Go to an Apple Store and let them show you how to do a context-click with two fingers. Or have a look at System Preferences/Keyboard and Mouse/Trackpad/Trackpad Gestures. You don't need to hit the button at all.
I'm teaching a C++ class right now, and actually, this behavior bugs me. I keep stressing that everything needs to be initalized because otherwise you don't know what kinds of garbage values you're going to get, and when g++ goes and initializes stuff to zero, it makes it harder for me to get this point across. ''
You are teaching a C++ class? Frightening. The idea that gcc or any other C or C++ compiler initialises automatic variables to zeroes is a completely unfounded and laughable rumor.
The Dells let you plug 4 GB of memory into the RAM slots; 3 1/4 will be available to the user. Some address space is needed for graphics hardware and other bits of hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing works on the Macs, but it is rather expensive to try out and an awful lot of money to pay for an additional 256 MB.
'' Geez, the whole Apple is more expensive still perpetuates even though it is not as true as it once was. By using the same basic components, there is now more of a direct comparisons between PCs and Macs, yet people automatically dismiss Macs as more expensive without really comparing the machines. You can get a Dell desktop for under $400 which is $200 less than the cheapest Mac. Remember though that Dell is selling you a cheaper computer because it does not have as many features. Instead of a Core 2, you'll get a Celeron D. Instead of XP Pro, you get XP Home. There is no wireless Bluetooth option. You don't get a remote. You don't get any software like iLife or FrontRow, etc. It's like complaining that a Toyota Camry is more expensive than a Toyota Corolla. ''
A few months ago I had to help someone on an extremely limited budget to buy a computer. Sadly the budget was too limited for any new Macintosh, and used Macs are horrendously expensive. So I visited about half a dozen computer stores to get the absolute best value for money. (Interestingly, the local supermarket turned out the best value). There are quite a few machines out there that are cheaper than any Macintosh - they are not as nice as a Mac, but they are cheaper, so you get what you pay for. However, if you start looking at the more expensive PCs, like £800 to £1000, and compare to an iMac at the same price, then suddenly the iMacs are extremely good value.
'' Uh, yeah. Apple somehow let their product get shipped out with a virus on it, and it's Microsoft's fault, because their software is the what the virus targets? As much as I dislike Microsoft and Windows, it's not their fault that someone planted a virus on iPods, and it's not their responsibility to make sure the iPods are clean when shipped. ''
One point that you miss is that Microsoft is both at the start and the end of the chain. Not only is that virus targetting Windows PCs, it also was installed on the iPods because someone made the mistake to use Windows in the production chain and some Windows PC was infected with a virus to start with. If Windows was safer, this wouldn't have happened.
Of course you are absolutely right for blaming Apple to let a Windows PC anywhere near the production of their iPods. Nobody should use Windows in a critical application and has only themselves to blame for being so stupid. Apple of all companies should know that.
Only a tiny percentage of iPods contained that virus. But apparently, one hundred percent of Windows PCs without third party protection software will be infected just by plugging in one of those iPods. I would say Microsoft is more to blame.
Dell sells many more computer units than Apple, but many of those are of the cheap $300 variety. In revenue, Apple is much closer to Dell, because Apple sells more expensive computers (but the most expensive Macs are actually a lot cheaper than comparable Dells), and also because Apple has this nice little sideline selling MP3 players. In profits, Apple is again closer to Dell, because they have much higher margins than Dell. And the stock market actually values Apple about 20 percent higher than Dell ($65 bn vs. $52 bn at the moment), mostly due to higher margins and higher growth.
I think the revenue numbers may also be a bit painted in favour of Dell: Lets say a pay $1000 for a computer, either from Dell, HP, or Apple. Dell counts it as $1000 revenue. If you bought the HP at PCWorld, and PCWorld paid $800 to HP, then the same computer is only $800 revenue for HP. If you bought a Mac at an Apple Store, things get interesting: Apple counts $800 or whatever has hardware revenue. They have a separate number for their store revenues, and the store made $1000 revenue, but the stores are not counted as part of their $19.32 bn revenue in the last year. So Dell revenues look actually bigger than they are compared to most other companies.
What's funny is a comparison between Apple and Gateway. In units, Gateway sells just slightly more than Apple. In computer hardware revenue, Gateway is tiny compared to Apple. And profits? Gateway makes less than ONE dollar from every computer sold. They might as well not bother.
'' And I believe you are wrong because copyright law stops you from modifying and deriving from. The GPL however permits it. Consequentely, without accepting the GPL, copyright law applies and you are not allowed to modify or derive. ''
An interesting difference here between for example US law and German law: In US law, you don't need to agree. The GPL is there a license that gives you permission to modify the software for your own use without anything you have to do in return. In German law, the GPL is a contract that gives you rights without you having to do anything in return, but the contract is only valid if both sides agree. So in the extreme case that you received software from me in Germany under the GPL, and you signed a document saying that you don't accept the GPL (but how stupid would you have to be to sign such a document), and then modified your own copy of the code without distributing it, I could sue you successfully.
In practice, there is no difference though. The GPL explicitly states that you don't need to sign anything, so in a court case you could always claim that you accepted the GPL, and nobody could prove the opposite.
'' A proxy does not get around the fact that you are downloading ''
What would work: If all ISPs or at least a great majority scan all emails for images and download _all_ the images, then the fact that an image is downloaded doesn't give the sender any information anymore. The next step would be an html feature to have images directly in the html; many legitimate uses of images do actually involve tiny images and including them directly in a webpage or email would probably be more efficient anyway; the ISP could then always replace the html image with inlined images.
I'll add a dissenting opinion - not that these guys are wrong, but that whatever they are publishing is pointless.
First, some kinds of software have harder requirements. Live critical software will have fewer bugs. That is just caused by the fact that there is zero tolerance for the slightest possibility of a bug, so there is hundred times more time invested in each line of code. Lets say it takes you two hours to write some code at reasonable quality. Your boss says: That's fine, but we must have a one hundred percent guarantee that this code is bug free. So he gives you five weeks time. Unless you are a complete moron, five weeks will be enough time to make it bug free. On that scale, Microsoft can deliver a bug-free Vista about two years before the sun turns to a supernova.
Second, automated tools don't find bugs, they find things that look suspicious to the tool. If you are used to some tool finding suspicious code, you will stop writing code that the tool finds suspicious (which will include quite a few bugs). You will have just as many bugs that don't look suspicious to this tool as you had before. As a consequence, the tool will find lots of suspicious activity in code written by people who never used this tool - if they were good programmers, very few of the suspicious activities will actually be bugs.
Third, testing doesn't find certain bugs. An example that actually happened to me: I forgot to initialise a variable. The code could not possibly work unless the variable was initialised to zero - but the testers didn't find a bug. Investigation showed that the code was called from three places, and looking at the assembler code, in each case the register holding the variable was actually passed in as zero by coincidence. Clearly a bug, but on the assembler level there was no malfunction, and therefore no user visible bug that testing could have found. Of course, just changing the compiler could have made the bug visible.
'' Its my right to hate who ever i want, for any reason i want, AND to tell people about it. You dont like what i say? Then dont read/listen.. pretty simple. ''
And I hate bastards like you, and I want to smash their faces whenever I see them. You don't like what I say? Then don't read/listen. Pretty simple.
'' The woman lost my sympathy when I read that. What an utterly ridiculous lack of perspective and scale. ''
But of course. The most important thing for woman who lost her son in a senseless murder is to keep a sense of perspective and scale when some racist bastard tries to rub salt in her wounds.
'' But seriously folks, this rather smacks of Thought Police. ''
No, this rather smacks of cracking down on a bastard who thought it was funny to put rather horrible racist comments on a webpage dedicated to the memory of a teenager who was murdered without the slightest provocation by some thugs who had no other motivation than wanting to kill a black person. I don't think anyone here in Britain is the slightest bit sorry for the guy.
'' No. GCC can be used to compile a proprietary app for example. It doesn't become "tainted" by the GPL. Now you can't modify the source of GCC and sell that without releasing the changes as open source under the GPL. ''
As an example, see MacOS X, which is completely developed using Open Source tools. Just in case your pointy-haired boss read the parent's post and didn't believe it.
'' To be fair, your confusion is more than warranted. I think the article is backwards. The author seems to imply that a content provider will purchase FairPlay encryption from DoubleTwist. The only reason for the content provider to do this would be if it were cheaper than purchasing FairPlay encryption from Apple directly. So DoubleTwist's target customer is a content company that wants to DRM its content and also wants to have its DRM'd content work on an iPod. ''
One way to turn this into a money maker: Let's say you have a band without record contract. You want to sell music from your webpage. You want DRM so people don't copy it (I'm not saying it is a good idea but if that's what you want and it is your music, go ahead) and you want people to be able to play it on iTunes and the iPod (to reach a big market). If someone sells you software for $29.99 that adds Fairplay DRM to your music, you might be willing to spend that money.
'' So Apple realized they suck at environmentally-friendly products...''
That Greenpeace study didn't look at how environmentally friendly products are. Mostly they looked at what promises "(commitments)" companies made for the future. Apple is known to be very bad at making promises and excellent at delivering, so that didn't go down well with Greenpeace. Making promises is cheap. Maybe Greenpeace makes a follow-up study in three years where they measure percentage of promises actually delivered. Then Apple was measured at how many percent of stuff is recycled. This doesn't take into account that things like MacMini and iPod Nano are tiny and produce much less garbage in the first place.
'' The GPL is *not* based on international copyright and contract law, but is rather parochially (and dangerously so) modeled on US/British legal views. One key point is the missing distinction between copyright (which cannot be transfered in German law but remains always with the author) and commercial exploitation rights (which can be assigned/sold etc.). The question whether the exact wording of the GPL implies an impossible transfer of copyright which would it make unenforcible in German law, or not is far from obvious, and it may require more court reviews until this is really settled in German law (the legal system does not require other courts to always follow precedence from isolated cases without established legal theory behind it). ''
The untransferable right of the author in German law is called "Urheberrecht", roughly translated as "creator's right". If I write software, then I am the creator, and according to German law nobody else is allowed to claim to be the creator. I cannot even sell you the right to call yourself the creator. That is the right protected by Urheberrecht: The right to claim that I am the author. There seems to be no such right explicitely mentioned in US law; on the other hand, if US citizen A writes some software, and US citizen B claims he wrote it, then B is a liar.
However, the US copyright _is_ the right to commercial exploitation. So your mapping US copyright = German Urheberrecht, ??? = german right to commercial exploitation is wrong. The correct mapping is German Urheberrecht = nothing corresponding in US law, German right to commercial exploitation = US copyright law.
'' What's really bad is that it's impossible to differentiate between two APs with the same SSID. My internet connection has gone out, and two neighbors have a network named 'linksys'--one is WEP-encrypted, and the other is open. Trying to connect to the open one mostly brings up a WEP password prompt. Argh, I don't want THAT linksys! ''
I suggest that after you go over to their houses and ask for permission to use their networks, you tell them how to change the SSID.
'' Market Share is an excuse for web sites to only support IE for Windows. ''
As a marketing person, I would do everything in my power to keep people away from my webpage who spend ridiculous amounts of money for flashy overpriced products. I wouldn't want someone who spends thousands and thousands on an overpriced MacPro and two 30 inch displays as a customer. I would very much prefer customers who spend $300 on a Dell computer.
'' The EU is going off the deep end by demanding that Microsoft not include this functionality. ''
Sorry, but you are just repeating the Microsoft propaganda here. Same thing happening here is with the EU's demand that certain interfaces should be opened: Microsoft starts crying that they shouldn't have to publish their source code but that they will still do it under pressure, whereas the EU had never demanded such a thing and everyone else says that publishing source code is completely pointless because source code is not a spec.
This time, the EU demands that Microsoft must not prevent competitors from producing security software for Windows, which is entirely reasonable, and Microsoft is crying that they are not allowed to make Vista secure, which is absolutely not what the EU demands. Yes, the things that the EU demands according to Microsoft propaganda are entirely unreasonable, but what the EU actually _does_ demand is perfectly reasonable.
'' It also has the effect of making it even more difficult for the little guy to get redress for wrongs done to him by anyone with a big legal budget. Under such a system, even if the "little guy" has a slam-dunk case, he he not only faces the risk of his own formidable legal bills, but now also those of a rich defendent who has lots of incentive rack up the charges, since if he wins, the little guy is on the hook. ''
You are missing a very important aspect of British law. If you have no money, and if your case has a chance of winning, you will get legal aid and not pay anything at all. In other words, if you are poor, you can go to court. If you are rich, you can go to court. If you are in between, you are stuck.
An extreme case is the McDonald libel case, where a group of activists made claims against McDonalds, producing a court case that went on for years and cost McDonalds millions plus even more in public relations. The activists lost the court case and lost everything they owned - which was exactly nothing. Someone with say a nice £300,000 pound house couldn't have done it because they also would have lost everything they owned - which would have been their home.
'' I agree that Microsoft (or likely anybody else) won't change to a per-core pricing model, but for different reasons. The point of per-CPU pricing is just to determine the market - the type of user/computer:
1 CPU = most laptops and desktops, low end servers 2 CPU = high-end workstations, average servers 4 CPU = high-end servers ''
Nice that the MacBook I bought is a high-end workstation.
'' For what it's worth, I think that proper remedy would be to:
Give the house back to the old man, provide monetary compensation to the buyers, strip the attorney that validated the transaction of his citizenship and forfeit all of his assets, to cover the price of reimbursing the victims, then promptly deport him. ''
There are four parties involved, of which one is a criminal, one is very rich (the bank), two are shafted, and then there may be some parties who were grossly negligent or even accomplices. What I think should be the first step: The house is returned to the original owner, and the purchaser doesn't need to repay the mortgage (the mortgage is covered by the house as security, so in a normal case the bank would get the house if the purchaser defaults, but in this case the bank can't get the house because the purchaser doesn't own it). So the original owner has a bit of trouble, the purchaser loses all the cash they paid, the bank loses the mortgage.
Purchaser and bank can take money off the fraudsters if they get caught. With these rules, the banks would have significant motivation to check that everything is fine, and they should be able to hire private detectives to catch the fraudsters. Purchasers could probably get insurance to cover for this kind of fraud.
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Go to an Apple Store and let them show you how to do a context-click with two fingers. Or have a look at System Preferences/Keyboard and Mouse/Trackpad/Trackpad Gestures. You don't need to hit the button at all.
'' Huh... you're right. Weird; didn't know that.
I'm teaching a C++ class right now, and actually, this behavior bugs me. I keep stressing that everything needs to be initalized because otherwise you don't know what kinds of garbage values you're going to get, and when g++ goes and initializes stuff to zero, it makes it harder for me to get this point across. ''
You are teaching a C++ class? Frightening.
The idea that gcc or any other C or C++ compiler initialises automatic variables to zeroes is a completely unfounded and laughable rumor.
The Dells let you plug 4 GB of memory into the RAM slots; 3 1/4 will be available to the user. Some address space is needed for graphics hardware and other bits of hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing works on the Macs, but it is rather expensive to try out and an awful lot of money to pay for an additional 256 MB.
'' Geez, the whole Apple is more expensive still perpetuates even though it is not as true as it once was. By using the same basic components, there is now more of a direct comparisons between PCs and Macs, yet people automatically dismiss Macs as more expensive without really comparing the machines. You can get a Dell desktop for under $400 which is $200 less than the cheapest Mac. Remember though that Dell is selling you a cheaper computer because it does not have as many features. Instead of a Core 2, you'll get a Celeron D. Instead of XP Pro, you get XP Home. There is no wireless Bluetooth option. You don't get a remote. You don't get any software like iLife or FrontRow, etc. It's like complaining that a Toyota Camry is more expensive than a Toyota Corolla. ''
A few months ago I had to help someone on an extremely limited budget to buy a computer. Sadly the budget was too limited for any new Macintosh, and used Macs are horrendously expensive. So I visited about half a dozen computer stores to get the absolute best value for money. (Interestingly, the local supermarket turned out the best value). There are quite a few machines out there that are cheaper than any Macintosh - they are not as nice as a Mac, but they are cheaper, so you get what you pay for. However, if you start looking at the more expensive PCs, like £800 to £1000, and compare to an iMac at the same price, then suddenly the iMacs are extremely good value.
'' Uh, yeah. Apple somehow let their product get shipped out with a virus on it, and it's Microsoft's fault, because their software is the what the virus targets? As much as I dislike Microsoft and Windows, it's not their fault that someone planted a virus on iPods, and it's not their responsibility to make sure the iPods are clean when shipped. ''
One point that you miss is that Microsoft is both at the start and the end of the chain. Not only is that virus targetting Windows PCs, it also was installed on the iPods because someone made the mistake to use Windows in the production chain and some Windows PC was infected with a virus to start with. If Windows was safer, this wouldn't have happened.
Of course you are absolutely right for blaming Apple to let a Windows PC anywhere near the production of their iPods. Nobody should use Windows in a critical application and has only themselves to blame for being so stupid. Apple of all companies should know that.
Only a tiny percentage of iPods contained that virus. But apparently, one hundred percent of Windows PCs without third party protection software will be infected just by plugging in one of those iPods. I would say Microsoft is more to blame.
Dell sells many more computer units than Apple, but many of those are of the cheap $300 variety. In revenue, Apple is much closer to Dell, because Apple sells more expensive computers (but the most expensive Macs are actually a lot cheaper than comparable Dells), and also because Apple has this nice little sideline selling MP3 players. In profits, Apple is again closer to Dell, because they have much higher margins than Dell. And the stock market actually values Apple about 20 percent higher than Dell ($65 bn vs. $52 bn at the moment), mostly due to higher margins and higher growth.
I think the revenue numbers may also be a bit painted in favour of Dell: Lets say a pay $1000 for a computer, either from Dell, HP, or Apple. Dell counts it as $1000 revenue. If you bought the HP at PCWorld, and PCWorld paid $800 to HP, then the same computer is only $800 revenue for HP. If you bought a Mac at an Apple Store, things get interesting: Apple counts $800 or whatever has hardware revenue. They have a separate number for their store revenues, and the store made $1000 revenue, but the stores are not counted as part of their $19.32 bn revenue in the last year. So Dell revenues look actually bigger than they are compared to most other companies.
What's funny is a comparison between Apple and Gateway. In units, Gateway sells just slightly more than Apple. In computer hardware revenue, Gateway is tiny compared to Apple. And profits? Gateway makes less than ONE dollar from every computer sold. They might as well not bother.
'' And I believe you are wrong because copyright law stops you from modifying and deriving from. The GPL however permits it. Consequentely, without accepting the GPL, copyright law applies and you are not allowed to modify or derive. ''
An interesting difference here between for example US law and German law: In US law, you don't need to agree. The GPL is there a license that gives you permission to modify the software for your own use without anything you have to do in return. In German law, the GPL is a contract that gives you rights without you having to do anything in return, but the contract is only valid if both sides agree. So in the extreme case that you received software from me in Germany under the GPL, and you signed a document saying that you don't accept the GPL (but how stupid would you have to be to sign such a document), and then modified your own copy of the code without distributing it, I could sue you successfully.
In practice, there is no difference though. The GPL explicitly states that you don't need to sign anything, so in a court case you could always claim that you accepted the GPL, and nobody could prove the opposite.
'' A proxy does not get around the fact that you are downloading ''
What would work: If all ISPs or at least a great majority scan all emails for images and download _all_ the images, then the fact that an image is downloaded doesn't give the sender any information anymore. The next step would be an html feature to have images directly in the html; many legitimate uses of images do actually involve tiny images and including them directly in a webpage or email would probably be more efficient anyway; the ISP could then always replace the html image with inlined images.
I'll add a dissenting opinion - not that these guys are wrong, but that whatever they are publishing is pointless.
First, some kinds of software have harder requirements. Live critical software will have fewer bugs. That is just caused by the fact that there is zero tolerance for the slightest possibility of a bug, so there is hundred times more time invested in each line of code. Lets say it takes you two hours to write some code at reasonable quality. Your boss says: That's fine, but we must have a one hundred percent guarantee that this code is bug free. So he gives you five weeks time. Unless you are a complete moron, five weeks will be enough time to make it bug free. On that scale, Microsoft can deliver a bug-free Vista about two years before the sun turns to a supernova.
Second, automated tools don't find bugs, they find things that look suspicious to the tool. If you are used to some tool finding suspicious code, you will stop writing code that the tool finds suspicious (which will include quite a few bugs). You will have just as many bugs that don't look suspicious to this tool as you had before. As a consequence, the tool will find lots of suspicious activity in code written by people who never used this tool - if they were good programmers, very few of the suspicious activities will actually be bugs.
Third, testing doesn't find certain bugs. An example that actually happened to me: I forgot to initialise a variable. The code could not possibly work unless the variable was initialised to zero - but the testers didn't find a bug. Investigation showed that the code was called from three places, and looking at the assembler code, in each case the register holding the variable was actually passed in as zero by coincidence. Clearly a bug, but on the assembler level there was no malfunction, and therefore no user visible bug that testing could have found. Of course, just changing the compiler could have made the bug visible.
'' Its my right to hate who ever i want, for any reason i want, AND to tell people about it. You dont like what i say? Then dont read/listen .. pretty simple. ''
And I hate bastards like you, and I want to smash their faces whenever I see them. You don't like what I say? Then don't read/listen. Pretty simple.
'' The woman lost my sympathy when I read that. What an utterly ridiculous lack of perspective and scale. ''
But of course. The most important thing for woman who lost her son in a senseless murder is to keep a sense of perspective and scale when some racist bastard tries to rub salt in her wounds.
'' But seriously folks, this rather smacks of Thought Police. ''
No, this rather smacks of cracking down on a bastard who thought it was funny to put rather horrible racist comments on a webpage dedicated to the memory of a teenager who was murdered without the slightest provocation by some thugs who had no other motivation than wanting to kill a black person. I don't think anyone here in Britain is the slightest bit sorry for the guy.
'' No. GCC can be used to compile a proprietary app for example. It doesn't become "tainted" by the GPL. Now you can't modify the source of GCC and sell that without releasing the changes as open source under the GPL. ''
As an example, see MacOS X, which is completely developed using Open Source tools. Just in case your pointy-haired boss read the parent's post and didn't believe it.
'' Now get to work on HDCP! ''
So what are you going to do if you can circumvent HDCP? Are you going to record 100 Megabyte per second coming out of your video card?
'' To be fair, your confusion is more than warranted. I think the article is backwards. The author seems to imply that a content provider will purchase FairPlay encryption from DoubleTwist. The only reason for the content provider to do this would be if it were cheaper than purchasing FairPlay encryption from Apple directly. So DoubleTwist's target customer is a content company that wants to DRM its content and also wants to have its DRM'd content work on an iPod. ''
One way to turn this into a money maker: Let's say you have a band without record contract. You want to sell music from your webpage. You want DRM so people don't copy it (I'm not saying it is a good idea but if that's what you want and it is your music, go ahead) and you want people to be able to play it on iTunes and the iPod (to reach a big market). If someone sells you software for $29.99 that adds Fairplay DRM to your music, you might be willing to spend that money.
that Apple would do anything because of Greenpeace?
'' So Apple realized they suck at environmentally-friendly products...''
That Greenpeace study didn't look at how environmentally friendly products are. Mostly they looked at what promises "(commitments)" companies made for the future. Apple is known to be very bad at making promises and excellent at delivering, so that didn't go down well with Greenpeace. Making promises is cheap. Maybe Greenpeace makes a follow-up study in three years where they measure percentage of promises actually delivered. Then Apple was measured at how many percent of stuff is recycled. This doesn't take into account that things like MacMini and iPod Nano are tiny and produce much less garbage in the first place.
'' The GPL is *not* based on international copyright and contract law, but is rather parochially (and dangerously so) modeled on US/British legal views. One key point is the missing distinction between copyright (which cannot be transfered in German law but remains always with the author) and commercial exploitation rights (which can be assigned/sold etc.). The question whether the exact wording of the GPL implies an impossible transfer of copyright which would it make unenforcible in German law, or not is far from obvious, and it may require more court reviews until this is really settled in German law (the legal system does not require other courts to always follow precedence from isolated cases without established legal theory behind it). ''
The untransferable right of the author in German law is called "Urheberrecht", roughly translated as "creator's right". If I write software, then I am the creator, and according to German law nobody else is allowed to claim to be the creator. I cannot even sell you the right to call yourself the creator. That is the right protected by Urheberrecht: The right to claim that I am the author. There seems to be no such right explicitely mentioned in US law; on the other hand, if US citizen A writes some software, and US citizen B claims he wrote it, then B is a liar.
However, the US copyright _is_ the right to commercial exploitation. So your mapping US copyright = German Urheberrecht, ??? = german right to commercial exploitation is wrong. The correct mapping is German Urheberrecht = nothing corresponding in US law, German right to commercial exploitation = US copyright law.
'' What's really bad is that it's impossible to differentiate between two APs with the same SSID. My internet connection has gone out, and two neighbors have a network named 'linksys'--one is WEP-encrypted, and the other is open. Trying to connect to the open one mostly brings up a WEP password prompt. Argh, I don't want THAT linksys! ''
I suggest that after you go over to their houses and ask for permission to use their networks, you tell them how to change the SSID.
'' Market Share is an excuse for web sites to only support IE for Windows. ''
As a marketing person, I would do everything in my power to keep people away from my webpage who spend ridiculous amounts of money for flashy overpriced products. I wouldn't want someone who spends thousands and thousands on an overpriced MacPro and two 30 inch displays as a customer. I would very much prefer customers who spend $300 on a Dell computer.
'' The EU is going off the deep end by demanding that Microsoft not include this functionality. ''
Sorry, but you are just repeating the Microsoft propaganda here. Same thing happening here is with the EU's demand that certain interfaces should be opened: Microsoft starts crying that they shouldn't have to publish their source code but that they will still do it under pressure, whereas the EU had never demanded such a thing and everyone else says that publishing source code is completely pointless because source code is not a spec.
This time, the EU demands that Microsoft must not prevent competitors from producing security software for Windows, which is entirely reasonable, and Microsoft is crying that they are not allowed to make Vista secure, which is absolutely not what the EU demands. Yes, the things that the EU demands according to Microsoft propaganda are entirely unreasonable, but what the EU actually _does_ demand is perfectly reasonable.
'' It also has the effect of making it even more difficult for the little guy to get redress for wrongs done to him by anyone with a big legal budget. Under such a system, even if the "little guy" has a slam-dunk case, he he not only faces the risk of his own formidable legal bills, but now also those of a rich defendent who has lots of incentive rack up the charges, since if he wins, the little guy is on the hook. ''
You are missing a very important aspect of British law. If you have no money, and if your case has a chance of winning, you will get legal aid and not pay anything at all. In other words, if you are poor, you can go to court. If you are rich, you can go to court. If you are in between, you are stuck.
An extreme case is the McDonald libel case, where a group of activists made claims against McDonalds, producing a court case that went on for years and cost McDonalds millions plus even more in public relations. The activists lost the court case and lost everything they owned - which was exactly nothing. Someone with say a nice £300,000 pound house couldn't have done it because they also would have lost everything they owned - which would have been their home.
'' I agree that Microsoft (or likely anybody else) won't change to a per-core pricing model, but for different reasons. The point of per-CPU pricing is just to determine the market - the type of user/computer:
1 CPU = most laptops and desktops, low end servers
2 CPU = high-end workstations, average servers
4 CPU = high-end servers ''
Nice that the MacBook I bought is a high-end workstation.
'' For what it's worth, I think that proper remedy would be to:
Give the house back to the old man,
provide monetary compensation to the buyers,
strip the attorney that validated the transaction of his citizenship and forfeit all of his assets, to cover the price of reimbursing the victims, then promptly deport him. ''
There are four parties involved, of which one is a criminal, one is very rich (the bank), two are shafted, and then there may be some parties who were grossly negligent or even accomplices. What I think should be the first step: The house is returned to the original owner, and the purchaser doesn't need to repay the mortgage (the mortgage is covered by the house as security, so in a normal case the bank would get the house if the purchaser defaults, but in this case the bank can't get the house because the purchaser doesn't own it). So the original owner has a bit of trouble, the purchaser loses all the cash they paid, the bank loses the mortgage.
Purchaser and bank can take money off the fraudsters if they get caught. With these rules, the banks would have significant motivation to check that everything is fine, and they should be able to hire private detectives to catch the fraudsters. Purchasers could probably get insurance to cover for this kind of fraud.