I'm friends with a bunch of the Danger employees. They aren't creepy, and they aren't run by lawyers. Many of them are ex-Apple, ex-WebTV, etc... It's a pretty typical Silicon Valley start-up.
Wouldn't you rather have them trying to integrate the 3rd party sites than attack them?
Streaming itunes wirelessly is nice but you still need to go back to your computer to change a song.
Which will be sitting on your lap instead of across the room next to the TV. Which will have a 1 megapixel or bigger display, instead of a 2x24 character LCD.
One thing missing from this device is a real optical out. I'm sorry but going analog mini jack -> digi optical doesn't make any sense.
Do you really think placing the LED 12" differently in either direction matters? It's not like the DAC is all optical internally.
The significance here is that the new motherboard is smaller.
Because Apple doesn't have to create motherboards that fit some standard size and fastener layout, they're free to adjust their designs as parts change, which makes them free to adjust the external design of the machine as the motherboard shrinks.
They also have a strong desire to be able to reuse a motherboard design across multiple products.
In other words, the smaller that G5 motherboard gets, the closer we are to seeing it in a consumer iMac, or even a PowerBook.
Innovation doesn't just grow on trees, and Apple's proprietary designs give them the flexibility needed to produce unique computers.
By contrast, there have been around, what, five? standard PC motherboard sizes since the 386. Commodity parts are great for end user prices, but commodity means "same", and it shows in the final product.
If Open Source is such a perfect model (as many here proclaim it to be), then won't it naturally be the best way for a corporation to maximize its profits?
Open Source (and especially Free Software) advocates do serious damage to their cause when they conflate maximizing profit with evil intentions, and proclaim open source as some sort of cure.
IMHO, the BSD license is used by programmers who want to see their implementation used in the widest possible applications, because they believe that progress comes from standing on the shoulders of giants (and they wouldn't mind being one of those giants.)
Apple has offered plenty of open source back to the community. Rendezvous, Open Directrory, Core Foundation, HFS, IOKit.
But these things are offered specifically instead of all their software creations because the adoption of these things as the foundation for other people's products will help Apple... and help maximize Apple's profits.
Don't think for a moment that IBM and Sun approach the issue even the slightest bit differently.
Apple should realise that the only way to protect youself from Open Source is to adopt a strong cryptographically signed service. There is no intrinsic value is any line of code but in code as a service. Sounds like lazy programmer bugs fixed by application of lawyer.
Apple's implementation of FairPlay is a cryptographically signed music file.
The problem is that the key has to be stored on the user's machine so that they can hear the music they bought.
Playfair just finds the key and decrypts the music file permanantly.
From my experience there are no markets with real competition. DSL has never been able to compete with cable for speed.
Funny you should write that, because in Cupertino, CA, where I live, I just hooked up a DSL line for $50/m that runs 6000/768, with 8 static IPs. (Sonic.Net)
And I'll soon be calling Comcast to disconnect my $55/m cable modem.
In my experience, having competition between Cable ISPs and DSL ISPs has had a huge impact on service and pricing.
The best part about Columbus' system is that they capture your first connection, and tell you about some of the other services they offer. Including a totally kick-ass flight schedule and gate locator system, that they appear to have written themselves.
I was so stunned that I fired off a quick thank-you email to them on the spot. It sure beats seeing the BSOD on the flight monitors like I've seen in other airports.
Heheh, it's so simple, you had to make it complicated.
To turn off the iPod, put it down and walk away.
It'll turn itself off after a short delay. The power button 'feature' is only there because geeks insisted they should be able to turn it 'off'.
And again with the power: How do I plug it into the wall?
You don't. You plug it into your computer, and it charges itself while it syncs with your playlists.
If you do have to plug it in to the wall, you connect the power supply to the cable that fits the device, just like every other of a thousand varriations of the DC power jack. And you don't have to think very hard about picking between the big hole and the small hole.
I see dozens of posts saying "people want simplicity." The article is ostensibly making that very point.
But you know what?
People BUY complexity. They could buy a Mac, but they buy the PC because it has 'more software'. They could buy a simple phone, but they buy the one with all the gee-wizz features. They could pay $10 for shareware, but they want Photoshop and Word.
On top of that, it's hard to make things simple. It costs more to make a product easy to use. (Especially with software, where cramming maximal items into the preferences panel seems to be an industry sport.)
The friend almost certainly has defective RAM, which is causing random bit errors in memory mapped files, which sometimes get written back to disk (if they're prefs files), which slowly makes the machine flakey and unstable.
For some reason, no one ever suspects that their flakey, unstable machine might have something as simple as a hardware problem they could fix themselves.
I was going to write something similar to your post. I'm saddened that so many people here have fallen into the binary trap. Black & White, Right and Wrong.
If we retrain ourselves to act like computers, what's keeping them from doing our jobs?
Why the hell should I give my real name and street address to register a domain name?
I'm allowed an unlisted telephone number. And even if my number is listed, it's reasonably difficult to do a reverse lookup from phone # to physical address. The information is available to law enforcement holding the required legal documents.
For domains, why should this information be public and easily harvested in bulk?
What happens when even the geeks can't get it work?
You know they didn't buy a Mac, that's what.
Seriously, get 'em DSL, an AirPort base station, iBooks and iSight for each family member, and now they have high speed wireless internet with videoconferencing.
Pile on a TiVo, any DVD player, and a $1000 30"+ CRT TV, and a decent sound system.
Total cost: way under $15k.
The key is, don't buy the best of everything, buy the stuff that's proven to work.
Todo. * relocatable packages * support for arch name in metadata, arch indep packages * multiple version of the same package can be installed simultaneously (is this really a package format issue?)
Sigh. The guy has an entire section on how well "standard" tools can manipulate these file formats, as if the typical user has any desire to do home surgery on their software.
(Well, why shouldn't he? The typical linux user does want this level of control...)
But there, at the end, in the neglected "ToDo" section, are the real issues. Features that put the user in control of their software instead of the other way around. Is anyone ever going to write a package management system that addresses the needs of the user, instead of the sysadmin?
most TiVo users who wanted to have more space or convert their collection to DVD have already figured out how to do so with minimal investment (TiVoNet, DVD-R, hard drive)
I suppose you think "most" = you and your friends.
Of the people I know with Tivos, including myself, about half have upgraded the hard drive. And none of them have set up video offloading, because we don't have the time to maintain such a cumbersome hack.
The half that haven't upgraded are generally our parents, who think the Tivo is the coolest thing ever, and would gladly buy a new unit instead of voiding the warentee.
Still, it's nice for brand new users who have never owned a PVR and don't know how to use telnet.
Which describes 249 Million Americans who don't own a PVR yet pretty well. I think they have a killer product on their hands, although it is a bit pricy.
was going to get the B&W unit until I found out (from reading the message boards) that websites have to be "supported" by Danger in order to display on the Sidekick. In other words, if you go to an unsupported site, you get a "sorry" error mesage on your screen. Then you e-mail Danger and ask them to add the website, but people on the boards have complained that AFTER A YEAR it hasn't happened.
This is just plain WRONG.
The Sidekick does not have a "valid-list" of websites. I use my sidekick to check the temperature of my hot-tub at home, which is available on a web page I wrote. I can assure you, I didn't have to ask anyone at Danger to "support" my webpage.
It's amazing how many people don't see this obvious consequence.
It's the same thing with Classic apps. If Apple makes them "too" well integrated, why should developers move forward?
Very few applications adapt with changing APIs. OS Venders need to maintain backwards compatibility so there are products for their new OSes, but write new APIs so there will be new products to replace them.
Putting too much energy into supporting your "old" APIs is a recipe for stagnation.
First, I'd estimate the value of the skills needed to assemble that pile of gear into a working computer at several thousand dollars.
That is, you have a valuable skill that allows you to assemble a desktop computer for far less than the average human.
Your comparison only goes to show how much both of those above companies are gouging their customers.
The customers of those two companies generally do not have the skill to assemble your pile of lowest-cost components.
And don't even get me started on the nightmare that befalls you when one of the 10 different suppliers you've chosen delivers an incompatible or broken part.
You clearly don't value your time.
I could spend 5 minutes ordering a new Mac or Dell online. Odds are good it would work perfectly on arrival, and all software would be installed and configured.
Or I could order PC components from 10 different suppliers, getting the best deals. Then I'd wait 8 weeks for the slowest shipment to arive. Then I'd spend at least 2 hours assembling it. Odds are definately not good that everything works on the first try. If something goes wrong, or was poorly documented, it might take 5 hours. And if something is truely broken, another 2 hours on the phone, and a few more hours dealing with shipping stuff back. And when the hardware is finally all working, then I get to install software!
I don't describe this out of ignorance. I bet my experiences building computers are pretty similar to those of most people here. It's just not worth it unless you're time is free.
The support overhead should be non-existant, as the school district IT staff should just set them all up as terminals, or can have images handy for quick ghosting (if needs be).
So the sysadmin that they don't have should be doing all this work (for free?)
Since when did TCO stop including the cost of deployment and support?
What if it had utilized protocol that made blanket exploit attempts unnecessary?
Uh, what if? Would it have spread faster? No.
I'm poo-poo'ing it's inevitable implementation in completely insecure manners. This article talks about how great it is to just turn on a laptop and instantly have access to all the resources around you. This 'feature rich' world is even worse than the microsoft security models out there. Leave an open, passwordless share out there on the 'net and see what universally available resources gets you.
In your own words, it is the "passwordless share" that is the problem, not the discovery of the same.
Rendevous is a discovery protocol. It is no different than ping. It can not discover what isn't there. It can not secure what isn't already secure. Hiding something without making it unavailable (as you seem to be advocating) does nothing for security.
In fact, I would argue that if all applications had rendevous support built in, they would be more secure on average, because the users of those applications would demand application layer authentication instead of being lulled into a false sense of security through obscurity.
Slashdot Mirror
Creepy?
I'm friends with a bunch of the Danger employees. They aren't creepy, and they aren't run by lawyers. Many of them are ex-Apple, ex-WebTV, etc... It's a pretty typical Silicon Valley start-up.
Wouldn't you rather have them trying to integrate the 3rd party sites than attack them?
What's needed now is something that looks and works like an iPod, but is actually an RF remote control for AirTunes...
You mean, like an iBook?
Streaming itunes wirelessly is nice but you still need to go back to your computer to change a song.
Which will be sitting on your lap instead of across the room next to the TV. Which will have a 1 megapixel or bigger display, instead of a 2x24 character LCD.
One thing missing from this device is a real optical out. I'm sorry but going analog mini jack -> digi optical doesn't make any sense.
Do you really think placing the LED 12" differently in either direction matters? It's not like the DAC is all optical internally.
The significance here is that the new motherboard is smaller.
Because Apple doesn't have to create motherboards that fit some standard size and fastener layout, they're free to adjust their designs as parts change, which makes them free to adjust the external design of the machine as the motherboard shrinks.
They also have a strong desire to be able to reuse a motherboard design across multiple products.
In other words, the smaller that G5 motherboard gets, the closer we are to seeing it in a consumer iMac, or even a PowerBook.
Innovation doesn't just grow on trees, and Apple's proprietary designs give them the flexibility needed to produce unique computers.
By contrast, there have been around, what, five? standard PC motherboard sizes since the 386. Commodity parts are great for end user prices, but commodity means "same", and it shows in the final product.
If Open Source is such a perfect model (as many here proclaim it to be), then won't it naturally be the best way for a corporation to maximize its profits?
Open Source (and especially Free Software) advocates do serious damage to their cause when they conflate maximizing profit with evil intentions, and proclaim open source as some sort of cure.
IMHO, the BSD license is used by programmers who want to see their implementation used in the widest possible applications, because they believe that progress comes from standing on the shoulders of giants (and they wouldn't mind being one of those giants.)
Apple has offered plenty of open source back to the community. Rendezvous, Open Directrory, Core Foundation, HFS, IOKit.
But these things are offered specifically instead of all their software creations because the adoption of these things as the foundation for other people's products will help Apple... and help maximize Apple's profits.
Don't think for a moment that IBM and Sun approach the issue even the slightest bit differently.
-pmb
TROLL?! What kind of crack are the moderators smoking and where do I get some?
Wow, the neighborhood is really going to hell around here.
No problem, except the next thing El' numbnuts is going to ask for is a tool to actually FIND something in all that mess.
I have over 3GB of mail archived using Eudora, and I use the search feature all the time.
Here's a nickel, buy yourself another gigabyte.
Are sysadmins trying to become the new beancounters? Who the hell are you to decide which of my data is valuable?
Apple should realise that the only way to protect youself from Open Source is to adopt a strong cryptographically signed service. There is no intrinsic value is any line of code but in code as a service. Sounds like lazy programmer bugs fixed by application of lawyer.
Apple's implementation of FairPlay is a cryptographically signed music file.
The problem is that the key has to be stored on the user's machine so that they can hear the music they bought.
Playfair just finds the key and decrypts the music file permanantly.
From my experience there are no markets with real competition. DSL has never been able to compete with cable for speed.
Funny you should write that, because in Cupertino, CA, where I live, I just hooked up a DSL line for $50/m that runs 6000/768, with 8 static IPs. (Sonic.Net)
And I'll soon be calling Comcast to disconnect my $55/m cable modem.
In my experience, having competition between Cable ISPs and DSL ISPs has had a huge impact on service and pricing.
-pmb
The best part about Columbus' system is that they capture your first connection, and tell you about some of the other services they offer. Including a totally kick-ass flight schedule and gate locator system, that they appear to have written themselves.
I was so stunned that I fired off a quick thank-you email to them on the spot. It sure beats seeing the BSOD on the flight monitors like I've seen in other airports.
Ok, I read the story, and read the comments.
NASA says they goofed and the pancam pix don't reflect what the human eye would see. (But that they could make those pix if they wanted to.)
What I don't see are links to the correct pictures. Not in the NYT story, not in the slashdot blurb, and not in the comments.
What gives?
Heheh, it's so simple, you had to make it complicated.
To turn off the iPod, put it down and walk away.
It'll turn itself off after a short delay. The power button 'feature' is only there because geeks insisted they should be able to turn it 'off'.
And again with the power:
How do I plug it into the wall?
You don't. You plug it into your computer, and it charges itself while it syncs with your playlists.
If you do have to plug it in to the wall, you connect the power supply to the cable that fits the device, just like every other of a thousand varriations of the DC power jack. And you don't have to think very hard about picking between the big hole and the small hole.
I see dozens of posts saying "people want simplicity." The article is ostensibly making that very point.
But you know what?
People BUY complexity. They could buy a Mac, but they buy the PC because it has 'more software'. They could buy a simple phone, but they buy the one with all the gee-wizz features. They could pay $10 for shareware, but they want Photoshop and Word.
On top of that, it's hard to make things simple. It costs more to make a product easy to use. (Especially with software, where cramming maximal items into the preferences panel seems to be an industry sport.)
People get what they pay for.
The friend almost certainly has defective RAM, which is causing random bit errors in memory mapped files, which sometimes get written back to disk (if they're prefs files), which slowly makes the machine flakey and unstable.
For some reason, no one ever suspects that their flakey, unstable machine might have something as simple as a hardware problem they could fix themselves.
-pmb
I was going to write something similar to your post. I'm saddened that so many people here have fallen into the binary trap. Black & White, Right and Wrong.
If we retrain ourselves to act like computers, what's keeping them from doing our jobs?
-pmb
Why the hell should I give my real name and street address to register a domain name?
I'm allowed an unlisted telephone number. And even if my number is listed, it's reasonably difficult to do a reverse lookup from phone # to physical address. The information is available to law enforcement holding the required legal documents.
For domains, why should this information be public and easily harvested in bulk?
what if I just insert one of those el cheapo USB-cards? Will that work?
No, it won't work. 10.3 requires a Macintosh built after USB became standard equipment. It doesn't need USB, but a machine built since then.
What happens when even the geeks can't get it work?
You know they didn't buy a Mac, that's what.
Seriously, get 'em DSL, an AirPort base station, iBooks and iSight for each family member, and now they have high speed wireless internet with videoconferencing.
Pile on a TiVo, any DVD player, and a $1000 30"+ CRT TV, and a decent sound system.
Total cost: way under $15k.
The key is, don't buy the best of everything, buy the stuff that's proven to work.
Todo.
* relocatable packages
* support for arch name in metadata, arch indep packages
* multiple version of the same package can be installed simultaneously (is this really a package format issue?)
Sigh. The guy has an entire section on how well "standard" tools can manipulate these file formats, as if the typical user has any desire to do home surgery on their software.
(Well, why shouldn't he? The typical linux user does want this level of control...)
But there, at the end, in the neglected "ToDo" section, are the real issues. Features that put the user in control of their software instead of the other way around. Is anyone ever going to write a package management system that addresses the needs of the user, instead of the sysadmin?
-pmb
most TiVo users who wanted to have more space or convert their collection to DVD have already figured out how to do so with minimal investment (TiVoNet, DVD-R, hard drive)
I suppose you think "most" = you and your friends.
Of the people I know with Tivos, including myself, about half have upgraded the hard drive. And none of them have set up video offloading, because we don't have the time to maintain such a cumbersome hack.
The half that haven't upgraded are generally our parents, who think the Tivo is the coolest thing ever, and would gladly buy a new unit instead of voiding the warentee.
Still, it's nice for brand new users who have never owned a PVR and don't know how to use telnet.
Which describes 249 Million Americans who don't own a PVR yet pretty well. I think they have a killer product on their hands, although it is a bit pricy.
-pmb
was going to get the B&W unit until I found out (from reading the message boards) that websites have to be "supported" by Danger in order to display on the Sidekick. In other words, if you go to an unsupported site, you get a "sorry" error mesage on your screen. Then you e-mail Danger and ask them to add the website, but people on the boards have complained that AFTER A YEAR it hasn't happened.
This is just plain WRONG.
The Sidekick does not have a "valid-list" of websites. I use my sidekick to check the temperature of my hot-tub at home, which is available on a web page I wrote. I can assure you, I didn't have to ask anyone at Danger to "support" my webpage.
ding ding ding ding! Give this man a prize.
It's amazing how many people don't see this obvious consequence.
It's the same thing with Classic apps. If Apple makes them "too" well integrated, why should developers move forward?
Very few applications adapt with changing APIs. OS Venders need to maintain backwards compatibility so there are products for their new OSes, but write new APIs so there will be new products to replace them.
Putting too much energy into supporting your "old" APIs is a recipe for stagnation.
$1575 total.
First, I'd estimate the value of the skills needed to assemble that pile of gear into a working computer at several thousand dollars.
That is, you have a valuable skill that allows you to assemble a desktop computer for far less than the average human.
Your comparison only goes to show how much both of those above companies are gouging their customers.
The customers of those two companies generally do not have the skill to assemble your pile of lowest-cost components.
And don't even get me started on the nightmare that befalls you when one of the 10 different suppliers you've chosen delivers an incompatible or broken part.
You clearly don't value your time.
I could spend 5 minutes ordering a new Mac or Dell online. Odds are good it would work perfectly on arrival, and all software would be installed and configured.
Or I could order PC components from 10 different suppliers, getting the best deals. Then I'd wait 8 weeks for the slowest shipment to arive. Then I'd spend at least 2 hours assembling it. Odds are definately not good that everything works on the first try. If something goes wrong, or was poorly documented, it might take 5 hours. And if something is truely broken, another 2 hours on the phone, and a few more hours dealing with shipping stuff back. And when the hardware is finally all working, then I get to install software!
I don't describe this out of ignorance. I bet my experiences building computers are pretty similar to those of most people here. It's just not worth it unless you're time is free.
The support overhead should be non-existant, as the school district IT staff should just set them all up as terminals, or can have images handy for quick ghosting (if needs be).
So the sysadmin that they don't have should be doing all this work (for free?)
Since when did TCO stop including the cost of deployment and support?
What if it had utilized protocol that made blanket exploit attempts unnecessary?
Uh, what if? Would it have spread faster? No.
I'm poo-poo'ing it's inevitable implementation in completely insecure manners. This article talks about how great it is to just turn on a laptop and instantly have access to all the resources around you. This 'feature rich' world is even worse than the microsoft security models out there. Leave an open, passwordless share out there on the 'net and see what universally available resources gets you.
In your own words, it is the "passwordless share" that is the problem, not the discovery of the same.
Rendevous is a discovery protocol. It is no different than ping. It can not discover what isn't there. It can not secure what isn't already secure. Hiding something without making it unavailable (as you seem to be advocating) does nothing for security.
In fact, I would argue that if all applications had rendevous support built in, they would be more secure on average, because the users of those applications would demand application layer authentication instead of being lulled into a false sense of security through obscurity.