What happened, was likely that they installed it, booted windows to see if it was working and then were just going to burn something. And then the tumbnails at the top level were obviously child porn, and they reported it.
Nothing really creepy - if he had as much as installed a password, they wouldn't have been able to it. But the above doesn't look very creepy to me, and if they saw it - of course they should report it.
WHat's also at issue is that submitting a computer for repairs does not give the service people a blank check to read my email or browse through my vacation pictures. I fix my own machine, but I don't fix my car myself, and I expect the technician not to rummage through stuff I may have left in the boot, looking for thrills.
If he happens to see a corpse while e.g. replacing tires (e.g. because he'd look at the spare tire), I'd expect him to report it. Anything else is privacy taken way too far.
I don't know all the things Opera has, but here are some goodies from the latest opera beta:
Orders of magnitude more stable than Firefox 2.x on my mac. Firefox 2.x just starts drawing every page corrupted after a while. Firefox 3 beta2 hasn't done so yet
while it doesn't have flashblock (my favourite plugin), it does have a menu entry for enable/disable plugins. Flashblock is what I want (flash default off, turn on for specific sites like youtube), but the opera way is acceptable.
automatic syncing of bookmarks and "speed dial" - a slick way to get to frequently used sites often. An extra plus is that this can be synced to opera on my cell phone.
better zooming than firefox 2. It magnifies everything, not just the text. Firefox 3 catches up with this.
it's better at remembering passwords than firefox. It offers to remember more, and you don't have to tell it to remember the password until you're logged in. Firefox catches up with the last part, and does it even better. Still doesn't remember as many sites, though
Here are some of the things firefox are better at:
Handling some broken sites. Opera has better compliance with web standards, firefox is better at real sites coden in broken ways ("Internet? That must be the blue E"), like my Internet bank.
I'm addicted to key+numerical to switch between tabs, and don't like the opera shortcuts. Same goes for text edit widget
If you had a backdoor which allows you to access remote computers anywhere would you
a) Tell everyone that you can do it
b) Use some dummy keyloggers and malware to suggests that you can't do it
c) use it in a very limited manner, making sure you the obtained information is not disclosed directly in any way - just used to keep tabs on e.g. foreign nations or to point discreetly at other sources of information
Excepting the departures of Truly Useless People, those last two weeks are somebody's last chance to find out that which you don't know about that which you are about to inherit. I am so sick of watching stupid managers and stupid successors squander that invaluable last chance because they act like scorned girlfriends or just don't understand the true value of even people who would leave, and the undocumented knowledge they carry in their heads.
A really good manager shouldn't need it, unless the organization is very small. Making sure that no critical knowledge is contained just in a single person is a very important task - not just to minimize the damage when (not if) he quits, but also to be able to handle vacations, health issues, accidents, avoid impossibly large work loads wearing.
I happen to know different, I'm marrying one. Partly for that reason. In my opinion, it's rare for a maladjusted child to come from a home where the father works, and the mother cares for the children, but it's common for maladjusted children to be latch key kids with both parents working 2 jobs.
If one has a university education, it's a waste to just stay at home with the kids. Also, the kids will be better off in good kindergartens, with educated personnel and many similarly aged friends to play with.
As for being maladjusted... compare the US to Scandinavia. In Scandinavia, far more parents are working, and the crime rates are much, much lower than the US.
Given that "k" is _defined_ to be 1000, "M" 1E6, "G" 1E9 and so on and are generic prefixes, I don't think it should go through even if the courts weren't broken. The prefixes are used properly in computing when it comes to speed, weight, dimensions etc, memory is the bastard exception.
Here in Norway, Mac OS X costs 990 NOK (approx $185 USD). An upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Basic costs 1150 NOK (215 USD). That's crippleware, it doesn't even come with the standard graphical interface... for that, you need to pay 1895 NOK (352). That's almost twice the price of a MacOS X upgrade...
And if you really want to get ripped off: Upgrading to the full version (Ultimate) costs 3095 NOK (575 USD). That's the price that should be compared to the MacOS X upgrade. Purchasing it for a new system costs 4595 NOK... 852 USD. That's a ripoff for a consumer OS, and more than some computers.
Why else would a home user need 20/20 if they aren't uploading torrents?
Update picasaweb/.mac/flickr etc with personal photos, send emails with large attachments, upload to youtube, improving the experience while working from home on a VPN (saving documents to a server) are some samples of legitimate purposes benefiting from high bandwidth.
The hardware is flaky but pretty, and very expensive.
Good design, good quality at a price point which gives good value for money for those who appreciate that.
The real question is, if Apple got all of these people to start running a desktop UNIX, what can Linux do to follow that lead?
Here are a couple of issues that are important to me:
Suspend/resume. Just close the lid, and the system suspends/resumes correctly. I can't remember this working well on Linux ever.
hot pluggable displays - e.g. attach a projector for a meeting or continue the work started on the sub when you arrive at the office and attach to the docking station ("booh" to Apple for not having that) or a large screen on your laptop
media compatibility. Patents are evil, open source is good, but neither changes the fact that getting media to "just work" is a hassle on Linux. MP3, AAC, quicktime and more.
Apple badly needs a small tour unit that can come to between $800 and $1000 with a monitor!
Apple doesn't need to do this any more than BMW needs to cover the sub-$20000 price range for cars. Apple doesn't try to be all things to everyone, but target the premium market.
That said, the iMac starts at the high end of this price range, and comes with goodies that are often missing on cheaper computers - e.g. web cam, bluetooth, DVD burner. And it comes with the full version of the OS, which is often extra on Windows these days.
I'll join in with the chorus of "Bullshit" as to the position on Apple Customers. Apple Customers value Shiny, and will continue to swarm accordingly. Steve Jobs would have to release at least two and probably three gold-plated turds in a row before this would change noticably.
Actually, my belief is that we like "shiny"[1] and quality. The same way as a BMW or Bang and Olufsen customer expects both to be present. The trade off? By expecting a premium product, one is willing to pay a premium price as well.
The same Apple that has stuck with DD2-667 even on their high-end workstations, despite there being faster DDR2 clocks? Apple doesn't look like they're the type to cash in on the newest buzzword-tech, which is sometimes good, and sometimes bad (I do wish the Mac Pros would ship with something a tad faster than DDR2-667...)
The fact that it took two years to realize imminent failure disturbs my mind. The worst thing is that this coder might have been an Open Source enthusiast that I'd expect to know better.
Being an Open Source enthusiast doesn't immediately make you a good project manager. Those are two separate skillsets. Some are great both (Linus Torvalds, to give on example), but you'll also find coders who can't deal with constraints and will never finish anything if not pushed/prodded/guided the right way.
Of course, they only have to provide the source offer to their customers (or anyone they distribute the binaries to, e.g. trial downloads).
If I make modifications to a GPL program and sell it to company A, I have no obligation whatsoever to company B or person C. If A requests the source, however, they have the right to it.
Yes. The bug is that the audio system has any correlation whatsoever, however minor and imperceptible, with the frickin' network stack, and even moreso that this is expected.
Why? The principle - giving realtime priority or similar to processes processing multimedia - is sound (no pun intended originally...). Thus, if the multimedia process requires a lot of processing power, there will be less left to deal with other things, like networking.
There's no lost context or missing information. The facts are that MS is OK with the idea that an MP3 reduces your network throughput. There's really nothing else to say in the matter. That one admitted fact alone is enough to declare it defective by design.
I think most users would prefer flawless playblack of sound and video than full network bandwidth in resource starved situations. Why this happens with MP3s is strange, though - playing full HD video is a situation where there should be a larger expectation of this happening.
No flash doesn't really work anymore - unfortunately. For most of the purposes people are using it, it's just the wrong thing...
But fortunately, with FireFox, you can have your cake and eat it too - install the flash plugin and flashblock. Flashblock is an extension that will show an icon for all flash content, but will allow you to click on it to start the flash app if it's something you need. Sites can be whitelisted too, so that e.g. every youtube link will work, but the annoying commercials everywhere aren't shown.
You are so, so wrong. If a US company owns them, then they are subject to US law. This is to prevent US based companies from just setting up a shell and providing services to, say....Cuba or any other restricted country. There are countless examples of subsidiaries getting in trouble for things that are illegal in the US -- but not where their offices are.
Or the other way round... In Norway, denying services due to e.g. nationality is illegal. If a US owned company operating in Norway does not serve Cuban customers, they could face discrimination charges. As they should, US law should not apply here.
Why would they?
Yum is more capable then apt, already included. Apt doesn't work properly with 64 bit systems either, when done the Red Hat way: Colouring (which is very nice in some ways, and utterly messy in others...).
Ok, I'll give you that, but can you explain why this is the opposite trend in the PC hardware industry?
In the mid-80s, a game could often be something made in a couple of months by a single person. If it was a big game, maybe it had commissioned music. The price of those games were, adjusted for inflation, not much lower than today. Compare that to the huge teams making today's games... unlike computer hardware, most of the cost is for the labour (plus rights, where needed) and the cost of manufacturing going down won't help you a lot.
It does cost them some money to provide the service, of course.
I'm sure they've run surveys, tests and scenarios on what would happen if they dropped the subscription fee and just used a higher price instead. "I want it to be cheaper" will always be a statement many (potential) customers would support, that doesn't make the change profitable.
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What happened, was likely that they installed it, booted windows to see if it was working and then were just going to burn something. And then the tumbnails at the top level were obviously child porn, and they reported it.
Nothing really creepy - if he had as much as installed a password, they wouldn't have been able to it. But the above doesn't look very creepy to me, and if they saw it - of course they should report it.
WHat's also at issue is that submitting a computer for repairs does not give the service people a blank check to read my email or browse through my vacation pictures. I fix my own machine, but I don't fix my car myself, and I expect the technician not to rummage through stuff I may have left in the boot, looking for thrills.
If he happens to see a corpse while e.g. replacing tires (e.g. because he'd look at the spare tire), I'd expect him to report it. Anything else is privacy taken way too far.
I don't know all the things Opera has, but here are some goodies from the latest opera beta:
- Orders of magnitude more stable than Firefox 2.x on my mac. Firefox 2.x just starts drawing every page corrupted after a while. Firefox 3 beta2 hasn't done so yet
- while it doesn't have flashblock (my favourite plugin), it does have a menu entry for enable/disable plugins. Flashblock is what I want (flash default off, turn on for specific sites like youtube), but the opera way is acceptable.
- automatic syncing of bookmarks and "speed dial" - a slick way to get to frequently used sites often. An extra plus is that this can be synced to opera on my cell phone.
- better zooming than firefox 2. It magnifies everything, not just the text. Firefox 3 catches up with this.
- it's better at remembering passwords than firefox. It offers to remember more, and you don't have to tell it to remember the password until you're logged in. Firefox catches up with the last part, and does it even better. Still doesn't remember as many sites, though
Here are some of the things firefox are better at:, by flexibilizing the order
"Verbing weirds language" - CalvinIf you had a backdoor which allows you to access remote computers anywhere would you
c) use it in a very limited manner, making sure you the obtained information is not disclosed directly in any way - just used to keep tabs on e.g. foreign nations or to point discreetly at other sources of informationa) Tell everyone that you can do it
b) Use some dummy keyloggers and malware to suggests that you can't do it
Excepting the departures of Truly Useless People, those last two weeks are somebody's last chance to find out that which you don't know about that which you are about to inherit. I am so sick of watching stupid managers and stupid successors squander that invaluable last chance because they act like scorned girlfriends or just don't understand the true value of even people who would leave, and the undocumented knowledge they carry in their heads.
A really good manager shouldn't need it, unless the organization is very small. Making sure that no critical knowledge is contained just in a single person is a very important task - not just to minimize the damage when (not if) he quits, but also to be able to handle vacations, health issues, accidents, avoid impossibly large work loads wearing.
I happen to know different, I'm marrying one. Partly for that reason. In my opinion, it's rare for a maladjusted child to come from a home where the father works, and the mother cares for the children, but it's common for maladjusted children to be latch key kids with both parents working 2 jobs.
If one has a university education, it's a waste to just stay at home with the kids. Also, the kids will be better off in good kindergartens, with educated personnel and many similarly aged friends to play with.
As for being maladjusted... compare the US to Scandinavia. In Scandinavia, far more parents are working, and the crime rates are much, much lower than the US.
Given that "k" is _defined_ to be 1000, "M" 1E6, "G" 1E9 and so on and are generic prefixes, I don't think it should go through even if the courts weren't broken. The prefixes are used properly in computing when it comes to speed, weight, dimensions etc, memory is the bastard exception.
Here in Norway, Mac OS X costs 990 NOK (approx $185 USD). An upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Basic costs 1150 NOK (215 USD). That's crippleware, it doesn't even come with the standard graphical interface... for that, you need to pay 1895 NOK (352). That's almost twice the price of a MacOS X upgrade...
And if you really want to get ripped off: Upgrading to the full version (Ultimate) costs 3095 NOK (575 USD). That's the price that should be compared to the MacOS X upgrade. Purchasing it for a new system costs 4595 NOK... 852 USD. That's a ripoff for a consumer OS, and more than some computers.
Sabotaging the free market like that should be illegal - including things like DVD regions.
Why else would a home user need 20/20 if they aren't uploading torrents?
Update picasaweb/.mac/flickr etc with personal photos, send emails with large attachments, upload to youtube, improving the experience while working from home on a VPN (saving documents to a server) are some samples of legitimate purposes benefiting from high bandwidth.
The hardware is flaky but pretty, and very expensive.
Good design, good quality at a price point which gives good value for money for those who appreciate that.
The real question is, if Apple got all of these people to start running a desktop UNIX, what can Linux do to follow that lead?
Here are a couple of issues that are important to me:
Apple badly needs a small tour unit that can come to between $800 and $1000 with a monitor!
Apple doesn't need to do this any more than BMW needs to cover the sub-$20000 price range for cars. Apple doesn't try to be all things to everyone, but target the premium market.
That said, the iMac starts at the high end of this price range, and comes with goodies that are often missing on cheaper computers - e.g. web cam, bluetooth, DVD burner. And it comes with the full version of the OS, which is often extra on Windows these days.
I'll join in with the chorus of "Bullshit" as to the position on Apple Customers. Apple Customers value Shiny, and will continue to swarm accordingly. Steve Jobs would have to release at least two and probably three gold-plated turds in a row before this would change noticably.
Actually, my belief is that we like "shiny"[1] and quality. The same way as a BMW or Bang and Olufsen customer expects both to be present. The trade off? By expecting a premium product, one is willing to pay a premium price as well.
[1] Not in the bling way, of course.
The same Apple that has stuck with DD2-667 even on their high-end workstations, despite there being faster DDR2 clocks? Apple doesn't look like they're the type to cash in on the newest buzzword-tech, which is sometimes good, and sometimes bad (I do wish the Mac Pros would ship with something a tad faster than DDR2-667...)
Mac Pros use FBD, not DDR2.There's no big need for 64 bit binaries. One of the beautiful things about x86_64 is that 32 bit programs continue to run.
The fact that it took two years to realize imminent failure disturbs my mind. The worst thing is that this coder might have been an Open Source enthusiast that I'd expect to know better.
Being an Open Source enthusiast doesn't immediately make you a good project manager. Those are two separate skillsets. Some are great both (Linus Torvalds, to give on example), but you'll also find coders who can't deal with constraints and will never finish anything if not pushed/prodded/guided the right way.
Of course, they only have to provide the source offer to their customers (or anyone they distribute the binaries to, e.g. trial downloads).
If I make modifications to a GPL program and sell it to company A, I have no obligation whatsoever to company B or person C. If A requests the source, however, they have the right to it.
Yes. The bug is that the audio system has any correlation whatsoever, however minor and imperceptible, with the frickin' network stack, and even moreso that this is expected.
Why? The principle - giving realtime priority or similar to processes processing multimedia - is sound (no pun intended originally...). Thus, if the multimedia process requires a lot of processing power, there will be less left to deal with other things, like networking.
There's no lost context or missing information. The facts are that MS is OK with the idea that an MP3 reduces your network throughput. There's really nothing else to say in the matter. That one admitted fact alone is enough to declare it defective by design.
I think most users would prefer flawless playblack of sound and video than full network bandwidth in resource starved situations. Why this happens with MP3s is strange, though - playing full HD video is a situation where there should be a larger expectation of this happening.No flash doesn't really work anymore - unfortunately. For most of the purposes people are using it, it's just the wrong thing...
But fortunately, with FireFox, you can have your cake and eat it too - install the flash plugin and flashblock. Flashblock is an extension that will show an icon for all flash content, but will allow you to click on it to start the flash app if it's something you need. Sites can be whitelisted too, so that e.g. every youtube link will work, but the annoying commercials everywhere aren't shown.
You are so, so wrong. If a US company owns them, then they are subject to US law. This is to prevent US based companies from just setting up a shell and providing services to, say....Cuba or any other restricted country. There are countless examples of subsidiaries getting in trouble for things that are illegal in the US -- but not where their offices are.
Or the other way round... In Norway, denying services due to e.g. nationality is illegal. If a US owned company operating in Norway does not serve Cuban customers, they could face discrimination charges. As they should, US law should not apply here.
Why would they? Yum is more capable then apt, already included. Apt doesn't work properly with 64 bit systems either, when done the Red Hat way: Colouring (which is very nice in some ways, and utterly messy in others...).
DAOC was fun, until they added the ultimate grind... TOA.
Ok, I'll give you that, but can you explain why this is the opposite trend in the PC hardware industry?
In the mid-80s, a game could often be something made in a couple of months by a single person. If it was a big game, maybe it had commissioned music. The price of those games were, adjusted for inflation, not much lower than today. Compare that to the huge teams making today's games... unlike computer hardware, most of the cost is for the labour (plus rights, where needed) and the cost of manufacturing going down won't help you a lot.
It does cost them some money to provide the service, of course. I'm sure they've run surveys, tests and scenarios on what would happen if they dropped the subscription fee and just used a higher price instead. "I want it to be cheaper" will always be a statement many (potential) customers would support, that doesn't make the change profitable.