Comment Re:Sorry... (Score 1) 664
The average Joe will run into DRM restrictions, and;(...)
The average Joe iTunes user won't eve know the DRM is there.
Comment Re:GTA IV == 100% Fail (Score 1) 531
From everything I have seen (playing the game), read and heard, you hold a fairly extreme minority view here.
Final Judgment — SCO Loses, Owes $3,506,526 265
Xenographic writes "SCO has finally lost to Novell, now that Judge Kimball has entered final judgment against SCO. Of course, this is SCO we're talking about. There's still the litigation in bankruptcy court, which allowed this case to resume so that they could figure out just how much SCO owes, which is $3,506,526, if I calculated the interest properly, $625,486.90 of which will go into a constructive trust. And then there's the possibility that SCO could seek to have the judgment overturned in the appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court when that fails. Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more. Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Comment Re:Microsoft and Apple (Score 1) 453
How the hell did that mess of a comment get modded up to "+5, Insightful"? I expect rapid anti-Apple madness around here, but I don't expect them to get modded up so high.
Apple's products are vastly superior to Microsoft's.
How so? I have run windows xp and several different linuxes on my laptops and desktops, as well as having used Mac OS pretty extensively.
What does linux have to do with it?
Windows XP wins hands down every single time.
What does Windows XP win at, being superior? How so? Doing what?
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations in federal court. Apple has not.
Courts are now the deciders for quality of tech?
Who said anything about courts being deciders of tech quality? You're pulling nonsense out of thin air. The question was "how are Apple and Microsoft different" and that was one example. Not a great example, but still...
Apple's monopoly power is in the portable music market. Microsoft's is in the desktop operating system market.
Apple's monopoly power is also in the hardware-that-is-allowed-to-run-Mac-OSX department.
Sure, and Microsoft has a monopoly on what hardware you can run the Xbox 360 system on.
Microsofts policy is "Here, do whatever you want with this so long as you buy it".
Yeah right, that's their policy.
Apple's policy is "We are licensing this to you. You have no rights to use it for anything other than what we explicitly declare and you better not fucking try to develop for it because we will sue you in to oblivion."
There is a large community of Apple developers that would disagree with that statement.
How, seriously, is Apple any better than anything else?
So now they're the worst "anything"? Right.
Google Adopts, Forks OpenID 1.0 316
An anonymous reader writes "Right on the heels of Microsoft's adoption of the OpenID protocol by announcing their intention to enable OpenID authentication against all Live IDs, Google has announced their intention to join the growing list of OpenID authentication providers. Except it turns out they're using their own version of OpenID that is incompatible with everyone else. It seems that Google will be using their own 'improved' version of OpenID (based upon research and user feedback of the OpenID system) which isn't backwards compatible with OpenID 1.0/2.0, in hopes of improving end-user experience at the cost of protocol compatibility and complexity."
Shuttleworth Sees Possibility For a QT-based GNOME 296
An anonymous reader writes "derStandard.at has an extensive interview with Ubuntu-founder Mark Shuttleworth, in which he seems to be pushing for a switch to QT in the GNOME-project: 'I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT.' He goes on to talk about Apple as an 'innovation leader' and problems with Hardy Heron."
ICANN Board Approves Wide Expansion of TLDs 490
penciling_in writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the relaxation of the rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains — a move that could drastically change the Internet. 'We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated,' said Roberto Gaetano, an ICANN board member. The future outcome of this decision was discussed on Slashdot a few days ago. It also seems, based on this post on CircleID from last month, that ICANN was already in preparation mode of mass TLD introductions. The new decision will allow companies to register their brands as generic top-level domain names (TLDs). For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as '.msn', Apple apply for '.mac', and Google for '.goog'... The decision was taken unanimously on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at the 32nd ICANN Meeting in Paris."
Ericsson Predicts Swift End For Wi-Fi Hotspots 286
mikesd81 writes "Mobile technology group Ericsson is predicting a 'swift end' for Wi-Fi hotspots, according to the PC Pro site. Johan Bergendahl, the company's chief marketing officer, offers this analysis: 'The rapid growth of mobile broadband is set to make Wi-Fi hotspots irrelevant ... Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era. Industry will have to solve the international roaming issue ... Carriers need to work together. It can be as simple as paying 10 euros per day when you are abroad.' He also pointed to a lack of coverage as a potential hindrance to the growth of the technology."
Comment Re:Check the candidate web sites (Score 2, Informative) 549
Did you actually follow the link and read the policy descriptions? That list is not policy descriptions, it's sound bites. There's significantly more detail on the site. Cynicism is an appropriate attitude to our political process and it's participants but if you don't take the opportunity to back it up with evidence it's just ignorance. So ... I'm not impressed by your lack of effort.
Professional Plone Development 98
Michael J. Ross writes "Among the hundreds of content management systems (CMSs) available for building Web sites, Plone may not be the most popular; but for the majority of experienced Python developers, it is without equal. This is partly due to Plone being one of the few major CMSs written in Python, and partly due to its powerful extensibility. Customizing and extending Plone, however, are not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, help is at hand, in Professional Plone Development, a book written by seasoned Plone developer Martin Aspeli." Read below for the rest Of Michael's review.
Man Wins Partial Victory In Circuit City Arrest 788
JeremyDuffy writes "Michael Righi, the man who was arrested at Circuit City for failing to show his reciept/driver's license, has fought a moral battle against the city for almost a month now. The case has already been settled and he emerged victorious... sort of. It turns out that he's already spent almost $7500 and would have kept fighting them too, but because his family would have been dragged into it, he was forced to take a deal. They've expunged his record and dropped all charges, but he had to give up his right to sue the city to do it."
Google Launches Free Wireless Broadband 116
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How Microsoft Can Make Zune a Success 305
jcatcw writes "Zune had potential, but 5 months in it barely gets passing grades. According to the article, there are five things Microsoft must change: 1) The built-in Wi-Fi, aka 'the social,' was a bad idea. 2) Tell newbies what it can do. 3) Create a low-end, flash-based player. 4) Push subscriptions. 5) Make it sexy. A Microsoft representative said, about the wireless concept: 'We felt we were addressing the social aspect of music, and the research we've done has shown that people understand the concept that wireless enables sharing ... but the tagline, while provocative, hasn't meant a lot to consumers.'"
Dvorak to Apple - Stop The iPhone 409
eldavojohn writes "John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the iPhone, citing the mobile handset business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies.' With Apple's image as a 'hot company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely fad-prone marketplace for cell phones will quickly turn the 'hot' iPhone passe'. Unless the company has several new models in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the iPhone a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'"
CA Proposes Rigorous Voting Machine Testing 172
christian.einfeldt writes "During her successful campaign for California Secretary of State, newly-minted California Elections Czar Debra Bowen spoke repeatedly of the need to use free open source software in voting machines to ensure the integrity of California's elections. Now that Secretary Bowen is acting on that campaign pledge, closed-source voting machine vendor Diebold worries aloud that rejecting its black-box voting machines could snarl California's elections. Diebold's concerns come at the same time that it is suing Massachusetts for declining to purchase those same voting machines." Quoting: "California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could [have the result of banishing] ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state. For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with 'red teams' of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes."
