It's not a matter of "decide". The house in question isn't in the coverage area of the fire department (the city). They are under no obligation to drive out to the boonies and fight fires there. Conversely, they have no authority to issue fees or fines.
The program which the homeowner didn't participate in was effectively a voluntary private form of insurance. It's ridiculous to claim that an insurance company refusing to provide coverage to somebody who didn't pay their premiums would be "criminal" but that's exactly what you're doing.
The fact that the firefighters apparently didn't have a fallback offer of "we show up, you hand us a check for $10,000, and we'll put out the fire" is unfortunate for this guy. However, just as there's no obligation for them to offer service to people outside the city at all, there's no obligation for them to have an "on-the-spot" offer either.
Inspecting metadata in packet headers is indeed part of the Internet's fundamental requirements. Injecting content into packets or packet streams is most assuredly not. It is, in fact, very much like the case of Comcast injecting the RESET bit into torrent traffic that got them sued a while back. The main difference is that instead of setting a bit in the header that closes the connection, they deliberately modify the content.
Also, this is not necessarily a non-destructive action. HTTP is used for an awful lot of things beyond serving web pages these days, but having an bunch of overlay code injected into a web service response is probably going not going to be appreciated by whatever is consuming that service. With sufficiently advanced deep packet inspection and pattern recognition they could probably tell the difference, but at that point they are quite literally reading all your web traffic.
I refer to it as Verizon's "Bullshit fee" as in "How much bullshit can we pile on this customer's statement before he calls to bitch about it?"
I've never had it double my costs, but a 2-person family plan that should be about $92/month frequently gets bills as high as $110. I seem to spend way too much time on the phone with their people - doesn't that cost them money too? They must be raking it in to make it worth putting up with the extra callers. I'm personally counting down the weeks until I can tell Verizon to take a flying leap without paying the ETF.
Um... I just got back from a couple months of travelling with my father. The main computer we had, used for everything from handling photos to gaming (older games but still gaming) was his Dell netbook with the specs I mentioned, running OEM Windows 7 (it came with Starter, I brought a key and in-place upgraded it to Ultimate).
My biggest complaint was the low screen real estate (some games wouldn't run, and working with high-res photos on such a tiny screen is painful) and slightly cramped / very non-ergo keyboard+touchpad (lots of email, in Outlook for good measure). Occasionally Alt+Tab would cause a brief hit on the hard disk for some paged-out memory, but most of the time it was fine. Waking from Sleep was instant-on, programs opened quickly, and we had enough apps open that the taskbar got crowded.
Was it as fast as my home boxes? No, especially at gaming (integrated graphics didn't help). Did it work just fine as a travel computer, despite doing things like editing photos and web pages (our site pre-dated most blogging)? Yep. Were any of my complaints due to the OS (other than the hassle of Starter)? Not at all, and I suspect XP would have been more annoying (no instant search!)
The Athlon is the only thing on that list that would even struggle, and even it would technically run Win7. (It meets the minimum specs, which are always a little overstated.) Seriously, Win7 runs just fine on netbooks with 1.6GHz single-core Atoms and 1GB of RAM. A 1GHz Athlon isn't going to be much slower than that. 2.7GHz and 4GB of RAM is vastly overkill to just run the OS and everyday apps, no "probably" about it; my work laptop/tablet is 1.2 GHz (Core2Duo ULV) with 4GB and runs Win7, Visual Studio, Outlook, several instances of Word, and a bunch of internal tools all at once just fine.
You must not have a particualrly large IT overhead, then. Win7 is much easier for IT types, but because UAC makes it a lot easier to handle user permissions and because it offers a ton more Group Policy options. Assuming you're running a Windows domain with administration done centrally from the domain controller, Win7 just makes all kinds of sense.
Yes, it requires more hardware than XP. For example, most netbooks more than 2 years old would have problems (no seriously, it runs fine on my dad's 1GB, 1.6GHz Atom netbook).
I'll ask around, but nothing I've heard from anybody at MS or on other techsites (until I saw this just now) suggests that T-Mobile *won't* be a launch partner. In fact, I was under the very distinct impression they would be, given how much they're partnering with MS elsewhere.
Really, you can't easily do this in Linux? That's... lame. Windows firewall (on modern versions, not that 9-year-old POS) allows outbound filtering, including blocking or allowing specific applications on specific ports. I've not bothered to set up the configuration you mention (I actually have a fair amount that legitimately uses port 80 outbound) but it wokrs great for denying a given application any "phone home" privileges.
Err WTF? Since when is MSHTML.dll part of the kernel? Do you even know what "kernel" means?
Windows Firewall on NT6.x (Vista and up) is a lot better than on XP. It's still not a true replacement for an intrusion detection/prevention system based on stateful packet analysis, but it does fine at keeping the average portscan off your back, or limiting certain services to Intranet (or even specific computers, with IPSEC if necessary) hosts. It's also a handy way to block "phone home" applications.
You should certainly have better security at the actual perimeter of a business network, but for protection of internal nodes Windows Firewall does fairly well.
The phones themselves can still be customized. Form factor, battery, weight, hardware keyboard design (or lack thereof), physical display size, extra buttons (you can't require them in any apps, but you can use them if you have them), different networks (including the various 3.x and 4G technologies), internal storage, camera capabilities (despite your sarcastic comment, some phones actually have half decent cameras and I'll pay a bit more for that), and more. Also, I believe that the OEMs are still allowed to pre-load software on the phones, so long as they don't change or replace the UI; that could be a differentiator easily.
Windows Mail (in Vista, moved out-of-box to Windows Live Essentials and called Windows Live Mail for 7) is actually a surprisingly good mail client. POP3, IMAP, and SMTP all seem very stable and have handled every server I've tried thim with, ranging from my school's Linux boxes to Gmail. It supports spam filtering, phishing filtering, and filter rules (not as good as Outlook's, but comparable to Gmail's). Decent-quality S/MIME support. Hmm... I'm not sure about LDAP, I'd need to check on that. It starts up fast and closes quickly (unlike Outlook), is very stable, and has a pretty sane memory footprint. It also handles being offline for a while quite well, better than Outlook (haven't tried Thunderbird for this).
It also is a nice newsreader, although the need for such seems to be very rare these days. It doesn't have groupware integration and can't communicate on the Exchange protocol, but does integrate with Windows Calendar and can hand off.ics files to it nicely.
It matters, but less than you might think. I tried it with my computer and a friend's box. Both are Core 2 CPUs at 2.8 GHz with the same amount of cache per core and the same model line (though his is a quad-core and mine is dual). However, mine is a 3-generation-old mid-range GPU (GeForce 9600) while his is a 1-generation-old gaming GPU (RadeonHD 4850). GPU benchmarks generally show his performing at least twice as fast as mine. The little "hardware accelerated rendering" tests on the IE9 testdrive site show a non-trivial difference, but it's more like 30-40%, not 100-160% that other benchmarks show.
Just for fun, I also tried it on my tablet. The thing has a tragically underpowered CPU (Core 2 Duo, but 1.20 GHz to the 2.80 GHz of our main boxes) and Intel Integrated graphics (X3100, I think). Most benchmarks put that hardly in the same order of magnitude as even my GPU, especially on such a slow CPU (integrated graphics is partly dependent on CPU speed). However, it still got about 40% what my main box got (call it 30% of my friend's) and was able to run all the demos. All other (non-hardware-accelerated) browsers did much worse. Based on that, I'd say that even on a crappy graphics chip, hardware rendering is a non-trivial advantage.
The Nokia N800 had full Flash on a 400 MHz ARM device with 96MB or so of RAM (and this was 3 years ago... Android is late to the party). It would have been incredibly painful browsing with full Flash on a platform like that except that it also had AdBlock Plus and Flashblock. Actually, even without Flash, ABP made the mobile browsing experience vastly better. Give me 800x480 with no ads over the iPhone 4's browsing experience, even sans Flash. Is there any ad-blocking extension for Android (honest question; I don't have one)?
It's hard to imagine a featureless and slow Windows Phone having anything very attractive to the average mobile customer strolling into an AT&T or T-Mobile store.
This is true, but I'm curious why you imagine that they're shipping a "featureless and slow" phone? It could certainly use more features, and there are a few that it will be the only major player without, but it has its own share of cool features and some of those aren't available on any *other* phone. As for slow... I can't say for sure, since they don't even have final hardware yet, but the specs MS is requiring are quite good and the demo models at PAX (set up to play games, but you could do other things with them too) seemed smooth and fast to me.
What was your problem on Kraken? IE9 didn't do well (mostly due to a really bad Gaussian Blur score, though a poor Beat Detection score didn't help either - the rest were well in line with other browsers) but it passed the test fine.
For the record, Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz laptop, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 9600 GS (512MB VRAM), Win7 x64: 51511.8ms +/- 0.2%. 40% of that was the Gaussian Blur test (20637.3ms +/- 0.4%) which seems to be the major outlier.
Please send feedback about this. It annoys the hell out of me, and the more people complain the more likely they are to fix it. Tools menu (gear icon on the right, or tap Alt) -> Send Feedback.
Extended Support is not really "supported" in the usual sense. Dangerous security bugs will be patched, but functionality bugs will not, and new features will not be backported - including IE, which is considered to be part of Windows (at least its rendering engine is).
In any case, it doesn't support WDDM, so you wouldn't get the full hardware acceleration anyhow.
Yeah, this really annoys me too. Submit Feedback, under the Tools menu (gear icon at far right, or tap Alt). The more people complain, the more likely they'll fix it.
You can adjust the amount of space given to the bar vs. given to the tabs. This doesn't bother me that much, but if you want to option to change it back you should use the Submit Feedback tool (under Tools, the gear-shaped icon at the far right) to tell Microsoft this.
Do you run as Admin? If so, you're throwing away far more security than you gain by using Firefox - IE7 on Vista (assuming patches are applied and UAC is enabled) is far more secure that a fully patched Firefox on XP running as Admin.
Even if you don't run as Admin, there's a lot of security features that XP just flat-out lacks. Claiming to use XP and claiming a reason that has anything to do with security is a self-contradictory statement.
Um... technically yes, but Flash (among other things) was already perfectly capable of that. Hardware-accelerated Flash has been available around for months.
You can turn off the hardware acceleration if you're truly that paranoid. It's in the Internet Options, under Advanced.
The article does mention Win7, but makes no mention of battery life. You can presumably put other OSes on it if you want. Battery life will probably be better than a typical laptop but worse than a long-life netbook or ultraportable, based on my guesses at how much of its chassis can be battery and the probable power consumption of the parts we know about (10" screen, Atom 550). I'd guess 6-8 hours, but though I'd love to see better I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's only 5 hours either.
Cost is unknown but if it's more than about $500 it's going to sell pretty poorly. Throw in WiMAX or similar and I'd either pay a bit more or accept a contract in exchange for a price subsidy.
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It's not a matter of "decide". The house in question isn't in the coverage area of the fire department (the city). They are under no obligation to drive out to the boonies and fight fires there. Conversely, they have no authority to issue fees or fines.
The program which the homeowner didn't participate in was effectively a voluntary private form of insurance. It's ridiculous to claim that an insurance company refusing to provide coverage to somebody who didn't pay their premiums would be "criminal" but that's exactly what you're doing.
The fact that the firefighters apparently didn't have a fallback offer of "we show up, you hand us a check for $10,000, and we'll put out the fire" is unfortunate for this guy. However, just as there's no obligation for them to offer service to people outside the city at all, there's no obligation for them to have an "on-the-spot" offer either.
Inspecting metadata in packet headers is indeed part of the Internet's fundamental requirements. Injecting content into packets or packet streams is most assuredly not. It is, in fact, very much like the case of Comcast injecting the RESET bit into torrent traffic that got them sued a while back. The main difference is that instead of setting a bit in the header that closes the connection, they deliberately modify the content.
Also, this is not necessarily a non-destructive action. HTTP is used for an awful lot of things beyond serving web pages these days, but having an bunch of overlay code injected into a web service response is probably going not going to be appreciated by whatever is consuming that service. With sufficiently advanced deep packet inspection and pattern recognition they could probably tell the difference, but at that point they are quite literally reading all your web traffic.
I refer to it as Verizon's "Bullshit fee" as in "How much bullshit can we pile on this customer's statement before he calls to bitch about it?"
I've never had it double my costs, but a 2-person family plan that should be about $92/month frequently gets bills as high as $110. I seem to spend way too much time on the phone with their people - doesn't that cost them money too? They must be raking it in to make it worth putting up with the extra callers. I'm personally counting down the weeks until I can tell Verizon to take a flying leap without paying the ETF.
Um... I just got back from a couple months of travelling with my father. The main computer we had, used for everything from handling photos to gaming (older games but still gaming) was his Dell netbook with the specs I mentioned, running OEM Windows 7 (it came with Starter, I brought a key and in-place upgraded it to Ultimate).
My biggest complaint was the low screen real estate (some games wouldn't run, and working with high-res photos on such a tiny screen is painful) and slightly cramped / very non-ergo keyboard+touchpad (lots of email, in Outlook for good measure). Occasionally Alt+Tab would cause a brief hit on the hard disk for some paged-out memory, but most of the time it was fine. Waking from Sleep was instant-on, programs opened quickly, and we had enough apps open that the taskbar got crowded.
Was it as fast as my home boxes? No, especially at gaming (integrated graphics didn't help). Did it work just fine as a travel computer, despite doing things like editing photos and web pages (our site pre-dated most blogging)? Yep. Were any of my complaints due to the OS (other than the hassle of Starter)? Not at all, and I suspect XP would have been more annoying (no instant search!)
The Athlon is the only thing on that list that would even struggle, and even it would technically run Win7. (It meets the minimum specs, which are always a little overstated.) Seriously, Win7 runs just fine on netbooks with 1.6GHz single-core Atoms and 1GB of RAM. A 1GHz Athlon isn't going to be much slower than that. 2.7GHz and 4GB of RAM is vastly overkill to just run the OS and everyday apps, no "probably" about it; my work laptop/tablet is 1.2 GHz (Core2Duo ULV) with 4GB and runs Win7, Visual Studio, Outlook, several instances of Word, and a bunch of internal tools all at once just fine.
You must not have a particualrly large IT overhead, then. Win7 is much easier for IT types, but because UAC makes it a lot easier to handle user permissions and because it offers a ton more Group Policy options. Assuming you're running a Windows domain with administration done centrally from the domain controller, Win7 just makes all kinds of sense.
Yes, it requires more hardware than XP. For example, most netbooks more than 2 years old would have problems (no seriously, it runs fine on my dad's 1GB, 1.6GHz Atom netbook).
Wait... you want a computer that just randomly enters sleep mode on you?
I'll ask around, but nothing I've heard from anybody at MS or on other techsites (until I saw this just now) suggests that T-Mobile *won't* be a launch partner. In fact, I was under the very distinct impression they would be, given how much they're partnering with MS elsewhere.
It's written on a number of DirectX 10+ technologies for the hardware acceleration. This is also why it's not on XP.
*COULD* they have put in the effort to support other platforms? Yes, of course. Would it have been anywhere close to worthwhile? Nope.
Really, you can't easily do this in Linux? That's... lame. Windows firewall (on modern versions, not that 9-year-old POS) allows outbound filtering, including blocking or allowing specific applications on specific ports. I've not bothered to set up the configuration you mention (I actually have a fair amount that legitimately uses port 80 outbound) but it wokrs great for denying a given application any "phone home" privileges.
Err WTF? Since when is MSHTML.dll part of the kernel? Do you even know what "kernel" means?
Windows Firewall on NT6.x (Vista and up) is a lot better than on XP. It's still not a true replacement for an intrusion detection/prevention system based on stateful packet analysis, but it does fine at keeping the average portscan off your back, or limiting certain services to Intranet (or even specific computers, with IPSEC if necessary) hosts. It's also a handy way to block "phone home" applications.
You should certainly have better security at the actual perimeter of a business network, but for protection of internal nodes Windows Firewall does fairly well.
The phones themselves can still be customized. Form factor, battery, weight, hardware keyboard design (or lack thereof), physical display size, extra buttons (you can't require them in any apps, but you can use them if you have them), different networks (including the various 3.x and 4G technologies), internal storage, camera capabilities (despite your sarcastic comment, some phones actually have half decent cameras and I'll pay a bit more for that), and more. Also, I believe that the OEMs are still allowed to pre-load software on the phones, so long as they don't change or replace the UI; that could be a differentiator easily.
I wouldn't write it off yet.
Windows Mail (in Vista, moved out-of-box to Windows Live Essentials and called Windows Live Mail for 7) is actually a surprisingly good mail client. POP3, IMAP, and SMTP all seem very stable and have handled every server I've tried thim with, ranging from my school's Linux boxes to Gmail. It supports spam filtering, phishing filtering, and filter rules (not as good as Outlook's, but comparable to Gmail's). Decent-quality S/MIME support. Hmm... I'm not sure about LDAP, I'd need to check on that. It starts up fast and closes quickly (unlike Outlook), is very stable, and has a pretty sane memory footprint. It also handles being offline for a while quite well, better than Outlook (haven't tried Thunderbird for this).
It also is a nice newsreader, although the need for such seems to be very rare these days. It doesn't have groupware integration and can't communicate on the Exchange protocol, but does integrate with Windows Calendar and can hand off .ics files to it nicely.
It matters, but less than you might think. I tried it with my computer and a friend's box. Both are Core 2 CPUs at 2.8 GHz with the same amount of cache per core and the same model line (though his is a quad-core and mine is dual). However, mine is a 3-generation-old mid-range GPU (GeForce 9600) while his is a 1-generation-old gaming GPU (RadeonHD 4850). GPU benchmarks generally show his performing at least twice as fast as mine. The little "hardware accelerated rendering" tests on the IE9 testdrive site show a non-trivial difference, but it's more like 30-40%, not 100-160% that other benchmarks show.
Just for fun, I also tried it on my tablet. The thing has a tragically underpowered CPU (Core 2 Duo, but 1.20 GHz to the 2.80 GHz of our main boxes) and Intel Integrated graphics (X3100, I think). Most benchmarks put that hardly in the same order of magnitude as even my GPU, especially on such a slow CPU (integrated graphics is partly dependent on CPU speed). However, it still got about 40% what my main box got (call it 30% of my friend's) and was able to run all the demos. All other (non-hardware-accelerated) browsers did much worse. Based on that, I'd say that even on a crappy graphics chip, hardware rendering is a non-trivial advantage.
The Nokia N800 had full Flash on a 400 MHz ARM device with 96MB or so of RAM (and this was 3 years ago... Android is late to the party). It would have been incredibly painful browsing with full Flash on a platform like that except that it also had AdBlock Plus and Flashblock. Actually, even without Flash, ABP made the mobile browsing experience vastly better. Give me 800x480 with no ads over the iPhone 4's browsing experience, even sans Flash. Is there any ad-blocking extension for Android (honest question; I don't have one)?
It's hard to imagine a featureless and slow Windows Phone having anything very attractive to the average mobile customer strolling into an AT&T or T-Mobile store.
This is true, but I'm curious why you imagine that they're shipping a "featureless and slow" phone? It could certainly use more features, and there are a few that it will be the only major player without, but it has its own share of cool features and some of those aren't available on any *other* phone. As for slow... I can't say for sure, since they don't even have final hardware yet, but the specs MS is requiring are quite good and the demo models at PAX (set up to play games, but you could do other things with them too) seemed smooth and fast to me.
What was your problem on Kraken? IE9 didn't do well (mostly due to a really bad Gaussian Blur score, though a poor Beat Detection score didn't help either - the rest were well in line with other browsers) but it passed the test fine.
For the record, Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz laptop, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 9600 GS (512MB VRAM), Win7 x64: 51511.8ms +/- 0.2%. 40% of that was the Gaussian Blur test (20637.3ms +/- 0.4%) which seems to be the major outlier.
Please send feedback about this. It annoys the hell out of me, and the more people complain the more likely they are to fix it. Tools menu (gear icon on the right, or tap Alt) -> Send Feedback.
Extended Support is not really "supported" in the usual sense. Dangerous security bugs will be patched, but functionality bugs will not, and new features will not be backported - including IE, which is considered to be part of Windows (at least its rendering engine is).
In any case, it doesn't support WDDM, so you wouldn't get the full hardware acceleration anyhow.
Yeah, this really annoys me too. Submit Feedback, under the Tools menu (gear icon at far right, or tap Alt). The more people complain, the more likely they'll fix it.
You can adjust the amount of space given to the bar vs. given to the tabs. This doesn't bother me that much, but if you want to option to change it back you should use the Submit Feedback tool (under Tools, the gear-shaped icon at the far right) to tell Microsoft this.
Do you run as Admin? If so, you're throwing away far more security than you gain by using Firefox - IE7 on Vista (assuming patches are applied and UAC is enabled) is far more secure that a fully patched Firefox on XP running as Admin.
Even if you don't run as Admin, there's a lot of security features that XP just flat-out lacks. Claiming to use XP and claiming a reason that has anything to do with security is a self-contradictory statement.
Um... technically yes, but Flash (among other things) was already perfectly capable of that. Hardware-accelerated Flash has been available around for months.
You can turn off the hardware acceleration if you're truly that paranoid. It's in the Internet Options, under Advanced.
The article does mention Win7, but makes no mention of battery life. You can presumably put other OSes on it if you want. Battery life will probably be better than a typical laptop but worse than a long-life netbook or ultraportable, based on my guesses at how much of its chassis can be battery and the probable power consumption of the parts we know about (10" screen, Atom 550). I'd guess 6-8 hours, but though I'd love to see better I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's only 5 hours either.
Cost is unknown but if it's more than about $500 it's going to sell pretty poorly. Throw in WiMAX or similar and I'd either pay a bit more or accept a contract in exchange for a price subsidy.
60% was *very* high. I was impressed (and sad for being impressed) that it was a non-trivial amount over 50%.