market. Everyone and their mom is releasing mobile Linux OSs. Like we saw on the desktop, it doesn't matter if the big corporations (like Novell) are backing you.
Ever heard of enhanced write filtering? When you make lots of frequent writes to flash, I would assume that companies that distribute or manufacture flash memory would definitely want to try REALLY hard disprove any negatives with the media. You don't have many problems with Linux in regards to this...but if you're running XP Embedded, you can trash flash memory as it constantly writes data out to the registry and the like.
Read. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms838638.aspx
Easily done. I've been doing it for years.
Cheapest way I know of is with good ol' s-video. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video
Then, there's composite or VGA, if your TV has the ports. S-Video cables are relatively cheap (though the ultrashielded gold plated cables can cost a bit) and work with most TVs out there today. Adding that functionality to a small fileserver with a TV card is a pretty fun, quick project, though depending on the codec you use for movies, you may wish to put a stout processor and plenty of RAM in the box.
But yes, until we've got a stouter network backbone in the US, physical media is going to be around. Though I know a couple people who work with Netflix streaming media's tech callcenter, and they do get plenty of business RIGHT NOW. So it's up to how much you want to pay for broadband...I'll advise you to stay away from Comcast connections though if you want to do streaming media, at least until real Net Neutrality legislation is passed.
As in, among the only politicians with a realistic chance for success (Ron Paul would actually be better served running as a Libertarian...there's no way the Republican party would ever make him their nominee, even if it meant losing the election. To them it is about a core set of ideals, and Paul challenges those ideals).
Obama is pro-Net Neutrality, has stated that he plans to roll out legislation to build up the US's network infrastructure (especially in regards to rural areas and isolated towns), and has sponsored legislation to create a federal website that allows taxpayers to actually see where their tax dollars are going. Ignore all the sloganeering and emotional stuff, clear all the marketing jargon away, and look at Obama's Illinois legislative record and his platform, and you'll see a lot of sponsored bills and goals that a lot of us geeks can agree with. (I'm partial to the 233 health care related bills...as a software development contractor, we just don't make as much as we used to. But when you take 3-4 month projects, getting your boss to pony up for health care is a rare thing).
Except, when Palm was about to release the Foleo, it was widely slammed by the media and the project was cancelled. Aka, the "Fooleo".
However, when Asus makes practically the same thing, someone decided to actually praise it. If this thing actually sells, THAT would be (ironic|amazing|hilarious).
I'll agree with you there that it's a threat to Microsoft...and probably not a threat to Ubuntu at all.
I've noticed that the old farts who have been using Windows or Unix for their entire careers seem to think that Fedora/Red Hat, because it's been around for awhile and well-known, is "better". It IS technically applying closed source rules to open source projects, but what the heck. They're also usually the ones that have the most pull with management, and if it gets them to adopt Linux instead of Windows Vista, then that's all the better.
However, if I'm using Ubuntu, and I like it fine, I'm not going to switch just because Fedora looks slightly better or whatever. It may siphon off a few of those aforementioned "late switcher" types though from the group switching over to making Linux their primary OS. Then again, they probably would have switched to Fedora anyway.