Posts by pdxbrit 19 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2012
Can't emphasize this enough. With your credit card, you have protection. With CurrentC, you're screwed.
I suppose they hope people are really stupid. If you're not going to accept C&P, I'll just pay with the credit card the old-fashioned way, so you'll still be stuck with the CC fees (avoidance of which seems to be one of the major drivers here). There's not a snowball in hell's chance I'd sign up for CurrentC.
"Sadly, Fry was a bit off the mark there. IP addresses are allocated globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which does delegate to local registries, but new addresses are not created with domain names. There is a cavernous amount of space in IPv6 – but it will run out one day."
Umm, no, not even close.
Check out RFC 2373, "IPv6 Addressing Architecture". In the original spec, 1/8th of the 128-bit address space is reserved for "Aggregatable Global Unicast Addresses" (and 5/8th more are still available/reserved).
That means you have 2^125 addresses available.
Imagine you hand out 1,000,000 addresses per second. You will exhaust that 1/8th of the address space in ~1,347,862,190,569,539,760,087,009 years.
The IPv6 address space is vastly larger than any conceivable use. While your point about the allocation of IPv4 addresses is entirely valid, it's rather marred by a wholly inaccurate characterization of IPv6 (the address space will never run out in any conceivable use case).
The exact same way they stop you from downgrading iOS etc. Despite the jailbreak successes, Apple have made it successively harder to break into their phones (I have an old boot-rom 3GS, one of the last iPhones to be "pwned for life").
Certainly, with enough resources and effort it is possible that the lock can be defeated, but the whole point is that if it costs ten grand to defeat, then it's not cost-effective to steal the phone. This isn't defending against a superpowers spy agency. This is defending against "casual" theft and, as such, it seems it should be pretty effective. I'm not a big fan of the walled-garden approach, but this is clearly one advantage.
Sigh. Define "comparatively slow". Compared to what? It's not going to be a Crysis rig, but it's more than sufficiently powerful for pretty much anything except high-end video games.
You seem unaware that general 3D-acceleration and hardware-specific acceleration for video (h.264, VC1, MPEG2 etc.) are not the same. This "thing" is so overpowered as an HTPC, it's not even funny, as you'd know if you bothered to check. It plays 1080p media in its sleep. Check out the videos of XMBC running on one on Youtube.
Symlinks work fine in the version of NTFS shipped with Vista too, so yes, Vista,. The problem is that Microsoft have utterly failed to integrate junction points in any usable way. There are third-party tools to manipulate them, and there's the command-line mklink command, at least on W7, but AFAICT, nothing in explorer that would let a non-geek manipulate them in any sane way, at least with what ships with the OS. So yes, absolutely "not exactly a high profile feature".
Junction points work fine, and can be very useful if you e.g. have a relatively small SSD boot drive and larger spinning disk. You can relocate whatever you like via directory junctions/links (a la symlinks), but it's not simple or obvious for the average user :-(
Because clearly, if you're caught speeding, it's appropriate that the prosecutor pursues the death penalty against you. After all, you committed the crimes for which you were charged. Oh, you don't think wildly disproportionate punishment would be appropriate here? Well, oddly enough, that's the problem.
You assert that "he knew what the possible consequences were". Would you care to present some evidence for that? Or perhaps you just made that up on the spot? His "crime" was sufficiently heinous that JSTOR refused to press charges and wanted the case dropped. Do you honestly fail to see a problem with a prosecutor abusing the law to further their career?
I believe it's a bit more complex than that.
1) If you order a home edition as most end-users are likely to do, you're stuck with Windows 8. I just went to Dell's website (US, since that is where I live) and tried a sample order of an Inspiron 15 (just at random, it's a popular laptop). It comes with Windows 8, and there are no options to choose anything else. I'd consider Dell a pretty major vendor.
2) If you buy a machine with Win 8 Pro, you have downgrade rights to Windows 7 Professional or Windows Vista Business (see http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/downgrade_rights.aspx). I still doubt the PC vendor will install these for you, but for a business with an IT dept, they're
likely to install their own image anyway.
So, no, most vendors will not ship Windows 7 installed any more, and depending on what you buy, you may or may not have the option to downgrade.
The fact that they don't release it at that point should be a positive point. Unlike the bug-laden pigs that have been some of the more recent Ubuntu releases (by that I mean anything post-10.04), precisely because of the ridiculous, must "release every 6 months and must have features X, Y and Z".
Features, Quality, Time. Choose any 2.
Ah yes,
so remind me, how do I tell my iPhone to use Chrome as my default browser? Oh, silly me, I can't!
Oh and it's not really Chrome at all, due to Apple's restrictions. It's just a skin over Webkit, and what's more without Nitro, so performance sucks. So yes, Apple were quite happy to let this one through since, due to the restrictions they impose, it doesn't compare very favourably to Safari.
Now if Google put out a maps app for iOs at that is visually compelling and has decent data behind it, that's a whole different story.
I suspect by "Google Maps" you mean the Apple app that uses the Google data. Don't blame Google for the crappy app. While the Google license is responsible for some of the limitations, that app has basically been unchanged since at least iOS 3.x and that's purely Apple's responsibility.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur. The fact that people are able to (eventually) produce working code with gobject/glib does not mean they have no issues. Seriously, implementing object-oriented paradigms in a non object-oriented language is ridiculously painful. It is indeed both tedious and error-prone. It's possible to produced working code in assembly language, but I don't think anybody is going to argue that it's easy/efficient. Horses for courses and all that.
Personally, I loathe C++ for various reasons, but I'd take C++ and Qt over C and gtk* any day.
Umm, who said anything about unsupported? Did you read the original post?
Let me spell it out for you, in case this is a bit difficult.
There's nothing to prevent you installing an older version of iOS except the hurdles that Apple put in place to prevent that. There are *zero* technical reasons for this. What was being asked for here is perfectly reasonable and perfectly feasible. The poster here wasn't suggesting people jailbreak their devices, he was suggesting Apple allow them to downgrade, and that is something over which they have complete control.
I think it's a pretty good bet that, unless the people doing the benchmark were incompetent idiots, they put in the appropriate amount memory in their system (since clearly that affects the price) and so, yes, to put in 1/2 or 1/4 in the "rival" systems makes the whole comparison extremely suspect.
Hey, my "inexpensive family care of choice" beats the "expensive sports car of choice" if I remove the spark plugs from all but one of the cylinders!
And one of the very first things it says in the terms and conditions link that you posted is "Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Google, the Terms will include the following:", i.e. you can't do caching etc. with the standard license. There's nothing that says you can't negotiate with Google and pay them for different terms.
So, the question once more becomes, what proof is offered that Apple tried to do so and that Google were unwilling to allow them to do so? It is certainly conceivable that Google were unwilling to co-operate or wanted to charge Apple "too much", but other explanations are equally plausible, not the least that Apple were determined to drop Google at any cost, up to and including shipping the turkey of an app that is in iOS 6.
Ingres first appeared in 1974. I recall running "University Ingres" on a PDP 11/44. I'm struggling to reconcile that with the term "flash in the pan".
As regards "fickle developers", I am struck by the irony here. If I were a customer running my business on HP Itanium kit and Oracle, I could easily ask about fickle database providers. At least if I were running one of the open source alternatives, I'm not at risk of my database provider suddenly and arbitrarily deciding that my hardware isn't supported. I'm sure Oracle will be more than happy to come in and replace your kit. I'm not so sure you COO/CIO will be happy with the bill unless they have a lot more money than sense.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
