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Comment Re:No worries (Score 2) 628

> In any case you don't "own" the OS on your computer. You have a license to use it, which is different.

False. I wish people would stop believing and repeating this lie.

You actually OWN that COPY. What you do NOT have is the right to redistribute copies of that copy. If you buy it off the shelf, you OWN that copy just as much as you own that copy of the hardcover or paperback book you bought from Barnes & Noble or from Amazon. You can even resell it, providing you do not retain a copy for yourself (legally, any backup copies must be either destroyed or ownership transferred along with the original).

Subscribed/rented software (Adobe CC for example, or Office 365, or SugarCRM SaaS) is a different matter; you're merely renting the software, so in that case you do merely "have a license to use it."

Comment Re:I'm sure this isn't about Young vs Trump, right (Score 4, Insightful) 574

> Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming's ass,

This is where he proves to be full of shit.
Have you ever listened to an 8-track? AWFUL SHIT.

Cassette? Perfectly fine - if it was encoded with HX Pro and Dolby C, and you have a deck with Dolby C decoding, AND you've aligned the heads properly, AND demagnetized and cleaned them regularly. In that case it would sound near-CD-quality--- the first few times you play it. Cassettes degrade over time. Streaming already sounds way better than 8-Track (even if highly compressed, low bit rate), and as far as cassettes are concerned... I don't miss them.

Neil Young is obviously deranged from the Damage Done.

Comment Re:Concorde 2.0 (Score 1) 238

It wasn't that; it was quite profitable.. but it depends on how you look at it. When people say it was expensive and unsuccessful, it's because the R&D for it never got amortized over a large production line, so the limited production drove the per-unit and maintenance costs way up.

Had the USA not enacted insanely tight overland supersonic flights laws (no sonic booms over populated areas, no sonic booms below 60,000', etc) then the SST would have been a longer production run and British and French airlines would have expanded to domestic US service. Outlawing sonic booms was done not because of booms generated by the aircraft (for high altitude craft the boom is usually very faint) but as a protectionist/anti-competitive measure.

Comment Re:Concorde 2.0 (Score 5, Interesting) 238

That is actually partially true; America hadn't yet built a supersonic passenger jet and outlawed overland supersonic flights over populated areas citing sonic booms (at FL600 sonic boom really isn't much of a problem) to protect the American airline system; having foreign airlines' supersonic airliners take business from American airline companies was unacceptable. It was an anti-competitive move. Had we not done that and in response instead developed supersonic airliners, the problem of sonic booms would have been eliminated a couple decades earlier - it wasn't until recently airfoils with wave cancelling properties (essentially creating two opposite-phased sonic booms) have been developed, so there won't be any need to outlaw low-altitiude sonic booms, let alone ones generated below 60,000'.

Comment Re:Shumway is more like Wine (Score 1) 283

Windows 7 Pro's/Ultimate's/Enterprise's Windows XP Compatibility Mode actually uses a FULL installation of Windows XP inside a hypervisor... exactly the same as Virtual PC (it's host is Virtual PC) or VirtualBox. It is absolutely 100% Windows XP compatible because it is a full install of Windows XP; you just won't get hardware video acceleration on many systems.

Comment It depends... (Score 1) 296

It depends... is the certification exam like MCSE or A+, where it's multiple-guess? If it is a multiple guess exam where focus is more on definitions and "what does PCMCIA stand for" than actual configuration and troubleshooting, then yes, the certs are utterly worthless. There are plenty of MCSE-wielding clueless voids out there... ...or is the cert like the RHCE exam where there are no multiple guess questions, but configuring several actual servers (as VMs) in a (virtual) network, configure various services, troubleshoot others, where you must possess real, tangible skills? You may not know what PCIe or PCMCIA stands for but if you can pass that exam, you can be trusted with configuring a server.

Whether certs are useless or not depends on the exam style. One method shows you're very good at rote memorization but doesn't show the ability to actually DO anything tangible with that knowledge. Others allow you to not know the definitions of terms but prove you have actual skills and experience required to get the job done.

(I always use PCMCIA as an example in such discussions because the joke translation is "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms")

Comment I should do this (Score 1) 215

I should do this. At my place I get calls about every other day from bill collectors. They're trying to reach the person who had the phone number previous to me. I explain that the person they are looking for is not here, that I have had the phone number since December, and they need to update their records and stop calling me because they are wasting both their time and mine. They refuse to update their records, so maybe I should cash in on it? If it's worth a couple years' salary... it'd be a hell of a nice bonus. :-)

Comment If it doesn't work as expected (Score 4, Funny) 360

If it doesn't work as expected, or a change in feature set results in data loss or poor performance, it's because you're doing it wrong... much like when the iPhone 4 introduced the faulty easy-to-short antenna design when holding the phone the way anyone holds ANY cellphone, Jobs excuse was "you're holding it wrong." Therefore in this case, extending Apple reasoning to the current use case, if you're editing metadata, you're doing it wrong.

Comment it's nonsense (Score 1) 84

Stupid.

If you offer your copyrighted work for download for free what possible complaint can you have against anyone who takes you up on that offer unless they redistribute via other methods or sites? Peer-peer nature of torrents excluded of course, since they knowingly uploaded knowing full well that peer-peer partial transfers would occur from each torrent downloader...

They should lose all exclusive right and the holdings of the copyright to any of the content they willfully made available for download.

Comment Re:Security team (Score 1) 517

> Until some drone with mapped server drives gets cryptolocker and gets everyone's files encrypted, and causes everyone to lose a day of work, then IT gets blamed for lacking security. Can't have it both ways, can ya?

Sure you can!
Nix scheduled scans during the day.
Nix realtime READ access of known files, but enable it for unknown files.
Turn on scan on write, which is really what matters.

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