This is no different than getting warrants after the fact or say a vice cop not just propositioning a hooker but going ahead and sleeping with her, paying her, then arresting her and seeking to keep much of that out of court.
... if that was possible I would seriously consider a change of career...
As much as I want people to be able to jailbreak their own devices and despite my prejudice against the prosecutors' case any judge that lets lose with a tirade in a court room needs to be removed from the bench. Nobody should be subject to a verbal assault by a judge or other public employee.
There are rules to follow in the legal system. In this case the judge believe that the prosecution may have seriously failed to follow those rules - in spite of the fact that his job is to know those rules very well indeed. And if the judge suspects your failure to follow the rules are deliberate or due to laziness you may be found to be in contempt of the court - something which can have serious consequences for your case and perhaps even your job in the legal business.
If you show up in front of a judge with a blatant disrespect for the court, the court will give you a hard time for it.
Microsoft does not "certify" 3rd party software in any way. They document/specify HOW to get a product certified. It is up to the vendors (Microsoft Partners) to do the testing and certification if they feel it brings them business value. The certification itself is typically conducted by external companies such as Veritest/[url:lionbridge.com] (now one company).
You can pretty much sign up as a Microsoft partner on "Registered Partner Level" for 0 USD and start the cerification process. Or spend 100 USD on a BizSpark package and get 2 years license to Visual Studio and all the MS-stuff you need to get going. The biggest cost is the actual verification by the external testing company - Microsoft is not making any money from the certification process. Their goal is to provide a method by which a software vendor can demonstrate microsoft-compliance for their product. And show that compliance by using a logo.
In short: Anybody who feels up to it can start certifying any FOSS software that runs on a Windows box. Feel like certifying WINE? Go right ahead. Think ClamWin should have the "Works with Windows 7" logo? Go for it - the community will probably gladly help. Think the official "Certified for Windows 2008 Server" logo would look nice on the webpage of Squeezebox Server (former "Slim Server"). Download the source and get started - perhaps Logitec will help you out with resources if you ask them - and be sure to brush up on your Perl skills before your start.
So no... Microsoft has not "caught up" with anything. And there are already a lot of certified.NET apps that run in a browser. No big deal. Anybody can start a Microsoft certification process and the bulk of the cost goes to external testing companies.
For the same reason millions of people buy gaming console?
"Because they satisfy one or more of your tech-needs at a price you are willing to pay"?
Hell, the ability to download pr0n on-the-go and render/consume it on a "Retina display" is probably in itself worth the asking price for an iPhone4...;-)
- Jesper
You should put all that stuff on an IMAP server on your home network (preferably a box you can reach from the outside using DDNS or a static entry if you have your own domain).
In that way your client OS'es can be whatever platform you choose, and they will all be able to access your mail storage.
Put older mails in separate folders.
If you can work with Linux there are plenty of choices. If not, consider Windows Home Server and get a mailserver product for Windows - there are plenty!
Many advanced email clients, such as Outlook or Evolution, will allow you to search for mails based on any criteria you like (subject, sender, body, date, etc). Hmmm except perhaps the actual mail header;-)
Personally i would never do this though. Generating and saving data is easy - limiting it is hard. Consider deleting stuff - you could start by deleting everything older than 36 months. The more you have to search through the more difficult it gets. In the end finding a single mail will be (or in your case: IS) like a needle in a haystack...
Also, why save all mails? Every time you reply to a mail a copy of the original mail is often included in your answer. So from today, consider deleting All inbound mails that you reply to;-)
Sorry Jesper, but you are wrong. I just tried it and the problem HAS NOT been fixed as of 4:47pm EST today.
Fair enough, you tested it and found the flaw alive and kicking.
Did you flush your browser cache before testing? And did you ensure that you are not getting the page from a proxy server someweher between you and the FB server?
If you are still getting the flaw (as I can see a number of other users are also reporting) my guess is that:
1.) They are getting cached results from somewhere
2.) Facebook has fixed the flaw, but propagating it to their 32.000 servers (literally dude) takes a little time.
Obviously I tested it myself before making the first comment;-) and I am unable to get any information listed. I have tried with 5 accounts belonging to friends and family (and I picked the e-mails they use for their FB accounts) without getting any interesting information. I would (obviously) not post something like my first comment on a/. front page article without testing it first...
Now, FB should still get hammered for being so damn stupid, but on the servers that I get results from the flaw is gone.
It is sad to see such an important topic treated like this. The test is practically worthless. It has absolutely no control questions and the structure makes no distinction between what people think of themselves and how they act in real life.
I suspect the majority of people scoring over 50 points are in fact egocentric narcissists who think they are very empathic.
Please. We might be./ers but we are still IT geeks. We can easily spot a mediocre or poorly constructed "test" and there is really no reason to waste our time with something on this level of quality (or lack thereof).
While the overall story might have been good if it had been described in more detail, this article is really too short and of too poor quality to hit the/. front page.
The description of the arguments in the case is too vague to provide any real value. Instead the author tries to generalize on a lot of topics which clearly are outside his field of expertise.
Improve the story, and re-post it. Or send your notes to Ars Technica and let them do the actual article.
Get rid if IE6? Boy I wish we could. But we can't.
Our 4-man startup software company targets medium sized corporate customers (250-2500 seats) and they are still using lots of old computers with IE6. There are many reasons but a few of the most noticable ones are:
1.) a ton of old Line-of-Business applications still uses IE6 for presentation. 2.) a surprisingly large amount of corporate software uses embedded IE6 components in their GUI.
Most of these corporations have installed newer browsers on their machines (some of them even installed non-MS browsers) but IE6 is still there - under the surface - because critical business applications are still depending on it.
All those Line-of-Business applications are extremely hard to remove. They often solve critical business needs so nobody wants to throw them away. They work and "do the things they were built to do". And since they just work there is no budget to replace them with somerhing else. The people who created them have left the company years ago so nobody really knows exactly how and why they are implemented.
But everbody knows this about their old LOB apps: they neeed IE6, they still work as intended, nobody can tell how to make an alternate solution, and there is no budget to analyze or re-implement them (and why would anybody want to - right?).
I imagine this is quite common for many corporations around the world and not just in my region.
I don't get it. This is old stuff. I tried such a membrane at CeBit in Hannover almost two years ago. It was made by a Japanese firm and could register "only" four concurrent touchpoints, but it is still very similar to this.
It was delivered as a thin plastic film in a black plastic frame about one inch wide all around and with a USB cable sticking out the lower left corner. They had sizes for 32, 37, 40, 42 and 50 inch LCD/plasma screens and showcased two 42 inch screens running Vista at their booth.
I wonder if the membrane is strong enough to used as a table surface. One of these membranes with a cheap 42 inch LCD TV and an Asus EE-PC could be a very cheap way to make a "Surface computer". And I would love to put such a homebrew surface/table computer between my sofa and my lounge chair...:-)
And the fact that you have chosen to post as "Anonymous Coward" but at the same time show the signs of a regular./ reader which probably has a user account, says even more than your post.
More than 3/4 of the things end-users love about computers are from rich client experiences. I very much doubt that will change. Browser are playing a catchup-game in order to approximate the most primitive things that rich clients are already capable of. And at the same time (thankfully) man-machine interfaces are evolving into new and great areas which will never fit into a browser.
If you think browser will ever get on level with the rich client you would also have to assume that the rich clients stop at their current level of evolution. And I just don't see that hapening.:-)
6 months later all the end-users are still happy with the application which provides them with the exact same and rich user experience as their favourite (rich) office application. Right? And they just LOVE the idea of paying monthly fees in order to use their software. Sure. And have no problems with the fact that their data are crossing the internet every time they access it. While not minding at all that the whole solution is nearly impossible to integrate with anything else. Poor performance is not an issue later - all screens open and close as fast as any one of them could wish for. Yep.
Paradise. Absolutely!:-D
Ask them to replace their MS Outlook client with "Exchange Web Access" too. And toss Microsoft Office out the window in favor of some obscure online spreadsheet/presentation/word-processor platform. I am sure they will love it. Its a much better user experience. And hey: much easier for the IT department as well. Hell, we could stop using computers at all and switch to ultra-thin clients!
I am sorry but I still don't understand the concept of this "GUI browser". It sounds like you are focusing a lot on the presentation layer and ignoring all the other aspects a rich client has.
What about 3rd party integration? Or a visual layout which matches the operating system? Or hotkeys and interactive behavior matching the OS? Or the ton of rich functionality provided by the OS to all local applications (security features, networking, local system access, core functionality like cross-application object embedding, etc)?
What exactly makes this "GUI browser" any better than just making a Flash 11 application and what are the benefits from using it? Which issues/problems does it solve?
So why not make a client/server solution, and make good clients for each of the platforms you want to support?
Compared to the absolutely massive resources needed to build an advanced web application with roughly the same capabilities as rich clients on those same OS'es it should not be too hard to do!
Why do we need a "GUI browser"? How would you describe such a thing anyway? The presentation layer of any modern OS already has all the things we need PLUS a ton of very useful local integration with with other applications?
I think I understand it. I will admit that I am not a network expert, just plain and simple business app developer.
And I still don't understand why I would want my own machine to answer HTTP calls of any form, or why I should allow my (hardware) firewall to allow incoming requests of that nature. The security implication alone is a nightmare.
I would never want to give any outside party the ability to execute "remote CGI" on my machine(s) nor would I want them to have the properties of a webserver.
Can you explain a scenario where such a set-up makes sense (from a business or usability perspective) and where other protocols are unable to get the job done?
Your view is typical of a techie or CTO responsible for a software roll-out. The basic thought seems to be avoiding rich clients at all costs in order to make the whole thing "simpler".
But there are a ton of disadvantages for web clients. And in many (bot not all) cases they outweigh the advantages!
- They require MUCH more advanced back-end infrastructure to work, often including several servers and lots of monitoring/management - much more complicated maintenance and upgrade - much more complicated backup and disaster recovery procedures - much more complex code in order to accomplish even the simplest things - inferior user experience (this will become more visible as the complexity of the application increases) - inferior 3rd party integration with the app (also more visible as the complexity increases) - single point of failure (in fact a whole pile of server processes on top of each other)
I have deployed both web applications and classic client/server applications in medium-sized enterprises (500 - 5000 seats) for business use. I can honestly tell you that the most complex ones have been the web-based ones. They often depend on a ton of existing technology that has to match very precise specifications, and they very seldom work "out of the box". Because of the advanced back-end diagnosing a problem is virtually a nightmare and you have several technology vendors all pointing fingers at each others for problems that (according to all of them) are not even supposed to exist.
So yes, you DO have to worry about deployment issues. You DO have to worry about software updates (which are often very complex because of the extensive technology stack). And it most certainly DOES NOT "just work".
You are correct in stating that users don't need to install anything. But hey - the same goes for the rich client. The roll-out of any decent client application can be totally automated very easily.:-)
Can you please explain WHY you would want to molest the primitive HTTP protocol in this way?
Seriously: why not use another protocol that is actually suited for the task at hand, and then let the client initiate the connection (thereby automatically solving a gazillion security issues and technical challenges imposed by NAT based consumer routers)?
Why - please - WHY do you want to take "web application concepts" and transmogrify them (read: totally molest them) into something they are not... while clearly ignoring that A LOT of existing technology has already solves most of these issues?
Why choose a web/HTTP implementation BEFORE analysing the task at hand instead of getting a clear picture of the task and THEN choosing an appropriate technology afterwords?
- Jesper
Slashdot Mirror
No. I sell life insurance policies to cops.
Yes, you are correct. The origin of the article on Ars even states: "By David Kravets, wired.com".
...
Guess I was too busy following the links and reading up on the actual text in the DMCA
- Jesper
This is no different than getting warrants after the fact or say a vice cop not just propositioning a hooker but going ahead and sleeping with her, paying her, then arresting her and seeking to keep much of that out of court.
... if that was possible I would seriously consider a change of career ...
- Jesper
The article on Ars Technica has a few extra details as well as links to further material.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/judge-in-xbox-modding-trial-berates-prosecution-halts-trial.ars
- Jesper
As much as I want people to be able to jailbreak their own devices and despite my prejudice against the prosecutors' case any judge that lets lose with a tirade in a court room needs to be removed from the bench. Nobody should be subject to a verbal assault by a judge or other public employee.
There are rules to follow in the legal system. In this case the judge believe that the prosecution may have seriously failed to follow those rules - in spite of the fact that his job is to know those rules very well indeed. And if the judge suspects your failure to follow the rules are deliberate or due to laziness you may be found to be in contempt of the court - something which can have serious consequences for your case and perhaps even your job in the legal business.
If you show up in front of a judge with a blatant disrespect for the court, the court will give you a hard time for it.
What is the surprise here?
- Jesper
The post is wrong - with all due respect.
... Microsoft has not "caught up" with anything. And there are already a lot of certified .NET apps that run in a browser. No big deal. Anybody can start a Microsoft certification process and the bulk of the cost goes to external testing companies.
Microsoft does not "certify" 3rd party software in any way. They document/specify HOW to get a product certified. It is up to the vendors (Microsoft Partners) to do the testing and certification if they feel it brings them business value. The certification itself is typically conducted by external companies such as Veritest/[url:lionbridge.com] (now one company).
You can pretty much sign up as a Microsoft partner on "Registered Partner Level" for 0 USD and start the cerification process. Or spend 100 USD on a BizSpark package and get 2 years license to Visual Studio and all the MS-stuff you need to get going. The biggest cost is the actual verification by the external testing company - Microsoft is not making any money from the certification process. Their goal is to provide a method by which a software vendor can demonstrate microsoft-compliance for their product. And show that compliance by using a logo.
In short: Anybody who feels up to it can start certifying any FOSS software that runs on a Windows box. Feel like certifying WINE? Go right ahead. Think ClamWin should have the "Works with Windows 7" logo? Go for it - the community will probably gladly help. Think the official "Certified for Windows 2008 Server" logo would look nice on the webpage of Squeezebox Server (former "Slim Server"). Download the source and get started - perhaps Logitec will help you out with resources if you ask them - and be sure to brush up on your Perl skills before your start.
So no
- Jesper
ba-da-boom!
Good one :-D
For the same reason millions of people buy gaming console? "Because they satisfy one or more of your tech-needs at a price you are willing to pay"? Hell, the ability to download pr0n on-the-go and render/consume it on a "Retina display" is probably in itself worth the asking price for an iPhone4... ;-)
- Jesper
You should put all that stuff on an IMAP server on your home network (preferably a box you can reach from the outside using DDNS or a static entry if you have your own domain).
In that way your client OS'es can be whatever platform you choose, and they will all be able to access your mail storage.
Put older mails in separate folders.
If you can work with Linux there are plenty of choices. If not, consider Windows Home Server and get a mailserver product for Windows - there are plenty!
Many advanced email clients, such as Outlook or Evolution, will allow you to search for mails based on any criteria you like (subject, sender, body, date, etc). Hmmm except perhaps the actual mail header ;-)
Personally i would never do this though. Generating and saving data is easy - limiting it is hard. Consider deleting stuff - you could start by deleting everything older than 36 months. The more you have to search through the more difficult it gets. In the end finding a single mail will be (or in your case: IS) like a needle in a haystack ...
Also, why save all mails? Every time you reply to a mail a copy of the original mail is often included in your answer. So from today, consider deleting All inbound mails that you reply to ;-)
- Jesper
- Jesper
Sorry Jesper, but you are wrong. I just tried it and the problem HAS NOT been fixed as of 4:47pm EST today.
Fair enough, you tested it and found the flaw alive and kicking.
;-) and I am unable to get any information listed. I have tried with 5 accounts belonging to friends and family (and I picked the e-mails they use for their FB accounts) without getting any interesting information. I would (obviously) not post something like my first comment on a /. front page article without testing it first ...
Did you flush your browser cache before testing? And did you ensure that you are not getting the page from a proxy server someweher between you and the FB server?
If you are still getting the flaw (as I can see a number of other users are also reporting) my guess is that:
1.) They are getting cached results from somewhere
2.) Facebook has fixed the flaw, but propagating it to their 32.000 servers (literally dude) takes a little time.
Obviously I tested it myself before making the first comment
Now, FB should still get hammered for being so damn stupid, but on the servers that I get results from the flaw is gone.
- Jesper
This flaw is no longer available on Facebook logon pages.
In fact it was removed before this story made it to the /. front page.
It was removed approx. 11 hours after the first public articles about it.
- Jesper
The main article states that iOS4 is updated. That is incorrect.
iOS 3x, or more correctly "iPhone OS 3" has also been updated in order to remove the flaw from iPads.
- Jesper
It is sad to see such an important topic treated like this. The test is practically worthless. It has absolutely no control questions and the structure makes no distinction between what people think of themselves and how they act in real life.
./ers but we are still IT geeks. We can easily spot a mediocre or poorly constructed "test" and there is really no reason to waste our time with something on this level of quality (or lack thereof).
I suspect the majority of people scoring over 50 points are in fact egocentric narcissists who think they are very empathic.
Please. We might be
Yes. Really.
- Jesper
While the overall story might have been good if it had been described in more detail, this article is really too short and of too poor quality to hit the /. front page.
The description of the arguments in the case is too vague to provide any real value. Instead the author tries to generalize on a lot of topics which clearly are outside his field of expertise.
Improve the story, and re-post it. Or send your notes to Ars Technica and let them do the actual article.
- Jesper
Get rid if IE6? Boy I wish we could. But we can't.
Our 4-man startup software company targets medium sized corporate customers (250-2500 seats) and they are still using lots of old computers with IE6. There are many reasons but a few of the most noticable ones are:
1.) a ton of old Line-of-Business applications still uses IE6 for presentation.
2.) a surprisingly large amount of corporate software uses embedded IE6 components in their GUI.
Most of these corporations have installed newer browsers on their machines (some of them even installed non-MS browsers) but IE6 is still there - under the surface - because critical business applications are still depending on it.
All those Line-of-Business applications are extremely hard to remove. They often solve critical business needs so nobody wants to throw them away. They work and "do the things they were built to do". And since they just work there is no budget to replace them with somerhing else. The people who created them have left the company years ago so nobody really knows exactly how and why they are implemented.
But everbody knows this about their old LOB apps: they neeed IE6, they still work as intended, nobody can tell how to make an alternate solution, and there is no budget to analyze or re-implement them (and why would anybody want to - right?).
I imagine this is quite common for many corporations around the world and not just in my region.
- Jesper
I don't get it. This is old stuff. I tried such a membrane at CeBit in Hannover almost two years ago. It was made by a Japanese firm and could register "only" four concurrent touchpoints, but it is still very similar to this.
... :-)
It was delivered as a thin plastic film in a black plastic frame about one inch wide all around and with a USB cable sticking out the lower left corner. They had sizes for 32, 37, 40, 42 and 50 inch LCD/plasma screens and showcased two 42 inch screens running Vista at their booth.
I wonder if the membrane is strong enough to used as a table surface. One of these membranes with a cheap 42 inch LCD TV and an Asus EE-PC could be a very cheap way to make a "Surface computer". And I would love to put such a homebrew surface/table computer between my sofa and my lounge chair
Really. You can't be serious.
And the fact that you have chosen to post as "Anonymous Coward" but at the same time show the signs of a regular ./ reader which probably has a user account, says even more than your post.
More than 3/4 of the things end-users love about computers are from rich client experiences. I very much doubt that will change. Browser are playing a catchup-game in order to approximate the most primitive things that rich clients are already capable of. And at the same time (thankfully) man-machine interfaces are evolving into new and great areas which will never fit into a browser.
If you think browser will ever get on level with the rich client you would also have to assume that the rich clients stop at their current level of evolution. And I just don't see that hapening. :-)
- Jesper
It sounds like a kick-ass method for making stuff than can bypass police-state/dictator censor crap and web filtering. Absolutely!
I still don't see any use that would be beneficial for normal users like myself, my girlfriend, daughter, mom, dad, ... etc. :-)
LOL.
Mjeah. Right. :-D
6 months later all the end-users are still happy with the application which provides them with the exact same and rich user experience as their favourite (rich) office application. Right? And they just LOVE the idea of paying monthly fees in order to use their software. Sure. And have no problems with the fact that their data are crossing the internet every time they access it. While not minding at all that the whole solution is nearly impossible to integrate with anything else. Poor performance is not an issue later - all screens open and close as fast as any one of them could wish for. Yep.
Paradise. Absolutely! :-D
Ask them to replace their MS Outlook client with "Exchange Web Access" too. And toss Microsoft Office out the window in favor of some obscure online spreadsheet/presentation/word-processor platform. I am sure they will love it. Its a much better user experience. And hey: much easier for the IT department as well. Hell, we could stop using computers at all and switch to ultra-thin clients!
Go for it. It will be great! :-D
I am sorry but I still don't understand the concept of this "GUI browser". It sounds like you are focusing a lot on the presentation layer and ignoring all the other aspects a rich client has.
What about 3rd party integration? Or a visual layout which matches the operating system? Or hotkeys and interactive behavior matching the OS? Or the ton of rich functionality provided by the OS to all local applications (security features, networking, local system access, core functionality like cross-application object embedding, etc)?
What exactly makes this "GUI browser" any better than just making a Flash 11 application and what are the benefits from using it? Which issues/problems does it solve?
- Jesper
So why not make a client/server solution, and make good clients for each of the platforms you want to support?
Compared to the absolutely massive resources needed to build an advanced web application with roughly the same capabilities as rich clients on those same OS'es it should not be too hard to do!
Why do we need a "GUI browser"? How would you describe such a thing anyway? The presentation layer of any modern OS already has all the things we need PLUS a ton of very useful local integration with with other applications?
- Jesper
I think I understand it. I will admit that I am not a network expert, just plain and simple business app developer.
And I still don't understand why I would want my own machine to answer HTTP calls of any form, or why I should allow my (hardware) firewall to allow incoming requests of that nature. The security implication alone is a nightmare.
I would never want to give any outside party the ability to execute "remote CGI" on my machine(s) nor would I want them to have the properties of a webserver.
Can you explain a scenario where such a set-up makes sense (from a business or usability perspective) and where other protocols are unable to get the job done?
- Jesper
True and false.
It is a success for the things it was originally created to solve.
It is a failure (although very widespread) for the more modern things it is used for in advanced web applications... ;-)
I totally disagree. Respectfully :-)
Your view is typical of a techie or CTO responsible for a software roll-out. The basic thought seems to be avoiding rich clients at all costs in order to make the whole thing "simpler".
But there are a ton of disadvantages for web clients. And in many (bot not all) cases they outweigh the advantages!
- They require MUCH more advanced back-end infrastructure to work, often including several servers and lots of monitoring/management
- much more complicated maintenance and upgrade
- much more complicated backup and disaster recovery procedures
- much more complex code in order to accomplish even the simplest things
- inferior user experience (this will become more visible as the complexity of the application increases)
- inferior 3rd party integration with the app (also more visible as the complexity increases)
- single point of failure (in fact a whole pile of server processes on top of each other)
I have deployed both web applications and classic client/server applications in medium-sized enterprises (500 - 5000 seats) for business use. I can honestly tell you that the most complex ones have been the web-based ones. They often depend on a ton of existing technology that has to match very precise specifications, and they very seldom work "out of the box". Because of the advanced back-end diagnosing a problem is virtually a nightmare and you have several technology vendors all pointing fingers at each others for problems that (according to all of them) are not even supposed to exist.
So yes, you DO have to worry about deployment issues. You DO have to worry about software updates (which are often very complex because of the extensive technology stack). And it most certainly DOES NOT "just work".
You are correct in stating that users don't need to install anything. But hey - the same goes for the rich client. The roll-out of any decent client application can be totally automated very easily. :-)
- Jesper
Can you please explain WHY you would want to molest the primitive HTTP protocol in this way? Seriously: why not use another protocol that is actually suited for the task at hand, and then let the client initiate the connection (thereby automatically solving a gazillion security issues and technical challenges imposed by NAT based consumer routers)? Why - please - WHY do you want to take "web application concepts" and transmogrify them (read: totally molest them) into something they are not... while clearly ignoring that A LOT of existing technology has already solves most of these issues? Why choose a web/HTTP implementation BEFORE analysing the task at hand instead of getting a clear picture of the task and THEN choosing an appropriate technology afterwords? - Jesper