Whatever was the problem with the standard BIOS that we've had for decades? Having the PC's most "hardware-near" firmware locked down only to run code permitted by a third party seems like an extremely bad idea. The whole point of a computer is that it obeys MY instructions blindly and perfectly.
I know, I've heard the argument for security, but has anyone ever even seen real, actual BIOS malware? As far as I'm concerned, that only exists in theory.
This trend has been rearing its ugly head for a while, but Nikon is known to be particularly bad.
They are extremely stingy with their warranty policies and will try at every opportunity to invalidate your warranty using any excuse they can find.
Buy that lens in the US and you live in Canada (never mind that they're exactly the same product)? Get that camera repaired or even just cleaned at a reputable but not officially recognized business? Ever use a third party battery or accessory? They will seriously use these excuses to invalidate your *entire* warranty.
Optical drives are on the way out? Good riddance. I'm tired of those slow, cumbersome wastes of space.
Any software that isn't delivered as a download (and most of it is these days) should be on a USB drive. And it should have been like this for years already.
Cloud? By the time something like that rolls out, we'll have storage that is capacious, cheap and fast enough to manage all your data without any of this cloud BS.
So, you think a good alternative to a VOIP provider that we suspect may be a threat to privacy is a VOIP provider that we KNOW actively collects, logs, reports and sells our search results?
I'm sure that alternatives like jitsi, Retroshare and other open source options work just as well or better, but, unfortunately, the network effect creates a huge barrier.
Are *you* able to convince your family, friends, co-workers, colleagues, classmates, acquaintances... all to use some other VOIP solution because it's open source and can better guarantee privacy? Do you think they even give a crap when they'll gladly sign away their privacy for Facebook?
Seriously, how did they not think to just offer an HD package as an additional tier of service at a higher price?
Is it really easier to jump over all the regulatory hurdles, setup all the negotiations and deal with all that lawyering around than it is to say, "here's an option for HD streaming for an additional $X/month"?
Somehow, I doubt that and it causes me to wonder if there isn't something nefarious going on here.
Other than it's actual effectiveness, I guess, I really like MSE for its clean, no-nonsense UI -- as opposed to every other AV software maker has elected to use some batshit redarted-ass UI that changes on a daily basis because AV software is otherwise boring and unglamourous.
1) not everyone can afford or even has access to enough bandwidth for steaming.
2) many of us are philosophically disinclined to allowing a third party to expropriate our computers -- our property -- in some strong-armed "agreement" in which we had no negotiations.
3) the selection nearly always sucks, *especially* if you're outside the US. There is no excuse for this in the digital, hyper-connected age.
Seriously, the studios could solve this with such a trivial effort: just offer us DRM-free xvid/mp4/mkv/whatever files for a few bucks a pop and it'll be way too cheap and easy for most people to bother with piracy.
What is needed is good mapping software that actually allows you to download vectors, POIs, etc. for entire selected regions onto the SD card or internal memory.
Osmand technically does this, but it's slow, awkward and the data is incomplete.
Google has been talking about offering this for a while, but I have yet to see anything come to fruition.
Garmin, TomTom and the other usual suspects don't appear to be offering anything other than some lame "connect your smartphone to your GPS device and do pointless stuff" software, but that's not really surprising; a full-fledged, all-in-the-phone mapping and navigation software would cannibalize much their core business.
Sorry, but there are mounds of evidence as to why the death penalty is not a deterrent (ie.: crimes of passion, psychological studies that show humans are *really* bad at thinking ahead and considering consequences ) and as long as there a still a chance of wrongful conviction, I won't stand for mandated state murder. Not to mention killing is morally wrong no matter what the context or circumstances.
I will happily see my tax dollars spent (and even increased) to incarcerate truly haneous offenders as long as is necessary.
Agreed, this is exactly what I do as well. Desktop running Ubuntu with a big hard drive or multiple external drives (make symlinks to all the drives, the share the parent folder of the symlinks).
Plus, this way, you can setup any number of cool uses, like dynamic DNS for a web server, SSH for remote access to get around pesky filters at hotels or what-have-you, maybe even remote streaming of your media, if your connection can handle it.
The hiberfile.sys attack won't work with TrueCrypt full disk or system encryption for Windows: the hibernation file itself is encrypted, as it's stored in the encrypted system partion.
TrueCrypt replaces the Windows boot loader with its own and requires the key to decrypt the system upon awakening.
So, if the computer is off or hibernated, they'll access the hiberfile... how?
Without piracy, I have a clear route for making an income from my work. With piracy, I have to hope that my work becomes a loss leader for itself, reaching a wider paying audience through a non-paying medium. Sure, sometimes it will work. I've encountered a few folks who've seen some of my work freely and wanted more. On the other hand, I've also encountered folks who have outright asked me when my latest piece will be on TPB, rather than buying it.
No, you need to find a business model that doesn't rely on creating an artificial scarcity for something that is necessarily infinite.
Complain all you will that it's not how you want to make a living, but you're no different than the vaudeville performers who bitched and moaned about those newfangled "radios" that relegated them to driving taxis and flipping burgers, because they were good stage performers but lousy musicians.
that I can't get tethering (officially...) without going to one of their crap capped plans.
This really gets my blood boiling. Any carrier that sells "tethering" (which is just virtual router software) as an added-cost feature is a lying, scamming piece of shit and they know it.
Really, you could have just said, "my uncle uses AOL," and that would have explained everything.
Joking aside, why did you use the telephone analogy? It's email, a postal mail analogy would have been perfect: it's as if someone sent him a nasty letter and printed your address in the top-left corner of the envelope.
As for what to do with his PC... well, if he's just the typical "Facebook and email" user, install Debian or something and rename the desktop icons ("Internet", "Email", etc.). I put Ubuntu on my mom's netbook and she pesters me no more often than she does about her Windows PC.
I hope this trend spreads so that the incumbent telcos are left only with the choice to either make good on their 200 billion dollar "promise" or go screw themselves.
It's essentially the same to use as Ubuntu 10 -- the last version before all the Unity crap, crippled Gnome and spyware commercializing -- plus, the software and updates are carefully vetted and upgrades are not so annoyingly frequent. And, of course, there's none of this commercialization BS.
I've been running it in a VM to prepare for the switch and it will be soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Extortion, harassment, intimidation, racketeering, predatory litigation ... take your pick. I'm sure they're are several more I've forgotten.
Whatever was the problem with the standard BIOS that we've had for decades? Having the PC's most "hardware-near" firmware locked down only to run code permitted by a third party seems like an extremely bad idea. The whole point of a computer is that it obeys MY instructions blindly and perfectly.
I know, I've heard the argument for security, but has anyone ever even seen real, actual BIOS malware? As far as I'm concerned, that only exists in theory.
This trend has been rearing its ugly head for a while, but Nikon is known to be particularly bad.
They are extremely stingy with their warranty policies and will try at every opportunity to invalidate your warranty using any excuse they can find.
Buy that lens in the US and you live in Canada (never mind that they're exactly the same product)? Get that camera repaired or even just cleaned at a reputable but not officially recognized business? Ever use a third party battery or accessory? They will seriously use these excuses to invalidate your *entire* warranty.
Optical drives are on the way out? Good riddance. I'm tired of those slow, cumbersome wastes of space.
Any software that isn't delivered as a download (and most of it is these days) should be on a USB drive. And it should have been like this for years already.
Cloud? By the time something like that rolls out, we'll have storage that is capacious, cheap and fast enough to manage all your data without any of this cloud BS.
So, you think a good alternative to a VOIP provider that we suspect may be a threat to privacy is a VOIP provider that we KNOW actively collects, logs, reports and sells our search results?
I'm sure that alternatives like jitsi, Retroshare and other open source options work just as well or better, but, unfortunately, the network effect creates a huge barrier.
Are *you* able to convince your family, friends, co-workers, colleagues, classmates, acquaintances ... all to use some other VOIP solution because it's open source and can better guarantee privacy? Do you think they even give a crap when they'll gladly sign away their privacy for Facebook?
Seriously, how did they not think to just offer an HD package as an additional tier of service at a higher price?
Is it really easier to jump over all the regulatory hurdles, setup all the negotiations and deal with all that lawyering around than it is to say, "here's an option for HD streaming for an additional $X/month"?
Somehow, I doubt that and it causes me to wonder if there isn't something nefarious going on here.
Other than it's actual effectiveness, I guess, I really like MSE for its clean, no-nonsense UI -- as opposed to every other AV software maker has elected to use some batshit redarted-ass UI that changes on a daily basis because AV software is otherwise boring and unglamourous.
1) not everyone can afford or even has access to enough bandwidth for steaming.
2) many of us are philosophically disinclined to allowing a third party to expropriate our computers -- our property -- in some strong-armed "agreement" in which we had no negotiations.
3) the selection nearly always sucks, *especially* if you're outside the US. There is no excuse for this in the digital, hyper-connected age.
Seriously, the studios could solve this with such a trivial effort: just offer us DRM-free xvid/mp4/mkv/whatever files for a few bucks a pop and it'll be way too cheap and easy for most people to bother with piracy.
What is needed is good mapping software that actually allows you to download vectors, POIs, etc. for entire selected regions onto the SD card or internal memory.
Osmand technically does this, but it's slow, awkward and the data is incomplete.
Google has been talking about offering this for a while, but I have yet to see anything come to fruition.
Garmin, TomTom and the other usual suspects don't appear to be offering anything other than some lame "connect your smartphone to your GPS device and do pointless stuff" software, but that's not really surprising; a full-fledged, all-in-the-phone mapping and navigation software would cannibalize much their core business.
Sorry, but there are mounds of evidence as to why the death penalty is not a deterrent (ie.: crimes of passion, psychological studies that show humans are *really* bad at thinking ahead and considering consequences ) and as long as there a still a chance of wrongful conviction, I won't stand for mandated state murder. Not to mention killing is morally wrong no matter what the context or circumstances.
I will happily see my tax dollars spent (and even increased) to incarcerate truly haneous offenders as long as is necessary.
Ha, I thought precisely the same thing as I parsed the headline.
It's interesting to see how they've gone from hated, wanted outlaws to (at least in my mind) maybe-they're-not-so-bad...
Funny you should ask...
Agreed, this is exactly what I do as well. Desktop running Ubuntu with a big hard drive or multiple external drives (make symlinks to all the drives, the share the parent folder of the symlinks).
Plus, this way, you can setup any number of cool uses, like dynamic DNS for a web server, SSH for remote access to get around pesky filters at hotels or what-have-you, maybe even remote streaming of your media, if your connection can handle it.
This seems to be addressing a problem that doesn't exist. The only thing SecureBoot appears to be "securing" is vendor lock-in.
No thank-you, please go away.
The hiberfile.sys attack won't work with TrueCrypt full disk or system encryption for Windows: the hibernation file itself is encrypted, as it's stored in the encrypted system partion.
TrueCrypt replaces the Windows boot loader with its own and requires the key to decrypt the system upon awakening.
So, if the computer is off or hibernated, they'll access the hiberfile ... how?
No, you need to find a business model that doesn't rely on creating an artificial scarcity for something that is necessarily infinite.
Complain all you will that it's not how you want to make a living, but you're no different than the vaudeville performers who bitched and moaned about those newfangled "radios" that relegated them to driving taxis and flipping burgers, because they were good stage performers but lousy musicians.
Can't come soon enough.
This really gets my blood boiling. Any carrier that sells "tethering" (which is just virtual router software) as an added-cost feature is a lying, scamming piece of shit and they know it.
Really, you could have just said, "my uncle uses AOL," and that would have explained everything.
Joking aside, why did you use the telephone analogy? It's email, a postal mail analogy would have been perfect: it's as if someone sent him a nasty letter and printed your address in the top-left corner of the envelope.
As for what to do with his PC ... well, if he's just the typical "Facebook and email" user, install Debian or something and rename the desktop icons ("Internet", "Email", etc.). I put Ubuntu on my mom's netbook and she pesters me no more often than she does about her Windows PC.
That's modern
medicine. Advances that keep
people alive that should have died
along time ago, back when they
lost what made them people.
I hope this trend spreads so that the incumbent telcos are left only with the choice to either make good on their 200 billion dollar "promise" or go screw themselves.
Huh, I didn't detect even a hint of sarcasm there. It's like you're unaware that chemotherapy is actually poison pumped directly into the bloodstream.
It's essentially the same to use as Ubuntu 10 -- the last version before all the Unity crap, crippled Gnome and spyware commercializing -- plus, the software and updates are carefully vetted and upgrades are not so annoyingly frequent. And, of course, there's none of this commercialization BS.
I've been running it in a VM to prepare for the switch and it will be soon.