Why do I want multiple Firewire ports standard? I don't have a single thing that uses Firewire. If I did (and one port weren't sufficient), I can buy a PCI(e) or PCMCIA card.
The thing with Apple is that they tend to give you everything you might need up front, rather than keeping costs low and letting you upgrade to the things you need. Sure, if you start with the Mac pro as your base and bring up other systems to match, the Mac pro may be less expensive, but I'd probably have everything I needed on a PC well before its specs rivaled that of a Mac pro.
As far as your argument on an sibling post about poor drivers and companies going under: if you buy the cheapest cards on the market this might be a concern, but you can buy expansion cards from reputable companies. Many OEMs (Dell, Hp, etc.) offer various expansion cards. I would expect their expansion cards work well with the systems they build, and these companies have five times as many sales as apple, so I don't see them going under any time soon.
Google may not be offering access to censored information, but they're still offering access to some information. They have less access to information than the rest of the world, but it's easier to access the information they do have.
As I see it, Google has two options. Comply with the government's censorship demands, or stop doing business in the country. Neither of these does the citizens of China any good. If they comply with the censorship demands, there is still a lot of information that can be delivered to the people of China. It may not give them information for a revolution, but it can still add a lot of value to people's lives.
Yeah, if Google leaves China, it hurts their bottom line. But in what world does Google leaving China benefit the citizens of China?
You state that "The family is in a situation where proof of accidental death would change how this was viewed in terms of paying for parts of the funeral." I assume this means there is some kind of life insurance policy or other legal entity that will pay for the funeral if it is found to be an accident.
Anything you find in his computer will likely be inadmissible if you have to take a company to court. My advice would be to hire a lawyer before you even touch his computer. If they feel it's appropriate, they can hire a licensed expert to search through that information. With the nature of digital information, anything you find on his system could just as easily have been forged by you as found by you.
The other thing to consider, is what evidence could you find? If he did in fact commit suicide, you may find a suicide note, that he visited suicide related websites, or some kind of correspondence with someone regarding suicide. He also might have covered his tracks.
If this turned out to be an accident, what evidence could you possibly find on his computer? You may find a calendar indicating he had plans for later in the week, but it's my understanding that when men commit suicide it's often a compulsion, and not something they planned out very far ahead of time.
If the family simply wants to know, you can find quite a bit of information on someone's computer. If this is to try and claim money in a court of law, the search needs to be done by a professional, but I have my doubts that a professional could prove anything other than suicide.
Do you have any idea at what point you get charged with obstruction of justice? Suppose the police come barreling through your front door (presumably with a warrant) and demand you give them the keys for your hard drive. Can you plead the fifth at the time, and hand over the keys only after a judge's order (and consulting a lawyer)? Or is it obstruction of justice to postpone obeying the police until you've had legal council?
Computrace has contacts with a variety of ISPs and law enforcement agencies. If the stolen laptop connects to the internet and reports it's IP address to Computrace, they will guarantee its return up to a certain amount.
That said, I have a friend who's LoJack secured laptop was stolen. He was under the impression that his computer was guaranteed up to $1,000 because it had LoJack on it. Turns out that since the thief didn't connect it to the internet within 30 days of stealing it, the guarantee didn't apply.
While I do think your odds of recovering a laptop are significantly improved if you pay the $50/year for LoJack, I agree that the more practical solution is to encrypt your hard drive, back up your data, and save the rest for a replacement.
I run one monitor at 1280x800, the other at 1280x1024. Admittedly it took some minor edits to xorg.conf, and a five line script to switch between single screen and dual screen, but it's certainly possible. Here is a brief tutorial.
This is one of the areas that Ubuntu has the most room for improvement. I'm hoping that Hardy will resolve some of the problems.
I've never had a laptop that I couldn't get wireless working on under Ubuntu. Back when I started using Ubuntu, it took a good hour of fiddling with ndiswrapper to get my Broadcom card working. As of Edgy (an old enough distribution that its support cycle is coming to an end), my broadcom card worked out of the box.
As a sibling post has stated, the LiveCD has some wireless issues, but it's been a while since I've seen problems on an installed system.
Apple might have trouble suing a user who bought a boxed copy of Leopard and installed it on a PC, but they should have little problem demonstrating that Psystar was aware of the license and deliberately violated it.
Seriously. I started reading the article, noticing that the site kept trying to access more and more ad servers. (I assume that since I use flash block it was finding that the Ad had not loaded, and continued looking for another one). Suddenly it forwarded me to a porn site, which I promptly closed.
Step 1: Do the bare minimum to get XP drivers to run on Windows.
Step 2: Have some third party get the rest of the features working for free.
Step 3: Ban the third party's work.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
It's been a while since I've seen a laptop without one. Generally laptops have the 4 pin Firewire ports, rather than the readily recognizable 6 pin ones.
Yes, but did you suck the content from the site nearest the requesting user? This patent doesn't cover pulling content from somewhere other than the server that offered the HTML document, it covers algorithms that determine which server is best able to provide content to a particular user.
Adobe AIR 1.0 will not be available on Linux. We plan to release Linux support shortly after the 1.0. release.
While we had originally planned to support Linux in the 1.0 timeframe, we have had to wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized.
So it sounds like they've been working on improving Flash as well.
Personally, I haven't had problems with Flash on Linux since they released version 9. I've run it on an x86 and a 64 bit processor using nswrapperplugin. I've had no problems with sound nor video scaling.
Except QTFairuse6 ripped the AAC frames from memory and put them in a DRM free container - no re-encoding necessary, and the resulting file has identical quality to the original sans DRM. This is more akin to pouring small orange juice containers into one larger jug to save space. (I believe Orange Juice is less effected by transitions than is soda).
http://truecrypt.org/ and similar tools may be of use. Not only can you protect an arbitrary volume with tc, you can hide another container inside it in a truly undetectable way.
I have a Truecrypt volume that hides my financial information. I use GnuCash on Linux, and was somewhat bothered by the fact that it offered on way to protect your financial data (something I consider fairly sensitive). So I set up a script that initiates truecrypt which then asks me for a password. Once the volume has mounted, it runs GnuCash. When GnuCash terminates, it runs truecrypt again to dismount the volume.
The volume is 630 MB, and every few months I back it up to a CD. The idea behind making a 630 MB volume for 2 MB worth of data is that if anyone finds the CD, they'll see that it's mostly full of an encrypted volume. They have no idea whether the content is financial information, porn, pirated media, etc. If I'd made a 5 MB volume, the possibilities are greatly reduced.
Still, it concerns me that someday I might find myself in legal trouble, and a search of my laptop will reveal a greatly over sized encrypted volume. I'll have no problem providing the password if a warrant is issued, but if the forensic experts are aware of Truecrypt's hidden volume capability, I have no proof that there is no hidden volume. I suppose that's the point of hidden volumes, but it seems like a double edged sword of using truecrypt.
My guess is that Sun is going to "optimize" MySQL for their hardware - then they will be able to "bundle" MySQL software/Sun hardware
But why did they have to pay a billion dollars to do that? MySQL being open source, couldn't they have done that without paying for mysql? I assume, they would have had to start with the open source version instead of the enterprise version, but I'm guessing it would have cost less than $1,000,000,000.
I've found that people often have that cynical view of Open Source, and I typically have a hard time explaining why quality software is free. But since FOSS doesn't cost anything and I assure them there are no viruses, people tend to be pretty willing to try it out if they think they can save $20/$60/$100 on a proprietary program, and once they've tried it, they tend to change their tune.
Also, I keep portable versions of several programs on my flash drive, so if there's a computer handy I can show the program in question without even having to install it on their computer.
I've learned that trying to convince someone who is happy with their software that they need to switch will be fruitless.
- When people are having problems with IE, I promote Firefox.
- When people are buying a new computer, I encourage them to try OpenOffice before buying MS Office. I've had several people try it and stick with it.
- When people complain about the loud ads in AIM, or having to run 4 different programs for AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo, I promote Pidgin.
- When someone wants to do some photo editing, but can't afford to shell out the cash for Photoshop, I suggest they try the Gimp. Nobody seems to like it, but they get their work done.
- When somebody can't get a media file to run, I suggest they try out VLC.
I have portable versions of all of the above (and then some) on my flash drive, so I can show people what I'm talking about if there's a computer nearby.
Once somebody is using most of the above software on Windows, I might suggest they try Linux if they voice a complaint about Windows (viruses, activation issues, slow boot time, bogged down system, etc.). I've gotten two people to try it out, one stuck with it, the other got a Mac.
There may be better promoters than my self, but I've found that if you're trying to push software (Free or not) on people who don't want it, they'll resist and you'll end up looking like an ass.
HDTV is generally defined by the resolution (at least 720p). ATSC is a broadcast method which can include HDTV, but can also include resolutions as low as 480i. HDTV may imply ATSC, but your earlier post made it sound like using DTV implied a resolution of at least 720p, which isn't the case.
So my current license expired in 2015, but thansk to this I have to get a new one a year early....
You think that's bad:
I'm a Kansas resident attending school out of state. Kansas recently adopted this great law that says all state-issued drivers licenses will expire on the resident's 21st birthday, and cannot be renewed early. When the bill first passed, you were required to come in on your 21st birthday to renew. If your 21st birthday is on a weekend, you can come in early and request a 15 day extension. This is a huge inconvenience for people like me, who would have to skip a day of class to even be in Kansas within 15 days of my birthday.
Last summer, they updated the law to give a 45 day extension (no paperwork needs to be filed) to all residents whose licenses expire on their 21st birthday. At first I breathed a sigh of relief: I'd have my spring break within 45 days of my birthday, so I'd be able to renew. Then I realized that my license still says it expires on my birthday, and I have no proof to offer any police officer that might pull me over in that time. I assume a Kansas officer would be aware of the extension, but since I'm not in Kansas, that won't help me either. I ended up filing for a six month extension so I'll have paperwork to prove my license isn't expired.
While I'm certainly not fond of a required national ID, I have no pity that you have to renew a year early.
It's like if a construction company and Habitat for Humanity were working together on a project and came up with some really good design ideas, then the construction company, half-way through construction, takes every scrap of material and blueprints away from the job site and uses them to build houses for paying customers.
Except from what I can see, Intel didn't take the plans away, they copied them, refined them, and (perhaps to aggressively) marketed to the same market. Once Intel started encroaching on the territory of OLPC, Negroponte stopped doing business with them. I haven't seen anything to suggest that Intel was planning to yank the rug out from under the OLPC project, they were trying to get some of the same customers (and why should a non-profit organization mind if the customers meet their needs elsewhere?).
Perhaps I'm a tad biased. As a Linux user, I appreciate everything Intel does for my community. They give us solid wireless drivers, open source graphics drivers, and the fastest processors on the market. Until there's somebody who offers a better product, I'm going to be doing business with Intel. I don't feel that Intel was committing some grave sin by marketing to the same people as a not for profit, but maybe I'm just trying to justify.
really? Microsoft is helping the Mono folks port the entire MS.Net framework which is available to MS Silverlight on Windows? Don't answer because you are WRONG
Yes and no. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft is helping the Mono folks by providing:
- Microsoft test suites for silverlight.
- Silverlight specifications beyond those available on the web.
- Binary codecs for windows media audio and windows media video, only for use running within Moonlight within a webbrowser.
Further, Microsoft has offered this covenant to downstream recipients of Moonlight promising not to sue for patent infringement so long as they are only used within Moonlight to implement Silverlight compatibility.
It's a far stretch to say they're helping Mono to port the entire.NET library, or even that they're working ensure solid Silverlight compatibility, but I'm sure Microsoft's contributions and promises are appreciated by the Moonlight team.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Microsoft and I hope Silverlight adoption fails because I have a hard time imagining Microsoft not turning around and breaking compatibility with Moonlight every time Moonlight catches up. I would even agree that if Silverlight takes hold and becomes a de facto requirement for surfing the web, Microsoft ought to be hit with an anti-trust suit (unless Moonlight provides solid, consistent compatibility).
But I do favor accuracy, and the original poster's claim of "Only on IE on Windows" was horribly inaccurate. The parent's claim that I was "WRONG" about Microsoft's support for Moonlight was also inaccurate, though he at least seems to have a basis for his beliefs.
I know this is slashdot, but is it too much to ask that you do a quick search before making such assertions? I've found several sources (including Microsoft's download site) which indicate Silverlight is also available for Macs, and that it runs in IE, Firefox and Safari with Opera support on the way.
Further, Microsoft has supported development of the Moonlight runtime which will make Silverlight functionality available on Linux. This may be a case of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", but it's hardly accurate to say that it only runs on Windows in IE.
Selling the 700MHz spectrum doesn't require switching to HDTV in the slightest. Far from it... It's simply that it's easiest to eliminate the channels right now, while every station is already required to have two transmitters operating, and they can just switch to the one that isn't in the 700MHz range. Selling off 700MHz is a recent afterthought.
Who said anything about HDTV? This whole discussion is about the DTV Converter Boxes that people will have to buy because their analog TV sets no longer work without them.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing with Apple is that they tend to give you everything you might need up front, rather than keeping costs low and letting you upgrade to the things you need. Sure, if you start with the Mac pro as your base and bring up other systems to match, the Mac pro may be less expensive, but I'd probably have everything I needed on a PC well before its specs rivaled that of a Mac pro.
As far as your argument on an sibling post about poor drivers and companies going under: if you buy the cheapest cards on the market this might be a concern, but you can buy expansion cards from reputable companies. Many OEMs (Dell, Hp, etc.) offer various expansion cards. I would expect their expansion cards work well with the systems they build, and these companies have five times as many sales as apple, so I don't see them going under any time soon.
As I see it, Google has two options. Comply with the government's censorship demands, or stop doing business in the country. Neither of these does the citizens of China any good. If they comply with the censorship demands, there is still a lot of information that can be delivered to the people of China. It may not give them information for a revolution, but it can still add a lot of value to people's lives.
Yeah, if Google leaves China, it hurts their bottom line. But in what world does Google leaving China benefit the citizens of China?
Anything you find in his computer will likely be inadmissible if you have to take a company to court. My advice would be to hire a lawyer before you even touch his computer. If they feel it's appropriate, they can hire a licensed expert to search through that information. With the nature of digital information, anything you find on his system could just as easily have been forged by you as found by you.
The other thing to consider, is what evidence could you find? If he did in fact commit suicide, you may find a suicide note, that he visited suicide related websites, or some kind of correspondence with someone regarding suicide. He also might have covered his tracks.
If this turned out to be an accident, what evidence could you possibly find on his computer? You may find a calendar indicating he had plans for later in the week, but it's my understanding that when men commit suicide it's often a compulsion, and not something they planned out very far ahead of time.
If the family simply wants to know, you can find quite a bit of information on someone's computer. If this is to try and claim money in a court of law, the search needs to be done by a professional, but I have my doubts that a professional could prove anything other than suicide.
Do you have any idea at what point you get charged with obstruction of justice? Suppose the police come barreling through your front door (presumably with a warrant) and demand you give them the keys for your hard drive. Can you plead the fifth at the time, and hand over the keys only after a judge's order (and consulting a lawyer)? Or is it obstruction of justice to postpone obeying the police until you've had legal council?
That said, I have a friend who's LoJack secured laptop was stolen. He was under the impression that his computer was guaranteed up to $1,000 because it had LoJack on it. Turns out that since the thief didn't connect it to the internet within 30 days of stealing it, the guarantee didn't apply.
While I do think your odds of recovering a laptop are significantly improved if you pay the $50/year for LoJack, I agree that the more practical solution is to encrypt your hard drive, back up your data, and save the rest for a replacement.
I run one monitor at 1280x800, the other at 1280x1024. Admittedly it took some minor edits to xorg.conf, and a five line script to switch between single screen and dual screen, but it's certainly possible. Here is a brief tutorial.
This is one of the areas that Ubuntu has the most room for improvement. I'm hoping that Hardy will resolve some of the problems.
I've never had a laptop that I couldn't get wireless working on under Ubuntu. Back when I started using Ubuntu, it took a good hour of fiddling with ndiswrapper to get my Broadcom card working. As of Edgy (an old enough distribution that its support cycle is coming to an end), my broadcom card worked out of the box.
As a sibling post has stated, the LiveCD has some wireless issues, but it's been a while since I've seen problems on an installed system.
Apple might have trouble suing a user who bought a boxed copy of Leopard and installed it on a PC, but they should have little problem demonstrating that Psystar was aware of the license and deliberately violated it.
The original.
Seriously. I started reading the article, noticing that the site kept trying to access more and more ad servers. (I assume that since I use flash block it was finding that the Ad had not loaded, and continued looking for another one). Suddenly it forwarded me to a porn site, which I promptly closed.
Step 1: Do the bare minimum to get XP drivers to run on Windows.
Step 2: Have some third party get the rest of the features working for free.
Step 3: Ban the third party's work.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
It's been a while since I've seen a laptop without one. Generally laptops have the 4 pin Firewire ports, rather than the readily recognizable 6 pin ones.
Yes, but did you suck the content from the site nearest the requesting user? This patent doesn't cover pulling content from somewhere other than the server that offered the HTML document, it covers algorithms that determine which server is best able to provide content to a particular user.
Personally, I haven't had problems with Flash on Linux since they released version 9. I've run it on an x86 and a 64 bit processor using nswrapperplugin. I've had no problems with sound nor video scaling.
Except QTFairuse6 ripped the AAC frames from memory and put them in a DRM free container - no re-encoding necessary, and the resulting file has identical quality to the original sans DRM. This is more akin to pouring small orange juice containers into one larger jug to save space. (I believe Orange Juice is less effected by transitions than is soda).
I have a Truecrypt volume that hides my financial information. I use GnuCash on Linux, and was somewhat bothered by the fact that it offered on way to protect your financial data (something I consider fairly sensitive). So I set up a script that initiates truecrypt which then asks me for a password. Once the volume has mounted, it runs GnuCash. When GnuCash terminates, it runs truecrypt again to dismount the volume.
The volume is 630 MB, and every few months I back it up to a CD. The idea behind making a 630 MB volume for 2 MB worth of data is that if anyone finds the CD, they'll see that it's mostly full of an encrypted volume. They have no idea whether the content is financial information, porn, pirated media, etc. If I'd made a 5 MB volume, the possibilities are greatly reduced.
Still, it concerns me that someday I might find myself in legal trouble, and a search of my laptop will reveal a greatly over sized encrypted volume. I'll have no problem providing the password if a warrant is issued, but if the forensic experts are aware of Truecrypt's hidden volume capability, I have no proof that there is no hidden volume. I suppose that's the point of hidden volumes, but it seems like a double edged sword of using truecrypt.
But why did they have to pay a billion dollars to do that? MySQL being open source, couldn't they have done that without paying for mysql? I assume, they would have had to start with the open source version instead of the enterprise version, but I'm guessing it would have cost less than $1,000,000,000.
Also, I keep portable versions of several programs on my flash drive, so if there's a computer handy I can show the program in question without even having to install it on their computer.
- When people are having problems with IE, I promote Firefox.
- When people are buying a new computer, I encourage them to try OpenOffice before buying MS Office. I've had several people try it and stick with it.
- When people complain about the loud ads in AIM, or having to run 4 different programs for AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo, I promote Pidgin.
- When someone wants to do some photo editing, but can't afford to shell out the cash for Photoshop, I suggest they try the Gimp. Nobody seems to like it, but they get their work done.
- When somebody can't get a media file to run, I suggest they try out VLC.
I have portable versions of all of the above (and then some) on my flash drive, so I can show people what I'm talking about if there's a computer nearby.
Once somebody is using most of the above software on Windows, I might suggest they try Linux if they voice a complaint about Windows (viruses, activation issues, slow boot time, bogged down system, etc.). I've gotten two people to try it out, one stuck with it, the other got a Mac.
There may be better promoters than my self, but I've found that if you're trying to push software (Free or not) on people who don't want it, they'll resist and you'll end up looking like an ass.
HDTV is generally defined by the resolution (at least 720p). ATSC is a broadcast method which can include HDTV, but can also include resolutions as low as 480i. HDTV may imply ATSC, but your earlier post made it sound like using DTV implied a resolution of at least 720p, which isn't the case.
You think that's bad:
I'm a Kansas resident attending school out of state. Kansas recently adopted this great law that says all state-issued drivers licenses will expire on the resident's 21st birthday, and cannot be renewed early. When the bill first passed, you were required to come in on your 21st birthday to renew. If your 21st birthday is on a weekend, you can come in early and request a 15 day extension. This is a huge inconvenience for people like me, who would have to skip a day of class to even be in Kansas within 15 days of my birthday.
Last summer, they updated the law to give a 45 day extension (no paperwork needs to be filed) to all residents whose licenses expire on their 21st birthday. At first I breathed a sigh of relief: I'd have my spring break within 45 days of my birthday, so I'd be able to renew. Then I realized that my license still says it expires on my birthday, and I have no proof to offer any police officer that might pull me over in that time. I assume a Kansas officer would be aware of the extension, but since I'm not in Kansas, that won't help me either. I ended up filing for a six month extension so I'll have paperwork to prove my license isn't expired.
While I'm certainly not fond of a required national ID, I have no pity that you have to renew a year early.
Except from what I can see, Intel didn't take the plans away, they copied them, refined them, and (perhaps to aggressively) marketed to the same market. Once Intel started encroaching on the territory of OLPC, Negroponte stopped doing business with them. I haven't seen anything to suggest that Intel was planning to yank the rug out from under the OLPC project, they were trying to get some of the same customers (and why should a non-profit organization mind if the customers meet their needs elsewhere?).
Perhaps I'm a tad biased. As a Linux user, I appreciate everything Intel does for my community. They give us solid wireless drivers, open source graphics drivers, and the fastest processors on the market. Until there's somebody who offers a better product, I'm going to be doing business with Intel. I don't feel that Intel was committing some grave sin by marketing to the same people as a not for profit, but maybe I'm just trying to justify.
Yes and no. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft is helping the Mono folks by providing:
- Microsoft test suites for silverlight.
- Silverlight specifications beyond those available on the web.
- Binary codecs for windows media audio and windows media video, only for use running within Moonlight within a webbrowser.
Further, Microsoft has offered this covenant to downstream recipients of Moonlight promising not to sue for patent infringement so long as they are only used within Moonlight to implement Silverlight compatibility.
It's a far stretch to say they're helping Mono to port the entire .NET library, or even that they're working ensure solid Silverlight compatibility, but I'm sure Microsoft's contributions and promises are appreciated by the Moonlight team.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Microsoft and I hope Silverlight adoption fails because I have a hard time imagining Microsoft not turning around and breaking compatibility with Moonlight every time Moonlight catches up. I would even agree that if Silverlight takes hold and becomes a de facto requirement for surfing the web, Microsoft ought to be hit with an anti-trust suit (unless Moonlight provides solid, consistent compatibility).
But I do favor accuracy, and the original poster's claim of "Only on IE on Windows" was horribly inaccurate. The parent's claim that I was "WRONG" about Microsoft's support for Moonlight was also inaccurate, though he at least seems to have a basis for his beliefs.
I know this is slashdot, but is it too much to ask that you do a quick search before making such assertions? I've found several sources (including Microsoft's download site) which indicate Silverlight is also available for Macs, and that it runs in IE, Firefox and Safari with Opera support on the way.
Further, Microsoft has supported development of the Moonlight runtime which will make Silverlight functionality available on Linux. This may be a case of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", but it's hardly accurate to say that it only runs on Windows in IE.
Who said anything about HDTV? This whole discussion is about the DTV Converter Boxes that people will have to buy because their analog TV sets no longer work without them.