Hi, can you tell me if you're having any luck running a composite manager with ubuntu 9.04? I'm at the point where I'm considering moving to something like Ubuntu that handles integration with the proprietary drivers automatically because the recent nvidia drivers are driving me crazy.
As a daily mac user, I can say that the author does point out some of the well-known gripes about leopard: 1) the stacks feature of the dock is just weird, and somewhat impractical to use with a folder with a larger number of items (although it has gotten better with one of the updates). 2) Spaces is not well implemented. A standard pager would have been a better choice, so you can see what windows are where. 3) Perhaps the biggest issue, a lot of people suspect (and this is supported by benchmarks) that Leopard is streamlined for intel macs, anybody with a G4 or G5 PPC can run it, but it doesn't run well. This is the first point release of OS X that hasn't been faster than its predecessors and that should say something. I nearly installed it myself on my dual G5, but after looking at the benchmarks, decided that 10.4 ran just fine, and I have a real pager already.
As for Ubuntu, the real thing keeping me back from using it is the gnome interface. There are basically two problems I have with it, the first is right what you point out, to be blunt, I find gnome and to a lesser extent, gtk, to be ugly. I really don't like it. It works, but QT is much nicer looking. That said, my other major problem with gnome is the minimalist design paradigm. Whenever I use gnome apps, I often find myself getting irritated at the lack of options. It wouldn't kill them to have a few more clicky things on their preferences windows. For the record: I use e17 as my desktop manager and run a mix of gtk, qt and kde 3.5 apps (won't use kde 4 because they nuked the konqueror, which is my favorite file manager of all time).
Don't kick yourself too hard: NVIDIA's drivers have been terrible lately too. It's almost like a conspiracy or something. I just recently bought a new nvidia graphics card and, I can't get sync to vblank running unless I have a composite manager running. The only problem is running a composite manager makes the X window manager unstable because NVIDIA and the people writing the composite managers can't communicate or agree on the correct way to do this or something. I never quite got it straight, something about NVIDIA insisting on rewriting some libraries in X and the composite managers using non-standard calls or something like that. It's a huge clusterfuck.
Another big issue is the powermizer thing that NVIDIA forces everyone to use. It scales the video card frequency depending on what it's being required to draw. The only problem is that is refuses to scale up the frequency rapidly unless an openGL object is being drawn and won't play nice with a composite manager. I haven't tried it, but recent kde has huge screen flickering problems because of this, and even just drag and dropping text in firefox causes it. The only workaround is to add some lines to your modules.conf to fool the powermizer into staying high power mode (which is fine for me because I use a desktop, but laptop users are SOL).
Anyhow, just to make comment slightly On Topic, congrats to the Ubuntu team! Even as a non-user of Ubuntu, I greatly appreciate their efforts to bring linux to everyone. Let's hope they start making a profit soon!
So this is/. and it just wouldn't be right if we didn't have a car analogy in this thread, so here's mine:
Computer speed and capabilities I expect will be like cars, which initially went through a growth phase where new models often produced substantial advantage over the previous models but then new advantages levelled off sometime in the 80s (e.g. a Ford Model T gets the same fuel economy as a Ford Explorer). Nowadays, I could go shopping for a Formula 1 racer or a Porsche, but why would I bother to pay that much for something that goes a lot faster than I need. What I need is a vehicle that gets me from point A to point B. Sure, if I'm into racing then I'll get a faster car, but if I want to go to the grocery store the Porsche won't expedite my trip sufficiently to justify the added cost of the Porsche.
With computers, we're at the point where if I want to run a word processor and some nice-ish graphics, I can buy a >2 GHz machine that does what I need and I don't need a dual quad-core Xeon. Sure, if I'm a gamer (=car racer) I need a suped up machine, but for more mundane tasks like e-mail and web surfing it doesn't really justify the additional cost to have a top of the line equipment. With cars, we're limited by the physical infrstructure and population density (I can't do 120 mph to go to the grocery store), whereas with computers, we're reaching the limits of what you need to have a good experience with a basic computing tasks, the physical limit of having a 2-D monitor and rendering images and sounds on it.
Yeah, it's kind of sad how people keep going on about this, but Obama's spending so far is not really any different from Bush Jr., Bush Sr., and Reagan who in turn each ran up the largest deficits in spending than any president since WWII. As conservatives often point out, Reagan constantly called for a balanced budget amendment, but he himself never actually proposed a budget that was balanced. Small wonder then that between congress and he the deficit ballooned. I'm guessing that it will be very difficult for Obama to increase the deficit in the long term, thanks to recent republican president's propensity for long, expensive, unnecessary wars and their inability to balance a budget. It has nothing to do with political ideology, it's how much U.S. debt the world economy will support.
If I stop think about it, it really pisses me off that conservatives are so easily hood-winked by the rich upper class and Wall Street who call for smaller government and lower taxes whenever a democrat is in power, but what we end up with is tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor, and a huge deficit to boot. Stupid.
What the hell are you talking about? Maybe you better clean out the registry on your windows machine, or better yet reformat, and find out how fast your machine used to be before you start trying to tell me about my much RAM is degrading. Yes, things like backlights on LCDs fade with use, and batteries have shorter lifespans, but that's normal wear and tear, the laptop itself runs just fine. I don't get any fewer floating point calculations per second, nor do my 3D rendered objects get any fewer frames per second. You can bitch and moan all you wish about how the Apple computers use standard components, but that doesn't explain why my Dell laptop fell apart after two years and my macbook pro is going strong after four. It's called QA/QC and it's expensive, look it up.
Erm, how about dell hard drives getting the click of death, dell hard drives showing up partially formatted (on machines bought with preinstalled software), Dell monitors arcing and frying themselves, Dell laptops gradually disintegrating over a period of about two years. Right, for every anecdote you've got against Apple, I've got one against Dell, because I've seen just about every problem and issue with them both. It doesn't make either of them right. When you actually dig up some statistics on average lifetime of computers by brand and their return rate due to defects, come talk to me.
As for me, I'm typing this on a four year old macbook pro that looks and runs about as good as the day I bought it. I could be wrong, but given that I expect an apple laptop to run about five years before it gets too slow to fix, I'm betting that the increased lifetime destroys most if not any advantage you get buy buying a cheaper machine. Are they perfect, sure as hell not, there are issues, but I've seen enough shitty laptops out there to realize that sometimes you get what you pay for.
That alone suggests that this contest was hijacked. Or at least, the only reason I can think of that it's on the list is because somebody at this company thought that spamming the contest was a good viral marketing strategy. I suppose that the time and effort involved in doing a decent poll (taking e-mail addresses, forcing a click-back from a message sent to that e-mail address) would have been too much trouble. Although, I think that if NASA were going to pick whatever name they liked best from the list anyway, they should have been more upfront about it. I don't think they expected to get this much publicity though.
At least it's not Xena or Xenu or whatever that name of that pyramid-scheme cult picked.
TFA states two reasons for why companies "dread" windows 7 (dread is the word TFA uses):
"The majority of participants do not plan to upgrade to Windows 7 in the next year. Economic factors are contributing to the delay in Windows 7 adoption for almost half of all participants. Software compatibility is the most frequently cited concern with Windows 7," notes the study, which was carried out by Dimensional on behalf of systems management appliance vendor KACE. KACE's KBox appliance is designed to help IT managers more easily deploy Windows, Mac, and Linux software across the enterprise.
The news for Microsoft doesn't get much better in Windows 7's sophomore season. Less than half of the IT pros surveyed, 42%, said their organizations planned to deploy Windows 7 within 12 to 24 months of release. 24% said they would wait 24 to 36 months, and 17% said they would wait more than 36 months to migrate to Windows 7.
So basically, yeah, why would they upgrade, especially when their profits aren't that good. What's bizarre here is what happens now? We have a huge entrenched monopoly operating system that nobody really wants to give up, do we just keep buying new computers and put old software on it? Do businesses end up like the aircraft traffic controllers with software 20 years and more out of date just because that's what works?
For myself, since I'm a dual rabid apple and linux fanboy, I certainly don't mind reading about how MS can't get people to buy their new product, but I don't see how this situation really helps apple or linux either. (I'm actually not an apple fanboy, I just think they make good hardware and software that isn't too annoying to use.) If they're worried about software compatibility migrating to vista, what makes anyone think they'll pick a non-windows OS? More likely they'll just keep putting band-aids on old systems.
Maybe what Microsoft really needs is an XP emulator, like the classic mode in OS X or rosetta for running PPC software on Intel, or an independent implementation of the XP API, like what's in wine. I haven't haven't heard anything about Microsoft designing such a thing though, has anyone else?
Also, as others have pointed out in this thread, you don't even know the workers did this. They could be framed by the company, or it could be random theft. For example, a while back some houses were burned in Washington state and it was blamed on ecoterrorists, but to me it looked just like insurance fraud. The housing market was tanking and that's a sufficient motive for someone to burn the property and blame someone else. If a contract is being negotiated, AT&T has sufficient motive to make the workers look bad, just as the workers have a motive to make AT&T give them a more favorable contract.
If the above list reflects how badly they treat they customers, before you get upset at the people working there you should probably consider that AT&T is not treating its workers well. I'm guessing it's not a good place to work and I'm assuming the workers were probably wrong until I found out the truth of the matter.
Let's hope that these organizations all go bankrupt before that. I heard once that often in repressive situations, no reform or anything like that really happens until the progenitors are all removed from power and sometimes that only happens when they die of old age. So how long do we need to wait for people who grew up with the internet and free information to come into positions of power? I'm in my early 30s and I was surfing bbs' while growing up, so maybe another ten years or so, so when people like me are in their 40s?
Actually, it hasn't been proven that the Navy's use of sonar damages these organisms, if you read the dissenting opinion from the recent supreme court decision ruling in favor of the Navy versus environmentalists, they say as much:
Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice David Souter, said Cooper had properly used her authority under the environmental law after finding that unrestricted sonar use could harm thousands of creatures. Instead of conducting an environmental study as the law required, or asking Congress to change the law, Ginsburg said, the Navy undermined the law with a "self-serving resort to an office in the White House" for an exemption.
This study represents a "nail in the coffin" type of study, where it is now known unequivocally that 203 decibels will harm wildlife. To logical people, this is what's known as "proof". Knowing this, you can now measure the sound level of the Navy's sonar tests and if it's above 203 decibels, you have direct evidence that the Navy IS harming marine animals. It sounds silly and trivial, but this is how logic works sometimes, you have to prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt, and past a shadow if you want to change society.
He could still be re-elected if Palin and the Republicans get their way. It would be a good thing too, my tubes were just again becoming clogged by too many internets. I keep trying to fix it myself, but I think my problem might be that I'm thinking of the internet as a big truck and that's just not right. It's not a big truck -- I really wish some helpful senator would come fix it for me. No!
Dumbest revision by Microsoft ever; they basically negated the advantages that their massive installed userbase gave them in terms of product preferences.
I wonder how much of this is because there was such a big time lag between when XP was released and when Vista was released. If Microsoft had focused on continuously evolving XP instead of rewriting from scratch, I bet that people would have had an easier time adapting to the differences because there would be fewer of them. On the other hand, when Apple released OS X it was a complete rewrite after OS 9 too, but they managed to do that pretty well, much better than Microsoft has managed it. I wonder why? Could it be that by changing everything, not just icons and names, but the entire layout that people could learn from scratch rather than re-learn it? Or... maybe they just write software that's easier to use?
In the old days, it was relatively easy to find out who was filching your information - now it can be hard to find out even what country someone is in, let alone who they are.
Depends on how far back you go -- in the U.S just after its revolution nobody thought much about copyright, especially British copyright. I don't think the U.S. government even enforced paying back loans owed to British subjects. Back then I'm guessing it was pretty darn hard to figure out who was ripping you off too, especially if you were British and somebody owed you money.
The way I see it, you're absolutely right and media protection on the internets is just hopeless and a lot of these organizations' business models are obsolete and just don't know it yet. Right now I can get the same quality news from just about anywhere on the internets but what I'm missing is news that's presented in a half-way intelligent way and some informed opinion. If you look at the example from television, you have a hundred channels now (1000 on directTV!) instead of the old three broadcast networks. The problem is that they're mostly crap, because they present news like it's a soap opera or an action movie complete with sound effects. Granted, the only time I watch CNN is when I'm at an airport and they have those televisions everywhere, and I could be mis-remembering, but I don't think that CNN was always like this. I think it used to be much more straight-forward, just the news (e.g., when Ted Turner still ran it). What happened? Cable TV and Fox News happened. I think the newspapers are going through the same thing right now, they're getting drowned out in a sea of mediocrity and news as entertainment.
Interestingly enough, the only news show I can watch is the NewsHour on PBS. However, PBS only gets 1/6th of its funding from the government, the rest is from private citizens and organizations -- which is really dumb if you think about it. We do need GOOD news, and if private industry is incapable of making a profit then it must come from the government as a service to society.
I was thinking in particular about linux on the desktop and in particular compiz versus the graphics drivers. You and the parent are right though, if I didn't fiddle with it and just used stable software, it would be like a tank. Not the M1 though -- it's a real gas guzzler whose stops for refueling caused Iraqi tanks to escape in 1991 (according to General Schwarzkopf). Also, it's not clear how well it would function in a real drawn out battle, not only is it a gas guzzler, but in a place like Iraq it needs to have it's air filters replaced every so often, which is another delay.
Well, continuing with my auto analogy, if Microsoft is the GM of the operating systems, that makes FOSS the VW microbus. Yeah sure it kinda works, but you spend half your time repairing it and the other half the time using it with parts broken. (Oh, and it's most commonly used by bearded hippies.)
I joke, I joke!:) I actually think that a great way to stimulate the economy would be to make micro-grants (by gov. standards) to pay programmers to write FOS software. That way, the tax-payer gets a return on their investment by having better quality software that is freely available. Oh wait, that would be communism... (Incidentally, isn't that what the Google Summer of Code is?)
Wait a minute here.... I read this story and I thought, well hey, a company tried to force on everyone a product that wasn't desirable for the consumer, waited a long time to deliver that product, and has a history of making some products that don't do so well, so is in deep trouble financially and might go under. Seemed pretty reasonable to me, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? If you don't make products that people want to buy, aren't you supposed to do poorly?
But then I remembered this is an April Fools joke. Since it's not true, and Microsoft is doing just fine, I thought about why it isn't true: either A) Microsoft really is making products that people want or B) Capitalism isn't working here. Regarding A, I suppose MS does make more decent products than bad ones, but I can't help but think of Microsoft as the GM of the auto-world 20 years ago in that they have a much larger market share than the quality of their products warrants (suggesting B). So I wonder when the Toyota of the operating system world is going to come along and eat MS' lunch? It must be nice to be a monopoly.
P.S. Please MS fanboys, try to remember that the troll or flamebait mods are not a substitute for an "I disagree that Vista was a failure" mod.
That's a very insightful comment, if I had mod points I'd just mod you up, but since I don't then I'll respond. It continually amazes me how often you see a similar brand of perversion, not just with women, but with homosexuals as well. Examples I can think of off the top of my head include the anti-gay preacher who was caught hiring male prostitutes, or the anti-gay congressman who was caught soliciting sex in the airport mens' room. When caught, these people always deny it, even when faced with overwhelming evidence. I think the screening is probably a good idea, but how would you get congress to go along with it? Finding a scape-goat like homosexuals or child pornography is always popular politically and that will mean resistance by politicians.
How about instead of instructing me to read TFS, you try reading what I said in my comment? I don't care that AT&T won't cut off my service -- I care that AT&T is colluding with the RIAA to spy on me! As for them being jerks, nowhere did I ever say that was downloading illegal content, you just inferred that I must be guilty because I was said I would cancel service if I might get a letter. The RIAA already has you thinking I'm guilty of copyright infringement and they haven't even had to look at whether I actually do it or not!
Who said anything about getting sued? AT&T is issuing take-down notices on behalf of the RIAA, not suing people. If they start working with the RIAA to sue people, you can be damn sure I'll cancel ASAP, of course I would, who wouldn't? Way to jump to conclusions there buddy....
I don't know about anybody else, but if I get one of those letters from AT&T, I'm going to to wait around for them to terminate my service, I'll be terminating my service as soon as it arrives. Jerks. I can live without internet or live with using a smaller wireless network.
Mod parent up! Along with the own it/license it false advertising, the entire current format for blu-ray media discs needs to scrapped, along with HDCP. The blu-ray java engine just means I need to run windows to play blu-ray discs as they should be and the HDCP means that I can't play my legally purchased discs using my legally purchased blu-ray disc drive except at a crummy resolution. I need to break the law and remove the copy protection just to view them. I would say this is a huge joke, but at $30 a disc, it isn't funny.
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Hi, can you tell me if you're having any luck running a composite manager with ubuntu 9.04? I'm at the point where I'm considering moving to something like Ubuntu that handles integration with the proprietary drivers automatically because the recent nvidia drivers are driving me crazy.
As a daily mac user, I can say that the author does point out some of the well-known gripes about leopard: 1) the stacks feature of the dock is just weird, and somewhat impractical to use with a folder with a larger number of items (although it has gotten better with one of the updates). 2) Spaces is not well implemented. A standard pager would have been a better choice, so you can see what windows are where. 3) Perhaps the biggest issue, a lot of people suspect (and this is supported by benchmarks) that Leopard is streamlined for intel macs, anybody with a G4 or G5 PPC can run it, but it doesn't run well. This is the first point release of OS X that hasn't been faster than its predecessors and that should say something. I nearly installed it myself on my dual G5, but after looking at the benchmarks, decided that 10.4 ran just fine, and I have a real pager already.
As for Ubuntu, the real thing keeping me back from using it is the gnome interface. There are basically two problems I have with it, the first is right what you point out, to be blunt, I find gnome and to a lesser extent, gtk, to be ugly. I really don't like it. It works, but QT is much nicer looking. That said, my other major problem with gnome is the minimalist design paradigm. Whenever I use gnome apps, I often find myself getting irritated at the lack of options. It wouldn't kill them to have a few more clicky things on their preferences windows. For the record: I use e17 as my desktop manager and run a mix of gtk, qt and kde 3.5 apps (won't use kde 4 because they nuked the konqueror, which is my favorite file manager of all time).
Don't kick yourself too hard: NVIDIA's drivers have been terrible lately too. It's almost like a conspiracy or something. I just recently bought a new nvidia graphics card and, I can't get sync to vblank running unless I have a composite manager running. The only problem is running a composite manager makes the X window manager unstable because NVIDIA and the people writing the composite managers can't communicate or agree on the correct way to do this or something. I never quite got it straight, something about NVIDIA insisting on rewriting some libraries in X and the composite managers using non-standard calls or something like that. It's a huge clusterfuck.
Another big issue is the powermizer thing that NVIDIA forces everyone to use. It scales the video card frequency depending on what it's being required to draw. The only problem is that is refuses to scale up the frequency rapidly unless an openGL object is being drawn and won't play nice with a composite manager. I haven't tried it, but recent kde has huge screen flickering problems because of this, and even just drag and dropping text in firefox causes it. The only workaround is to add some lines to your modules.conf to fool the powermizer into staying high power mode (which is fine for me because I use a desktop, but laptop users are SOL).
Anyhow, just to make comment slightly On Topic, congrats to the Ubuntu team! Even as a non-user of Ubuntu, I greatly appreciate their efforts to bring linux to everyone. Let's hope they start making a profit soon!
So this is /. and it just wouldn't be right if we didn't have a car analogy in this thread, so here's mine:
Computer speed and capabilities I expect will be like cars, which initially went through a growth phase where new models often produced substantial advantage over the previous models but then new advantages levelled off sometime in the 80s (e.g. a Ford Model T gets the same fuel economy as a Ford Explorer). Nowadays, I could go shopping for a Formula 1 racer or a Porsche, but why would I bother to pay that much for something that goes a lot faster than I need. What I need is a vehicle that gets me from point A to point B. Sure, if I'm into racing then I'll get a faster car, but if I want to go to the grocery store the Porsche won't expedite my trip sufficiently to justify the added cost of the Porsche.
With computers, we're at the point where if I want to run a word processor and some nice-ish graphics, I can buy a >2 GHz machine that does what I need and I don't need a dual quad-core Xeon. Sure, if I'm a gamer (=car racer) I need a suped up machine, but for more mundane tasks like e-mail and web surfing it doesn't really justify the additional cost to have a top of the line equipment. With cars, we're limited by the physical infrstructure and population density (I can't do 120 mph to go to the grocery store), whereas with computers, we're reaching the limits of what you need to have a good experience with a basic computing tasks, the physical limit of having a 2-D monitor and rendering images and sounds on it.
Yeah, it's kind of sad how people keep going on about this, but Obama's spending so far is not really any different from Bush Jr., Bush Sr., and Reagan who in turn each ran up the largest deficits in spending than any president since WWII. As conservatives often point out, Reagan constantly called for a balanced budget amendment, but he himself never actually proposed a budget that was balanced. Small wonder then that between congress and he the deficit ballooned. I'm guessing that it will be very difficult for Obama to increase the deficit in the long term, thanks to recent republican president's propensity for long, expensive, unnecessary wars and their inability to balance a budget. It has nothing to do with political ideology, it's how much U.S. debt the world economy will support.
If I stop think about it, it really pisses me off that conservatives are so easily hood-winked by the rich upper class and Wall Street who call for smaller government and lower taxes whenever a democrat is in power, but what we end up with is tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor, and a huge deficit to boot. Stupid.
What the hell are you talking about? Maybe you better clean out the registry on your windows machine, or better yet reformat, and find out how fast your machine used to be before you start trying to tell me about my much RAM is degrading. Yes, things like backlights on LCDs fade with use, and batteries have shorter lifespans, but that's normal wear and tear, the laptop itself runs just fine. I don't get any fewer floating point calculations per second, nor do my 3D rendered objects get any fewer frames per second. You can bitch and moan all you wish about how the Apple computers use standard components, but that doesn't explain why my Dell laptop fell apart after two years and my macbook pro is going strong after four. It's called QA/QC and it's expensive, look it up.
Erm, how about dell hard drives getting the click of death, dell hard drives showing up partially formatted (on machines bought with preinstalled software), Dell monitors arcing and frying themselves, Dell laptops gradually disintegrating over a period of about two years. Right, for every anecdote you've got against Apple, I've got one against Dell, because I've seen just about every problem and issue with them both. It doesn't make either of them right. When you actually dig up some statistics on average lifetime of computers by brand and their return rate due to defects, come talk to me.
As for me, I'm typing this on a four year old macbook pro that looks and runs about as good as the day I bought it. I could be wrong, but given that I expect an apple laptop to run about five years before it gets too slow to fix, I'm betting that the increased lifetime destroys most if not any advantage you get buy buying a cheaper machine. Are they perfect, sure as hell not, there are issues, but I've seen enough shitty laptops out there to realize that sometimes you get what you pay for.
That alone suggests that this contest was hijacked. Or at least, the only reason I can think of that it's on the list is because somebody at this company thought that spamming the contest was a good viral marketing strategy. I suppose that the time and effort involved in doing a decent poll (taking e-mail addresses, forcing a click-back from a message sent to that e-mail address) would have been too much trouble. Although, I think that if NASA were going to pick whatever name they liked best from the list anyway, they should have been more upfront about it. I don't think they expected to get this much publicity though.
At least it's not Xena or Xenu or whatever that name of that pyramid-scheme cult picked.
So basically, yeah, why would they upgrade, especially when their profits aren't that good. What's bizarre here is what happens now? We have a huge entrenched monopoly operating system that nobody really wants to give up, do we just keep buying new computers and put old software on it? Do businesses end up like the aircraft traffic controllers with software 20 years and more out of date just because that's what works?
For myself, since I'm a dual rabid apple and linux fanboy, I certainly don't mind reading about how MS can't get people to buy their new product, but I don't see how this situation really helps apple or linux either. (I'm actually not an apple fanboy, I just think they make good hardware and software that isn't too annoying to use.) If they're worried about software compatibility migrating to vista, what makes anyone think they'll pick a non-windows OS? More likely they'll just keep putting band-aids on old systems.
Maybe what Microsoft really needs is an XP emulator, like the classic mode in OS X or rosetta for running PPC software on Intel, or an independent implementation of the XP API, like what's in wine. I haven't haven't heard anything about Microsoft designing such a thing though, has anyone else?
Also, as others have pointed out in this thread, you don't even know the workers did this. They could be framed by the company, or it could be random theft. For example, a while back some houses were burned in Washington state and it was blamed on ecoterrorists, but to me it looked just like insurance fraud. The housing market was tanking and that's a sufficient motive for someone to burn the property and blame someone else. If a contract is being negotiated, AT&T has sufficient motive to make the workers look bad, just as the workers have a motive to make AT&T give them a more favorable contract.
Here is a short list of things AT&T has done in recent memory: limits on "unlimited" use, cancellation of service for criticizing the company, and colluding with the RIAA & MPAA to spy on their internet customers, colluding with the NSA to illegally spy on U.S. citizens.
If the above list reflects how badly they treat they customers, before you get upset at the people working there you should probably consider that AT&T is not treating its workers well. I'm guessing it's not a good place to work and I'm assuming the workers were probably wrong until I found out the truth of the matter.
Let's hope that these organizations all go bankrupt before that. I heard once that often in repressive situations, no reform or anything like that really happens until the progenitors are all removed from power and sometimes that only happens when they die of old age. So how long do we need to wait for people who grew up with the internet and free information to come into positions of power? I'm in my early 30s and I was surfing bbs' while growing up, so maybe another ten years or so, so when people like me are in their 40s?
This study represents a "nail in the coffin" type of study, where it is now known unequivocally that 203 decibels will harm wildlife. To logical people, this is what's known as "proof". Knowing this, you can now measure the sound level of the Navy's sonar tests and if it's above 203 decibels, you have direct evidence that the Navy IS harming marine animals. It sounds silly and trivial, but this is how logic works sometimes, you have to prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt, and past a shadow if you want to change society.
Stevens is not necessarily retired: Palin, Republicans call for special Senate election.
He could still be re-elected if Palin and the Republicans get their way. It would be a good thing too, my tubes were just again becoming clogged by too many internets. I keep trying to fix it myself, but I think my problem might be that I'm thinking of the internet as a big truck and that's just not right. It's not a big truck -- I really wish some helpful senator would come fix it for me. No!
I wonder how much of this is because there was such a big time lag between when XP was released and when Vista was released. If Microsoft had focused on continuously evolving XP instead of rewriting from scratch, I bet that people would have had an easier time adapting to the differences because there would be fewer of them. On the other hand, when Apple released OS X it was a complete rewrite after OS 9 too, but they managed to do that pretty well, much better than Microsoft has managed it. I wonder why? Could it be that by changing everything, not just icons and names, but the entire layout that people could learn from scratch rather than re-learn it? Or... maybe they just write software that's easier to use?
Depends on how far back you go -- in the U.S just after its revolution nobody thought much about copyright, especially British copyright. I don't think the U.S. government even enforced paying back loans owed to British subjects. Back then I'm guessing it was pretty darn hard to figure out who was ripping you off too, especially if you were British and somebody owed you money.
The way I see it, you're absolutely right and media protection on the internets is just hopeless and a lot of these organizations' business models are obsolete and just don't know it yet. Right now I can get the same quality news from just about anywhere on the internets but what I'm missing is news that's presented in a half-way intelligent way and some informed opinion. If you look at the example from television, you have a hundred channels now (1000 on directTV!) instead of the old three broadcast networks. The problem is that they're mostly crap, because they present news like it's a soap opera or an action movie complete with sound effects. Granted, the only time I watch CNN is when I'm at an airport and they have those televisions everywhere, and I could be mis-remembering, but I don't think that CNN was always like this. I think it used to be much more straight-forward, just the news (e.g., when Ted Turner still ran it). What happened? Cable TV and Fox News happened. I think the newspapers are going through the same thing right now, they're getting drowned out in a sea of mediocrity and news as entertainment.
Interestingly enough, the only news show I can watch is the NewsHour on PBS. However, PBS only gets 1/6th of its funding from the government, the rest is from private citizens and organizations -- which is really dumb if you think about it. We do need GOOD news, and if private industry is incapable of making a profit then it must come from the government as a service to society.
I was thinking in particular about linux on the desktop and in particular compiz versus the graphics drivers. You and the parent are right though, if I didn't fiddle with it and just used stable software, it would be like a tank. Not the M1 though -- it's a real gas guzzler whose stops for refueling caused Iraqi tanks to escape in 1991 (according to General Schwarzkopf). Also, it's not clear how well it would function in a real drawn out battle, not only is it a gas guzzler, but in a place like Iraq it needs to have it's air filters replaced every so often, which is another delay.
Well, continuing with my auto analogy, if Microsoft is the GM of the operating systems, that makes FOSS the VW microbus. Yeah sure it kinda works, but you spend half your time repairing it and the other half the time using it with parts broken. (Oh, and it's most commonly used by bearded hippies.)
:) I actually think that a great way to stimulate the economy would be to make micro-grants (by gov. standards) to pay programmers to write FOS software. That way, the tax-payer gets a return on their investment by having better quality software that is freely available. Oh wait, that would be communism... (Incidentally, isn't that what the Google Summer of Code is?)
I joke, I joke!
Wait a minute here.... I read this story and I thought, well hey, a company tried to force on everyone a product that wasn't desirable for the consumer, waited a long time to deliver that product, and has a history of making some products that don't do so well, so is in deep trouble financially and might go under. Seemed pretty reasonable to me, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? If you don't make products that people want to buy, aren't you supposed to do poorly?
But then I remembered this is an April Fools joke. Since it's not true, and Microsoft is doing just fine, I thought about why it isn't true: either A) Microsoft really is making products that people want or B) Capitalism isn't working here. Regarding A, I suppose MS does make more decent products than bad ones, but I can't help but think of Microsoft as the GM of the auto-world 20 years ago in that they have a much larger market share than the quality of their products warrants (suggesting B). So I wonder when the Toyota of the operating system world is going to come along and eat MS' lunch? It must be nice to be a monopoly.
P.S. Please MS fanboys, try to remember that the troll or flamebait mods are not a substitute for an "I disagree that Vista was a failure" mod.
That's a very insightful comment, if I had mod points I'd just mod you up, but since I don't then I'll respond. It continually amazes me how often you see a similar brand of perversion, not just with women, but with homosexuals as well. Examples I can think of off the top of my head include the anti-gay preacher who was caught hiring male prostitutes, or the anti-gay congressman who was caught soliciting sex in the airport mens' room. When caught, these people always deny it, even when faced with overwhelming evidence. I think the screening is probably a good idea, but how would you get congress to go along with it? Finding a scape-goat like homosexuals or child pornography is always popular politically and that will mean resistance by politicians.
How about instead of instructing me to read TFS, you try reading what I said in my comment? I don't care that AT&T won't cut off my service -- I care that AT&T is colluding with the RIAA to spy on me! As for them being jerks, nowhere did I ever say that was downloading illegal content, you just inferred that I must be guilty because I was said I would cancel service if I might get a letter. The RIAA already has you thinking I'm guilty of copyright infringement and they haven't even had to look at whether I actually do it or not!
Who said anything about getting sued? AT&T is issuing take-down notices on behalf of the RIAA, not suing people. If they start working with the RIAA to sue people, you can be damn sure I'll cancel ASAP, of course I would, who wouldn't? Way to jump to conclusions there buddy....
grr, I haven't had my coffee yet this morning... That should read, I'm NOT going to wait around for them to terminate my service.
I don't know about anybody else, but if I get one of those letters from AT&T, I'm going to to wait around for them to terminate my service, I'll be terminating my service as soon as it arrives. Jerks. I can live without internet or live with using a smaller wireless network.
Mod parent up! Along with the own it/license it false advertising, the entire current format for blu-ray media discs needs to scrapped, along with HDCP. The blu-ray java engine just means I need to run windows to play blu-ray discs as they should be and the HDCP means that I can't play my legally purchased discs using my legally purchased blu-ray disc drive except at a crummy resolution. I need to break the law and remove the copy protection just to view them. I would say this is a huge joke, but at $30 a disc, it isn't funny.