Posts by Daniel B. 3134 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2007
I'm guessing that won't happen, because M$ is a sore loser. They went for the losing, crappy HD-DVD standard which tanked hardly, and they might even be blamed for that (the menu system & other stuff in HDDVD was MSFT tech). The day HD-DVD died, MS said "oh, physical media is so ded, downloads r d future!" but in truth, they were sore losers.
Oh, and by the way ... you fail at tech as well. RFID has a very limited operation range, so its use for missing/kidnapped children is nil. It also makes the "oh noes mark of teh beast" argument kinda silly, because they can't really track students *outside* school because of this very limitation.
For RFID to actually track people everywhere, you would have to have RFID readers *everywhere*.
"Just look at our recent election results and the poor track record of our president. Even when its right in front of there faces...they choose to ignore the obvious."
Yes, I am also apalled that so many Republicans were elected/re-elected, given their awful record at breaking the US. Wait, that's what you meant, didn't you?
"I have no idea what the ID does for BATHROOM breaks though, do they have card swipe locks on the bathroom doors or something?"
I guess they have RFID checkers in the classroom door, so it won't open unless you have your RFID. It might also serve to track you actually going to the bathroom vs. just skipping out class.
There was already a "HyperV guest tools" ISO image for RHEL, and could be hacked to work on Ubuntu. It would put the drivers for the virtual network card, virtual HDD and something else I can't remember. RHEL only added it to the stock drivers in the distro, I'd guess.
I think the Retina MacBooks are for posers and/or gamers. Maybe. I'd probably strike out gamers, because the Retinas aren't upgradable, and thus you can't up 'em to 16Gb like my non-Retina MBP. Apple can sell overpriced Retinas because people still drool at the fruity stuff and will spend $$$ if they can on that.
That said, regular, non-Retina MacBooks are pretty much worth their price. I do wish they had user-replaceable batteries, but on the rest, they're pretty much customizable. And even if a Mac is more expensive than a typical PC Laptop, knowing I am not paying the M$ tax is a huge plus for me!
I didn't spend *that* much in my W8 h8, but I did buy a 13" MBP instead of a "regular" laptop because of Win8. It was getting stuck with that POS or doing the mighty jump to OSX. And given that a former boss managed to skip Windows entirely thanks to choosing OSX since day one (he mostly used Solaris, so he didn't even use windows at work) and the UNIXy aspects of OSX well... it was worth jumping back to Mac. (I stopped using it sometime around 1997. Previous to that, we were a Mac house.) Ironically, my jump to Windows/PC had been on dev grounds, MS being more "open" than Apple for development stuff. Currently, MS is a broken ecosystem where something you might learn will be deprecated in a couple of years.
Thankfully, my main dev platform these days is Java.
"That's exactly why you'll never see an Office for Linux - you need Windows to run it."
I'm using Office right now ... on Mac OS X. They do release stuff outside their M$ ecosystem, they just haven't added Linux to the mix. And they actually should go on an Office for Linux; it could give them an escape route when Windows finally comes crashing down. I don't think it will happen soon though; it'll take a couple of years before Windows loses the OS wars. Hell, if Apple were to open up, they might even take over the Windows market entirely at this rate. The Mac version of Office still has menus (and the Ribbon) because the OS doesn't have menu-less apps, by the way.
Oh yes. Netbooks were selling pretty well when they were running Linux, and were gaining traction. Of course, they start selling 'em with Winblows and suddenly they started being crap. I unfortunately bought one after they had started sticking Win7 on 'em, and well, it's the junk netbook that we use when none of the other stuff is available.
Maybe I should outright rip out Win7 and stick Linux on the thing. Uh-oh, it has no DVD drive ... oops...
I'd also consider how the stuff goes on Brazil. Other than being the only country that doesn't talk Spanish in Latin America, well, they're part of Latin America. Which as a whole outnumbers the US as a market.
And guess what? Android rules this market as well. It used to be BlackBerry, but in the last year they've moved on to BlackBerry. Yes, a few have gone iPhone but most of 'em have gone Android.
Apple will eventually lose the smartphone war. Hopefully they'll lose the "patent trolling" war as well.
"I do love it when Linux users make jokes about other OS not being widely used."
Though it is right, win8 is headed to be the next Vista; most corporates have begun win7 migrations and *don't* support win8 at all. One of our consultants got bit by this, he went all "ooooh win8 upgrade cheap" only to get bit at the client's premises: "your setup is not supported. You can't plug your lappy into the network!"
Bummer.
To do an Elop is to shit all over the R&D of a respectable mobile company. That would be killing off BB10 and imposing the shit WP8 OS.
Except in BBs case, that wouldn't just stagnate them, it would kill them. RIM's remaining asset is actually their secure OS; while "Secure Windows" is an oxymoron even among the non-techies.
You'd see why the article calls Linux a series of cheap hacks if you read the part saying "... says some dude from FreeBSD". Every couple of years, someone from the bitter BSD groups will come out and bitch about Linux because Linux went out and did what GNU and BSD were supposed to be (the free/open alternative to Unix). See Theo De Raadt basically spewing the same bile about 5+ years ago. (The GNU people themselves have their own tantrum, they insist on calling Linux "GNU/Linux" as well.)
That said, the flock of C-gulls description isn't that off the mark. I've been using Linux since 1998, and during that time I've seen the silliness of branching and deprecation done real quick for either personal tantrums, pride, or infighting within the dev groups. Anyone remember ALSA, which was the one standard to supersede all other sound systems in Linux? Now there are a zillion "sound systems" still duking it out. Ditto with the XMMS project mentioned in this article. Or mpg123 and mpg321. And now the kernel itself seems to be doing the stupid change dance as well. Anyone using the latest and greatest distro might have noticed that the standard ethernet interface is no longer "eth0" but some weird thing called "p6p1". What does that mean?
So Linux and the FOSS community do need to get their act up, but it isn't as bad as the BSDites are painting it.
Most cable co's over here (Mexico) have ALWAYS done CGN. Cablemodems are infamous over here for giving the 10.x.x.x addys, in so much that I learned about NAT because of this practice long before I ever even heard the term NAT, or the need for something like this.
Hopefully, IPv6 will kill these shady practices...
The main reason I have stuck with Blackberry is precisely this: I don't trust either platform. Ok, that and BBM, and BB's security model/encrypted FS & stuff.
I have no guarantees that Google's Android won't slurp that data, and iOS well ... I don't like walled gardens.
WebOS is dead, though it might come back.
Nokia killed Symbian and all its alternate mobile OSes.
And I still don't like MS.
It seems that my next smartphone choice is going to be very, very hard.
Chernobyl has left large areas of land uninhabitable for the next 1000 years or so. Fukushima hasn't, most of the estimates are "only" for 20 years or so. It isn't harmless, but it isn't "the next Chernobyl" either.
It is relevant that both Chernobyl and Fukushima were byproducts of bad management, and in Chernobyl's case it was reckless abuse of an unsafe reactor type (RBMK). On Fukushima, it was TEPCO's neglect to tsunami-proof their backup systems....
"Anyone who disputes this should look at the state of smartphones prior to the launch of the iPhone."
Lots of Symbian smartphones that did a lot of awesome shit. As Nokia hadn't borged Symbian, most smartphone manufacturers embraced this and were working on a standard UI to be used on the whole platform (UIQ) so they did have something to aim for.
WinMo sucked, but then again WinMo always sucked donkey balls.
RIM had good security, but their specs sucked and the OS would start getting the "infinite clock of DOOM" issues when the shared memory ran out (which is sadly, *still* common on most BBs due to stupidly limited shared memory on the BBs). The first OS with decent features was 4.5, though I'd say that 6 would be the first one that actually looks nice enough to compete with the rest.
Maemo was nice.
Didn't even know about Android back then.
The iPhone killed most of these, so now we have to choose between secure-but-clunky-BB, grab-your-data-Android, or "my way or the highway" iOS. Neither looks pleasant. The Smartphone market looks uglier than pre-iPhone.
Oh so very true. The first gen iPhone in fact would actually fall into a feature phone category before the 3G's release. No apps aside from the ones given to you by Apple. In fact, probably worse than feature phones, as these can have third-party apps installed while the original iPhone couldn't.
as demonstrated by that famous #superinjunction TT from last year. Jimbo is right on this one.
But he also fails to see stuff like the real-life H2G2, and that the Wikipedia *itself* is based on D. Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" concept. Remember one of the reasons it sold better than the Encyclopaedia Galactica? ;)
"Gmail, Hotmail, Flickr, online VMs for testing the list goes on. People are already using online services for many things.
Woz is old school, he's an electronics engineer and hardware hacker. Why does his opinion count in the world of software and online communications?"
Wait till someone hacks into a bank email account outsourced into Gmail. Given the stuff stored in bank employee e-mails, it's bound to be a blast!
Security in the cloud (or insecurity) is something that should be taken into account, but in a lot of cases, isn't. And it isn't like data loss or hacks haven't happened:
- MobileMe wiping iDevices clean if you cancelled your MobileMe trial but failed to unconfigure MobileMe on the iDevice.
- the Danger SideKick getting mass amnesia due to Oracle RAC replication corruption.
- The Amazon/iDevice hack mentioned in the same article.
I'd like to point out that I distrust anything that smells like DES or uses DES at any point. That one has been cracked since the 20th century, I even distrust 3DES for this reason. Its only a matter of time that someone finds how to crack 3DES based on the DES crack.
Also, anything with "MS" in the name is usually a half-assed security implementation, and this is proof of it.
Um...
"They've designed a quite secure mobile ecosystem from day-one."
Nope, the suff they're announcing is new; full-device crypto since 2009, but the iThingys have been out there for longer than that.
There's another platform that *did* get built with security from the ground up, and it ain't Apple, it's BB. If Apple is going to get that distinctive, maybe Symbian should deserve is as well, even if they added it later?
Only an iZombie would think that Android is the only other smartphone platform out there. Full device encryption on Blackberry predates both of those, and has been built with security from the ground up sonce day one.
Which was years before either platform was even in the drawing board.
Maybe that's why BB has FIPS certification and the iSlab doesn't ... Those certs take years to get...
Maybe the public perception on CompSci and math folks would be more appreciative if they knew that thanks to those 'eggheads' the Allies had much less casualties than they would've had if GCHQ hadn't been able to read the Wehrmacht 'secure' comms.
But the real reason would've been that they didn't want the world+dog to know they had cracked Enigma; instead they gave away Enigma machines to the Commonwealth countries, so they would be able to read their stuff. Also, the Enigma itself came to be after the Germans' previous cypher was directly involved with a real bad case of pwnage: the Mexico City / Zimmerman telegram. When the fact that GCHQ had cracked their cypher went public, the German gov't took Arthur Scherbius seriously with his newfangled crypto machine...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
