One of the things about Civ V that quickly stuck me was how much less crash prone the Linux version is when compared to the Windows version. I had co-op players constantly going offline because their version was crashing all the time.
2) Most encryption schemes compress before encrypting. So nothing is lost there. As for de-duplication, I don't see that being a huge concern because a) even if encryption is an option most people won't use it and b) When TFA has dropbox's head honcho saying "We think of encryption beyond that as a users choice."
3) That argument doesn't really fly at all. Security is not an all or nothing thing. Different security serves different purposes and can mitigate different attacks. e.g. encrypting data client side means that if Dropbox's servers were compromised or their users database was stolen that my data is still secure.
You realise dropbox is free, right?
Basic Dropbox is, none of the other options are. And besides, why is that an excuse? If they can encrypt data as they send it, and as they store it on the cloud, why is it impossible to encrypt it on the client, or provide an API to allow a 3rd party to encrypt it? Furthermore, as it is the paid service that pays their wages, why aren't they implementing a feature that customers, particularly corporates would pay for and which would enhance their reputation for secure storage?
If you want encryption, then fine, do it yourself. You obviously know that your stuff won't be indexable or shareable so won't be calling for support or slagging Dropbox off online when you find indexing and sharing not working.
Well that's a stupid argument right there. I wonder if car companies apply it too - well if you want an airbag in your car why don't you install it yourself? Just because a single individual has the technical wherewithal to implement something doesn't excuse the company for not implementing it in the first place, particularly when it is a feature that many people want.
There's room to suggest Dropbox should offer a pay-for encrypted service. The thing is, no matter how well they do it, it'll always be vulnerable to government interference, and it'll never be fully trusted anyway. BYO means no government interference and trust *for the relatively small number of people who care* without raising the costs too much for the multitudes who don't.
No it won't. The point of a well designed client side encryption is Dropbox simply have no idea what they are storing on their servers. Government can interfere until the cows come home but Dropbox have no idea what is in those files.
> What's wrong with that? It's one of the cores of the only fair type of government we've found so far that works, communism.
Yes. It worked out so well that corruption caused it to implode in a most spectacular manner. Just ask anyone from the former Soviet block how much communism "works".
You're a silver spoon member of the 1% by comparison.
It takes more than wishful thinking and a single political party with no check on it's power to run a country effectively.
> First, why analyze the percentage of computer and math degree holders who hold an IT job? Why is a mathematics degree automatically equivalent to a CS degree?
Computer Science is ultimately a branch of mathematics. That much should be obvious to anyone that's been through a decent University program.
Yes you'd have to warn the user that a protected folder means exactly that and there are restrictions on what you can do with it, e.g. access in some dropbox clients, web browsers, sharing to others. People will get it.
Even better, this encryption / decryption could be thrown open as a pluggable API so 3rd parties could write their own encryption protocols to whatever personal or corporate standard they desired. For transparency the aforementioned passphrase encryption could even be supplied for review.
Same goes for Skydrive, Google Drive etc. There is no excuse for not offering encryption. Not that I'm in the tinfoil hat camp to think this is to facilitate monitoring (although it does). More likely it's because these cloud storage servers use file hashing to spare themselves the bother of storing 1,000,000 copies of the same file. It still sucks though and even if the option is off by default, encryption of at least one folder should be provided.
Hell, I'd be happy if we could open up code shops on Indian Reservations here and help get a lot of those kids out of their cycle of poverty and alcoholism.
> If we're going to open up our southern border...
The problem with H1-Bs is not that they "feruhners". The problem with H1-Bs is that they are an underclass that's at the mercy of the company that imported them. They are even lower on the totem pole than underpaid undocumented Mexicans.
If you are an H1-B, ICE knows exactly where to find you if you get too "uppity".
> But then I have to do that for every single disc. And I value my time.
What time? You stick the disk in and type run.
There is no "time" involved. The computer does all of the work. It chugs along quietly while you go do something else.
The part of the process that requires my direct interaction with the computer actually takes LESS time than futzing with a console player would.
There's no need to "pretend' that disk menus are useless. They serve no real purpose for 99.9% of users. If anything, they are a bother.
> Yes, you can muddle through all the playlists by hand and extract everything you want, but sometimes you just want a family member to be able to play the damn thing.
Actually, if you want to play the "joe average" card here it makes much more sense to rip the media and present a simple menu option so that "a family member is able to play the damn thing".
The whole Tivo/iTunes/XBMC interface is MUCH simpler for rube relatives than anything that a DVD or BluRay will present to you. It's f*cking ironic that people will defend this sh*t. Each disk is it's own personal precious little snowflake with it's own interface and quirks.
It's the exact opposite of what all of the HID groupies say you should be doing with user interfaces.
If you want to "just play the movie", the interface that something like XBMC gives you is FAR superior to the usual consumer option.
> Sadly, the Raspberry Pi lacks SATA, which is what the unit uses to connect to the optical drive.
There's no good reason you couldn't use a USB device which would be the usual approach for plugging an optical drive into a small low profile machine such as the PI.
> Why use a regular player? Because it "just works".
Kind of sort of after a fashion with lost of nonsense and bother.
I ditched my last console DVD player because "just works" doesn't really work.
> The experience is overall smoother.
No it isn't. A PC provides a much better playback experience. It's simpler, more direct, and completely under your control. You can enforce a single standard UI across multiple playback devices.
Ripping a BD can be a pain but it's usually worth the effort even for a rental.
> Yes... because there is no way the compression schemes of ripped files can improve over time.
Except we aren't talking about "ripped files", we're talking about STREAMING. What you can achieve with genuine ripped files will actually make the streaming services all look hopelessly pathetic.
Streaming services suffer from the same problem as cable providers. They are corporations that want to cut corners and they know that the average American will eat dirt.
The entire "download-as-you-go" concept is fatally flawed.
Bandwidth caps aren't even the biggest problem here despite being the likely show stopper.
That is of course why software tends to use Unicode is used these days. A file can unambiguously include the chars it uses and the codepages they come from. How they are stored is where an encoding comes in. UTF-8 tends to be a popular encoding of Unicode because legacy tools tend to cope with it better and the files can be a bit smaller than UTF-16 depending on the contents (amount of markup vs text).
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. -- Dawkins
