Yeah, if you want OSX you'll need one.. but which one?
If OSX is going to be your primary OS, and you want to mostly work in OSX and virtualize everything else on top of it... by all means get a powerful mac, ideally a pricey tower so you can get some extra hard drives inside it etc, which makes multi-booting a lot less of a hassle for when you don't want to access linux/windows in VM.
You can setup multiple boot or VM environments for Windows, Linux, and of course Mac OS X.
Except you can't VM OSX desktop edition, and buying an ADDITIONAL copy of OSX Server for each VM is expensive, and doesn't really help you since, as an OSX developer you want to test your software on OSX client, and probably both 10.4, and 10.5, possibly even 10.3 -- DESKTOP editions, since that's what most users use.
So, my approach has been to buy a powerful PC, and do all the linux/solaris/bsd/windows stuff on that, and then to have an Apple laptop. You can get a very serviceable PC tower for the fraction of the price of a Mac tower, and if OSX isn't going to be your 'primary' OS its much more flexible way to go.
The money you save by buying a PC tower instead of a Mac one can then be thrown at at a Mac Mini and a cheap KVM... or in my case, I have an Apple laptop.
So I took the test and scored 90.91% (30/33) And I'm Canadian.
The 3 I missed...
I had no idea what Roosevelt threatened to do to the supreme court when they declared parts of the New Deal were unconstitutional. I didn't know what particular rights the first amendment gives. And I missed the one about the Scopes "Monkey Trial", which I'm not sure how I got wrong. I think I misread the correct answer as something to do with teaching evolution in private schools.
Of course, I got a few right that I made educated guesses on too, so it works out I guess. I had no trouble with the ones that were more 'general knowledge' but struggled with the real "Americana". Like the source of the phrase 'wall of separation' between church and state... I didn't actually know the answer was Thomas Jefferson's letters, but made it as an educated guess from the choices.
Overall, though I'm shocked that any elected official would score less than 80% on it... never mind less than 50%.
Many Americans are actually very happy to be Americans, because of their freedom and ability to grow rich.
Well that's the propaganda; Reality seems to have taken a somewhat different direction.
After all, with all that freedom and ability to get rich, one has to ask... why are you locking yourselves up, putting yourselves under surveillance... and other than a small and shrinking elite, steadily getting poorer.
Don't bother answering, just wrap yourself up in the flag, and go back to that happy place in your head where you are still free and getting rich.
This is one of those hard cases which is going to make bad law. There was nothing legitimate to charge Lori Drew with, so they went reaching for any tool available -- in this case, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which has already been pretty badly stretched. If Drew is found guilty (and she will be, on the emotional factor)
Traditionally there wasn't really much to hold US citizens together. They came from a hodge-podge of different nations and subscribed to a hodge-podge of different religions that were often at odds with one another. One might have hoped that they would resort to their Constitution in order to create a nucleus to unite around but perhaps that document is just too heavy on points one can disagree with. So they used a symbol that is devoid of any meaning other than the one each individual puts their for himself: their colours.
Canada isn't really significantly different than the US in this regard, yet we have no strange deference to our flag.
I hear your overall argument and don't disagree with your analysis, but I think its more like when a toddler attaches to a 'blankie', in that it -can- happen, but it certainly doesn't necessarily happen, and seriously, by this point its something America really should have outgrown by now.
Actually, the problem is that even though the game is "installed" to the HD, it's not really installed. It's just a disc image copied to the HD and mounted so the game thinks it's accessing the disc, same as before. This way, no games have to change their code to work this way. The downside is the case of Halo 3 (and some other games) where they used the HD already. Now it's using the HD as a "disc" and for caching, which wouldn't be necessary if they knew they were running entirely from the disc. There's no easy fix to make it work in both cases.
You mean like mounting an iso image as a file? That should be trivial to detect. The xbox is still essentially a windows system right, and its 100% standardized hardware, right... so it could simply be a case of checking the drive letter. If its running from whatever the standard dvd drive is, its on the CD, if its running from whatever the standard virtual drive letter is, its running from the hard disk...
Or perhaps something more robust...
I mean its not like Microsoft would be trying to mask the fact that its running from a virtual drive in this scenario, so there are probably a number of other simple things it could do, like query the driver, and see if its called 'microsoft xbox virtual drive' or whatever.
Of course, the ISP & the backbone has to prioritize traffic when they are using much of the bandwidth of a pipe. And then traffic shaping might even make customers happy (prioritizing VoIP over eDonkey makes sense, right?) But whatever they do, they should do it in the open.
The trouble with this is that some asshat is going to idiotically make an edonkey that indentifies itself as voip and then brag about how fast it is, and customers will soak it up because all the reviews and benchmarks will gleefully tell us its the fastest.
The solution? Bandwidth should be linked to money. We should be able, as consumers start with reasonable defaults, and then specify, per application/port/destination/whatever how much bandwidth we want to use for a given task. ISPs can set rates on different service thresholds, and then the market will sort itself out.
my email, torrent, windows updates, IM, most stuff really,... low priority bulk rates, first person shooter traffic and voip and video chat... high priority; web browsing - medium.
if lizards lived 13 times longer than they do today, they would in fact be 13 times larger..
Hi there,
Welcome to remedial math. You are here because you don't understand the relationship of volume, mass, and length very well.
If you have a 1x1x1" cube that weighs one pound, and it were to become 13x larger, would it really be a 13 lb cube 13x13x13" to a side?
If that were true, it is actually, by volume, 2197 times larger than it was before, and as a result its density has gone from 1 lb per cubic inch to 0.006 lb per cubic inch.
If you have 1x1" cube, and you make its volume 13x times larger, and as a bonus keep the density the same, how large would it be? Answer: 2.35x2.35x2.35" Not nearly as impressive.
By extension, an iguana that is 6ft long, that grows 13x as big by volume, would be maybe 15' ft long, and stand 28" tall. Again... not all that impressive.
And even all that assumes a constant growth rate, which of course, isn't the case. There is a big growth spurt at the beginning, and it slows down from there.
The advantage that OSX and Linux have is a willingness to break badly written apps and not offer seamless version to version compatibility for app developers.
They have a willingness because the market is small enough that nobody cares.
If **enterprises** had been as invested in OS9 when OSX hit, or as invested in PPC when Intel hit as they were invested in XP when Vista hit, Apple would NEVER have been able to pull off those switches and simply abandon the legacy.
Joe consumer can go where Apple goes, for the most part, and if he has to buy a new printer or some new software, so be it. An enterprise has a LOT more infrastructure and a LOT more invested in the existing system in custom software, in file formats, in network protocols, and is a LOT less willing and able to just abandon things and start over every couple iterations.
Want to run an app that worked in 10.1 but not in 10.5? Tough.
There are vanishingly few "screwed over" customers "angry" about HDCP. Most people never even see the "restrictions" on their "freedom." They subscribe to cable, buy their BluRay players, buy their disks, and it all works just fine. If they didn't, then these stories would be in Time Magazine (or, better yet, TV Guide) and not on Slashdot.
For a couple reasons: 1) Consumers are retarded. I know of lots of people with HDTVs that watch the game stretched and distorted on an SD channel and think its the bees knees. Some of them even have access to the same channel in actual HD and don't even know it.
These people wouldn't know HDCP had downsampled their blu-ray on their non HDCP compliant device unless it hit them over the head with hammer.
And savvy people, the ones who know, mostly just buy compatible hardware.
2) The reality is HDCP really isn't screwing that many people over... at least not yet. That shoe hasn't dropped yet, and it probably won't drop until its obsolete, and people start fuming that their blu-ray disks don't work anymore on anything. And that's not going to happen for a while.
In my opinion DRM in general isn't going to hit people HARD until something MAJOR gets taken down while the DRM they use is in wide use. e.g. Apple closing the iTunes Music store is probably the only thing that would do it -today-. So far all the DRM hits have been minor league... Major League Baseball killing their drm format, or first generation blu-ray players not working with new discs... stuff that only hits small early adopter markets.
Sooner or later though, something big will get taken down, and people at large will sit up and notice. Probably won't be for another 10+ years though.
There's very little profit in writing a piece of malware to specifically target Vista, even though it's quite possible to do so, and has been done in labs.
That's true, but at the same time, Vista's security has been quite successful in the sense that the majority of XP malware doesn't work on it, because Vista did block a lot of the avenues in.
Much of this isn't about security...it's about control.
The two are inextricably interrelated. You can't have security without control.
I see part of it as heading toward the nasty "trusted computing",
"Trusted computing" is only nasty if the OWNER of the hardware is not trusted. I have said on multiple occasions, I am -for- signed drivers etc, provided the OWNER of the hardware can sign drivers he trusts.
Unfortunately, most average owners are probably better off if they relinquish control to a 3rd party, because they lack the ability to make correct or even reasonable system admin decisions. However, as long as there is a way for owners to assert control, and take responsibility, I have no issue.
In practice with Vista, this IS actually possible. You can sign drivers that you trust, for use on your machine.
The only trouble is that its not nearly well known enough. It needs to become more mainstream. People need to learn how to sign drivers they trust rather than being shown how to disable driver signing the moment they get an unsigned driver they want to use, even if it is easier.
This means I have to live with Microsoft's brain-dead default settings that eat up valuable screen real estate for no good reason...except that this way Microsoft can move people one step closer to "have it our way...we know best".
If you want to complain about a world where the vendor controls you Apple has no equal.;) Though yes, I agree it should always be possible for the hardware owner to assert control over the system.
MacOS and Linux have both learned from Microsoft's mistakes. The difference is MacOS and Linux have been able to leverage this knowledge and make things more secure and better. Microsoft can't. It is hamstrung by legacy compatibility.
Because users demand it.
Now to point. Most Linux users install software via their repositories. If it is not in the repository, they don't run it.
This is a strawman, because linux users aren't like windows users. And the OSS repositories aren't really like the predominantly proprietary windows ecosystem. OSX users and the OSX ecosystem is more like Windows... and yes, people download stuff from all over the place and run it on their Mac. the only reason they aren't getting pwned left and right is that they are still to small a segment for malware authors to really target.
And if windows users migrated to Linux, they'd still be downloading random shite and installing it.
Most linuxs force you to run as a non-privelaged user and don't bug you as much as Windows UAC does, so that you don't actually disable this security.
Most linuxes don't have oodles of software that expects to run as root. Vista, by supporting 9x/2k/xp software has a huge legacy of code people want to use that requires administrator. Vista can either: a) just let it all run, and security be damned b) block escalation outright, and if it crashes, fuck it c) let the user decide
What choice did Vista really have? a) doesn't make any progress. b) is unusable; there is simply TOO much legacy stuff people rely on. and c) while annoying at least is a workable compromise. UAC will be less and less annoying as more and more software is (re)written to conform to running without escalation.
The only reason the security in OSX or Ubuntu isn't as annoying is that there isn't a trainload of legacy software that everyone uses that expects to be running as root. If there was, it would be the same nightmare. In other words, the fault isn't really Vista, its just the windows ecosystem.
If you can manage to run Vista without installing legacy software, UAC almost as unobtrusive as the security in OSX. There are only a few UAC prompts that are truly misplaced.
No kidding. The console is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of what it's plugged into.
Do the math. The rest of what its plugged into, in most peoples homes is off most of the time.
If my console used 200W, it would cost me about $0.028 to run for an hour.
Or $245.28 per year. If you turned it off when you weren't using it, it would easily probably drop to under $40 per year. So you'd be paying an extra $200/year to have it 'idling on'. That's enough to buy 3-4 more games per year.
The A/V would cost $0.307/hr at full bore (or maybe $0.15/hr if I didn't want the neighbours calling the police).
Right. Ok. But you don't remotely run it full bore 24/7 do you? Or are you seriously claiming you are spending $2628.00 per year to run the rest of your 'A/V'?
Do the math, 1 hr per day at full bore would only cost you $112/yr, add in another 4 hours per day at 'half bore', and that's another $219.00... so $331/year for your 'A/V' at 5 hours per day everyday (which is around the national average). Quite bluntly, that total seems a bit high, but maybe you've got the whole full on home theater thing going which puts you out of the average, but lets run with it.
$331/year for your A/V 5 hours a day (1 hour at full bore, 4 at half) $245/year to have your console idling 24x7
$245 vs $331? Your console is NOT a 'drop in the bucket'
And the average household is running an 'A/V' center that consumes considerably less power than yours. So for most people that $331/year will be a smaller number, while the console stays the same.
The Wii has the power button in the front. The Wii Power LED has 3 colors: green - on, yellow - standby, red-off.
Its quite clear, and not at all deceptive.
The Wii in standby consumes 1 Watt if the wireless connect24 is off, and 10 watts if it is on. The Wii just idling on is 13 watts.
The xbox 360 also has a standby, and consumes 2.5 watts, vs 150+ Watts if its on and idling. I don't have a 360, and don't know where the power button is, nor how one puts it into standby.
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
Vista is more secure than XP. Unfortunately, people it turns out, really don't give a shit about security.
or the extra pseudo-security features that don't really do anything,
Forcing legions of inept users to not run as administrator is not pseudo-security.
I'll concede that some the warnings amount to pseudo-security, but the reality is that Vista is much more secure than XP. Signed drivers, the inability to put administrator items into your startup, and a whack of other measures all significantly hardened Vista to a damned LOT of the XP malware out there. Unfortunately it also broke a bunch of shoddily written legitimate apps, and users care more about running that crap than security.
since there are still exploits from the Win2K days that work on an out-of-the-box Vista install
Vista is much more secure than XP. Its not remotely impregnable, but it could be considered to be like a police armor compared to XP/2K's T-shirt and short-shorts.
But the bigger problem for windows isn't remote exploits, its its own users. Windows is a victim of its own success, the malware ecosystem for windows is unique.
Even if Windows were impregnable, due to its marketshare, it would still be the dominant target for exploits that rely on the meat using the PC. So Vista is challenged not only with being secure, but with protecting users from themselves... which has led to Vista being tasked with the impossible.
But give it time, there is nothing about OSX or Linux that makes it more secure against idiots installing keyloggers, rootkits, and other malware into their systems. If they ever have the same sizeable legions of inept users then the malware authors will target them too.
Maybe, just maybe, because they feel that adding value to the OS is a great way to justify getting people to buy an upgrade version.
Why would you pay for an upgrade that made it more zippy? I mean, if you don't think its at all sluggish now, what would the value of making it faster be?
If they can make it 'faster enough' that people are going to pay to upgrade, that would be evidence that a lot of people aren't satisfied with its current performance.
Wouldn't Linux be a better OS if the community spent more time working on the weaknesses instead of polishing up the cool stuff?
So you are saying the developers should focus on the weaknesses? I think we can all agree on that... Would it be too much to ask you believe that this is what Apple is doing? That performance is OSX's weakness... so Apple is focusing on it.
What exactly did you think Apple should do, if not improve performance?
I think apple should improve performance, because I think that's one of its biggest weaknesses. If I thought it was zippy enough I would suggest they add features, or focus on power management, or focus on inconsistencies in the UI... or court game developers. There are lots of things they could work to improve... but I think Apple focussing on performance is the right move... it is its biggest weakness.
We've long "propped up" the book publishing industry by arbitrarily banning people from using their printing presses to print particular books. It is completely artificial, but after 300 years of it, it doesn't seem to have been entirely destructive.
No, its completely different, because practically nobody owns a printing press nor the means to mass reproduce books, yet. The law is essentially practical and enforcable because of this. I agree its still 'arbitrary' in a sense, but its not really an issue because it doesn't get in the way of everybody all the time.
The key problem with software copyright is that EVERYONE has the means to do it without any real effort, so its no longer a reasonable point to grant exclusive legal rights.
If we reached a 'star trek' replicator technology, then at that point a LOT of other laws, like perhaps legal restrictions on the means to create 'printed books' would be rendered similarly obsolete.
Whereas your plan would require an unweildly amount of logins.
You mean like I have different logins for all my other games? A login for battle.net a login for wow, a login for warhammer online,... I've managed to survive.
I think I'll pass on memorising 40 different logins and which games corrosponds to each.
loginame+portal, loginanem+civ4, loginname+hl2... make the login name correspond to the game.
Also.. how does that work with friends? Do you get each and every one of your friends to add all 40 of your accounts? And vice versa?
No. I have a cellphone, and IM accounts. The number of games I have in common with my friends is pretty small. And its not like my friends need to know anything about my portal or my bejewelled...
Unworkable.
Whereas I consider playing full retail price for a game that I can't effectively even lend to my brother while I play something else even more unworkable.
Still I agree... at 40 games its unworkable. Then again, my policy is simply not to patronize steam unless I have to. Ironically perhaps I don't really object to the fact that you can't sell games, but the inability to simultaneously play multiple games on your account makes the system completely worthless in my opinion.
If I want to play game X, and my wife wants to play game Y, we should be able to. Even if they are on the same account. There is NO justification whatsoever for that restriction.
I've been playing RTS's off and on since C&C and Warcraft (the original), and I've always had a love/hate relationship with them. I love the strategy and tactics of the genre, but the whole concept of "micro" and continuously abysmal unit AI just infuriates me.
Your complaint is valid, but largely applies to playing campaigns against the computer.
One of the things that makes playing against humans more fun, is that they have the same limitations you do... they can't simultaneously micro-manage every single unit no matter where it is on the map, picking of the edges of your army with a couple lone scouts at one end, massing their army at another, fighting skirmishes on 2 fronts, and using every units special ability while issuing detailed build / repair orders at each of their 4 bases...
I agree it can be demented, and it leads players to turtle, and hold map choke points to disrupt the AI, and force the battle as much as possible to a single fronts instead of all over the place.
But player vs player doesn't really suffer from this. I think the real solution should be to develop AI's that play like people, that have limits on how many points of focus they can really have.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple... Get an Intel based Apple...
Yeah, if you want OSX you'll need one.. but which one?
If OSX is going to be your primary OS, and you want to mostly work in OSX and virtualize everything else on top of it... by all means get a powerful mac, ideally a pricey tower so you can get some extra hard drives inside it etc, which makes multi-booting a lot less of a hassle for when you don't want to access linux/windows in VM.
You can setup multiple boot or VM environments for Windows, Linux, and of course Mac OS X.
Except you can't VM OSX desktop edition, and buying an ADDITIONAL copy of OSX Server for each VM is expensive, and doesn't really help you since, as an OSX developer you want to test your software on OSX client, and probably both 10.4, and 10.5, possibly even 10.3 -- DESKTOP editions, since that's what most users use.
So, my approach has been to buy a powerful PC, and do all the linux/solaris/bsd/windows stuff on that, and then to have an Apple laptop. You can get a very serviceable PC tower for the fraction of the price of a Mac tower, and if OSX isn't going to be your 'primary' OS its much more flexible way to go.
The money you save by buying a PC tower instead of a Mac one can then be thrown at at a Mac Mini and a cheap KVM... or in my case, I have an Apple laptop.
So I took the test and scored 90.91% (30/33)
And I'm Canadian.
The 3 I missed...
I had no idea what Roosevelt threatened to do to the supreme court when they declared parts of the New Deal were unconstitutional. I didn't know what particular rights the first amendment gives. And I missed the one about the Scopes "Monkey Trial", which I'm not sure how I got wrong. I think I misread the correct answer as something to do with teaching evolution in private schools.
Of course, I got a few right that I made educated guesses on too, so it works out I guess. I had no trouble with the ones that were more 'general knowledge' but struggled with the real "Americana". Like the source of the phrase 'wall of separation' between church and state... I didn't actually know the answer was Thomas Jefferson's letters, but made it as an educated guess from the choices.
Overall, though I'm shocked that any elected official would score less than 80% on it... never mind less than 50%.
Many Americans are actually very happy to be Americans, because of their freedom and ability to grow rich.
Well that's the propaganda; Reality seems to have taken a somewhat different direction.
After all, with all that freedom and ability to get rich, one has to ask... why are you locking yourselves up, putting yourselves under surveillance... and other than a small and shrinking elite, steadily getting poorer.
Don't bother answering, just wrap yourself up in the flag, and go back to that happy place in your head where you are still free and getting rich.
This is one of those hard cases which is going to make bad law. There was nothing legitimate to charge Lori Drew with, so they went reaching for any tool available -- in this case, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which has already been pretty badly stretched. If Drew is found guilty (and she will be, on the emotional factor)
But will probably be undone on appeal.
Traditionally there wasn't really much to hold US citizens together. They came from a hodge-podge of different nations and subscribed to a hodge-podge of different religions that were often at odds with one another. One might have hoped that they would resort to their Constitution in order to create a nucleus to unite around but perhaps that document is just too heavy on points one can disagree with. So they used a symbol that is devoid of any meaning other than the one each individual puts their for himself: their colours.
Canada isn't really significantly different than the US in this regard, yet we have no strange deference to our flag.
I hear your overall argument and don't disagree with your analysis, but I think its more like when a toddler attaches to a 'blankie', in that it -can- happen, but it certainly doesn't necessarily happen, and seriously, by this point its something America really should have outgrown by now.
Seriously, if your kid is in school, he is going to spend the better part of 8 hours each day in "conventional social situations".
Anyone who thinks school is a 'conventional social situation' needs a reality check.
Huh? At least in shows like House I have seen several instances where the dialogue from the next shot is heard before the shot actually changes.
Then you'll be happy to know we'll be able to fix that for you now. ;)
Actually, the problem is that even though the game is "installed" to the HD, it's not really installed. It's just a disc image copied to the HD and mounted so the game thinks it's accessing the disc, same as before. This way, no games have to change their code to work this way. The downside is the case of Halo 3 (and some other games) where they used the HD already. Now it's using the HD as a "disc" and for caching, which wouldn't be necessary if they knew they were running entirely from the disc. There's no easy fix to make it work in both cases.
You mean like mounting an iso image as a file? That should be trivial to detect. The xbox is still essentially a windows system right, and its 100% standardized hardware, right... so it could simply be a case of checking the drive letter. If its running from whatever the standard dvd drive is, its on the CD, if its running from whatever the standard virtual drive letter is, its running from the hard disk...
Or perhaps something more robust...
I mean its not like Microsoft would be trying to mask the fact that its running from a virtual drive in this scenario, so there are probably a number of other simple things it could do, like query the driver, and see if its called 'microsoft xbox virtual drive' or whatever.
Of course, the ISP & the backbone has to prioritize traffic when they are using much of the bandwidth of a pipe. And then traffic shaping might even make customers happy (prioritizing VoIP over eDonkey makes sense, right?) But whatever they do, they should do it in the open.
The trouble with this is that some asshat is going to idiotically make an edonkey that indentifies itself as voip and then brag about how fast it is, and customers will soak it up because all the reviews and benchmarks will gleefully tell us its the fastest.
The solution? Bandwidth should be linked to money. We should be able, as consumers start with reasonable defaults, and then specify, per application/port/destination/whatever how much bandwidth we want to use for a given task. ISPs can set rates on different service thresholds, and then the market will sort itself out.
my email, torrent, windows updates, IM, most stuff really,... low priority bulk rates, first person shooter traffic and voip and video chat... high priority; web browsing - medium.
if lizards lived 13 times longer than they do today, they would in fact be 13 times larger..
Hi there,
Welcome to remedial math. You are here because you don't understand the relationship of volume, mass, and length very well.
If you have a 1x1x1" cube that weighs one pound, and it were to become 13x larger, would it really be a 13 lb cube 13x13x13" to a side?
If that were true, it is actually, by volume, 2197 times larger than it was before, and as a result its density has gone from 1 lb per cubic inch to 0.006 lb per cubic inch.
If you have 1x1" cube, and you make its volume 13x times larger, and as a bonus keep the density the same, how large would it be? Answer: 2.35x2.35x2.35" Not nearly as impressive.
By extension, an iguana that is 6ft long, that grows 13x as big by volume, would be maybe 15' ft long, and stand 28" tall. Again... not all that impressive.
And even all that assumes a constant growth rate, which of course, isn't the case. There is a big growth spurt at the beginning, and it slows down from there.
they can turn search results into 3D experience.
It's UNIX! I know this!
They quoted a NASA official as saying that just because we can't see it doesn't mean it isn't in the box, we haven't opened the box to verify it.
Schrödinger's spider?
The advantage that OSX and Linux have is a willingness to break badly written apps and not offer seamless version to version compatibility for app developers.
They have a willingness because the market is small enough that nobody cares.
If **enterprises** had been as invested in OS9 when OSX hit, or as invested in PPC when Intel hit as they were invested in XP when Vista hit, Apple would NEVER have been able to pull off those switches and simply abandon the legacy.
Joe consumer can go where Apple goes, for the most part, and if he has to buy a new printer or some new software, so be it. An enterprise has a LOT more infrastructure and a LOT more invested in the existing system in custom software, in file formats, in network protocols, and is a LOT less willing and able to just abandon things and start over every couple iterations.
Want to run an app that worked in 10.1 but not in 10.5? Tough.
There are vanishingly few "screwed over" customers "angry" about HDCP. Most people never even see the "restrictions" on their "freedom." They subscribe to cable, buy their BluRay players, buy their disks, and it all works just fine. If they didn't, then these stories would be in Time Magazine (or, better yet, TV Guide) and not on Slashdot.
For a couple reasons:
1) Consumers are retarded. I know of lots of people with HDTVs that watch the game stretched and distorted on an SD channel and think its the bees knees. Some of them even have access to the same channel in actual HD and don't even know it.
These people wouldn't know HDCP had downsampled their blu-ray on their non HDCP compliant device unless it hit them over the head with hammer.
And savvy people, the ones who know, mostly just buy compatible hardware.
2) The reality is HDCP really isn't screwing that many people over... at least not yet. That shoe hasn't dropped yet, and it probably won't drop until its obsolete, and people start fuming that their blu-ray disks don't work anymore on anything. And that's not going to happen for a while.
In my opinion DRM in general isn't going to hit people HARD until something MAJOR gets taken down while the DRM they use is in wide use. e.g. Apple closing the iTunes Music store is probably the only thing that would do it -today-. So far all the DRM hits have been minor league... Major League Baseball killing their drm format, or first generation blu-ray players not working with new discs... stuff that only hits small early adopter markets.
Sooner or later though, something big will get taken down, and people at large will sit up and notice. Probably won't be for another 10+ years though.
PS There are surely ways around it.
Doesn't matter. I shouldn't be restricted. I shouldn't have to go 'underground'.
The fact that I can is irrelevant.
The fact that you could still get alcohol during the prohibition doesn't make prohibition any more palatable.
There's very little profit in writing a piece of malware to specifically target Vista, even though it's quite possible to do so, and has been done in labs.
That's true, but at the same time, Vista's security has been quite successful in the sense that the majority of XP malware doesn't work on it, because Vista did block a lot of the avenues in.
Much of this isn't about security...it's about control.
The two are inextricably interrelated. You can't have security without control.
I see part of it as heading toward the nasty "trusted computing",
"Trusted computing" is only nasty if the OWNER of the hardware is not trusted. I have said on multiple occasions, I am -for- signed drivers etc, provided the OWNER of the hardware can sign drivers he trusts.
Unfortunately, most average owners are probably better off if they relinquish control to a 3rd party, because they lack the ability to make correct or even reasonable system admin decisions. However, as long as there is a way for owners to assert control, and take responsibility, I have no issue.
In practice with Vista, this IS actually possible. You can sign drivers that you trust, for use on your machine.
The only trouble is that its not nearly well known enough. It needs to become more mainstream. People need to learn how to sign drivers they trust rather than being shown how to disable driver signing the moment they get an unsigned driver they want to use, even if it is easier.
This means I have to live with Microsoft's brain-dead default settings that eat up valuable screen real estate for no good reason...except that this way Microsoft can move people one step closer to "have it our way...we know best".
If you want to complain about a world where the vendor controls you Apple has no equal. ;)
Though yes, I agree it should always be possible for the hardware owner to assert control over the system.
MacOS and Linux have both learned from Microsoft's mistakes. The difference is MacOS and Linux have been able to leverage this knowledge and make things more secure and better. Microsoft can't. It is hamstrung by legacy compatibility.
Because users demand it.
Now to point. Most Linux users install software via their repositories. If it is not in the repository, they don't run it.
This is a strawman, because linux users aren't like windows users. And the OSS repositories aren't really like the predominantly proprietary windows ecosystem. OSX users and the OSX ecosystem is more like Windows... and yes, people download stuff from all over the place and run it on their Mac. the only reason they aren't getting pwned left and right is that they are still to small a segment for malware authors to really target.
And if windows users migrated to Linux, they'd still be downloading random shite and installing it.
Most linuxs force you to run as a non-privelaged user and don't bug you as much as Windows UAC does, so that you don't actually disable this security.
Most linuxes don't have oodles of software that expects to run as root. Vista, by supporting 9x/2k/xp software has a huge legacy of code people want to use that requires administrator.
Vista can either:
a) just let it all run, and security be damned
b) block escalation outright, and if it crashes, fuck it
c) let the user decide
What choice did Vista really have? a) doesn't make any progress. b) is unusable; there is simply TOO much legacy stuff people rely on. and c) while annoying at least is a workable compromise. UAC will be less and less annoying as more and more software is (re)written to conform to running without escalation.
The only reason the security in OSX or Ubuntu isn't as annoying is that there isn't a trainload of legacy software that everyone uses that expects to be running as root. If there was, it would be the same nightmare. In other words, the fault isn't really Vista, its just the windows ecosystem.
If you can manage to run Vista without installing legacy software, UAC almost as unobtrusive as the security in OSX. There are only a few UAC prompts that are truly misplaced.
No kidding. The console is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of what it's plugged into.
Do the math. The rest of what its plugged into, in most peoples homes is off most of the time.
If my console used 200W, it would cost me about $0.028 to run for an hour.
Or $245.28 per year. If you turned it off when you weren't using it, it would easily probably drop to under $40 per year. So you'd be paying an extra $200/year to have it 'idling on'. That's enough to buy 3-4 more games per year.
The A/V would cost $0.307/hr at full bore (or maybe $0.15/hr if I didn't want the neighbours calling the police).
Right. Ok. But you don't remotely run it full bore 24/7 do you? Or are you seriously claiming you are spending $2628.00 per year to run the rest of your 'A/V'?
Do the math, 1 hr per day at full bore would only cost you $112/yr, add in another 4 hours per day at 'half bore', and that's another $219.00... so $331/year for your 'A/V' at 5 hours per day everyday (which is around the national average). Quite bluntly, that total seems a bit high, but maybe you've got the whole full on home theater thing going which puts you out of the average, but lets run with it.
$331/year for your A/V 5 hours a day (1 hour at full bore, 4 at half)
$245/year to have your console idling 24x7
$245 vs $331? Your console is NOT a 'drop in the bucket'
And the average household is running an 'A/V' center that consumes considerably less power than yours. So for most people that $331/year will be a smaller number, while the console stays the same.
The Wii has the power button in the front.
The Wii Power LED has 3 colors: green - on, yellow - standby, red-off.
Its quite clear, and not at all deceptive.
The Wii in standby consumes 1 Watt if the wireless connect24 is off, and 10 watts if it is on.
The Wii just idling on is 13 watts.
The xbox 360 also has a standby, and consumes 2.5 watts, vs 150+ Watts if its on and idling. I don't have a 360, and don't know where the power button is, nor how one puts it into standby.
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
Vista is more secure than XP. Unfortunately, people it turns out, really don't give a shit about security.
or the extra pseudo-security features that don't really do anything,
Forcing legions of inept users to not run as administrator is not pseudo-security.
I'll concede that some the warnings amount to pseudo-security, but the reality is that Vista is much more secure than XP. Signed drivers, the inability to put administrator items into your startup, and a whack of other measures all significantly hardened Vista to a damned LOT of the XP malware out there. Unfortunately it also broke a bunch of shoddily written legitimate apps, and users care more about running that crap than security.
since there are still exploits from the Win2K days that work on an out-of-the-box Vista install
Vista is much more secure than XP. Its not remotely impregnable, but it could be considered to be like a police armor compared to XP/2K's T-shirt and short-shorts.
But the bigger problem for windows isn't remote exploits, its its own users. Windows is a victim of its own success, the malware ecosystem for windows is unique.
Even if Windows were impregnable, due to its marketshare, it would still be the dominant target for exploits that rely on the meat using the PC. So Vista is challenged not only with being secure, but with protecting users from themselves... which has led to Vista being tasked with the impossible.
But give it time, there is nothing about OSX or Linux that makes it more secure against idiots installing keyloggers, rootkits, and other malware into their systems. If they ever have the same sizeable legions of inept users then the malware authors will target them too.
Maybe, just maybe, because they feel that adding value to the OS is a great way to justify getting people to buy an upgrade version.
Why would you pay for an upgrade that made it more zippy? I mean, if you don't think its at all sluggish now, what would the value of making it faster be?
If they can make it 'faster enough' that people are going to pay to upgrade, that would be evidence that a lot of people aren't satisfied with its current performance.
Wouldn't Linux be a better OS if the community spent more time working on the weaknesses instead of polishing up the cool stuff?
So you are saying the developers should focus on the weaknesses? I think we can all agree on that... Would it be too much to ask you believe that this is what Apple is doing? That performance is OSX's weakness... so Apple is focusing on it.
What exactly did you think Apple should do, if not improve performance?
I think apple should improve performance, because I think that's one of its biggest weaknesses. If I thought it was zippy enough I would suggest they add features, or focus on power management, or focus on inconsistencies in the UI... or court game developers. There are lots of things they could work to improve... but I think Apple focussing on performance is the right move... it is its biggest weakness.
We've long "propped up" the book publishing industry by arbitrarily banning people from using their printing presses to print particular books. It is completely artificial, but after 300 years of it, it doesn't seem to have been entirely destructive.
No, its completely different, because practically nobody owns a printing press nor the means to mass reproduce books, yet. The law is essentially practical and enforcable because of this. I agree its still 'arbitrary' in a sense, but its not really an issue because it doesn't get in the way of everybody all the time.
The key problem with software copyright is that EVERYONE has the means to do it without any real effort, so its no longer a reasonable point to grant exclusive legal rights.
If we reached a 'star trek' replicator technology, then at that point a LOT of other laws, like perhaps legal restrictions on the means to create 'printed books' would be rendered similarly obsolete.
Whereas your plan would require an unweildly amount of logins.
You mean like I have different logins for all my other games? A login for battle.net a login for wow, a login for warhammer online,... I've managed to survive.
I think I'll pass on memorising 40 different logins and which games corrosponds to each.
loginame+portal, loginanem+civ4, loginname+hl2... make the login name correspond to the game.
Also.. how does that work with friends? Do you get each and every one of your friends to add all 40 of your accounts? And vice versa?
No. I have a cellphone, and IM accounts. The number of games I have in common with my friends is pretty small. And its not like my friends need to know anything about my portal or my bejewelled...
Unworkable.
Whereas I consider playing full retail price for a game that I can't effectively even lend to my brother while I play something else even more unworkable.
Still I agree... at 40 games its unworkable. Then again, my policy is simply not to patronize steam unless I have to. Ironically perhaps I don't really object to the fact that you can't sell games, but the inability to simultaneously play multiple games on your account makes the system completely worthless in my opinion.
If I want to play game X, and my wife wants to play game Y, we should be able to. Even if they are on the same account. There is NO justification whatsoever for that restriction.
I've been playing RTS's off and on since C&C and Warcraft (the original), and I've always had a love/hate relationship with them. I love the strategy and tactics of the genre, but the whole concept of "micro" and continuously abysmal unit AI just infuriates me.
Your complaint is valid, but largely applies to playing campaigns against the computer.
One of the things that makes playing against humans more fun, is that they have the same limitations you do... they can't simultaneously micro-manage every single unit no matter where it is on the map, picking of the edges of your army with a couple lone scouts at one end, massing their army at another, fighting skirmishes on 2 fronts, and using every units special ability while issuing detailed build / repair orders at each of their 4 bases...
I agree it can be demented, and it leads players to turtle, and hold map choke points to disrupt the AI, and force the battle as much as possible to a single fronts instead of all over the place.
But player vs player doesn't really suffer from this. I think the real solution should be to develop AI's that play like people, that have limits on how many points of focus they can really have.
Like Star Control II was such a great game. Who the hell on slashdot even remembers it?
Jerk! Loser! Nerd! Idiot! Jerk! Nerd! Nerd! Idiot! Loser!