That's just a guideline.. at least from my own experience... 5-10 years of experience in a given field are usually deemed to be an acceptable substitute for a formal education in that field.
Ah, well then; I don't need a BA/BS to get a job at facebook, i just need to have worked at facebook for 5 years...
Neither do you apparently. At some point in the near future, secureboot will be a requirement everywhere.
Even if we assume that were to be true. What does that have to with buying a new computer today?
Its like saying I won't buy this year's car because one day cars will have mandatory computer assisted driving, and I disagree with that. Cars today don't have that. So what exactly are you protesting by refusing to buy one?
You are effectively refusing to buy a product that doesn't have a feature you don't want it to have because one day a future version of it might? WTF?
a)...until Microsoft requires PCs to have mandatory Restricted Boot to have its shiny Windows Logo, or (better yet) for "protection" from patent lawsuits.
Which doesn't affect the PC you are buying today at all. And it won't next year. They aren't going to retroactively force you to update the firmware on your pc.
I'm all for protesting mandatory secure boot; but I'm perfectly fine with optional secure boot.
(b) see (a) and replace "mandatory Restricted Boot" with "soldered-on storage" (see also Intel). It meshes perfectly with people's slow migration to solid-state.
And again doesn't affect the computer you buy today.
And I'm not even sure what the fear there even actually is. So what if there's an SSD soldered onto the mainboard?
For anyone who has a large music collection, next click the "album" column heading, until it says "Album by Artist/Year" (ascending or descending whichever you prefer)
I find that is the best sort for a large music collection and probably matches closest how most people physically organize their physical collection. (alpha-chronological by artist)
Then optionally click the little "down arrow" in the "search music" box in the upper right, and deselect "search entire library" to get rid of the new popup window in there.
Then its pretty much itunes 10 except you can't get album artwork on this list anymore, nor in the sidebar. Which sucks.
As for itunes 11 other views: Album "grid" view is idiotic in nearly any scenario. Genre view is pretty much idiotic unless you've personally tagged your entire collection yourself.
Artist View seems promising, but its got a few shortcomings; I'm not sold on showing small album art next to the artist. (It shows larger album art next to the album as well which I do like.) But even the small art triples the amount of space the each line in the artist list sidebar takes, and makes the artist list unwieldly. And if you have more than one album by an artist then its not really helping you much because if you are looking for a particular artist, and you skim for a particular album cover it may or may not be visible; so you have to skim the text anyway.
It also sorts albums alphabetically, which i dislike. albums should be sorted chronologically imo.
Finally, if the itunes screen is wide enough, it dvides the song list into 2 columns, which makes it a lot more of a chore to find a particular track -- you can't just skim down the list.
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
As long as the packets get through, it doesn't interpret that any damage has been done. Thus the net turns a pretty blind eye to SURVEILLANCE.
Remember when Gmail and a lot of other services didn't use SSL by default (or in some cases, at all)? Now, it's practically unthinkable - in part because companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook want people to be able to use their services safely if they need to. They've recognized the power to do good that their services have.
"safely" from who? When you use SSL to use a gmail service, Google is decrypting and logging everything at their end. You are somewhat safe from from 3rd party eavesdropping, and not at all safe from someone on Google eavesdropping.
Hell, these days you can't even detect what people are googling for by snooping on their traffic.
Right. I can't. But Google can. And anything that's on the "inside" can.
Don't forget the NSA built secret interception/surveillance rooms at AT%T. You really think they couldn't put a room inside Facebook or Google?
Yeah, as long as you can sit directly in front, they do work pretty great. Had one for years. Too big to haul away, so I sold it with the house when I moved.
Too big to haul away? My 60" DLP was 90 lbs and and about 15" deep at the deepest point. One guy could lift it by himself, although it was a lot less awkward with two.
The average dining room table, love seat, recliner, dresser... is far more difficult to move.
As for viewing angles? They were fine; you could sit anywhere in the room and see it just fine. The only bad viewing angle was if you were too high looking at a substantial downward angle which would only be a problem if you sat on a baby's high-chair 2 feet away from it.
But its nice to actually be able to see what you are eating and drinking in a Sports Pub these days without them having to dim the lights just so that people can see the rear projections screens mounted like a sword of Damocles over the bar.
For sure, the thin/flat superbright plasmas and LCD/LED screens are far better suited to that mounting arrangement.
But unless there's an actual game on I just wish they'd turn the fuckers off. They are annoying distractions. If they were just in dedicated sports pubs it wouldn't be a problem, but they seem to be everywhere these days. Family restaurants, fast food restaurants, and so on, the volume is turned off, the content is just mindless drivel -- bowling and tennis highlights, commercials for gum... Nobody wants to watch this crap, but its bright and shiny and it moves so your eyes are drawn to them.
intendo should have put more hardware into the actual console and not used that tablet thingy they ship with it.
That tablet thingy has actual physical controls. Thumbsticks, d-pads, actual buttons...
Trading that for an android app that will run on the 'cheapest tablets' would deliver a pretty lousy user experience and then what? It wouldn't be included with the system either, so most people would have to buy a tablet...?
So developers, including nintendo wouldn't be able to assume you had one, so games couldn't be built around the assumption that you had one...
Yeah... that would be complete garbage in comparison to what they did. A proper gaming tablet (with physical controls) included with every system is the way to go. Plus it sets them apart from just doing what MS is doing with smartglass.
The desktop functions the same way OSX has for the past 10 years and iOS is different. People don't expect OSX to behave like iOS and vice versa.
And then they reverse the mousewheel direction for no reason at all, and turned scrollbars to invisible so that even on a 30" screen you have to "try to scroll" to figure out whether there is more content or not, or where you are in a document.
Fortunately you can still fix these things with settings, but really, Apple is merrily going full steam ahead towards converging iOS with OSX for no good reason.
But the local computer shop or data recovery firm sure cares, as secure boot eliminates their ability to bypass windows to recover data direct from storage.
That is FUD, lies, and misinformation.
a) secure boot can be easily disabled within bios/uefi on all x86 units, which is all current Windows 8 desktops, all current windows 8 laptops, and a big chunk of the windows 8 tablets too.* So if you drag in a working windows 8 pc, they can boot their favorite live cd with minimal effort.
b) Worst case they'd pull the hard drive out of the defective unit and just extract the data directly. Half the data recovery jobs a computer shop deals with are due to hardware failure where the laptop or desktop is fried, and pulling the hard drive out is the smart thing to do if the rest of the PC hardware doesn't work or is failing or is unreliable.
Secureboot is nearly irrelevant in this scenario.
Really, the only people secureboot currently impacts in any non-trivial way are people who want to dual boot linux and windows 8 on the same PC.
* WinRT tablets are the exception, but those devices are very much ipad market product, and data recovery would proceed along the same lines it does for an ipad. Can you boot an ipad up off your favorite linux live CD to recover the data? Of course not. Same thing.
Joe Shmoe will care that the latest virus to infest his system leaves his data corrupted and secure boot prevents any remedial actions.
I was essentially responding to the original posters complaint that there were too many UI changes between Windows XP -> Vista/7 -> 8 and his assertion that he now ran ubuntu. (Which has been a roller coaster of UI changes over the last few years.)
That was my point.
So now your proposed 'solution' is to download a whole bunch more linuxes and try them all too... ?
Is that what someone who doesn't want to learn a new UI, and is all up in arms about the way they reworked the windows 8 start menu is going to want? Lets learn a whole new everything instead...?! And not just one... but he's supposed to "try a few" from a set of 300.
1. Ubuntu is free. Installing the latest upgrade costs no money.
Few people ever upgrade the installed OS on their PC. They get a new OS with a new PC. Price of the OS or any issues actually performing the upgrade is really not a factor to most people.
2. Ubuntu upgrades work better than Windows upgrades. Fewer things break.
Not in my experience. Do you have anything more than your experience to counter.
And per my previous note, most people don't manually upgrade anyway, so 'installation difficulty' is fairly moot for most people.
3. You can opt out of the 6 month cycle by installing an LTS release.
You can opt out of upgrading windows too. Mainstream support for 7 goes to 2015. (Extended support to 2020.)
If you don't like change, run the computer until it dies of old age. As long as you don't need the latest software you'll be fine.
Switching to Ubuntu doesn't seem like it solves the problem at all.
It takes enterprises years to move from one release to another
It takes -some- enterprises years. Others were experimenting with windows 8 during the preview phase and have it rolled out in a few places as a pilot program.
Some IT departments spend all their time putting out fires; other IT departments spend their time planning for the future.
And still other IT departments, for better or worse, thought 2005 was a really good year for computers and plan to stay there until hell freezes over.
I guess that's better than the ones stuck in 2001.
The university philosophy department is probably the most overlooked. I took a number of philosophy courses, and they were absolutely worth it.
First there is the 'critical thinking' and logical argument component; and society as a whole could use more of that.
There there is the ethics and morality segments which are truly great because they delve into the root arguments behind abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, torture, and so on. Its worth exploring those questions in a university level environment.
How morality arises independently of divine edict is worth exploring, as well as examining things like the moral difference between triage and organ harvesting and even where the two can collide.
Beyond that, formal philosophy and logic converges with high level computing science questions about NP completeness, the halting problem, and so on.
We need to get a Republican elected to president so we can start caring again.
I agreed with everything else that you said but that.
The last republican president started the current wars, and the last 2 republican candidates have given no indication they would have prosecuted war less aggressively.
GOG had an opportunity to support Linux, and failed to do so even when every other store has done so.
Every other store? You mean steam? With its current dismal handful of linux titles? Give me a break. I'd like to see GoG do linux releases... a lot of the titles are running in DOSbox anyway so it wouldn't even be a huge step at least for their oldest stuff.
But they recently added Mac and got into indie stuff, where steam has had mac and indie for while now. So I'll give them a few more years before I even think to find fault with them over Linux.
By then between the indie and dosbox stuff they'll even have a decent library to offer.
I'll personally not feel any sympathy when Microsoft kill then off.
Because Wing commander II is going to ever be offered as a metro app via the windows store?
For sure. Steam had it and more people know about steam than GoG. It was on store shelves too, which gets another demographic.
Why buy it from steam but not gog if you know about both? The only reason to buy it from anyone else but GoG is if you are getting it cheaper. The steam sales tend to be almost absurd after all.
But that all relates to PURCHASERS. As soon as your in the 'i want it free, pirate torrent' getting a cracked version vs the DRM free version is insane. Nobody with half a brain would want some cracker tampered copy vs an original DRM free version.
Anyone who has ever played a lot of cracked games has run into issues from time to time with some titles, where the crack didn't work properly and the game was playable for a while, but you couldn't finish it. Or where if you had a cracked copy you couldn't apply a patch, etc.
If there was an official drm free version available that would be FAR more desirable in general to people looking to actually play the pirated game.
Witcher 2 sold 1.1 M copies for the PC in its first 7 months. It only sold 40 k DRM-free copies through GOG, which would the crackers most likely find to crack?
It REALLY underscores how ineffective the investment in DRM is. The game was released without it, and the DRM version was still cracked and widely pirated.
The Urquan Masters remake is better than the original; in that its the same, but its been updated to run on modern PCs.
I've picked up several titles on GoG, my -only- complaint at all is the lack of xpacs with a number of titles. (Wing Commander / WC II), Dungeon Keeper, Wing Commander Privateer, Syndicate...
In some cases I have the original with xpacs, so their lack is annoying -- and the incentive to re-buy the game as a drm free download is diminished.
In other cases, i never had the xpac, and if they offered it that would be a huge draw for me.
Lol, fair enough. The early RSS for some of the older radios is crazy finicky. As I recall, we got it working in DOSbox though on top of Windows XP on a Pentium 4, with a PCI serial card.
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That's just a guideline.. at least from my own experience... 5-10 years of experience in a given field are usually deemed to be an acceptable substitute for a formal education in that field.
Ah, well then; I don't need a BA/BS to get a job at facebook, i just need to have worked at facebook for 5 years...
Hmmm.
Neither do you apparently. At some point in the near future, secureboot will be a requirement everywhere.
Even if we assume that were to be true. What does that have to with buying a new computer today?
Its like saying I won't buy this year's car because one day cars will have mandatory computer assisted driving, and I disagree with that. Cars today don't have that. So what exactly are you protesting by refusing to buy one?
You are effectively refusing to buy a product that doesn't have a feature you don't want it to have because one day a future version of it might? WTF?
a) ...until Microsoft requires PCs to have mandatory Restricted Boot to have its shiny Windows Logo, or (better yet) for "protection" from patent lawsuits.
Which doesn't affect the PC you are buying today at all. And it won't next year. They aren't going to retroactively force you to update the firmware on your pc.
I'm all for protesting mandatory secure boot; but I'm perfectly fine with optional secure boot.
(b) see (a) and replace "mandatory Restricted Boot" with "soldered-on storage" (see also Intel). It meshes perfectly with people's slow migration to solid-state.
And again doesn't affect the computer you buy today.
And I'm not even sure what the fear there even actually is. So what if there's an SSD soldered onto the mainboard?
For now...
For the lifetime of that PC.
If you are going to refuse to buy a piece of hardware because the next generation hardware might be different you are pretty much fucked.
Half way there.
For anyone who has a large music collection, next click the
"album" column heading, until it says "Album by Artist/Year" (ascending or descending whichever you prefer)
I find that is the best sort for a large music collection and probably matches closest how most people physically organize their physical collection. (alpha-chronological by artist)
Then optionally click the little "down arrow" in the "search music" box in the upper right, and deselect "search entire library" to get rid of the new popup window in there.
Then its pretty much itunes 10 except you can't get album artwork on this list anymore, nor in the sidebar. Which sucks.
As for itunes 11 other views:
Album "grid" view is idiotic in nearly any scenario.
Genre view is pretty much idiotic unless you've personally tagged your entire collection yourself.
Artist View seems promising, but its got a few shortcomings; I'm not sold on showing small album art next to the artist. (It shows larger album art next to the album as well which I do like.) But even the small art triples the amount of space the each line in the artist list sidebar takes, and makes the artist list unwieldly. And if you have more than one album by an artist then its not really helping you much because if you are looking for a particular artist, and you skim for a particular album cover it may or may not be visible; so you have to skim the text anyway.
It also sorts albums alphabetically, which i dislike. albums should be sorted chronologically imo.
Finally, if the itunes screen is wide enough, it dvides the song list into 2 columns, which makes it a lot more of a chore to find a particular track -- you can't just skim down the list.
Then
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
As long as the packets get through, it doesn't interpret that any damage has been done. Thus the net turns a pretty blind eye to SURVEILLANCE.
Remember when Gmail and a lot of other services didn't use SSL by default (or in some cases, at all)? Now, it's practically unthinkable - in part because companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook want people to be able to use their services safely if they need to. They've recognized the power to do good that their services have.
"safely" from who? When you use SSL to use a gmail service, Google is decrypting and logging everything at their end. You are somewhat safe from from 3rd party eavesdropping, and not at all safe from someone on Google eavesdropping.
Hell, these days you can't even detect what people are googling for by snooping on their traffic.
Right. I can't. But Google can. And anything that's on the "inside" can.
Don't forget the NSA built secret interception/surveillance rooms at AT%T. You really think they couldn't put a room inside Facebook or Google?
Yeah, as long as you can sit directly in front, they do work pretty great. Had one for years. Too big to haul away, so I sold it with the house when I moved.
Too big to haul away? My 60" DLP was 90 lbs and and about 15" deep at the deepest point. One guy could lift it by himself, although it was a lot less awkward with two.
The average dining room table, love seat, recliner, dresser... is far more difficult to move.
As for viewing angles? They were fine; you could sit anywhere in the room and see it just fine. The only bad viewing angle was if you were too high looking at a substantial downward angle which would only be a problem if you sat on a baby's high-chair 2 feet away from it.
But its nice to actually be able to see what you are eating and drinking in a Sports Pub these days without them having to dim the lights just so that people can see the rear projections screens mounted like a sword of Damocles over the bar.
For sure, the thin/flat superbright plasmas and LCD/LED screens are far better suited to that mounting arrangement.
But unless there's an actual game on I just wish they'd turn the fuckers off. They are annoying distractions. If they were just in dedicated sports pubs it wouldn't be a problem, but they seem to be everywhere these days. Family restaurants, fast food restaurants, and so on, the volume is turned off, the content is just mindless drivel -- bowling and tennis highlights, commercials for gum... Nobody wants to watch this crap, but its bright and shiny and it moves so your eyes are drawn to them.
intendo should have put more hardware into the actual console and not used that tablet thingy they ship with it.
That tablet thingy has actual physical controls. Thumbsticks, d-pads, actual buttons...
Trading that for an android app that will run on the 'cheapest tablets' would deliver a pretty lousy user experience and then what? It wouldn't be included with the system either, so most people would have to buy a tablet...?
So developers, including nintendo wouldn't be able to assume you had one, so games couldn't be built around the assumption that you had one...
Yeah... that would be complete garbage in comparison to what they did. A proper gaming tablet (with physical controls) included with every system is the way to go. Plus it sets them apart from just doing what MS is doing with smartglass.
The desktop functions the same way OSX has for the past 10 years and iOS is different. People don't expect OSX to behave like iOS and vice versa.
And then they reverse the mousewheel direction for no reason at all, and turned scrollbars to invisible so that even on a 30" screen you have to "try to scroll" to figure out whether there is more content or not, or where you are in a document.
Fortunately you can still fix these things with settings, but really, Apple is merrily going full steam ahead towards converging iOS with OSX for no good reason.
But the local computer shop or data recovery firm sure cares, as secure boot eliminates their ability to bypass windows to recover data direct from storage.
That is FUD, lies, and misinformation.
a) secure boot can be easily disabled within bios/uefi on all x86 units, which is all current Windows 8 desktops, all current windows 8 laptops, and a big chunk of the windows 8 tablets too.* So if you drag in a working windows 8 pc, they can boot their favorite live cd with minimal effort.
b) Worst case they'd pull the hard drive out of the defective unit and just extract the data directly. Half the data recovery jobs a computer shop deals with are due to hardware failure where the laptop or desktop is fried, and pulling the hard drive out is the smart thing to do if the rest of the PC hardware doesn't work or is failing or is unreliable.
Secureboot is nearly irrelevant in this scenario.
Really, the only people secureboot currently impacts in any non-trivial way are people who want to dual boot linux and windows 8 on the same PC.
* WinRT tablets are the exception, but those devices are very much ipad market product, and data recovery would proceed along the same lines it does for an ipad. Can you boot an ipad up off your favorite linux live CD to recover the data? Of course not. Same thing.
Joe Shmoe will care that the latest virus to infest his system leaves his data corrupted and secure boot prevents any remedial actions.
Joe Shmoe doesn't think that far ahead.
I was essentially responding to the original posters complaint that there were too many UI changes between Windows XP -> Vista/7 -> 8 and his assertion that he now ran ubuntu. (Which has been a roller coaster of UI changes over the last few years.)
That was my point.
So now your proposed 'solution' is to download a whole bunch more linuxes and try them all too... ?
Is that what someone who doesn't want to learn a new UI, and is all up in arms about the way they reworked the windows 8 start menu is going to want? Lets learn a whole new everything instead...?! And not just one... but he's supposed to "try a few" from a set of 300.
1. Ubuntu is free. Installing the latest upgrade costs no money.
Few people ever upgrade the installed OS on their PC. They get a new OS with a new PC. Price of the OS or any issues actually performing the upgrade is really not a factor to most people.
2. Ubuntu upgrades work better than Windows upgrades. Fewer things break.
Not in my experience. Do you have anything more than your experience to counter.
And per my previous note, most people don't manually upgrade anyway, so 'installation difficulty' is fairly moot for most people.
3. You can opt out of the 6 month cycle by installing an LTS release.
You can opt out of upgrading windows too. Mainstream support for 7 goes to 2015. (Extended support to 2020.)
If you don't like change, run the computer until it dies of old age. As long as you don't need the latest software you'll be fine.
Switching to Ubuntu doesn't seem like it solves the problem at all.
It takes enterprises years to move from one release to another
It takes -some- enterprises years. Others were experimenting with windows 8 during the preview phase and have it rolled out in a few places as a pilot program.
Some IT departments spend all their time putting out fires; other IT departments spend their time planning for the future.
And still other IT departments, for better or worse, thought 2005 was a really good year for computers and plan to stay there until hell freezes over.
I guess that's better than the ones stuck in 2001.
I dunno, is the Ubuntu roller-coaster really much better.
Well, there's a relatively recent 'distracted driving' law there that prohibts handheld electronics while driving amongst other things.
So there are more than -plenty- of people to monitor driving around with a bluetooth handsfree solution of some sort.
The university philosophy department is probably the most overlooked. I took a number of philosophy courses, and they were absolutely worth it.
First there is the 'critical thinking' and logical argument component; and society as a whole could use more of that.
There there is the ethics and morality segments which are truly great because they delve into the root arguments behind abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, torture, and so on. Its worth exploring those questions in a university level environment.
How morality arises independently of divine edict is worth exploring, as well as examining things like the moral difference between triage and organ harvesting and even where the two can collide.
Beyond that, formal philosophy and logic converges with high level computing science questions about NP completeness, the halting problem, and so on.
Its not just about reading Plato or Kant.
We need to get a Republican elected to president so we can start caring again.
I agreed with everything else that you said but that.
The last republican president started the current wars, and the last 2 republican candidates have given no indication they would have prosecuted war less aggressively.
You seem to be in denial.
GOG had an opportunity to support Linux, and failed to do so even when every other store has done so.
Every other store? You mean steam? With its current dismal handful of linux titles? Give me a break. I'd like to see GoG do linux releases ... a lot of the titles are running in DOSbox anyway so it wouldn't even be a huge step at least for their oldest stuff.
But they recently added Mac and got into indie stuff, where steam has had mac and indie for while now. So I'll give them a few more years before I even think to find fault with them over Linux.
By then between the indie and dosbox stuff they'll even have a decent library to offer.
I'll personally not feel any sympathy when Microsoft kill then off.
Because Wing commander II is going to ever be offered as a metro app via the windows store?
Thus, I have two mobile phones, two phone numbers, two e-mail inboxes. Work and play are two different spheres, and it stays that way.
2 phones at twice the price to operate. A partitioned phone sounds like it might be a lot cheaper in the long run.
Either people prefered the DRM Version
They were identical.
or over a million purchasers were unaware of it.
For sure. Steam had it and more people know about steam than GoG. It was on store shelves too, which gets another demographic.
Why buy it from steam but not gog if you know about both? The only reason to buy it from anyone else but GoG is if you are getting it cheaper. The steam sales tend to be almost absurd after all.
But that all relates to PURCHASERS. As soon as your in the 'i want it free, pirate torrent' getting a cracked version vs the DRM free version is insane. Nobody with half a brain would want some cracker tampered copy vs an original DRM free version.
Anyone who has ever played a lot of cracked games has run into issues from time to time with some titles, where the crack didn't work properly and the game was playable for a while, but you couldn't finish it. Or where if you had a cracked copy you couldn't apply a patch, etc.
If there was an official drm free version available that would be FAR more desirable in general to people looking to actually play the pirated game.
I thought i read somewhere that android is structured to use user accounts for each app as part of their separation model.
If that's accurate than the normal 'multiple-user' model can't also be simultaneously used.
while anyone who's ever taken a professional ethics course...
isn't taking a course on ethics at all. They're taking a corporate sponsored course in avoiding liability.
Take an actual academic ethics course at a university instead of a worthless 'professional ethics' course.
But is that really ironic?
Yes.
Witcher 2 sold 1.1 M copies for the PC in its first 7 months. It only sold 40 k DRM-free copies through GOG, which would the crackers most likely find to crack?
It REALLY underscores how ineffective the investment in DRM is. The game was released without it, and the DRM version was still cracked and widely pirated.
The Urquan Masters remake is better than the original; in that its the same, but its been updated to run on modern PCs.
I've picked up several titles on GoG, my -only- complaint at all is the lack of xpacs with a number of titles. (Wing Commander / WC II), Dungeon Keeper, Wing Commander Privateer, Syndicate...
In some cases I have the original with xpacs, so their lack is annoying -- and the incentive to re-buy the game as a drm free download is diminished.
In other cases, i never had the xpac, and if they offered it that would be a huge draw for me.
Lol, fair enough. The early RSS for some of the older radios is crazy finicky. As I recall, we got it working in DOSbox though on top of Windows XP on a Pentium 4, with a PCI serial card.