Debian Stable is the closest Debian has to an equivalent of Ubuntu's LTS release. Debian Testing's about a Ubuntu 'normal'.
But the two distros work in different ways, the comparison's not that cut-and-dried, since LTS releases are just normal releases with long support times.
Debian Stable is unchanging in featureset for its lifetime, Debian Testing is the testing for the next Stable, and Debian Unstable is where the changes to be tested are made.
As I understand it, Ubuntu 'freezes' a mirror of Debian testing, prettifies it, and releases it as Ubuntu. This is grossly under-representing Ubuntu's contribution, but is sort-of accurate in principle
From my side, there are two factors at play. First, I get a notice via email that then requires _manual processing_. This means that the cost of providing you service, just suddenly went up because now a _person_ has to get involved in your internet service and do something in order to comply with the law.
Is the ISP legally obliged to ensure its users don't do illegal things?
If so, I'd have expected more ISPs to run similar operations.
Why do YOUR illegal activities have to cost ME money? Where do you get off thinking you can just go do as you please without there being consequences? We are not going to protect you, and you better get used to the idea that you WILL NOT engage in this behavior without there being risk to you.
On the contrary, surely it is entirely acceptable that those people making legitimate use of your network costs you some of the money you charge them for that use?
(that cost being that which you spend on determining whether this suspected thief is actually thieving)
Secondly, file sharers use a disproportionate share of bandwidth as compared to legal and legit users, and cutting their asses off has a positive benifical effect on the network.
This is fine. And I wish ISPs would just say that they're overselling their resources rather than pretending that anyone who wants access to the services they thought they signed up to is stealing music.
I consider p2p users to be undesireable customers anyways, and so when they get caught and reported to me, I use that opportunity to engage in some education about the teeth in my terms of service. Yes, cutting people off has quite an immediate and therapeutic effect on their behavior, they will behave as we proscribe in the ToS which means not using the service to break the law, and if it happens that they don't like that policy they still get to pay their early termination fee and if there is no other choice where they live, well thats just too damm bad.
One point of contention in the article is that these people are getting cut off on nothing more than an assumption that they must be pirating stuff since they're using P2P.
This is like arresting people leaving hardware shops with crowbars on the grounds that they're going to burgle houses.
Blah blah.... I'm closed minded and choose to judge people based on prejudice rather than by their own actions. Therefore MicroSoft is and always will be an evil company
I know it's hard for the FOSS zealots and Microsoft haters but really, it is possible that Microsoft might be changing, personally I think it's been happening for a few years. The company culture seems much less predatory and hostile nowadays for the most part - there are still some shitty things and people for sure but it takes a long time to change a company of that size.
And, if they are changing, it takes a long time to reverse a reputation as bad as the one they have.
They should be commended for trying, rather than insulting for simply existing. Encourage companies when they do what's good rather than hate them no matter what and they might be encouraged to follow the good path rather than simply change their mind for getting flack no matter what they do.
MS have a long and distinguished history of fucking people over. It will take a long time of them specifically not fucking people over for people to stop expecting anything MS announce to have ulterior motives.
In much the same way as those people suspicious of MS cannot expect a turnaround in the attitude of the company overnight, you cannot realistically expect an overnight turnaround in the way Microsoft is perceived.
I'm no MS hater. I know they've done a pretty big bunch of good things, and, as a Linux user I'm relishing (and, admittedly slightly worried by) the substantial increase in quality from them recently. IE and Office are two bits of MS software that have come on leaps and bounds in the past few years. But I still viewed everything they release with some suspicion because for so many years that has been the most appropriate thing to do. And for several years into the future, the MS I know is going to be the one that one should be suspicious of. Maybe they are changing, but they'll have to change dramatically and far to realistically win people over into thinking they're working for the good of anyone but themselves.
I've not used the FF3.5 installer, but the FF3 one had a checkbox in the installer for it. If they've dropped this for FF3.5, that's a Bad Thing IMO, but I don't think the design of the FF3.5 installer is something likely to gain much news coverage...
What I'm asking is this: What makes it a monopoly?
I guess Microsoft is the biggest OS retailer on computers, but what's a computer?
Biggest OS retailer on PCs. Ignoring the notion that a mac isn't a PC (are modern 'PCs' any closer to an IBM PC than a wintel mac?), MS do have the vast bulk of the market on desktop and laptop personal computers.
This is where they have a monopoly. The issue, in general, though, is less that they have the monopoly than that they abuse the fact they have one.
But what about MP3 players? I confess I do not know the figures for sure, but when I walk down the street it seems 90% of portable music players are iPods.
In my experience it's far closer to 50%. But, again, I've no idea of the true figures.
When you installed Firefox, you specifically sought out the installer, downloaded it and ran it. It's quite a reasonable assumption there that you'd like to use it as your default browser.
i put into account my minimum wage is at least 6euro's, put that over the time it costs to download 3 to 8 hours it's too expensive after about 2 hours. the same goes for subscription movies, it's a fucking waste of my money as its cheaper time wise to just get the dvd..
It's a waste of time to sit there waiting for it to download, sure.
Mine download in the background while I'm doing other things, mostly while I'm asleep. The total time expended on that activity is likely less than 10 minutes to find the torrent and initiate the download. That's 1euro for a film, which is certainly pretty cheap compared to what we pay in the UK.
GPS is nice, but technology can break down, and when there's road construction going on that you don't know about you're pretty much screwed.
What? No. You go round the roadworks and it calculates another route. You don't even need to tell it to.
And if my £60 TomTom has a 'roadblock' feature, I'd be surprised if many others don't.
I never understood why a TomTom or similar device has to display a map of the surroundings of the vehicle. It distracts from the driving and it's useless unless you know where you are, in which case you don't need the TomTom anyway. You only need the voice.
I tried following just the voice commands for a bit, and couldn't get myself to the point where I trusted myself to be correctly following the instructions. I don't think I did anything wrong in that time, but every turning felt like a bit of a gamble.
In contrast, a quick look at the screen with a map on it and I can see the context of the junction. So I know that I've got to turn left here but 20 feet down the road I want to turn right, say. Or that this little road on the left isn't actually the 'next left' the satnav wants me to go down.
I'm also appalling at counting roundabout exits (though I tend to give directions using them), and work better off knowing which direction I'm going to be leaving in, where, again, the map comes in handy.
In general, I find the voice mostly useless, so turn it off, and just use the map with the arrows at the bottom. I do tend to have a reasonable idea of where I'm going, though - I'll have researched the route and at the very least recognise towns I'm going to be going through or towards.
Irrespective of how they got there, MS are in a damned-if-they-do,-damned-if-they-don't position at the minute, much as they were with IE8.
It is widely acknowledged that WinXP is insecure by default. Sure, it's possible to make it more secure, but the vast bulk of its userbase don't.
MS are therefore, quite rightly, under pressure to remove the insecure WinXP installs from the internet. They can go one of two ways:
1) Force updates to XP that make it more secure. Aside from flogging a bit of a dead horse, this would just lead to less and less well integrated updates. XP was never intended to be significantly changed by updates, that's just not the way Windows works. And users neither expect nor want an update to suddenly rob them of the ability to run as an administrator.
2) Force users to upgrade from XP to a newer OS. This gets everyone on a more recently designed OS, which actually follows some kind of security principles, reduces the need to develop things for multiple Windows platforms (software, training, support) and makes it easier for MS to keep up with updates (two products rather than three).
MS were, IMO, uncharacteristically 'nice' in their acceptance that everyone would rather have XP than Vista, and so let people carry on with XP. From what I gather, there is far wider support for Windows 7 than there was for Vista, and MS seem to have fixed a lot of the things they broke with Vista.
I can understand the distaste at allowing downgrades to Vista, but I really can't understand a desire to keep XP boxes going any longer than is absolutely necessary.
It's a tiny, tiny fraction of what is spent on the DOD and for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Exactly what "return" are we getting on our "investment" there?
Friendly customers, one of which has some oil.
Depending on how you perceive it, either they're set to be rapidly-developing countries that feel a debt to the US for it's freedom, or a pair of countries with puppet governments installed that will always side with US industry.
Either way, there's a return on an investment there. No comments on the means being justified by the ends, but you've got to admit there's clearly scope for *some* return from those two countries. And there's the obvious benefits war always gives to technology.
Though the screens are getting better, many people find it much easier to read off paper than a monitor, including people who've grown up with computers, so I don't think it's a habit thing.
And all my textbooks are full of annotations, I can't imagine there's a piece of software that makes it easier than quickly scrawling/drawing in the margin of a book, without me having to go out and acquaint myself with a tablet of some sort.
Slashdot Mirror
The release in the Southern Hemisphere has an extra six-months of bug squishing.
Er, ish.
Debian Stable is the closest Debian has to an equivalent of Ubuntu's LTS release. Debian Testing's about a Ubuntu 'normal'.
But the two distros work in different ways, the comparison's not that cut-and-dried, since LTS releases are just normal releases with long support times.
Debian Stable is unchanging in featureset for its lifetime, Debian Testing is the testing for the next Stable, and Debian Unstable is where the changes to be tested are made.
As I understand it, Ubuntu 'freezes' a mirror of Debian testing, prettifies it, and releases it as Ubuntu. This is grossly under-representing Ubuntu's contribution, but is sort-of accurate in principle
Is the ISP legally obliged to ensure its users don't do illegal things? If so, I'd have expected more ISPs to run similar operations.
On the contrary, surely it is entirely acceptable that those people making legitimate use of your network costs you some of the money you charge them for that use? (that cost being that which you spend on determining whether this suspected thief is actually thieving)
This is fine. And I wish ISPs would just say that they're overselling their resources rather than pretending that anyone who wants access to the services they thought they signed up to is stealing music.
One point of contention in the article is that these people are getting cut off on nothing more than an assumption that they must be pirating stuff since they're using P2P. This is like arresting people leaving hardware shops with crowbars on the grounds that they're going to burgle houses.
And I presume the 3G coverage map hit /. the other week, so that's a bit of a no-no for a Hull resident, too.
This is exactly not what I said.
And, if they are changing, it takes a long time to reverse a reputation as bad as the one they have.
MS have a long and distinguished history of fucking people over. It will take a long time of them specifically not fucking people over for people to stop expecting anything MS announce to have ulterior motives. In much the same way as those people suspicious of MS cannot expect a turnaround in the attitude of the company overnight, you cannot realistically expect an overnight turnaround in the way Microsoft is perceived. I'm no MS hater. I know they've done a pretty big bunch of good things, and, as a Linux user I'm relishing (and, admittedly slightly worried by) the substantial increase in quality from them recently. IE and Office are two bits of MS software that have come on leaps and bounds in the past few years. But I still viewed everything they release with some suspicion because for so many years that has been the most appropriate thing to do. And for several years into the future, the MS I know is going to be the one that one should be suspicious of. Maybe they are changing, but they'll have to change dramatically and far to realistically win people over into thinking they're working for the good of anyone but themselves.
I've not used the FF3.5 installer, but the FF3 one had a checkbox in the installer for it. If they've dropped this for FF3.5, that's a Bad Thing IMO, but I don't think the design of the FF3.5 installer is something likely to gain much news coverage...
Isn't half the point of a computer that you don't need to pay such a price for being lazy?
Biggest OS retailer on PCs. Ignoring the notion that a mac isn't a PC (are modern 'PCs' any closer to an IBM PC than a wintel mac?), MS do have the vast bulk of the market on desktop and laptop personal computers.
This is where they have a monopoly. The issue, in general, though, is less that they have the monopoly than that they abuse the fact they have one.
In my experience it's far closer to 50%. But, again, I've no idea of the true figures.
When you installed Firefox, you specifically sought out the installer, downloaded it and ran it. It's quite a reasonable assumption there that you'd like to use it as your default browser.
This is not the case with routine system updates.
That's been my plan thus far.
I've no idea what it'll do if I upgrade to it, so I'm sticking with IE6 on my PC, and IE7 on everyone else's.
My understanding is that this is not so much about individual users as it is about the market.
No, I don't see how shipping without IE helps anyone.
Yeah, that'd be why the EU hasn't ordered MS to do anything until they have finished looking into whether MS is committing a crime or not.
It's a waste of time to sit there waiting for it to download, sure.
Mine download in the background while I'm doing other things, mostly while I'm asleep. The total time expended on that activity is likely less than 10 minutes to find the torrent and initiate the download. That's 1euro for a film, which is certainly pretty cheap compared to what we pay in the UK.
What? No. You go round the roadworks and it calculates another route. You don't even need to tell it to.
And if my £60 TomTom has a 'roadblock' feature, I'd be surprised if many others don't.
I tried following just the voice commands for a bit, and couldn't get myself to the point where I trusted myself to be correctly following the instructions. I don't think I did anything wrong in that time, but every turning felt like a bit of a gamble. In contrast, a quick look at the screen with a map on it and I can see the context of the junction. So I know that I've got to turn left here but 20 feet down the road I want to turn right, say. Or that this little road on the left isn't actually the 'next left' the satnav wants me to go down. I'm also appalling at counting roundabout exits (though I tend to give directions using them), and work better off knowing which direction I'm going to be leaving in, where, again, the map comes in handy. In general, I find the voice mostly useless, so turn it off, and just use the map with the arrows at the bottom. I do tend to have a reasonable idea of where I'm going, though - I'll have researched the route and at the very least recognise towns I'm going to be going through or towards.
Yeah. And it didn't go round corners, either.
A BFG9000, then?
Exactly.
Irrespective of how they got there, MS are in a damned-if-they-do,-damned-if-they-don't position at the minute, much as they were with IE8.
It is widely acknowledged that WinXP is insecure by default. Sure, it's possible to make it more secure, but the vast bulk of its userbase don't.
MS are therefore, quite rightly, under pressure to remove the insecure WinXP installs from the internet. They can go one of two ways:
1) Force updates to XP that make it more secure. Aside from flogging a bit of a dead horse, this would just lead to less and less well integrated updates. XP was never intended to be significantly changed by updates, that's just not the way Windows works. And users neither expect nor want an update to suddenly rob them of the ability to run as an administrator.
2) Force users to upgrade from XP to a newer OS. This gets everyone on a more recently designed OS, which actually follows some kind of security principles, reduces the need to develop things for multiple Windows platforms (software, training, support) and makes it easier for MS to keep up with updates (two products rather than three).
MS were, IMO, uncharacteristically 'nice' in their acceptance that everyone would rather have XP than Vista, and so let people carry on with XP. From what I gather, there is far wider support for Windows 7 than there was for Vista, and MS seem to have fixed a lot of the things they broke with Vista.
I can understand the distaste at allowing downgrades to Vista, but I really can't understand a desire to keep XP boxes going any longer than is absolutely necessary.
You can do it with a CD now.
Then you get the browser the same way you get the drivers to make the network card work - a USB stick and someone else's working PC.
No, but when he stops stealing TVs you generally stop getting the police to watch him.
Friendly customers, one of which has some oil.
Depending on how you perceive it, either they're set to be rapidly-developing countries that feel a debt to the US for it's freedom, or a pair of countries with puppet governments installed that will always side with US industry.
Either way, there's a return on an investment there. No comments on the means being justified by the ends, but you've got to admit there's clearly scope for *some* return from those two countries. And there's the obvious benefits war always gives to technology.
Though the screens are getting better, many people find it much easier to read off paper than a monitor, including people who've grown up with computers, so I don't think it's a habit thing. And all my textbooks are full of annotations, I can't imagine there's a piece of software that makes it easier than quickly scrawling/drawing in the margin of a book, without me having to go out and acquaint myself with a tablet of some sort.
This is why publishers love it, though.