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Comment All you need to know is in the URL (Score 1) 742

.aspx

They're still trying to do their own thing, regardless of where the rest of the world is going.

Now, is Microsoft a different company and more open to open source? Yes. I have an open source package to control Azure (and they support Linux on it). They've been supportive of the local OpenStack meetups. They're a bit less hostile to dual booting systems. The costs and licensing have come down a good amount. The Xbox 360 is a really nice gaming system. They have way better backwards compatibility than Apple.

But they're still at heart the same company. The UI they started in Windows phone made it to the Xbox, then to Windows 8. That kind of UI just doesn't work on laptops and they should have figured that out. The Xbox One was going to squash game resale and borrowing. Live is a pretty big disaster, and every update to Windows 7 tries to include some new version of Bing, hoping I'll install it.

Can I install different browsers in Chrome OS? Don't know, don't care. Chrome OS is a small fraction of the laptop market, and my Android devices have various choices for browsers and most importantly, I can set the default browser and have that service every http link I come across, same with most other apps.

Comment Re:Medium (Score 1) 128

I'll admit I first thought "well duh" as I have my own small business (nothing as large as most Kickstarter campaigns, but I've hired a CPA or two in my time). But the points you bring up are really important ones and can quickly derail a project if there's not enough advance planning. Along with all of the technical and logistical aspects of a successful campaign, there's also the financial ones.

Comment Re:Please learn about IXP (Score 1) 213

Please learn about traceroute.

I don't have specific sites to go to (the site linked doesn't tell you what they're connecting to to test) but I have to go on the assumption that both AWS and Linode are eating their own dogfood. Going to Linode takes me through Level3 whereas going to Amazon takes me through Qwest. As soon as I've gone two hops (my local router, the other end of my FIOS link) I'm on divergent paths. By hop #5 (out of ~18 hops) I'm off the Verizon network.

But you're the expert.

Comment Re:Polar opposites..... (Score 5, Insightful) 304

You're not understanding the issues here.

I don't like DRM. I use it in places (like my Kindle) because I have to. I don't rent videos online, I buy the DVD/BR and rip it so I can play it where I want to. That's my choice and I pay more for it ($10 for the BR vs. $1.99 or whatever to rent it). There's no requirement for you buy DRMs books, you can still buy a dead tree version, you're just going to pay more for it. In return for the lower price, you give up some of your rights to it. Music companies have figured out the proper balance between cost and piracy and things are pretty settled. Hopefully the movie and ebook industries follow suit at some point.

At the same time, content creators need to ensure they're properly compensated for their work. US copyright law has thrown this way out of skew, so until that gets fixed we're stuck in this situation for now. Either way, this doesn't give you the wholesale right to steal (pirate, borrow, whatever you want to call it) content from others. Neither side is talking about what should be a reasonable timeframe for length of a copyright. Should it be 20 years? 30? 50? 100? How long after content is made should the author (or heirs) continue to be paid for that work?

I'm not being obtuse, I'm at best being a devil's advocate to make you realize there's two sides to the DRM issue and by being deliberately obtuse about one instance of DRM use barely scratches the surface of the problems, companies, and ideas that are involved in producing digital forms of what was traditionally dead tree (or cellulose or vinyl) media.

Comment Re:good riddance (Score 3, Informative) 304

You don't remember the fiasco all that well.

Someone who didn't have the authority to do so uploaded the book to Amazon for publishing. Yes, Amazon could have handled the communication a bit better, but the book should have never been able to be available for Kindle from that publisher in the first place.

Comment Re:Meh. fud spam. (Score 1) 237

You're seeing reverse movement especially with tablets and chromebooks. People don't store media locally anymore - it's all in the cloud. My dad just got a new computer and he's amazed at how it has 500GB in it. Yes the /. crowd uses a lot more (I have 10TB usable) but as more and more normal users start storing their data at AWS or OneDrive or Box or Dropbox, the need for local storage drops to the point where having only a relatively small SSD makes sense. At home I've got a 256GB SSD for my Windows game system and the rest is iSCSI coming from my server.

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