Adobe are notorious for this. I have a copy of CS5.5 and all appropriate licenses (A 5.0 license and a 5.5 upgrade license). My laptop broke down recently and I had to get a new one. I reinstalled all my software but got a nasty shock with the Adobe suite. It kept informing me that my license keys (If you have an upgrade license key, you have to enter both that and the license key you're upgrading for, for extra blech) couldn't be used.
Turns out you're only allowed two physical installations of the Adobe Suite per license. Okay, that's a major restriction but I guess license terms are license terms. What isn't so acceptable is how Adobe tie a license to a machine. Their DRM seems to associate an installation with a specific piece of hardware, and if you want to use their software on a third machine you have to explicitly tell Adobe that you uninstalled it from the machine that it's installed on.
You can't do that if the machine it's installed on has broken down.
What's more. Adobe don't seem able to deactivate a license either, even if you contact them and tell them, "Hey, my computer broke down. Can you unauthorize it for me?"
My pirating days are long behind me, but this is the kind of crap that makes me give serious consideration again.
No DRM in history has ever prevented a copyrighted product from eventually making it into the hands of people who paid nothing for it. It only serves to annoy and demonize the people who actually paid for the product, you know, the ones responsible for your revenue? The ones you might want to keep sweet if you want repeat custom?
Bullying people with ever more draconian copyright laws isn't going to work either.
Re: how many other manufactures would offer to replace the whole system?
Guess you're not very familiar with the Mac Pro then. The case is a tool-free design. You can do a drive swap in 2 minutes flat. No screwdriver required.
So the fact that the News Corp hacks broke into the voicemail of a murdered child but didn't delete anything wasn't a cause for revulsion? The story was true except for one detail.
I learned a lot of the stuff you mentioned at high school, including fabricating circuit boards with a CAD program running on a BBC micro and a vat of etching chemicals.
Tell you what, Maths is difficult and the adult numeracy figures show that it's not doing much good anyway, so lets scrap maths education whilst we're at it. After all, the opportunity cost isn't worth it.
Re: It might help give children a better model of what a computer is and does
Do they actually teach kids to use the more sophisticated statistical analysis features of a modern spreadsheet package? Or do they just teach them to enter grids of numbers (and maybe to add up columns)?
Primary school is all about giving the kids a little taste of everything to see what they like. If kids aren't ever exposed to coding at an early age, how will they ever know that it's something they want to pursue as a career in the future? We simply can't just rely on kids being geeky enough to want to teach themselves in the future. The BBC's Computer Literacy programme of the 80s had a huge influence on my career choice and I think efforts to recapture its spirit should be applauded.
And I wish you'd keep these opinion pieces to your blog instead of plastering them all over a news site.
I wanted to use the thumbs down, stop, wtf, fail, nuke and anon icons all at once. Can you give us a feature to do that?
Not only is this ridiculous, intrusive and fascist, it's probably also in breach of EU law. As for the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd, I'm glad you feel so happy for the whole world to see your credit card details, bank statements, medical histories and love letters to your significant other an I look forward to reading them.
Most IT projects that overrun on time or money do so because they fall at the first hurdle - requirements capture. Either the dev team don't know how to ask the right questions to find out what the client wants, or the client just gives rubbish answers to the questioning. Then then the product is a lot later on in development someone points out that what's being built isn't what they wanted (If you're really unlucky, this will happen on delivery of the finished system), requiring lots of work to be done over. This is a problem that affects public and private IT projects alike.
If you don't solve this problem then all the caps in the world won't help. You either abandon half-finished projects because of the cap, or you break the cap to get a project delivered (often due to the sunk cost fallacy).
Whether it's the dev team or the clients (or both) who are crap at communicating is pretty much irrelevant. Until the communication problem is fixed, this will remain an issue.
I found completely the opposite. When you have bad eyesight, you have to deal with all manner of magnification devices and/or large print books. These things are awkward to say the least. The kindle lets you adjust the font size, and that alone makes it far more appealing to me than a dead tree. Add in the note taking, passage marking and bookmarking features and the ability to carry hundreds of books around and it's just so much better that I've found I've done far more reading since getting it than I had in the 5 years previously.
And I find searching pretty handy when looking up quotes!
Yes I would turn the job down. Not on principle, but out of pragmatism. If an organization is so keen to invade its employees' privacy then it must be a horrible organization to work for.
The moment an interviewer asks me for a social network login is the moment I stand up and walk out without another word. I'd no more let someone access that stuff than I would let them read my mail.
And that's the point. Physics says that a doubling of CO2 should give us a ~1c rise in temp. Further doubling will result in significantly lower rises in temperature. That's the settled science.
Not even Plan 9 can even come close to Manos: The Hands of Fate for sheer terribleness. From a 10 minute intro scene of a family driving where literally nothing happens (it was meant to have the credits superimposed over it, but they forgot) to the "haunting" Torgo theme to Torgo himself who was supposed to be some kind of goat person but just looked like he'd crapped himself to an ending implied paedophilia.
I'd expect this kind of tripe from The Inquirer, but I thought El Reg had better standards. I come here to read tech news, not to read about how evil you think Apple is or how much they suck.
If new evidence comes to light that sheds doubt on a conviction, then the conviction is quashed. That's not the same as a pardon, where the conviction stands but the punishment is rescinded or the guilty party forgiven for their crime
Nobody's talking about forcing the Met Office to implement ZX Spectrum support, just wanting them to use an open standard (say, XML) instead of a closed one (Flash/AIR).
It surely wouldn't take a lot more effort to implement the client widgets in HTML/Javascript (as the widget engines in both Mac OS and Windows use anyway) and feed them from an XML file would it? That way, even if they choose not to develop a Linux widget themselves, the fact that the data to be consumed is provided in an open format means that anyone who wants to create their own widget is free to do so.
Had the US government not tried to push this bill through in secret, without consulting people who weren't involved with the "creative" industries and without a free and open debate on the merits and failings of the legislation in question, those who were in most danger of getting screwed by the law probably wouldn't have felt the need to resort to shouting and civil disobedience to being the issues to light.
Of course the shaping of the legislation should have been done in a more mature way, but political representatives should also be expected to behave in a trustworthy way.
Churchill is supposed to have once observed tha Democracy was the worst system of government, except for all the others that have been tried. Perhaps the same applies to passwords.
And what exactly is wrong with streaky bacon? Not that there's anything wrong with back bacon of course, but the crispiness of properly cooked streaky just can't be beat.
Much better job than the CV article, which was just plain insulting on far too many levels.
Most of the advice still falls under the category of "bloody obvious" though.
Also, you missed one. If they ask you a question on a topic to which you don't know the answer, replay in a clear tone "Honestly? I don't know". If you're honest you'll make a better impression than if you try to bullshit an answer on the spot.
All it takes is one company to foul up or have a falling out with some other company, and poof. Your data's good as gone.
My friends keep touting Spotify as the best thing ever, but I prefer the music stores (itunes, amazon MP3, etc) because once I've obtained the files from the vendor, they can't redact them. I just read that some dance music label has gotten arsey with Spotify and ganked all their music from the service. If your only access to the music in question was Spotify then you're now SOL.
Cloud is a good name for this kind of service, because real life clouds tend to vanish in a hurry too.
Er, guys? Remember how one of the big selling points of the Kindle over dead trees is all the fancy dan accessibility options you get such as being able to resize the screen font, and text to speech?
What are people who relied on that feature meant to do when their old Kindle breaks?
I certainly hopes the Touch has Text to Speech, while it may seem like a gimmick to people with good eyesight, I can assure it isn't a gimmick to those of us who don't.
Well it's a win for the Navy in one way, it demonstrates how badly you can get in your enemies' shit if you jam their access to GPS. Might want to make a note of that one...
When the Vista debacle was in full swing I was in the market for a new laptop. I wasn't going to touch Vista with a barge pole so the choice was basically between a laptop running a Linux distro or a Macbook running the newly released Leopard.
I do think Linux is a nice system, has a lot going for it and is infinitely tinkerable.
I got the Macbook, and 4 years later still use it on a daily basis.
Why? Simple. Linux is for geeks. Mac OS is for people who do work on their computers. I use my computer to do stuff, not so I can sit in front of it all day and just fiddle with it for its own sake. The ability to tinker with Linux is a big plus in the right circumstances, but for most people it just gets in the way of using the computer. Worse than this, if you're looking for software there's little choice on Linux, just what's available in the open source community plus a small handful of bones that the commercial software houses have chosen to throw the Linux community. There's not even any guarantee that you can use your video card or networking hardware with Linux because there might be no drivers due to copyright/patents/trade secrets. Mac OS can run Adobe Suite, including Photoshop. Linux can't.
As for freedom of choice, what's the point of it when your only choice is some piece of software that's a pale imitation of the commercial package it's a copy of with a screwy interface and dependant on someone who's developing and supporting it as a hobby? GIMP is no Photoshop. OpenOffice is no Microsoft Office.
Stallman, meanwhile, just makes himself look more ridiculous every day. His anti-anything-but-GPL, pro-kiddy-fiddling stance just makes him look like a seriously screwed up individual. If you want people using Linux you have to give them a compelling reason other than religious dogma. You also need to stop attacking people who are trying to give people that reason. Shuttleworth has done more to get Linux into the public conciousness than you ever have, and all you do is attack him.
Whatever your opinions on walled gardens (I'm personally against them as far as proper computers go, but for a mobile device I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks), trying to draw attention to them by launching an attack on someone no longer in a position to defend himself is also a pretty unpleasant and unethical way to behave.
I'd suggest, Mr. Stallman, that you take a long hard look at yourself before accusing others of immoral behaviour again.
He just stuffed an operating system build for the desktop onto a tablet and hoped for the best. The Windows XP/Vista tablets were utterly horrible to use. Apple didn't invent the tablet, but they realised that tablets need a tablet operating system, as in an operating system built from the ground up to interface with the user through a touch screen, not a desktop operating system with multitouch bolted on.
Register
68 posts • joined Sunday 29th August 2010 11:08 GMT
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Adobe are notorious for this. I have a copy of CS5.5 and all appropriate licenses (A 5.0 license and a 5.5 upgrade license). My laptop broke down recently and I had to get a new one. I reinstalled all my software but got a nasty shock with the Adobe suite. It kept informing me that my license keys (If you have an upgrade license key, you have to enter both that and the license key you're upgrading for, for extra blech) couldn't be used.
Turns out you're only allowed two physical installations of the Adobe Suite per license. Okay, that's a major restriction but I guess license terms are license terms. What isn't so acceptable is how Adobe tie a license to a machine. Their DRM seems to associate an installation with a specific piece of hardware, and if you want to use their software on a third machine you have to explicitly tell Adobe that you uninstalled it from the machine that it's installed on.
You can't do that if the machine it's installed on has broken down.
What's more. Adobe don't seem able to deactivate a license either, even if you contact them and tell them, "Hey, my computer broke down. Can you unauthorize it for me?"
My pirating days are long behind me, but this is the kind of crap that makes me give serious consideration again.
No DRM in history has ever prevented a copyrighted product from eventually making it into the hands of people who paid nothing for it. It only serves to annoy and demonize the people who actually paid for the product, you know, the ones responsible for your revenue? The ones you might want to keep sweet if you want repeat custom?
Bullying people with ever more draconian copyright laws isn't going to work either.
Re: how many other manufactures would offer to replace the whole system?
Guess you're not very familiar with the Mac Pro then. The case is a tool-free design. You can do a drive swap in 2 minutes flat. No screwdriver required.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy
It's always hilarious to see someone get hoisted by his own petard.
Now run his arse out of the country!
Re: Orlowski gets it wrong
So the fact that the News Corp hacks broke into the voicemail of a murdered child but didn't delete anything wasn't a cause for revulsion? The story was true except for one detail.
This post has been deleted by a moderator
I learned a lot of the stuff you mentioned at high school, including fabricating circuit boards with a CAD program running on a BBC micro and a vat of etching chemicals.
Re: Hobble-de-hoi
Tell you what, Maths is difficult and the adult numeracy figures show that it's not doing much good anyway, so lets scrap maths education whilst we're at it. After all, the opportunity cost isn't worth it.
Re: It might help give children a better model of what a computer is and does
Do they actually teach kids to use the more sophisticated statistical analysis features of a modern spreadsheet package? Or do they just teach them to enter grids of numbers (and maybe to add up columns)?
Re: optional
Your if statement will always return true because you'e assigning the value 'good' to 'science', not checking if science has the value good.
You need to do some programming courses, I think :)
Primary school is all about giving the kids a little taste of everything to see what they like. If kids aren't ever exposed to coding at an early age, how will they ever know that it's something they want to pursue as a career in the future? We simply can't just rely on kids being geeky enough to want to teach themselves in the future. The BBC's Computer Literacy programme of the 80s had a huge influence on my career choice and I think efforts to recapture its spirit should be applauded.
And I wish you'd keep these opinion pieces to your blog instead of plastering them all over a news site.
Scrotum.
There, I've now broken the law in Arizona.
Or, if you want to be REALLY offensive... GRAHAM NORTON!
That's what they always say.
"If you're not in favour of <insert intrusive or oppressive law here> then YOU'RE A PEDO!"
I wanted to use the thumbs down, stop, wtf, fail, nuke and anon icons all at once. Can you give us a feature to do that?
Not only is this ridiculous, intrusive and fascist, it's probably also in breach of EU law. As for the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd, I'm glad you feel so happy for the whole world to see your credit card details, bank statements, medical histories and love letters to your significant other an I look forward to reading them.
Most IT projects that overrun on time or money do so because they fall at the first hurdle - requirements capture. Either the dev team don't know how to ask the right questions to find out what the client wants, or the client just gives rubbish answers to the questioning. Then then the product is a lot later on in development someone points out that what's being built isn't what they wanted (If you're really unlucky, this will happen on delivery of the finished system), requiring lots of work to be done over. This is a problem that affects public and private IT projects alike.
If you don't solve this problem then all the caps in the world won't help. You either abandon half-finished projects because of the cap, or you break the cap to get a project delivered (often due to the sunk cost fallacy).
Whether it's the dev team or the clients (or both) who are crap at communicating is pretty much irrelevant. Until the communication problem is fixed, this will remain an issue.
Re: Kindle - useful, but not for *all* reading.
I found completely the opposite. When you have bad eyesight, you have to deal with all manner of magnification devices and/or large print books. These things are awkward to say the least. The kindle lets you adjust the font size, and that alone makes it far more appealing to me than a dead tree. Add in the note taking, passage marking and bookmarking features and the ability to carry hundreds of books around and it's just so much better that I've found I've done far more reading since getting it than I had in the 5 years previously.
And I find searching pretty handy when looking up quotes!
Re: Try this one on for size...
Yes I would turn the job down. Not on principle, but out of pragmatism. If an organization is so keen to invade its employees' privacy then it must be a horrible organization to work for.
The moment an interviewer asks me for a social network login is the moment I stand up and walk out without another word. I'd no more let someone access that stuff than I would let them read my mail.
None of their godamned business.
Manos: The Hands of Fate
Space Mutiny
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Showgirls
Re: Preconceived agendas, etc.
And that's the point. Physics says that a doubling of CO2 should give us a ~1c rise in temp. Further doubling will result in significantly lower rises in temperature. That's the settled science.
[citation needed]
Yes. I also saw the total poop storm the other operators are kicking up over that announcement and their intention to complain to Ofcom
Given that one of the biggest new features doesn't work in the UK and probably won't for years to come (LTE), this isn't that much of a surprise.
Not even Plan 9 can even come close to Manos: The Hands of Fate for sheer terribleness. From a 10 minute intro scene of a family driving where literally nothing happens (it was meant to have the credits superimposed over it, but they forgot) to the "haunting" Torgo theme to Torgo himself who was supposed to be some kind of goat person but just looked like he'd crapped himself to an ending implied paedophilia.
Shite article
I'd expect this kind of tripe from The Inquirer, but I thought El Reg had better standards. I come here to read tech news, not to read about how evil you think Apple is or how much they suck.
Re: Logitech SetPoint sucks
TL:DR
Re: What a fucking hypocrite!
You, sir, makes me wish I could upvote this 1000 times.
That one quote is everything that's wrong with British politics in general and Blair's NuLabour in particular.
War is peace!
Freedom is slavery!
Ignorance is strength!
Good for them
Maybe with all these profits coming in they can finally get around to paying the millions of pounds of tax they sweet talked their way out of.
@haroldo
If new evidence comes to light that sheds doubt on a conviction, then the conviction is quashed. That's not the same as a pardon, where the conviction stands but the punishment is rescinded or the guilty party forgiven for their crime
You, sir, are a moron.
Nobody's talking about forcing the Met Office to implement ZX Spectrum support, just wanting them to use an open standard (say, XML) instead of a closed one (Flash/AIR).
It surely wouldn't take a lot more effort to implement the client widgets in HTML/Javascript (as the widget engines in both Mac OS and Windows use anyway) and feed them from an XML file would it? That way, even if they choose not to develop a Linux widget themselves, the fact that the data to be consumed is provided in an open format means that anyone who wants to create their own widget is free to do so.
you'd think for 5 grand they'd build its case out of a material that doesn't look so cheap and bloody nasty. It looks like something from the mid-90s!
Also possibly not a smart purchase if you have back trouble.
Had the US government not tried to push this bill through in secret, without consulting people who weren't involved with the "creative" industries and without a free and open debate on the merits and failings of the legislation in question, those who were in most danger of getting screwed by the law probably wouldn't have felt the need to resort to shouting and civil disobedience to being the issues to light.
Of course the shaping of the legislation should have been done in a more mature way, but political representatives should also be expected to behave in a trustworthy way.
And blind users or those with poor facial recognition skills use the system by...?
Churchill is supposed to have once observed tha Democracy was the worst system of government, except for all the others that have been tried. Perhaps the same applies to passwords.
You fail high school mathematics forever.
12 + (12 X 50%) = 18
The Razr if FUGLY!
Something that's all the more shocking considering what a solid piece of design the classic RAZR was, it was a thing of beauty.
What the hell went wrong in the industrial design dept?
Kindle touch
Why aren't Amazon releasing the Touch over here?
Streaky
And what exactly is wrong with streaky bacon? Not that there's anything wrong with back bacon of course, but the crispiness of properly cooked streaky just can't be beat.
Much better job than the CV article, which was just plain insulting on far too many levels.
Most of the advice still falls under the category of "bloody obvious" though.
Also, you missed one. If they ask you a question on a topic to which you don't know the answer, replay in a clear tone "Honestly? I don't know". If you're honest you'll make a better impression than if you try to bullshit an answer on the spot.
This is why I don't trust the cloud
All it takes is one company to foul up or have a falling out with some other company, and poof. Your data's good as gone.
My friends keep touting Spotify as the best thing ever, but I prefer the music stores (itunes, amazon MP3, etc) because once I've obtained the files from the vendor, they can't redact them. I just read that some dance music label has gotten arsey with Spotify and ganked all their music from the service. If your only access to the music in question was Spotify then you're now SOL.
Cloud is a good name for this kind of service, because real life clouds tend to vanish in a hurry too.
Badass probe
Voyager 2 is the Chuck Norris of space hardware.
DS9
That's all well and good, but can it hold off a Dominion battle fleet of Gem Hadar coming through the Bajor wormhole?
Text to speech fail
Er, guys? Remember how one of the big selling points of the Kindle over dead trees is all the fancy dan accessibility options you get such as being able to resize the screen font, and text to speech?
What are people who relied on that feature meant to do when their old Kindle breaks?
I certainly hopes the Touch has Text to Speech, while it may seem like a gimmick to people with good eyesight, I can assure it isn't a gimmick to those of us who don't.
So you can make your Mac immune to this trojan by installing VMWare Fusion? Cool.
I guess you should ditch the open source spell-checker then.
Well it's a win for the Navy in one way, it demonstrates how badly you can get in your enemies' shit if you jam their access to GPS. Might want to make a note of that one...
It also doesn't give you free reign to be an arsehole.
Freedom from the age of concent
When the Vista debacle was in full swing I was in the market for a new laptop. I wasn't going to touch Vista with a barge pole so the choice was basically between a laptop running a Linux distro or a Macbook running the newly released Leopard.
I do think Linux is a nice system, has a lot going for it and is infinitely tinkerable.
I got the Macbook, and 4 years later still use it on a daily basis.
Why? Simple. Linux is for geeks. Mac OS is for people who do work on their computers. I use my computer to do stuff, not so I can sit in front of it all day and just fiddle with it for its own sake. The ability to tinker with Linux is a big plus in the right circumstances, but for most people it just gets in the way of using the computer. Worse than this, if you're looking for software there's little choice on Linux, just what's available in the open source community plus a small handful of bones that the commercial software houses have chosen to throw the Linux community. There's not even any guarantee that you can use your video card or networking hardware with Linux because there might be no drivers due to copyright/patents/trade secrets. Mac OS can run Adobe Suite, including Photoshop. Linux can't.
As for freedom of choice, what's the point of it when your only choice is some piece of software that's a pale imitation of the commercial package it's a copy of with a screwy interface and dependant on someone who's developing and supporting it as a hobby? GIMP is no Photoshop. OpenOffice is no Microsoft Office.
Stallman, meanwhile, just makes himself look more ridiculous every day. His anti-anything-but-GPL, pro-kiddy-fiddling stance just makes him look like a seriously screwed up individual. If you want people using Linux you have to give them a compelling reason other than religious dogma. You also need to stop attacking people who are trying to give people that reason. Shuttleworth has done more to get Linux into the public conciousness than you ever have, and all you do is attack him.
Whatever your opinions on walled gardens (I'm personally against them as far as proper computers go, but for a mobile device I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks), trying to draw attention to them by launching an attack on someone no longer in a position to defend himself is also a pretty unpleasant and unethical way to behave.
I'd suggest, Mr. Stallman, that you take a long hard look at yourself before accusing others of immoral behaviour again.
He just stuffed an operating system build for the desktop onto a tablet and hoped for the best. The Windows XP/Vista tablets were utterly horrible to use. Apple didn't invent the tablet, but they realised that tablets need a tablet operating system, as in an operating system built from the ground up to interface with the user through a touch screen, not a desktop operating system with multitouch bolted on.
New Tactics
In that case, I hope the counterprotesters can come up with something non-violent and utterly humiliating for these morons to deal with.
As WBC are basically a bunch of religious fanatic lawyers you can imagine how fun to be around they truly are.
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