I see their point... but at the same time I'm wondering about the practicality of this. If you really are a professional graphics artist are you really doing your work on the built-in display? I have my MacBook Pro connected to an external 24" LCD when I'm not traveling (the laptop lid is closed in 'clamshell' mode).
So what should Apple have done?
You've got a graphics card that really does support 32-bit color depth. Connect a display that can support it and, to the extent that the human eye can detect it you get all the colors advertised. Internally any application running on the machine belives it has 32-bit color. The built-in display on these laptops creates the illusion to graphics card, application, and end-user.
Should Apple (who likes to use simple terminology that their end-users will understand) have listed it as "Millions of colors to your application but really only 8-bit with dithering on the built-in screen"? This would totally baffle most users. I suppose their specs sheet could have thrown in a disclaimer (maybe they did -- I'm not referencing any spec sheets as I write this).
To make my point, if these users had been Apple, what path would they have followed:
Put in a better display (even if this raises the price of the computer by a large amount)?
Change the 'Display Preferences' selection so that only 8-bit color depth is available when using the built-in display -- understanding what this would do to limit applications and also understanding that having done it the way Apple did it, the graphics card manages the dithering to create the illusion whereas with this option there would just be 256 flat color tones and no illusion?
Try to be more accurate about how to describe this color mode by explaining that the graphics card supports millions of colors, which means applications can leverage millions of colors, but the display will merely emulate these colors?
I don't see option #1 or #2 being very good options at all. This leaves option #3... but this isn't something easily described in the display preferences panel -- nor do I think it should be. I can only imagine putting some footnote in the technical specs which explain what they're really doing.
Again... I suspect that most serious professionals who need the color accuracy are not doing their serious fine-detail work on the built-in display.
While I understand their point... I think they're picking at nits. I OWN one of these machines they speak of and I really don't feel that I've been defrauded.
I'm a bit of a coffee fanatic and spent a great deal of time learning about coffee, roasting, brewing, and how to get the best possible cup. I'll try to sum up what I've learned.
About 30% of a coffee bean is water soluble. 70% are solids which wont dissolve no matter how long you leave them in water. Of the soluble portion, 2/3rds (20% of the bean) yield flavors that most people would find desirable. 1/3 (10% of the bean) yields flavors which are bitter and not as desirable. Caffeine is bitter. "some" is good... too much isn't so good.
Forunately if the temperature, pressure, grind, and timing of the extraction are all correct then the desirable components will dissolve faster and the less desirable flavors will dissolve last. This means that if you cut-off the extraction process at the right time, you can get most of the good stuff and leave the bad stuff behind. The trick is in getting the extraction correct.
Turns out that drip coffee makers and percolators can't control the extraction process. Espresso machines can be both good and bad (most low-end machines are bad), but a good espresso machine will make fantastic coffee.
What makes the machine good is it's ability to carefully control the temperature and pressure during the extraction. In 1961, the Faema company invented an espresso machine brew group which circulates some hot water from the boiler through the metal of the brew group. If hot water goes through a large mass of cold metal, the metal will wick the heat out of the water before it hits the beans... since the water would then be too cold, the extraction wouldn't be very good. By circulating the water through the brew group to warm the metal to the waters desired temperature, the water and metal mass of the brew group is equalized so that when extraction occurs the water wont be cooled down, temperature of the water when it hits the beans will remain consistent and you'll be able to control the extraction much better. This brew group is called the Faema E61 brew group. 26 years later it's STILL the ruling brew group. Many top machines use this brew group even if they machine is built by another maker. Other high-end machines tend to try to copy the Faema system by temperature-controlling their brew groups as well. Low end machines don't control the brew group temperature and the results.... speak for themselves. =(
The grind should be fairly fine... fine enough that if you put a small amount on your counter (or the palm of your hand) and then press a finger into it you should be able to still see some traces of your fingerprint in the grinds. You don't want dust (don't want to see a perfect fingerprint) but you dont' want it so course that there's no hint of a fingerprint. Propeller grinders aren't capable of grinding fine enough. Some low-quality burr grinders either cannot grind fine enough or they generate too much heat from friction and end up damaging the beans (like over-roasting would do). A good burr grinder should be able to grind fine enough without generating heat that damages the ground coffee.
Before pulling a shot, if the machine has been sitting idle too long then I'd "pull a blank". Basically just run water through the machine's brew group for a minute to make sure you've re-normalized the temperature. If steam comes out then it's too hot. Water temperature should only be about 205 F (not boiling).
If the coffee is dispensed into the porta-filter basket and then FIRMLY tamped (lean on it with a little body weight) and twist to polish it. Attach the porta-filter to the brew group, put a couple of clear shot glasses under the spouts and grab a watch with a second hand.
Pull the shot and time how long it takes to extract the shot. It should take about 25-27 seconds. Much shorter and you've under-extracted... possibly you didn't tamp tight enough or your grind wasn't fine enough. Much longer and you've over-extracted -- you've gone beyond the 20% of the bean that's desirable and grabbed plenty of that 10%
Just review the comments on any slashdot article. We're all commenting on the same stuff, and usually making the same points -- and yet all phrased uniquely. That's because what appears to be a handful of words and phrasing techniques actually has near limitless ways to say the same thing.
If a teacher were to have students write a 10-word essay on a topic, I still think the number of variations would be extremely large and the probability of any two students saying exactly the same 10 words would be very small. Now expand this to merely a few pages.
I've played the 'rumor' game in a class -- the game where one person whispers a story to the person next to them, that 2nd person whispers the same story to a 3rd and so on until it goes around the room. The last person finally announces the story to everyone in the room and the rest of you snicker because they aren't even close to the original story. Even when we TRY to repeat what we just heard, we naturally rephrase it -- often to the point that we get it completely wrong. As humans, we seem to be very bad at using our minds to plagiarize even when we are *supposed* to be plagiarizing. It's not very likely that entire paragraphs could be duplicated word for word by mere accident unless it was a deliberate.
Turnitin.com doesn't declare that they own the material -- they just scan it. They aren't selling the material, they're selling the matching service designed to hunt-down plagiarism violations. I read the whole article and went to the Turnitin.com website -- they DO show where they found the match and the source material for it -- so if a person repeats something they themselves wrote in an earlier work, it would be seen as such.
Imbedding citations to another person's work is not plagiarism IF you cite the work. It's plagiarism if you write it in such a way that suggests that the work is your original work. Frankly, if someone quotes another person and fails to cite the source then they *should* be flagged.
Going after the manufacturers is pointless. They make what the market demands. I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned CAFE. Few people I talk to seem to know or understand how CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) works. Basically the government mandates that manufacturer's average fuel economy for the entire fleet of vehicles meet or exceed a target and imposes big fines if they don't.
As a consequence, car companies typically subsidize the cost of the most fuel efficient cars because each car sold helps to drive up their averge -- giving them the ability to sell the much more in-demand gas-guzzling models. If they do not subsidize the price of those models, they wont sell enough to meet their CAFE goals.
Compare the price of a Ford Focus to a Ford Mustang. The Focus has a base price of about $13,500 -- while the Mustang has a base price of about $19,250 (a difference of almost $6k). Do you really believe the Mustang actually costs Ford that much more to build? Note that MOST of the cost of the car is in engineering, testing, building plants & equipment, etc. (probably very nearly the same for both cars) and only some of the cost is actually based on the price of the materials in the car -- but even then, it's not as though you could possibly rationalize that there is some $6k more worth of material in the Mustang.
No, the Focus is subsidized by the manufacturer. Ford sells that model at a loss because it helps them achieve CAFE, reduces fines, and every unit sold helps offset their average and allows them to sell the more fuel hungry models which are very profitable. The profit from these vehicles more than makes up for the loss on the economy cars. I'm only using these two cars from the same maker as an example -- all car makers do this.
What would happen if Ford decided to just quit making gas-guzzlers? Answer: They'd go out of business. Why? Because the only thing left to sell would be economy cars like the Focus. The public doesn't *want* to buy those cars, they buy them only because of the very attractive price tag. Unfortunately Ford can't maintain that price tag subsidy without something to offset it and they've just cut those models from their fleet. The small segment of the market that does want a small economy car will just buy it from the competition who still subsidize it. The moral of this story is that if the manufacturer does "the right thing" they get punished for it.
And this brings me to my point: The REAL problem is the politicians who are too cowardly to fix the problem at it's source... the BUYERS. If the politicians imposed a big tax (regardless of kind... sales tax, annual tag taxes, gasoline tax, etc.), then they'd get voted out of their jobs -- and we can't have that now can we? No, the smarter political move is to blame the auto-industry and tell the public that they are all victims.
An awkward truth is that if you survey buyers who aren't *really* buying a car now, most people will tell say that they believe we should all be driving more efficient vehicles. But when Joe Consumer walks into the showroom, he or she rationalizes why their personal situation is an exception and they need the gas guzzler. Buyers will not likely voluntarily give up their lust for big cars with miserable economy without a stronger personal incentive.
An 8% royalty per saw is outrageous. Note that this fee is the royalty charged merely for the [em]license[/em] to use the technology. The manufacturer still has to engineer and adapt the saw to use it -- so the burden of all costs to employ the device is still on the maker. I can well imagine that they might have been intrigued by the idea, but were forced to back away and rationalize why it had problems once they they learned the price tag.
I don't think the manufacturers are guiltless either. As the article points out, the manufacturers have a certain level of immunity granted to them against lawsuits associated with injuries -- so they realize have very little incentive to make them safer. They do have an incentive for keeping them from children, which is why most stationary power tools now have some sort of key -- so that children can't start the machine if they try to play with it (at least all my stationary power tools have this).
There are far cheaper ways to protect ones fingers from table saws. Woodworking catalogs sell all sorts of devices -- but the low-tech devices seem to work best. Just push the wood through the saw using an old stick so that your fingers never come near the blade (this is what I do). There are hold-down devices to keep the wood securely traveling through the blade so that you don't need to get your fingers near. Some of these include "feather boards" (looks like a giant plastic hair comb which rides on an angle against the wood to hold the workpiece steady, though there are many variations and many wood workers make their own) to hold-down devices that look like spring-loaded roller-skate wheels to hold the wood firm. They're reasonably cheap. They never fail.
What surprises me is that to look at some of these safety accessories, it's obvious that they cost pennies to make -- and yet the manufacturers not only DO NOT include them with the saw, they don't really make a good standard way to mount aftermarket accessories to the saw. This always puzzled me because I realized that for a few pennies (or even nothing at all) they could make the saw drammatically safer, and yet they don't. Once I read the article and learned that the legal precidents basically grant them some fairly good level of protection from these sorts of lawsuits it makes sense as to why they just don't care.
I don't think either side has the consumer's best interest at heart.
Or just run NeoOffice on the Mac. This is really an OpenOffice.org port to the Mac so that it doesn't require an X windowing environment to run (though there is a Mac version of OO.o that runs under X). It does a pretty good job of reading & writing MS Office files (not perfect), it stores docs in native OpenDocument standard format (these are really.xml files which have been zipped and saved as a single open-doc file -- which means you can get external software to parse the docs & integrate with them), AND it runs on Mac, Linux, Solaris, & Windows. Did I mention it has a much more attractive price tag than MS Office?? =)
When I read the headline about Microsoft not making a virtual PC port, my first thought was "Does anybody really care?" It would be a completely irrelevant product.
Though there is some merit due to the fact that no computer or OS is ever completely safe, the Mac is vastly safer than Windows and it certainly isn't because Mac's are so outrageously rare that no unscrupulous hackers own one and it also isn't because unscrupulous hackers are so noble that their honor prevents them from writing malware for the Mac. If you believe that, you are deluded. (Of course if you are right then it's all the more reason to buy a Mac!)
So why haven't Mac's seen their fair share of malware?
It is because the OS is simply more secure by design. Are there flaws in that design? Of course there are. But I think the reason reason is more non-technical.
Just try to run and administer a Windows box securely. It's extremely hard to do. A knowledgable security person can do it with a great deal of effort -- but the average home consumer sure can't. You'll also rapidly discover that not all, but a substantial quantity of Windows software is written with the assumption that applications are installed by the same users who will be running them or that all users have administrative rights all the time. The Windows developer community has this flawed mentality and the OS paradigm does very little to enforce a more secure model.
Mac OS X, in contrast, has a completely different security and usage paradigm. Use a Mac and you'll quickly discover that the OS assumes that the OS should live in one part of the filesystem, installed apps in another, and users should only modify files that are found in their home directories -- further, no user is an admin. Even administrative users run unprivileged and have to type their password to perform administrative actions. Developers with any experience on a Mac quickly learn this paradigm. There are exceptions and I have found them, but they are uncommon on the Mac whereas they are quite common on Windows.
There are so many technical reasons why the Mac is more secure, but the underlying non-technical reason is because (a) developers and users alike are basically lazy and will follow the path of least resistence and (b) the path of least resistence on Windows is to not bother with security at all whereas the path of least resistence on the Mac is to actually have a more secure installation... the OS & it's tools actually make doing this seem quite natural.
Bottom line: The average non-technical Windows user really cannot maintain a secure machine and Microsoft's OS paradigm does little to encourage secure devopment practices. The average non-technical Mac user actually can maintain a fairly secure machine without really knowing what they're doing... and that's because the OS makes it easy for both the users and the developers to have good security habbits.
Mac user's should be a little paranoid, but the OS is vastly more secure. While we'll probably get a small number of malware problems, it'll never come close to approaching the scale of security problems enjoyed by Windows users.
1. Widescreen X86 iBook - This one is obviously going to happen, but probably not now. Apple will drop 4:3 format entirely, as will the rest of the world (showing they are, as always, technology leaders). They just won't cannibalize Powerbook sales with iBooks until they have milked it long enough.
And I would ordinarily agree with you... come out with the newest & best features in the high-end products first, then introduce those features in the lower-end models later. That way people who were teetering on which version to buy will have to shell out more cash for the high-end items if they want those features. Those that refuse to shell out more will bide their time, but buy the low-end version later and Apple still eventually gets all the sales.
But Apple doesn't seem to think that way. Examples:
Apple came out with the Nano before releasing the iPod Video -- the rapid succession in the introduction of these models makes it clear that they were both ready at about the same time. Had the new video version come out first, those high-end users would probably not have bought a nano. By doing things backward, they've sold a pile of Nanos to users who turned right around and bought the new high-end Video.
Apple has "wired" and "wireless" (bluetooth) versions of their keyboard & mouse, but users have been asking for a mouse with more than just one button for years. Apple releases one... but it has a cord; wireless isn't an option. I think they will come out with a bluetooth version of the Mighty Mouse, but not until after they've milked the sales of the corded version (and I think the time is ripe... no rumors for it though, but I wont be surprised if it happens).
I can think of several others. Apple seems to boost their low-end models first and my own personal observation (without doing a study) is that it seems so consistent that I now count on it.
Steve Jobs seems to understand that a fundamental difference between those on a budget and those with money to burn -- those on the budget will buy the item just once. Those with money to burn will buy the same item over and over again -- and he milks that for all it's worth.
Oh... and as for the BT Remote... no way. That's a 1000:1 longshot. They've already quietly introduced the new iPod "Universal Dock" that has an IR remote sensor and they also now separately sell the IR control that comes with the iMac. That very same control in conjunction with the universal dock will let you control your iPod or iPod video from across the room (actually it's quite nice to sit across the room with your iPod video connected to a TV and be able to fully control it as a player. There's no way Apple will introduce a BT version of the remote until they introduce iPods with builtin BlueTooth -- something else they'll probably eventually do.
I think eBay - just as several governments are now doing to banks - should be held liable anyway. WHY? Because they're responsible for the pathetically weak authentication system which allow for password theft and consumers are nearly powerless to do anything about it.
You can't "Phish" the password from someone who has to use 2-factor authentication systems to gain access to an account (e.g. smart card). Smart card readers are about $15 these days and the cards are pretty cheap. It would cost much to allow sellers and even buyers opt to get a more highly secured authentication scheme for their account making them virtually immune to phisphing and spyware attacks that lift passwords. eBay could give those sellers & buyers an icon so that parties could know who their dealing with and that's not a scam (at least if it is a scam they KNOW who's responsible for it.)
The idea behind pressuring the banks (and eBay) for this sort of thing is that they alone can make or break the fraud. They claim it isn't their fault and they should be liable, but unless THEY are willing to make stronger authentication an option, law enforcement and victims will never really be able to make a substantial dent in this sort of thing.
Scripting languages are nice to throw some quick and easy stuff together -- but they don't scale. I've had customers who did all the possible optimization they could do to eek out the last bit of performance from their scripted (interactively interpreted - e.g. PERL). They switched to Java because Java (even without HotSpot) gives much better performance. WITH HotSpot it's as fast as binary compiled and linked languages like C. The 'ol "Java is slow" argument is ancient history and just isn't true anymore; hasn't been true for years.
The comparison here is understated. It isn't that they don't know EVERYTHING about how stuff works, it's that they don't even know SOMETHING about how stuff works. Most computer users in the early 80's (when home computing was starting out) had a fairly good idea of how most of the key things worked. PC users understood what autoexec.bat and config.sys were for and how to edit them. Maybe they couldn't write their boot loader and only the hard-core users could write terminate-and-stay-resident (TSRs, remember them?) programs, but today I find people who really fancy themsevles as "techs" who, frankly, cannot handle anything that doesn't come with a wizard or GUI.
I interviewed a potential Solaris sys-admin for a company that needed one. I asked him if he would describe the boot process of a server -- in whatever level of a detail he could provide. The detail I got back was "you turn it on. It does the power-on-self-test. The kernel loads, and the login screen appears." Hmm... ok... ignoring the boot-prom for the moment, I asked if he could provide any more detail about what happens between the kernel loading and the login prompt appearing. Answer "well, when the kernel loads, it displays a login prompt". He was asking for $150,000 to start.
It's not just computer tech -- you can say the same for lots of other areas. For example: kitchen tech. Eating out is common, sure... but even people who cook at home these days are usually using prepared mixes & such. When prepared mixes got started it was for the "convenience". Home cooks knew how to make all kinds of stuff from scratch. The convenience has evolved (or should I say "devolved") to dependence. Today the average home cook has no idea how to make stuff from scratch and simply MUST buy the prepared mixes. Many of them are amazingly easy -- so easy, in fact, that it's almost astonishing that people wont make it themselves. I'm talking about stuff that only has three ingredients and one of them is optional.
I think convenience devolving into dependence is probably common to many areas. Computer tech isn't special in this regard.
A little over a month ago we asked you for your questions to send on to the World of Warcraft development team. Unfortunately, it appears that these questions were misrouted to the Blizzard PR department.
Taco, you've got it all wrong... now that all the original developers have left, those marketing people are the development team!;-)
Was there ever a time when Microsoft invented useful things? I must have fallen asleep on that day. As far as I can remember, manipulating markets has ALWAYS been Microsoft's core business. Remember guys -- this is the company that didn't even write MS-DOS.
Laast time I checked, it was illegal in the US for telemarketers to call cell phones.
It was illegal for a telemarketer to contact you via any method that forced you to pay (e.g. your cellphone). They maintained lists of cellphone exchanges and avoided them.
HOWEVER... now we have phone number portability. In addition to taking your cellphone number to a new mobile carrier, you can also take your cellphone number to a land line or vice versa.
Telemarketers argued that it's no longer possible to know if the number they are calling is a mobile phone. Now you have to register your mobile number with the do-not-call list or prepare to be inundated with marketed on your cellphone while you pay for the minutes.
There is still a differential rate of reproduction between different groups and so natural selection is carrying on exactly like it has always done.
No... that's not correct. The difference here is that we humans tamper with 'evolution' in unnatural ways. Not just us -- but everything we domesticate. This includes crops, livestock, even the family pet. Bulldogs are unlikely to reproduce successfully on their own because they need c-section births. If "natural" selection were at work, the breed would be extinct. How is the 'natural' selection process carrying on exactly as it has always done in this case?
Bulldogs are one example, but we do it with a lot more than the family pet. We have crops that don't reproduce at all -- yet these crops *still* exist! Natural selection? I think not!
I suppose it's politically easier to argue about how it applies to pets than it is to argue about how it applies to people. I think you'll find that differences in the reproduction between different groups of people is less to do with genetics and more to do with social and/or political environments. There may be differences, but you can't pin these differences on nature.
Natural selection does not necessarily apply equal pressure on each generation. Many generations may have it easy, allowing genetic variations to propogate for some time until a more severe event occurs (e.g. a plague) that genetically attacks our species. Perhaps only a minority of us are fortunate enough to have the genetic makeup to survive. Think of it as a rubber-band stretching -- allowing us to beat natural selection for only so long before the rubber band snaps us back.
But for now, medical science is frequently beating nature. 'Natural' selection may not be neutralized to the point of having zero impact, but it sure has been reduced to a much less significant factor than it was in years past.
You need to break up the jobs of message storage, client connections, and mail transfer into isolated components that can scale independent of each other and be clustered for scalability and high-availability.
Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) are often dedicated for either inbound and outbound and also interface to scanning software (e.g. BrightMail Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus, see: http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/pr oducts.cfm?ProductID=642%20) to check for the usual suspects. For inbound mail, they leveraage directory servers (which replicate with ease) to find the specific message store used to host the mailbox for the inbound message, and then route it correctly. These are load balanced for availability and scalability.
A user's mailbox will only exist on a single message store, but the message stores can be clustered for high-availability.
Client connections similarly allow an array of "message multiplexors" to scale that end of the problem. The multiplexors speak webmail, IMAP, and POP. Similar to the MTAs, they are load balanced. A user can connect to any multiplexor and a directory server is used to find that user's proper message store to connect them to their mailbox.
To the end user it looks like a single server that does POP, IMAP, and WebMail. In truth it's broken into components to achieve high scalability and availability.
A single message store can usually store a few hundred thousand mailboxes -- for a million mailboxes you'd probably only need a handful of them.
By the same token you can attack the claim the "loss" calculated by the RIAA is based on a fallacy. They proceed from the false assumption that if the person had no access to the music illegally, they would buy the CD. I submit that this is also simply unprovable and therefore should not be used in the calculation of "loss" the labels feel they have as a result of P2P.
Actually, you could probably prove that not only is it a bad assumption that the person would buy the CD, you could probably show that the person could not buy the CD -- even if they wanted to.
The whole "you stole billions of dollars from me" argument is based on the notion that the person would have bought the CD had they not obtained it via sharing. I suppose that would be true if the person who downloaded all the music had all the wealth of Bill Gates. The average person that the RIAA is targeting are school & college students. These are people with limited financial resources. If there was absolutely no way to obtain the music through sharing, then they'd probably just buy 1 or 2 CDs on a paycheck as they can afford them and do without the rest.
The argument that the downloader would have bought the music CD had it not been for the file-sharing network is absurd.
Who's to say he WONT someday dismantle his furniture and use those boxes to ship something?
I've got a pile of FedEx shipping supplies too, but mine are just sitting on a shelf waiting until I need to ship something. I think this guy is pretty clever (not to mention earth-friendly) by coming up with more than just 1 use for the boxes before they're sent to a landfill.
Exactly. MS word may be dull, unispired, and poorly designed with layers of complexity. But it does its job well and is not hard to use. Star office is slow, has an clumsy layout. is unattractive, and is even more complex. I've tried it and hate it. It's why I use macs: linux office apps suck.
You tried it and hate it? Did you try it for more than 6 minutes before you gave up because every menu option wasn't EXACTLY where it is in MS Office?
StarOffice, OpenOffice and NeoOffice/J (on the Mac) are extremely similar to MS Office in functionality and ease of use. Was it the $399 non-discountable price tag what attracted you to MS Office as opposed to the $79 StarOffice or the $0 OpenOffice?
For a $399 cost difference I think I can afford to learn the few subtle feature & menu differences.
Let's rephrase the survey... apprently Pew Research wasn't clever enough to notice that the difference isn't your age so much as it is your level of responsibilities.
People with jobs, spouses, kids, and other responsibilities don't have the idle time to keep up with constant interruptions for meaningless chit-chat. When we do chit-chat, IM is far far too slow and time consuming - we actually communicate using strangely effective organs evolved from prehistoric times called "vocal cords".
I recall the days when computers didn't network very well at all. Even your IBM mainframes couldn't talk to your IBM PCs without installing some proprietary special-purpose product to make communication possible -- and they were both made by the same company. Once standardized networking began to emerge (IP networking) the industry changed. I do recall the suggestions that the PC could probably run some of the applications that the mainframe was running and how absurd the IT folks thought those claims were... it would never happen. And yet... it did happen. Once computers could finally communicate, a reason for open standards, open systems, and open software emerged.
Zealots like me like the idea of "openness", but I don't think Joe Average Consumer really thinks a whole lot about it. But... I do think that Joe Average does want "interoperability".
A common comment you'll hear from Apple owners is that they perceive their computer spends more time helping them do what they want to do rather than them spending all their time supporting their computer. Taken differently, these (mostly non-technical) people are really just saying that they don't want to care about their computer... they just want it to work.
So far, consumers do still need to "support" their Linux installations. Linux doesn't "just work". Windows still needs too much care & feeding... it doesn't "just work" either -- especially where security is concerned. Mac OS X seems to be the best at just working -- even for people who don't know what they're doing. Yes it happens to be Unix. Yes Unix has a more stable foundation than Windows. But we only know this because we're largely a technical community. Joe Average doesn't know this and doesn't want to know this. Most of them probably have no idea that Firefox is considered to be "open" and that IE is considered to be "proprietary". They run what they run either because (a) it was there or (b) their computer buddy told them that's what they should use or (c) that's what they learned to use at work or school -- and I almost forgot... it works with the sites they need to visit.
Open software tends to be more interoperable - so I think it's tends to slowly erode away at the market share of non-interoperable systems. But I think the real difference is that interoperability wins over non-interoperability... not that open systems win over proprietary ones.
Though I want open software to win out, I must confess that I don't believe the average consumer really cares a whole lot about it.
The rationale behind why public disclosure of a security flaw (knowing that the 'bad guys' will hear about it too) is based on the idea that (a) customers have a right to know that they are at risk and also need to apply a fix as soon as it's available, and (b) companies should face pressure (even extreme pressure) to prioritize the fixes for these bugs.
It's pretty much accepted across the industry that the disclosure that there is a vulnerability is a "good thing". Indiscriminately revealing the gory details about how to exploit the vulnerability is a "bad thing".
After reading all the articles, it sounds like the exploit was discovered months ago, the patch has been available for months, and though Mr. Lynn demonstrated that the exploit is real (usually required to establish credibility) he did not expose the gory details necessary to allow someone to exploit the attack on their own.
So what's the big deal?
I'm particularly annoyed with Cisco's comment about Mr. Lynn having "illegally" obtained his information. Frankly, it's in the best interest of the public, the Internet, and the security world that security researches will decompile code to search for exploits. The security indsutry accepts that "security through obscurity" is a very bad idea. Vetted code is deemed secure because the gory details have been explosed to a wide audience and *still* no exploits could be found -- NOT because nobody was allowed to know how it all worked.
Slightly off-topic, but certainly related... I'm surprised none of the comments I've read have mentioned the 'User Agent Switcher' plugin.
When I run into apps that tell me they require IE and refuse to work with anything else, I find that quite often it's not that they contain something specific that no other browser can support, but more likely that they've only ever been tested with IE and the site wont support you unless you run IE.
In Firefox, click "Tools" -> "Extensions", then click "Get More Extensions" and search for something called "User Agent Switcher".
It basically lies to the web app server and reports that you are running a different browser. Just pick a browser that the site supports and usually the site will just work.
A word of caution that obviously there are sites that do only work with specific browsers because of the way they were coded -- but often times the site is merely checking the User-Agent HTTP header string and simply refuses to let you proceed any further if the string doesn't match one of the sites supported browsers. The plugin does NOT change the capabilities of Firefox to emulate IE... the plugin lets your browser lie to the server so that you can get past the browser version check.
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So what should Apple have done?
You've got a graphics card that really does support 32-bit color depth. Connect a display that can support it and, to the extent that the human eye can detect it you get all the colors advertised. Internally any application running on the machine belives it has 32-bit color. The built-in display on these laptops creates the illusion to graphics card, application, and end-user.
Should Apple (who likes to use simple terminology that their end-users will understand) have listed it as "Millions of colors to your application but really only 8-bit with dithering on the built-in screen"? This would totally baffle most users. I suppose their specs sheet could have thrown in a disclaimer (maybe they did -- I'm not referencing any spec sheets as I write this).
To make my point, if these users had been Apple, what path would they have followed:
- Put in a better display (even if this raises the price of the computer by a large amount)?
- Change the 'Display Preferences' selection so that only 8-bit color depth is available when using the built-in display -- understanding what this would do to limit applications and also understanding that having done it the way Apple did it, the graphics card manages the dithering to create the illusion whereas with this option there would just be 256 flat color tones and no illusion?
- Try to be more accurate about how to describe this color mode by explaining that the graphics card supports millions of colors, which means applications can leverage millions of colors, but the display will merely emulate these colors?
I don't see option #1 or #2 being very good options at all. This leaves option #3... but this isn't something easily described in the display preferences panel -- nor do I think it should be. I can only imagine putting some footnote in the technical specs which explain what they're really doing.Again... I suspect that most serious professionals who need the color accuracy are not doing their serious fine-detail work on the built-in display.
While I understand their point... I think they're picking at nits. I OWN one of these machines they speak of and I really don't feel that I've been defrauded.
I'm a bit of a coffee fanatic and spent a great deal of time learning about coffee, roasting, brewing, and how to get the best possible cup. I'll try to sum up what I've learned.
About 30% of a coffee bean is water soluble. 70% are solids which wont dissolve no matter how long you leave them in water. Of the soluble portion, 2/3rds (20% of the bean) yield flavors that most people would find desirable. 1/3 (10% of the bean) yields flavors which are bitter and not as desirable. Caffeine is bitter. "some" is good... too much isn't so good.
Forunately if the temperature, pressure, grind, and timing of the extraction are all correct then the desirable components will dissolve faster and the less desirable flavors will dissolve last. This means that if you cut-off the extraction process at the right time, you can get most of the good stuff and leave the bad stuff behind. The trick is in getting the extraction correct.
Turns out that drip coffee makers and percolators can't control the extraction process. Espresso machines can be both good and bad (most low-end machines are bad), but a good espresso machine will make fantastic coffee.
What makes the machine good is it's ability to carefully control the temperature and pressure during the extraction. In 1961, the Faema company invented an espresso machine brew group which circulates some hot water from the boiler through the metal of the brew group. If hot water goes through a large mass of cold metal, the metal will wick the heat out of the water before it hits the beans... since the water would then be too cold, the extraction wouldn't be very good. By circulating the water through the brew group to warm the metal to the waters desired temperature, the water and metal mass of the brew group is equalized so that when extraction occurs the water wont be cooled down, temperature of the water when it hits the beans will remain consistent and you'll be able to control the extraction much better. This brew group is called the Faema E61 brew group. 26 years later it's STILL the ruling brew group. Many top machines use this brew group even if they machine is built by another maker. Other high-end machines tend to try to copy the Faema system by temperature-controlling their brew groups as well. Low end machines don't control the brew group temperature and the results.... speak for themselves. =(
The grind should be fairly fine... fine enough that if you put a small amount on your counter (or the palm of your hand) and then press a finger into it you should be able to still see some traces of your fingerprint in the grinds. You don't want dust (don't want to see a perfect fingerprint) but you dont' want it so course that there's no hint of a fingerprint. Propeller grinders aren't capable of grinding fine enough. Some low-quality burr grinders either cannot grind fine enough or they generate too much heat from friction and end up damaging the beans (like over-roasting would do). A good burr grinder should be able to grind fine enough without generating heat that damages the ground coffee.
Before pulling a shot, if the machine has been sitting idle too long then I'd "pull a blank". Basically just run water through the machine's brew group for a minute to make sure you've re-normalized the temperature. If steam comes out then it's too hot. Water temperature should only be about 205 F (not boiling).
If the coffee is dispensed into the porta-filter basket and then FIRMLY tamped (lean on it with a little body weight) and twist to polish it. Attach the porta-filter to the brew group, put a couple of clear shot glasses under the spouts and grab a watch with a second hand.
Pull the shot and time how long it takes to extract the shot. It should take about 25-27 seconds. Much shorter and you've under-extracted... possibly you didn't tamp tight enough or your grind wasn't fine enough. Much longer and you've over-extracted -- you've gone beyond the 20% of the bean that's desirable and grabbed plenty of that 10%
Just review the comments on any slashdot article. We're all commenting on the same stuff, and usually making the same points -- and yet all phrased uniquely. That's because what appears to be a handful of words and phrasing techniques actually has near limitless ways to say the same thing.
If a teacher were to have students write a 10-word essay on a topic, I still think the number of variations would be extremely large and the probability of any two students saying exactly the same 10 words would be very small. Now expand this to merely a few pages.
I've played the 'rumor' game in a class -- the game where one person whispers a story to the person next to them, that 2nd person whispers the same story to a 3rd and so on until it goes around the room. The last person finally announces the story to everyone in the room and the rest of you snicker because they aren't even close to the original story. Even when we TRY to repeat what we just heard, we naturally rephrase it -- often to the point that we get it completely wrong. As humans, we seem to be very bad at using our minds to plagiarize even when we are *supposed* to be plagiarizing. It's not very likely that entire paragraphs could be duplicated word for word by mere accident unless it was a deliberate.
Turnitin.com doesn't declare that they own the material -- they just scan it. They aren't selling the material, they're selling the matching service designed to hunt-down plagiarism violations. I read the whole article and went to the Turnitin.com website -- they DO show where they found the match and the source material for it -- so if a person repeats something they themselves wrote in an earlier work, it would be seen as such.
Imbedding citations to another person's work is not plagiarism IF you cite the work. It's plagiarism if you write it in such a way that suggests that the work is your original work. Frankly, if someone quotes another person and fails to cite the source then they *should* be flagged.
Going after the manufacturers is pointless. They make what the market demands. I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned CAFE. Few people I talk to seem to know or understand how CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) works. Basically the government mandates that manufacturer's average fuel economy for the entire fleet of vehicles meet or exceed a target and imposes big fines if they don't.
As a consequence, car companies typically subsidize the cost of the most fuel efficient cars because each car sold helps to drive up their averge -- giving them the ability to sell the much more in-demand gas-guzzling models. If they do not subsidize the price of those models, they wont sell enough to meet their CAFE goals.
Compare the price of a Ford Focus to a Ford Mustang. The Focus has a base price of about $13,500 -- while the Mustang has a base price of about $19,250 (a difference of almost $6k). Do you really believe the Mustang actually costs Ford that much more to build? Note that MOST of the cost of the car is in engineering, testing, building plants & equipment, etc. (probably very nearly the same for both cars) and only some of the cost is actually based on the price of the materials in the car -- but even then, it's not as though you could possibly rationalize that there is some $6k more worth of material in the Mustang.
No, the Focus is subsidized by the manufacturer. Ford sells that model at a loss because it helps them achieve CAFE, reduces fines, and every unit sold helps offset their average and allows them to sell the more fuel hungry models which are very profitable. The profit from these vehicles more than makes up for the loss on the economy cars. I'm only using these two cars from the same maker as an example -- all car makers do this.
What would happen if Ford decided to just quit making gas-guzzlers? Answer: They'd go out of business. Why? Because the only thing left to sell would be economy cars like the Focus. The public doesn't *want* to buy those cars, they buy them only because of the very attractive price tag. Unfortunately Ford can't maintain that price tag subsidy without something to offset it and they've just cut those models from their fleet. The small segment of the market that does want a small economy car will just buy it from the competition who still subsidize it. The moral of this story is that if the manufacturer does "the right thing" they get punished for it.
And this brings me to my point: The REAL problem is the politicians who are too cowardly to fix the problem at it's source... the BUYERS. If the politicians imposed a big tax (regardless of kind... sales tax, annual tag taxes, gasoline tax, etc.), then they'd get voted out of their jobs -- and we can't have that now can we? No, the smarter political move is to blame the auto-industry and tell the public that they are all victims.
An awkward truth is that if you survey buyers who aren't *really* buying a car now, most people will tell say that they believe we should all be driving more efficient vehicles. But when Joe Consumer walks into the showroom, he or she rationalizes why their personal situation is an exception and they need the gas guzzler. Buyers will not likely voluntarily give up their lust for big cars with miserable economy without a stronger personal incentive.
An 8% royalty per saw is outrageous. Note that this fee is the royalty charged merely for the [em]license[/em] to use the technology. The manufacturer still has to engineer and adapt the saw to use it -- so the burden of all costs to employ the device is still on the maker. I can well imagine that they might have been intrigued by the idea, but were forced to back away and rationalize why it had problems once they they learned the price tag.
I don't think the manufacturers are guiltless either. As the article points out, the manufacturers have a certain level of immunity granted to them against lawsuits associated with injuries -- so they realize have very little incentive to make them safer. They do have an incentive for keeping them from children, which is why most stationary power tools now have some sort of key -- so that children can't start the machine if they try to play with it (at least all my stationary power tools have this).
There are far cheaper ways to protect ones fingers from table saws. Woodworking catalogs sell all sorts of devices -- but the low-tech devices seem to work best. Just push the wood through the saw using an old stick so that your fingers never come near the blade (this is what I do). There are hold-down devices to keep the wood securely traveling through the blade so that you don't need to get your fingers near. Some of these include "feather boards" (looks like a giant plastic hair comb which rides on an angle against the wood to hold the workpiece steady, though there are many variations and many wood workers make their own) to hold-down devices that look like spring-loaded roller-skate wheels to hold the wood firm. They're reasonably cheap. They never fail.
What surprises me is that to look at some of these safety accessories, it's obvious that they cost pennies to make -- and yet the manufacturers not only DO NOT include them with the saw, they don't really make a good standard way to mount aftermarket accessories to the saw. This always puzzled me because I realized that for a few pennies (or even nothing at all) they could make the saw drammatically safer, and yet they don't. Once I read the article and learned that the legal precidents basically grant them some fairly good level of protection from these sorts of lawsuits it makes sense as to why they just don't care.
I don't think either side has the consumer's best interest at heart.
Or just run NeoOffice on the Mac. This is really an OpenOffice.org port to the Mac so that it doesn't require an X windowing environment to run (though there is a Mac version of OO.o that runs under X). It does a pretty good job of reading & writing MS Office files (not perfect), it stores docs in native OpenDocument standard format (these are really .xml files which have been zipped and saved as a single open-doc file -- which means you can get external software to parse the docs & integrate with them), AND it runs on Mac, Linux, Solaris, & Windows. Did I mention it has a much more attractive price tag than MS Office?? =)
When I read the headline about Microsoft not making a virtual PC port, my first thought was "Does anybody really care?" It would be a completely irrelevant product.
Though there is some merit due to the fact that no computer or OS is ever completely safe, the Mac is vastly safer than Windows and it certainly isn't because Mac's are so outrageously rare that no unscrupulous hackers own one and it also isn't because unscrupulous hackers are so noble that their honor prevents them from writing malware for the Mac. If you believe that, you are deluded. (Of course if you are right then it's all the more reason to buy a Mac!)
So why haven't Mac's seen their fair share of malware?
It is because the OS is simply more secure by design. Are there flaws in that design? Of course there are. But I think the reason reason is more non-technical.
Just try to run and administer a Windows box securely. It's extremely hard to do. A knowledgable security person can do it with a great deal of effort -- but the average home consumer sure can't. You'll also rapidly discover that not all, but a substantial quantity of Windows software is written with the assumption that applications are installed by the same users who will be running them or that all users have administrative rights all the time. The Windows developer community has this flawed mentality and the OS paradigm does very little to enforce a more secure model.
Mac OS X, in contrast, has a completely different security and usage paradigm. Use a Mac and you'll quickly discover that the OS assumes that the OS should live in one part of the filesystem, installed apps in another, and users should only modify files that are found in their home directories -- further, no user is an admin. Even administrative users run unprivileged and have to type their password to perform administrative actions. Developers with any experience on a Mac quickly learn this paradigm. There are exceptions and I have found them, but they are uncommon on the Mac whereas they are quite common on Windows.
There are so many technical reasons why the Mac is more secure, but the underlying non-technical reason is because (a) developers and users alike are basically lazy and will follow the path of least resistence and (b) the path of least resistence on Windows is to not bother with security at all whereas the path of least resistence on the Mac is to actually have a more secure installation... the OS & it's tools actually make doing this seem quite natural.
Bottom line: The average non-technical Windows user really cannot maintain a secure machine and Microsoft's OS paradigm does little to encourage secure devopment practices. The average non-technical Mac user actually can maintain a fairly secure machine without really knowing what they're doing... and that's because the OS makes it easy for both the users and the developers to have good security habbits.
Mac user's should be a little paranoid, but the OS is vastly more secure. While we'll probably get a small number of malware problems, it'll never come close to approaching the scale of security problems enjoyed by Windows users.
But Apple doesn't seem to think that way. Examples:
I can think of several others. Apple seems to boost their low-end models first and my own personal observation (without doing a study) is that it seems so consistent that I now count on it.
Steve Jobs seems to understand that a fundamental difference between those on a budget and those with money to burn -- those on the budget will buy the item just once. Those with money to burn will buy the same item over and over again -- and he milks that for all it's worth.
Oh... and as for the BT Remote... no way. That's a 1000:1 longshot. They've already quietly introduced the new iPod "Universal Dock" that has an IR remote sensor and they also now separately sell the IR control that comes with the iMac. That very same control in conjunction with the universal dock will let you control your iPod or iPod video from across the room (actually it's quite nice to sit across the room with your iPod video connected to a TV and be able to fully control it as a player. There's no way Apple will introduce a BT version of the remote until they introduce iPods with builtin BlueTooth -- something else they'll probably eventually do.
I think eBay - just as several governments are now doing to banks - should be held liable anyway. WHY? Because they're responsible for the pathetically weak authentication system which allow for password theft and consumers are nearly powerless to do anything about it.
You can't "Phish" the password from someone who has to use 2-factor authentication systems to gain access to an account (e.g. smart card). Smart card readers are about $15 these days and the cards are pretty cheap. It would cost much to allow sellers and even buyers opt to get a more highly secured authentication scheme for their account making them virtually immune to phisphing and spyware attacks that lift passwords. eBay could give those sellers & buyers an icon so that parties could know who their dealing with and that's not a scam (at least if it is a scam they KNOW who's responsible for it.)
The idea behind pressuring the banks (and eBay) for this sort of thing is that they alone can make or break the fraud. They claim it isn't their fault and they should be liable, but unless THEY are willing to make stronger authentication an option, law enforcement and victims will never really be able to make a substantial dent in this sort of thing.
Scripting languages are nice to throw some quick and easy stuff together -- but they don't scale. I've had customers who did all the possible optimization they could do to eek out the last bit of performance from their scripted (interactively interpreted - e.g. PERL). They switched to Java because Java (even without HotSpot) gives much better performance. WITH HotSpot it's as fast as binary compiled and linked languages like C. The 'ol "Java is slow" argument is ancient history and just isn't true anymore; hasn't been true for years.
The RIAA should win... and the court should award damages in the amount $1.
Maybe that would teach the RIAA that we're sick of their pathetic lawsuits for thousands of dollars against minors.
The comparison here is understated. It isn't that they don't know EVERYTHING about how stuff works, it's that they don't even know SOMETHING about how stuff works. Most computer users in the early 80's (when home computing was starting out) had a fairly good idea of how most of the key things worked. PC users understood what autoexec.bat and config.sys were for and how to edit them. Maybe they couldn't write their boot loader and only the hard-core users could write terminate-and-stay-resident (TSRs, remember them?) programs, but today I find people who really fancy themsevles as "techs" who, frankly, cannot handle anything that doesn't come with a wizard or GUI.
I interviewed a potential Solaris sys-admin for a company that needed one. I asked him if he would describe the boot process of a server -- in whatever level of a detail he could provide. The detail I got back was "you turn it on. It does the power-on-self-test. The kernel loads, and the login screen appears." Hmm... ok... ignoring the boot-prom for the moment, I asked if he could provide any more detail about what happens between the kernel loading and the login prompt appearing. Answer "well, when the kernel loads, it displays a login prompt". He was asking for $150,000 to start.
It's not just computer tech -- you can say the same for lots of other areas. For example: kitchen tech. Eating out is common, sure... but even people who cook at home these days are usually using prepared mixes & such. When prepared mixes got started it was for the "convenience". Home cooks knew how to make all kinds of stuff from scratch. The convenience has evolved (or should I say "devolved") to dependence. Today the average home cook has no idea how to make stuff from scratch and simply MUST buy the prepared mixes. Many of them are amazingly easy -- so easy, in fact, that it's almost astonishing that people wont make it themselves. I'm talking about stuff that only has three ingredients and one of them is optional.
I think convenience devolving into dependence is probably common to many areas. Computer tech isn't special in this regard.
A little over a month ago we asked you for your questions to send on to the World of Warcraft development team. Unfortunately, it appears that these questions were misrouted to the Blizzard PR department.
;-)
Taco, you've got it all wrong... now that all the original developers have left, those marketing people are the development team!
Was there ever a time when Microsoft invented useful things? I must have fallen asleep on that day. As far as I can remember, manipulating markets has ALWAYS been Microsoft's core business. Remember guys -- this is the company that didn't even write MS-DOS.
Laast time I checked, it was illegal in the US for telemarketers to call cell phones.
It was illegal for a telemarketer to contact you via any method that forced you to pay (e.g. your cellphone). They maintained lists of cellphone exchanges and avoided them.
HOWEVER... now we have phone number portability. In addition to taking your cellphone number to a new mobile carrier, you can also take your cellphone number to a land line or vice versa.
Telemarketers argued that it's no longer possible to know if the number they are calling is a mobile phone. Now you have to register your mobile number with the do-not-call list or prepare to be inundated with marketed on your cellphone while you pay for the minutes.
There is still a differential rate of reproduction between different groups and so natural selection is carrying on exactly like it has always done.
No... that's not correct. The difference here is that we humans tamper with 'evolution' in unnatural ways. Not just us -- but everything we domesticate. This includes crops, livestock, even the family pet. Bulldogs are unlikely to reproduce successfully on their own because they need c-section births. If "natural" selection were at work, the breed would be extinct. How is the 'natural' selection process carrying on exactly as it has always done in this case?
Bulldogs are one example, but we do it with a lot more than the family pet. We have crops that don't reproduce at all -- yet these crops *still* exist! Natural selection? I think not!
I suppose it's politically easier to argue about how it applies to pets than it is to argue about how it applies to people. I think you'll find that differences in the reproduction between different groups of people is less to do with genetics and more to do with social and/or political environments. There may be differences, but you can't pin these differences on nature.
Natural selection does not necessarily apply equal pressure on each generation. Many generations may have it easy, allowing genetic variations to propogate for some time until a more severe event occurs (e.g. a plague) that genetically attacks our species. Perhaps only a minority of us are fortunate enough to have the genetic makeup to survive. Think of it as a rubber-band stretching -- allowing us to beat natural selection for only so long before the rubber band snaps us back.
But for now, medical science is frequently beating nature. 'Natural' selection may not be neutralized to the point of having zero impact, but it sure has been reduced to a much less significant factor than it was in years past.
There are ISP-grade products that do it. Sun has one. See http://www.sun.com/software/products/messaging_srv r/home_messaging.xml
r oducts.cfm?ProductID=642%20) to check for the usual suspects. For inbound mail, they leveraage directory servers (which replicate with ease) to find the specific message store used to host the mailbox for the inbound message, and then route it correctly. These are load balanced for availability and scalability.
You need to break up the jobs of message storage, client connections, and mail transfer into isolated components that can scale independent of each other and be clustered for scalability and high-availability.
Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) are often dedicated for either inbound and outbound and also interface to scanning software (e.g. BrightMail Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus, see: http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/p
A user's mailbox will only exist on a single message store, but the message stores can be clustered for high-availability.
Client connections similarly allow an array of "message multiplexors" to scale that end of the problem. The multiplexors speak webmail, IMAP, and POP. Similar to the MTAs, they are load balanced. A user can connect to any multiplexor and a directory server is used to find that user's proper message store to connect them to their mailbox.
To the end user it looks like a single server that does POP, IMAP, and WebMail. In truth it's broken into components to achieve high scalability and availability.
A single message store can usually store a few hundred thousand mailboxes -- for a million mailboxes you'd probably only need a handful of them.
By the same token you can attack the claim the "loss" calculated by the RIAA is based on a fallacy. They proceed from the false assumption that if the person had no access to the music illegally, they would buy the CD. I submit that this is also simply unprovable and therefore should not be used in the calculation of "loss" the labels feel they have as a result of P2P.
Actually, you could probably prove that not only is it a bad assumption that the person would buy the CD, you could probably show that the person could not buy the CD -- even if they wanted to.
The whole "you stole billions of dollars from me" argument is based on the notion that the person would have bought the CD had they not obtained it via sharing. I suppose that would be true if the person who downloaded all the music had all the wealth of Bill Gates. The average person that the RIAA is targeting are school & college students. These are people with limited financial resources. If there was absolutely no way to obtain the music through sharing, then they'd probably just buy 1 or 2 CDs on a paycheck as they can afford them and do without the rest.
The argument that the downloader would have bought the music CD had it not been for the file-sharing network is absurd.
Oh crap! You've just reminded me that it's been a week since I last downloaded the software updates or scanned for viruses in my car!
Gotta run!
Who's to say he WONT someday dismantle his furniture and use those boxes to ship something?
I've got a pile of FedEx shipping supplies too, but mine are just sitting on a shelf waiting until I need to ship something. I think this guy is pretty clever (not to mention earth-friendly) by coming up with more than just 1 use for the boxes before they're sent to a landfill.
You tried it and hate it? Did you try it for more than 6 minutes before you gave up because every menu option wasn't EXACTLY where it is in MS Office?
StarOffice, OpenOffice and NeoOffice/J (on the Mac) are extremely similar to MS Office in functionality and ease of use. Was it the $399 non-discountable price tag what attracted you to MS Office as opposed to the $79 StarOffice or the $0 OpenOffice?
For a $399 cost difference I think I can afford to learn the few subtle feature & menu differences.
Let's rephrase the survey... apprently Pew Research wasn't clever enough to notice that the difference isn't your age so much as it is your level of responsibilities.
People with jobs, spouses, kids, and other responsibilities don't have the idle time to keep up with constant interruptions for meaningless chit-chat. When we do chit-chat, IM is far far too slow and time consuming - we actually communicate using strangely effective organs evolved from prehistoric times called "vocal cords".
I recall the days when computers didn't network very well at all. Even your IBM mainframes couldn't talk to your IBM PCs without installing some proprietary special-purpose product to make communication possible -- and they were both made by the same company. Once standardized networking began to emerge (IP networking) the industry changed. I do recall the suggestions that the PC could probably run some of the applications that the mainframe was running and how absurd the IT folks thought those claims were... it would never happen. And yet... it did happen. Once computers could finally communicate, a reason for open standards, open systems, and open software emerged.
Zealots like me like the idea of "openness", but I don't think Joe Average Consumer really thinks a whole lot about it. But... I do think that Joe Average does want "interoperability".
A common comment you'll hear from Apple owners is that they perceive their computer spends more time helping them do what they want to do rather than them spending all their time supporting their computer. Taken differently, these (mostly non-technical) people are really just saying that they don't want to care about their computer... they just want it to work.
So far, consumers do still need to "support" their Linux installations. Linux doesn't "just work". Windows still needs too much care & feeding... it doesn't "just work" either -- especially where security is concerned. Mac OS X seems to be the best at just working -- even for people who don't know what they're doing. Yes it happens to be Unix. Yes Unix has a more stable foundation than Windows. But we only know this because we're largely a technical community. Joe Average doesn't know this and doesn't want to know this. Most of them probably have no idea that Firefox is considered to be "open" and that IE is considered to be "proprietary". They run what they run either because (a) it was there or (b) their computer buddy told them that's what they should use or (c) that's what they learned to use at work or school -- and I almost forgot... it works with the sites they need to visit.
Open software tends to be more interoperable - so I think it's tends to slowly erode away at the market share of non-interoperable systems. But I think the real difference is that interoperability wins over non-interoperability... not that open systems win over proprietary ones.
Though I want open software to win out, I must confess that I don't believe the average consumer really cares a whole lot about it.
The rationale behind why public disclosure of a security flaw (knowing that the 'bad guys' will hear about it too) is based on the idea that (a) customers have a right to know that they are at risk and also need to apply a fix as soon as it's available, and (b) companies should face pressure (even extreme pressure) to prioritize the fixes for these bugs.
It's pretty much accepted across the industry that the disclosure that there is a vulnerability is a "good thing". Indiscriminately revealing the gory details about how to exploit the vulnerability is a "bad thing".
After reading all the articles, it sounds like the exploit was discovered months ago, the patch has been available for months, and though Mr. Lynn demonstrated that the exploit is real (usually required to establish credibility) he did not expose the gory details necessary to allow someone to exploit the attack on their own.
So what's the big deal?
I'm particularly annoyed with Cisco's comment about Mr. Lynn having "illegally" obtained his information. Frankly, it's in the best interest of the public, the Internet, and the security world that security researches will decompile code to search for exploits. The security indsutry accepts that "security through obscurity" is a very bad idea. Vetted code is deemed secure because the gory details have been explosed to a wide audience and *still* no exploits could be found -- NOT because nobody was allowed to know how it all worked.
Slightly off-topic, but certainly related... I'm surprised none of the comments I've read have mentioned the 'User Agent Switcher' plugin.
When I run into apps that tell me they require IE and refuse to work with anything else, I find that quite often it's not that they contain something specific that no other browser can support, but more likely that they've only ever been tested with IE and the site wont support you unless you run IE.
In Firefox, click "Tools" -> "Extensions", then click "Get More Extensions" and search for something called "User Agent Switcher".
It basically lies to the web app server and reports that you are running a different browser. Just pick a browser that the site supports and usually the site will just work.
A word of caution that obviously there are sites that do only work with specific browsers because of the way they were coded -- but often times the site is merely checking the User-Agent HTTP header string and simply refuses to let you proceed any further if the string doesn't match one of the sites supported browsers. The plugin does NOT change the capabilities of Firefox to emulate IE... the plugin lets your browser lie to the server so that you can get past the browser version check.