I'd rather take 95% of the "normal people" market and not loose (sic) my hair by the age of 50 thank you. You choose to run an operating system knowing full well it wouldn't work with flash or silverlight. Don't blame your mistakes on others or expect them to cater to your decision.
Actually, I choose not to run Silverlight most of the time, the operating system can run both those plug-ins just fine (hint, it's not Linux). Most normal people do not have Silverlight, and do not particularly want it, so good luck with targeting them. If you want to make solutions in Silverlight though, you're a Microsoft developer, not a web developer.
Just as people wasted years of company time and resources by targeting Active-X and thus requiring IE, and now regret it, you're doing the same targeting Silverlight, you just don't know it yet.
1. This is a feature, not a bug - stateless connections force you to push the state elsewhere (database,client) and allow you to scale easier to large user bases 2. As a user, I like having control over the client side thanks 3. mod_deflate 4. Not a fundamental flaw, and something that could easily be addressed if certain browser makers didn't want to strangle the web
There are certainly some applications where web servers are not well suited like real-time video editing, but the success of the web has partly been due to these deficiencies that you point out (stateless, anarchic). In fact I think you'll see it encroach more and more on traditionally desktop areas - already many help documents, most email, and many online shopping activities are done via the browser.
Anything involving fetching/editing/sharing discrete resources is well suited to the web and the strictures it imposes. That includes most of what we consider to be natural desktop applications today.
I've been playing with Silverlight. Took me a single night to cook up a file upload control that works on IE6,7,8, Firefox 2 & 3, Intel Mac & Windows (even 2000) and will work on any other platform Microsoft targets in the future.
With Microsoft's track record of openness and cross platform support, what could possibly go wrong with your plan?
BTW, your upload control doesn't work on most browsers on the web today, and I wouldn't download a plugin for your content, sorry.
No problems here, either before or after the update - I'm quite pleased with my phone.
Apple should be clearer about timelines, possible issues, and the bug fixes they release, and avoid all this pointless speculation. 'Bug Fixes' is a joke as a description. As it is their silence leaves an echo chamber for negative complaints to become the only story for the iPhone.
I wonder how many of these problems are down to poor network service though? They certainly seem to be concentrated in the US.
Well, there's also video cam support - it is supposed to ask your permission first, but perhaps there are unexplored features/vulnerabilities in it too :
Remember when MSFT was the one promoting openness, as compared to the evil Apple and IBM empires?
No, I don't.
I do remember how they screwed over their suppliers (QDOS), partners (IBM with OS 2, Sun with Java, PlaysForSure etc), and customers though(WinME, PlaysForSure). Also how they steamrollered the industry into the near monopoly monoculture we have today (Contracts forbidding BeOS or Linux on OEM machines, binary formats etc). Nice job rewriting history though.
Worked out well for them till people got tired of being screwed over and paying for mediocre knock-offs of other people's ideas.
Cellphone-to-cellphone reliability and call quality are illusions, get used to it.
I think you meant to say - cell reliability is an illusion in the United States, on the AT&T network. I've *never* had a dropped call, on any phone (including 3G iPhone).
By what I've read on the net it seems like every new iPhone is affected.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Many iPhones have absolutely no problems, including mine (UK, on O2 network). It is worth considering that most people with a problem will complain, whereas most without one won't bother visiting discussion groups etc.
The success of the iPod's interface is largely the result of a contracted company called Pixo that any other company could have hired
But is the success of the iPod solely down to the interface? I'd say it's a combination of the great work by Pixo (staffed by former Apple employees, and led by Mercer, formerly at Apple), and integration with a great form factor/usability, and a touch of panache.
It was just small enough for a pocket, the scroll wheel and physical controls were nice and simple and went with the pared down interface, it could store loads of music (and yet wasn't a brick), it had a nice program to organise your music and get it on there (also from outside Apple), and it had a fast Firewire interface as opposed to USB 1.
All those things were available individually in other players at the time, but bringing them all together in a product that shipped was what made the iPod a success. I remember showing one to someone after they first came out, and they said 'One day, all music players will work this way'. They were right in that others would try to emulate this integration (see Zune), but wrong in that there is something difficult about getting all those elements working together so well in one device, and getting it shipped for a reasonable* price.
Consumers are PEOPLE, first and foremost. They have a sense of right and wrong, and most importantly, fairness. There are outliers, but the majority of people want to play fair.
The majority of people will pirate if they think they'll get away with it, without social stigma or punishment. Online pirating is practically risk free, so the question people ask themselves is - Why not, after all, everyone else is doing it?
To use your analogy, if the gas station in town sells at $3 a gallon and suddenly people find they can syphon off fuel for free, and no one will notice, how many people would take advantage of that - I'd say over 50%. And you can rely on them coming up with post-facto justifications like 'The price was too high, they were ripping us off', 'I can't afford gas' etc.
Since I'm impatient, even on binary distros I compile my own kernel and manually patch in drivers rather than wait for distros to releasing updated packages.
You are not the target market for Ubuntu, why would you expect it to conform to your expectations (which frankly are pretty extreme)? Most of the things which you quote as disadvantages for you, are advantages for someone who just comes fresh to Linux, and has no idea what a kernel is, and doesn't want to read distro forums and linuxtoday every day, they just want things to work with no tinkering.
I hope Ubuntu doesn't turn people off though.
I seriously doubt it will turn people new to Linux off in any way. The only people it will turn off are those like yourself who like to tinker and customise, which is fine because there are many other specialised distros for you.
If you'd read the article, you'd know that the problem manifests at low signal strength.
That's in the summary, not the article (which I did read), and frankly it's just a get-out clause so he can later backtrack. At low signal strength this sort of problem occurs in lots of other phones as well - that's what happens when you lose the 3G signal. So this could be down to just bad service from AT&T/Optus, or a fault with the way the iPhone handles low signal for 3G (as he assumes), or a fault with only some peoples' phones. Without proper investigation, it's impossible to say, and no, the link to one forum post you quoted before does not constitute proper investigation. Unfortunately Apple are not inclined to investigate this kind of thing, because they'd rather hush it up and quietly release a patch if it is their fault, but to talk as if we already know what the problem is is misleading.
If it's a problem with all the phones across the world, funny that it only happens on certain networks, for certain people, no?
I would never buy MobileMe as it strikes me as an overpriced, undersupported waste of time - why not just use gmail and other free services, or better still pay for your own domain and keep your email for life? Certainly wouldn't trust Apple to provide cloud services after their bait-and-switch with.mac, there are better options.
I certainly wouldn't trust this article however, and looking at forums with say 50 participants on a thread is not a good way to judge whether there are widespread problems, or what the cause of those problems may be. This may be an issue with the network, with specific phones, or with overcrowding of the network in certain areas. It's unlikely to be all phones as most people just aren't experiencing it.
As to 'fanboys', I suggest next time you use that term you consider whether they actually exist, or whether they just make an easy rhetorical punch-bag and feed your own delusions of superiority?
Oh well, its[sic] hard to feel much sympathy for early adopter suckers who fell for some bling & a slick marketing campaign.
This kind of bullshit seems to roll off the tongue of Apple detractors like yourself. I guess you love wallowing in the feeling of superiority over these superficial, duped mac/iphone users? Strange that you feel the need to impute spurious reasons for buying it to them.
I know I didn't buy it for those reasons, but because the UI on every other phone I've looked at is a crappy, ill-thought out train-wreck, that and the iPhone does quite a lot of things well in a small package. There are a few things that aren't up to par (camera, ebooks), but that's still better than other phones, in my opinion. Don't really mind if you disagree for valid reasons though, I'm sure it's not for everyone.
I haven't been disappointed in the least with the signal strength on O2; if there is a problem with it in some countries though, I hope they do get it sorted out, I'd be annoyed if it was dropping calls - maybe it's a problem with some phones? I don't think much of this article however as it's full of uninformed speculation and reads more like scaremongering.
That's interesting. I haven't seen any dropped calls as yet on mine, or signal problems, it's 3G all the time. It may depend a lot on the network AT&T has in your area I guess.
Seems odd if it is an iPhone specific problem that complaints haven't been more widespread. Suppose the way to test it would be to put the same sim in a different 3G phone when experiencing problems with the iPhone and see how it works? I'm sure there was a time when journalists did that kind of testing before writing an article, instead of filling it with easy speculation.
Can this be fixed by a firmware update? It said something about the stack which made me think firmware, or is it just shoddy hardware?
Can this hypothetical technical flaw, in an unknown chipset which the iPhone may possibly use, be fixed in in a possible future firmware update?
Possibly.
However a story from a cnet journalist quoting a financial analyst on a technical problem where they're not even sure of the chipset in question is not very credible. I haven't heard of any reception problems on other sites - I wonder how widespread they are?
I would never fly with RyanAir anyway as they try to bilk their customers in any way possible. Probably they just want to make more money from all the other services they try to sell you when you buy a ticket. They haven't started charging extra for the air you breathe yet, but they do for hold baggage.
I've had friends turned away because they used their driving license as ID for a domestic flight (rather than a passport), and because they arrived 10 minutes before the published check-in time, forced to wait in a queue till 2 minutes after the time, then told the check-in was closed and charged £60.
They're a terrible airline, and this action just reinforces their utter disregard for their customers.
See Ring species - species boundaries are not as clear cut as your definition would have them, though that's a good rule of thumb.
There are many arguments over how to define species - Morphological differences (which in practice is often the starting point), Biological differences, Shared ancestry etc.
So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq...
Really quite irrelevant to the question of Bush, but... Iraq was nothing to do with 9/11, and invading the country has solved nothing and given the US a whole raft of problems in the mideast which are now just going to get worse. It is an attempt to dominate the mideast by force, which the US has neither the patience, the budget, nor the military might to do.
I've usually found./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view,
I don't believe political disagreements have anything to do with intelligence. Osama Bin Laden is intelligent, that doesn't mean you have to agree with him.
Perhaps the world you want to live in is dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, whom Christ would have disowned - I'd rather not live in that world.
The US has helped, and continues to help, to prop up the festering cesspool of little dictators in the mideast - they backed Saddam in the 80s, backed the Iranian coup before that, and currently back Pakistan, Saudi, Israel, and many others with military and monetary assistance. If you want to address those issues, I suggest you look to your own countries current actions in backing undesirable regimes worldwide.
I thought it was simply pointing out that the original poster was placing an unrealistic burden on those studying a subject. No student of any other discipline, be it English, history, science, etc., is given such the burden of discovering the "origin and original meaning" of EVERY text that is released.
No, but I'd expect them to have some interest in the origin and original meaning of the texts they hold to be worthy/good/true. If not, I don't feel anything they say on the subject warrants attention, and they certainly couldn't be considered 'students' in any meaningful sense. The same would go for literature students studying literature which has been twice translated - it's pointless if you have no interest in going back to the originals or at least comparing translations.
Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you're anonymous...
This is also the biggest problem with wikipedia, and a good reason never to trust anything you find there. There have been several scandals on wikipedia of information being modified by interested parties - I would link to wikipedia, but I don't think they have a page about that.
In future most knowledge databases will be attributed, like Knol, because that leads to accountability, which leads to accuracy.
Oh, so one site being compromised WILL result in all of your accounts being compromised after all. Please get your story straight. This is a terrible idea and is just trading security for convenience.
I suspect you still misunderstand, that or you're being deliberately obtuse. OpenID is structured as follows :
OpenID Provider - provides you with a central point for identification and a means of signing in and managing sign-ins to other sites. This is the only party that can verify your identity, so you choose someone you trust not to screw up (i.e., not Facebook or MySpace etc).
OpenID Consumer or Relying party - these are the many websites that you want to log into and currently have your details written on a sticky/stored in 1Password/stored in a text file etc - the logins for which you probably don't care about much anyway, but which you have to remember currently.
If one of those many consumers is hacked, you will lose nothing save any info you've chosen to give them.
If the provider is hacked (very unlikely if you've chosen a good provider), then it's conceivable that someone could gain access to your accounts with consumers. Many providers (e.g. myopenid.com) allow disabling password login and only using a certificate, which does give a good measure of security - far more than transmitting your passwords in forms over http and relying on email to send them, which you are currently doing all the time on various sites.
Personally I wouldn't use my OpenID for my bank or anything financial, as it's good to isolate those accounts, but it is vastly superior to our current system of :
Identity verification by email Submitting passwords via unencrypted forms Sharing passwords/logins over many different sites, who are all storing it in various ways (hashed? in the clear? you don't know) Often people use the same password for everything and never change it Putting the onus for security on to many smaller sites, rather than one which specialises in security
The downside is it can give a false impression of security if people don't carefully consider who they trust to be their provider. For example if FaceBook was your provider they'd probably be happy to sell your traffic patterns to anyone who asked, but then, if you use FaceBook, you already let them do that.
And if only ONE of those websites is compromised, my login is now compromised across the board,
Take the trouble to read up on OpenID, and you'll find this is not the case. Having one site which you log in to compromised will not compromise the others. The only way you'd lose control of your openid identity is if your openID provider was compromised.
You can also select how much information you disclose to different sites, revoke permissions to certain sites, and choose more secure login methods like certificates.
Slashdot Mirror
PHP doesn't make crappy code, coders do.
One word for you : realEscapeString
I'd rather take 95% of the "normal people" market and not loose (sic) my hair by the age of 50 thank you. You choose to run an operating system knowing full well it wouldn't work with flash or silverlight. Don't blame your mistakes on others or expect them to cater to your decision.
Actually, I choose not to run Silverlight most of the time, the operating system can run both those plug-ins just fine (hint, it's not Linux). Most normal people do not have Silverlight, and do not particularly want it, so good luck with targeting them. If you want to make solutions in Silverlight though, you're a Microsoft developer, not a web developer.
Just as people wasted years of company time and resources by targeting Active-X and thus requiring IE, and now regret it, you're doing the same targeting Silverlight, you just don't know it yet.
1. This is a feature, not a bug - stateless connections force you to push the state elsewhere (database,client) and allow you to scale easier to large user bases
2. As a user, I like having control over the client side thanks
3. mod_deflate
4. Not a fundamental flaw, and something that could easily be addressed if certain browser makers didn't want to strangle the web
There are certainly some applications where web servers are not well suited like real-time video editing, but the success of the web has partly been due to these deficiencies that you point out (stateless, anarchic). In fact I think you'll see it encroach more and more on traditionally desktop areas - already many help documents, most email, and many online shopping activities are done via the browser.
Anything involving fetching/editing/sharing discrete resources is well suited to the web and the strictures it imposes. That includes most of what we consider to be natural desktop applications today.
I've been playing with Silverlight. Took me a single night to cook up a file upload control that works on IE6,7,8, Firefox 2 & 3, Intel Mac & Windows (even 2000) and will work on any other platform Microsoft targets in the future.
With Microsoft's track record of openness and cross platform support, what could possibly go wrong with your plan?
BTW, your upload control doesn't work on most browsers on the web today, and I wouldn't download a plugin for your content, sorry.
No problems here, either before or after the update - I'm quite pleased with my phone.
Apple should be clearer about timelines, possible issues, and the bug fixes they release, and avoid all this pointless speculation. 'Bug Fixes' is a joke as a description. As it is their silence leaves an echo chamber for negative complaints to become the only story for the iPhone.
I wonder how many of these problems are down to poor network service though? They certainly seem to be concentrated in the US.
Well, there's also video cam support - it is supposed to ask your permission first, but perhaps there are unexplored features/vulnerabilities in it too :
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help04.html#117089
If I was a hacker^^^^^^security researcher, I'd be looking there first.
One of the reasons why I surf with Flash off.
Remember when MSFT was the one promoting openness, as compared to the evil Apple and IBM empires?
No, I don't.
I do remember how they screwed over their suppliers (QDOS), partners (IBM with OS 2, Sun with Java, PlaysForSure etc), and customers though(WinME, PlaysForSure). Also how they steamrollered the industry into the near monopoly monoculture we have today (Contracts forbidding BeOS or Linux on OEM machines, binary formats etc). Nice job rewriting history though.
Worked out well for them till people got tired of being screwed over and paying for mediocre knock-offs of other people's ideas.
Cellphone-to-cellphone reliability and call quality are illusions, get used to it.
I think you meant to say - cell reliability is an illusion in the United States, on the AT&T network. I've *never* had a dropped call, on any phone (including 3G iPhone).
By what I've read on the net it seems like every new iPhone is affected.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Many iPhones have absolutely no problems, including mine (UK, on O2 network). It is worth considering that most people with a problem will complain, whereas most without one won't bother visiting discussion groups etc.
The success of the iPod's interface is largely the result of a contracted company called Pixo that any other company could have hired
But is the success of the iPod solely down to the interface? I'd say it's a combination of the great work by Pixo (staffed by former Apple employees, and led by Mercer, formerly at Apple), and integration with a great form factor/usability, and a touch of panache.
It was just small enough for a pocket, the scroll wheel and physical controls were nice and simple and went with the pared down interface, it could store loads of music (and yet wasn't a brick), it had a nice program to organise your music and get it on there (also from outside Apple), and it had a fast Firewire interface as opposed to USB 1.
All those things were available individually in other players at the time, but bringing them all together in a product that shipped was what made the iPod a success. I remember showing one to someone after they first came out, and they said 'One day, all music players will work this way'. They were right in that others would try to emulate this integration (see Zune), but wrong in that there is something difficult about getting all those elements working together so well in one device, and getting it shipped for a reasonable* price.
*For certain values of reasonable
Consumers are PEOPLE, first and foremost. They have a sense of right and wrong, and most importantly, fairness. There are outliers, but the majority of people want to play fair.
The majority of people will pirate if they think they'll get away with it, without social stigma or punishment. Online pirating is practically risk free, so the question people ask themselves is - Why not, after all, everyone else is doing it?
To use your analogy, if the gas station in town sells at $3 a gallon and suddenly people find they can syphon off fuel for free, and no one will notice, how many people would take advantage of that - I'd say over 50%. And you can rely on them coming up with post-facto justifications like 'The price was too high, they were ripping us off', 'I can't afford gas' etc.
Since I'm impatient, even on binary distros I compile my own kernel and manually patch in drivers rather than wait for distros to releasing updated packages.
You are not the target market for Ubuntu, why would you expect it to conform to your expectations (which frankly are pretty extreme)? Most of the things which you quote as disadvantages for you, are advantages for someone who just comes fresh to Linux, and has no idea what a kernel is, and doesn't want to read distro forums and linuxtoday every day, they just want things to work with no tinkering.
I hope Ubuntu doesn't turn people off though.
I seriously doubt it will turn people new to Linux off in any way. The only people it will turn off are those like yourself who like to tinker and customise, which is fine because there are many other specialised distros for you.
If you'd read the article, you'd know that the problem manifests at low signal strength.
That's in the summary, not the article (which I did read), and frankly it's just a get-out clause so he can later backtrack. At low signal strength this sort of problem occurs in lots of other phones as well - that's what happens when you lose the 3G signal. So this could be down to just bad service from AT&T/Optus, or a fault with the way the iPhone handles low signal for 3G (as he assumes), or a fault with only some peoples' phones. Without proper investigation, it's impossible to say, and no, the link to one forum post you quoted before does not constitute proper investigation. Unfortunately Apple are not inclined to investigate this kind of thing, because they'd rather hush it up and quietly release a patch if it is their fault, but to talk as if we already know what the problem is is misleading.
If it's a problem with all the phones across the world, funny that it only happens on certain networks, for certain people, no?
I would never buy MobileMe as it strikes me as an overpriced, undersupported waste of time - why not just use gmail and other free services, or better still pay for your own domain and keep your email for life? Certainly wouldn't trust Apple to provide cloud services after their bait-and-switch with .mac, there are better options.
I certainly wouldn't trust this article however, and looking at forums with say 50 participants on a thread is not a good way to judge whether there are widespread problems, or what the cause of those problems may be. This may be an issue with the network, with specific phones, or with overcrowding of the network in certain areas. It's unlikely to be all phones as most people just aren't experiencing it.
As to 'fanboys', I suggest next time you use that term you consider whether they actually exist, or whether they just make an easy rhetorical punch-bag and feed your own delusions of superiority?
Oh well, its[sic] hard to feel much sympathy for early adopter suckers who fell for some bling & a slick marketing campaign.
This kind of bullshit seems to roll off the tongue of Apple detractors like yourself. I guess you love wallowing in the feeling of superiority over these superficial, duped mac/iphone users? Strange that you feel the need to impute spurious reasons for buying it to them.
I know I didn't buy it for those reasons, but because the UI on every other phone I've looked at is a crappy, ill-thought out train-wreck, that and the iPhone does quite a lot of things well in a small package. There are a few things that aren't up to par (camera, ebooks), but that's still better than other phones, in my opinion. Don't really mind if you disagree for valid reasons though, I'm sure it's not for everyone.
I haven't been disappointed in the least with the signal strength on O2; if there is a problem with it in some countries though, I hope they do get it sorted out, I'd be annoyed if it was dropping calls - maybe it's a problem with some phones? I don't think much of this article however as it's full of uninformed speculation and reads more like scaremongering.
That's interesting. I haven't seen any dropped calls as yet on mine, or signal problems, it's 3G all the time. It may depend a lot on the network AT&T has in your area I guess.
Seems odd if it is an iPhone specific problem that complaints haven't been more widespread. Suppose the way to test it would be to put the same sim in a different 3G phone when experiencing problems with the iPhone and see how it works? I'm sure there was a time when journalists did that kind of testing before writing an article, instead of filling it with easy speculation.
Can this be fixed by a firmware update? It said something about the stack which made me think firmware, or is it just shoddy hardware?
Can this hypothetical technical flaw, in an unknown chipset which the iPhone may possibly use, be fixed in in a possible future firmware update?
Possibly.
However a story from a cnet journalist quoting a financial analyst on a technical problem where they're not even sure of the chipset in question is not very credible. I haven't heard of any reception problems on other sites - I wonder how widespread they are?
I would never fly with RyanAir anyway as they try to bilk their customers in any way possible. Probably they just want to make more money from all the other services they try to sell you when you buy a ticket. They haven't started charging extra for the air you breathe yet, but they do for hold baggage.
I've had friends turned away because they used their driving license as ID for a domestic flight (rather than a passport), and because they arrived 10 minutes before the published check-in time, forced to wait in a queue till 2 minutes after the time, then told the check-in was closed and charged £60.
They're a terrible airline, and this action just reinforces their utter disregard for their customers.
See Ring species - species boundaries are not as clear cut as your definition would have them, though that's a good rule of thumb.
There are many arguments over how to define species - Morphological differences (which in practice is often the starting point), Biological differences, Shared ancestry etc.
I do think that a lot of people are turned off by the size of MS more than the quality of its products.
Or maybe it's their mediocre products and utter disregard for their customers and partners that turns people off?
"Believes he is appointed by God - check" ... you know, just give me a Bush quote that supports this in any way ...
Cite this
http://www.slate.com/id/2106590/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/02/usa.religion
"Believes he is absolute ruler - check"
See above. Also, just what has he ever got done without congress.
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0604b.asp
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/bush-commutes-libbys-sentence/
So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq...
Really quite irrelevant to the question of Bush, but... Iraq was nothing to do with 9/11, and invading the country has solved nothing and given the US a whole raft of problems in the mideast which are now just going to get worse. It is an attempt to dominate the mideast by force, which the US has neither the patience, the budget, nor the military might to do.
I've usually found ./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view,
I don't believe political disagreements have anything to do with intelligence. Osama Bin Laden is intelligent, that doesn't mean you have to agree with him.
Perhaps the world you want to live in is dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, whom Christ would have disowned - I'd rather not live in that world.
The US has helped, and continues to help, to prop up the festering cesspool of little dictators in the mideast - they backed Saddam in the 80s, backed the Iranian coup before that, and currently back Pakistan, Saudi, Israel, and many others with military and monetary assistance. If you want to address those issues, I suggest you look to your own countries current actions in backing undesirable regimes worldwide.
I thought it was simply pointing out that the original poster was placing an unrealistic burden on those studying a subject. No student of any other discipline, be it English, history, science, etc., is given such the burden of discovering the "origin and original meaning" of EVERY text that is released.
No, but I'd expect them to have some interest in the origin and original meaning of the texts they hold to be worthy/good/true. If not, I don't feel anything they say on the subject warrants attention, and they certainly couldn't be considered 'students' in any meaningful sense. The same would go for literature students studying literature which has been twice translated - it's pointless if you have no interest in going back to the originals or at least comparing translations.
Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you're anonymous...
This is also the biggest problem with wikipedia, and a good reason never to trust anything you find there. There have been several scandals on wikipedia of information being modified by interested parties - I would link to wikipedia, but I don't think they have a page about that.
In future most knowledge databases will be attributed, like Knol, because that leads to accountability, which leads to accuracy.
Really?
Really.
Oh, so one site being compromised WILL result in all of your accounts being compromised after all. Please get your story straight. This is a terrible idea and is just trading security for convenience.
I suspect you still misunderstand, that or you're being deliberately obtuse. OpenID is structured as follows :
OpenID Provider - provides you with a central point for identification and a means of signing in and managing sign-ins to other sites. This is the only party that can verify your identity, so you choose someone you trust not to screw up (i.e., not Facebook or MySpace etc).
OpenID Consumer or Relying party - these are the many websites that you want to log into and currently have your details written on a sticky/stored in 1Password/stored in a text file etc - the logins for which you probably don't care about much anyway, but which you have to remember currently.
If one of those many consumers is hacked, you will lose nothing save any info you've chosen to give them.
If the provider is hacked (very unlikely if you've chosen a good provider), then it's conceivable that someone could gain access to your accounts with consumers. Many providers (e.g. myopenid.com) allow disabling password login and only using a certificate, which does give a good measure of security - far more than transmitting your passwords in forms over http and relying on email to send them, which you are currently doing all the time on various sites.
Personally I wouldn't use my OpenID for my bank or anything financial, as it's good to isolate those accounts, but it is vastly superior to our current system of :
Identity verification by email
Submitting passwords via unencrypted forms
Sharing passwords/logins over many different sites, who are all storing it in various ways (hashed? in the clear? you don't know)
Often people use the same password for everything and never change it
Putting the onus for security on to many smaller sites, rather than one which specialises in security
The downside is it can give a false impression of security if people don't carefully consider who they trust to be their provider. For example if FaceBook was your provider they'd probably be happy to sell your traffic patterns to anyone who asked, but then, if you use FaceBook, you already let them do that.
And if only ONE of those websites is compromised, my login is now compromised across the board,
Take the trouble to read up on OpenID, and you'll find this is not the case. Having one site which you log in to compromised will not compromise the others. The only way you'd lose control of your openid identity is if your openID provider was compromised.
You can also select how much information you disclose to different sites, revoke permissions to certain sites, and choose more secure login methods like certificates.