|
|
|
| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 16 2012 @ 07:07 AM EDT |
Guess who owns Skype and is pushing it's use on their
various platforms? Yep, Microsoft. So, will use of
Microsoft software with Skype features, be also not legal?
The "powers" that be, want to keep the power.
So, when a government tells it's citizens that they MUST buy
a product or use a product that the government forces on
them, is that "right"?
The problems is, that governments can be corrupted (even the
best of them), and influence peddling can then result in
some product or service being forced on the citizens, that
the citizens (en mass, or per person) do not want to either
use, or pay for.
Use of the Microsoft browser, to fill out government web
forms, is a prime example. This "you need to use IE" to
access a government web site (forms too) is found on many
government servers, even today.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: jesse on Saturday, June 16 2012 @ 10:39 AM EDT |
Don't directly care.
MS might.
There are some laws about "electronic trash" that require the vendor
to buy them back for disposal.
When the resale value becomes less than $10 US, I expect "customers",
especially the corporate ones, will realize how much junk MS is.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 16 2012 @ 11:56 AM EDT |
"An Explanation of the News From Apple"
I'm disturbed by
the increasing joined-at-the-hip nature of OS X. I've
removed iTunes from my
Mac Mini (currently Snow Leopard / v10.6.8) due in
part to the web store
components being out of my control - no way to remove
them. It also did a poor
job of ripping CDs from my collection. I've found
other ripping tools and other
music players so there's no deafening silence.
I'm also anti-"App
Store". [A] The blasted turkey took too long setting up
an account and [B] kept
on shouting about upgrades to OS X "Lion". This will
extend to "Mtn. Lion" if
they only offer it as a download. If they charge say
$30 (vs. $20 for
online) for a boxed version then I'll buy a copy to see what
was deleted from
"Snow Leopard". I like having physical media and the
freedom to function
off-line.
Ted K.
P.S. Sic semper tyrannis ... [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: PolR on Saturday, June 16 2012 @ 02:05 PM EDT |
They say:
Microsoft may eventually end up buying Nokia, but that’s
at least a year away
Makes me think of a guy who wants to buy a
luxury car. But it is too expensive. He hires some goon to make the car cheaper.
The goon scrapped the paint, broke the windows, ripped the seats, pierced
the gas tank, skewed the wheels, demolished the engine and trashed the
transmission.
Next morning the car was cheaper. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 16 2012 @ 07:37 PM EDT |
| More tax dollars sunk in private industry? When does the revolt begin? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 16 2012 @ 11:12 PM EDT |
This is an interesting article, but I noticed a few mistakes in the subjects
that I know a bit about. Bell's work on the telephone was interesting, as at the
time he wasn't trying to invent a telephone at all. He, like many other people
at the time was trying to develop a "harmonic telegraph", or as we would say
today, a frequency multiplexed telegraph. The frequency multiplexing was by
means of multiple mechanical "tuning forks" which were supposed to each respond
to only a single narrow frequency.
His harmonic telegraph design
however was a miserable failure. It was so bad at frequency discrimination
however, you could actually hear the vibrations caused by voices at the
transmitter being transmitted through the wires. Other people were aware of this
effect, but ignored it as "every knew" that the real money was in telegraphs.
What Bell did was recognise a market opportunity for short range
"telegraphs" that didn't need trained operators. Businesses could operate remote
messaging systems themselves rather than relying on written telegrams. Most
people thought that would only be a niche market, while Bell recognised that the
speed and convenience of it meant it had a much wider market than the telegraph.
As for Morse "inventing" the telegraph, that is complete rubbish. He
wasn't the first to develop an electric telegraph, and he wasn't the first to
put one into operation. What he did do was come up with a "system" that was
economic for low traffic lines. Since most lines were low traffic, it came to be
widely used. However, high volume routes didn't use his system, as it wasn't as
efficient in it's use of capacity on the wire. The thing to remember is that
there was never just one type of telegraph in use. There were multiple
types which each had different advantages and disadvantages in different
applications.
For both Bell and Morse, what you could say about them
is that they recognised what the market needed, and brought out products which
filled that need. From a technology perspective, neither inventor was
exceptional (Morse's grasp of electricity and magnetism was actually quite
poor).
As for Farnsworth and television, the best you could say about
him was that he was good at self promotion. He didn't produce the first working
television, and the early ones he did build were completely impractical.
Television as we know it was developed by other people. What he was good at was
raising money from investors to use in patent battles with others, and getting
manufacturers to buy licenses to avoid his lawsuits.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 17 2012 @ 08:19 AM EDT |
It used to be that abandoning the QT platform would have triggered a guaranteed
public release of the software outside the QT public license. Could it be that
Nokia is still developing QT in order to avoid something related to that? I
would have thought the LGPL release already satisfied everything the KDE people
and so on might want????
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: complex_number on Sunday, June 17 2012 @ 03:47 PM EDT |
| [www.post-gazette.com]
Well,
if you thought that the tacking performed by the likes of Google etc was bad
then this is in a whole different universe.
Go and read the story linked
above. You will see the sort of society that the Ad men want for us.
If you
don't want this ad tracking then there a number of things you can do (besides
using tools like AdBlock-Plus). As a minimum, there are:-
1) Don't sign up
for FaceBook, Twitter or any other social media sites
2) Use different
browsers for different purposes
3) Use different email account on different
domains when you sign up for sites.
4) Login as a different user to your PC
when doing ANY financial transaction
5) Clear cookies and history after
leaving a site.
6) Never tell the truth about yourself in online sites
(unless required by law). Send the add trackers on wild goose chases. I'm a 25yr
old Female named Samantha with a hotmail account for a good number of shopping
sites. Use the hotmail once, do your shopping then let it die. If they must
collect everything about you the very least you can do is to give them the wrong
data.
7) don't sign up to anytype of store newsletters or online offers
with your real name.
To quote from'Hill St Blues', 'Be careful out
there'.
Personally, I'd like to get the lot of them shutdown but it ain't
gonna happen. This is why.
I travelled to CA on business yesterday. I popped
in my local SIM car into my phone and headed for my hotel. I'd not gone 5 miles
up I5 before I got three SMS messages. These were from a store I done business
with 2 months ago on my last trip. I had to give them my phone as I wanted
something that they were out of stock and they needed to call me back when
they'd got it in. Never once did I give them explicit permission to keep my
phone on record or use it for marketing especially as I paid for the items I
purchased from them with Cash. Needless to say, I will never be using them
again.
---
Ubuntu & 'apt-get' are not the answer to Life, The Universe
& Everything which is of course, "42" or is it 1.618?
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
