I see no mention of removing all network connectivity, sealing them in a lead box, and encasing the box in a large block of cement. Until those things happen (or their equivalents), any computer is still "hackable." I believe they really mean that they couldn't think of a way to hack them, which is quite different.
I am very eager to see a follow up in 6 months and a year out. I hope things go well, but I am afraid that I am still skeptical of the claims, but I do wish them well.
Any attempt to impose censorship will inevitably lead to bizarre and ironic situations. People who want censorship usually think that the world is a simple place with black and white decisions about right and wrong. Reality smacks you in the face when you try to apply what seems like a simple concept to actual situations.
I mainly use my netbook when I travel. I also see a lot of my students using them; they fit well on the arms of school desks, and the students have young enough eyes to tolerate the small screens.
I see netbooks being very popular as second computers. Like I said, I use mine for traveling. Most of the students have a full sized desktop or laptop at home.
XP fans will be happy because netbooks may force MS to keep it for a while.
The biggest problem I see for MS is that a lot of the netbooks are coming out as part of data plans. The telcos are going to want to shave every bit of cost off these systems that they can, and the "MicroSoft tax" is one very obvious source of cost savings.
I am sure Best Buy is getting paid well for this, but ultimately it does hurt their reputation. One reason people go to a store like Best Buy is for information. If they get a reputation for giving out bad information then a lot of the reason for going there disappears.
Granted, the typical reader of Slashdot probably doesn't need a lot of advice, and we probably know how to get better prices elsewhere. However, we do talk to a lot of people who are thinking about buying computers. I am thinking at this point it is probably better to go to Wal-mart where people assume the clerks know nothing about the products than it is to go to BestBuy where management is encouraging employees to give out bad information.
I know there will be a lot of flames about the clerks at Best Buy being stupid, and people who rely on them are even stupider. However, I do know some Best Buy employees, and some of them are pretty sharp.
There have been a lot of these cases lately. On frequent theme is that the person publishing the schedule is also associated with some type of criticism of the transit authority involved. That suggests that the real reason for the lawsuits is to silence the critic rather than to block publication of the schedules. I haven't seen the proposed agreement in this case, but the license that has been proposed by the other transit authorities usually contains some language that ties access to the schedule data to restrictions on criticism of the transit authority. I wonder if that will happen here.
The thing that interests me is the model they are using. The major players are coming to an agreement on a standard before releasing products. The pattern over the last couple of decades has been for every major player to develop their own proprietary system and then try to force the market to their standard.
This more open model is at the root of most successful technologies. Take a look at the TV industry. There was one common standard. Any company with the expertise could build a TV that would work with all commercial TV broadcasts, and broadcasters could send to any manufacturer's TV's. If TV had been invented in the 1990's, I could only watch Sony broadcasts on my Sony TV.
The modern PC is another example. The IBM-PC was an inferior design, but it was an open standard; anyone could make parts and software for an IBM-PC.
This technology might be boring, environmentally evil, and make us all sterile, but I am still glad to see the way this is being released.
For a long time KDE was regarded as the stable businesslike desktop and Gnome was for the experimenters. It is interesting to me that the roles have largely reversed. Gnome is now taking an incremental, evolutionary approach while KDE is the one taking risks and being more revolutionary.
The only real way to answer this question is to give it a try.
Slapping a fee on everything could hurt the YouTube brand a lot, so it needs to be done slowly and starting at the fringes.
I think they should let content providers charge subscription fees for their channels. Of course, YouTube/Google would get a cut of the revenue. Regular viewers shouldn't complain because this is new content above and beyond what is currently offered. YouTube could assess how users react and everyone could get a feel for how the price structures should be set up.
My guess is that the content provides will seriously overprice their content. Content providers have pretty consistently overestimated the value of their content and what consumers will pay. We will probably end up with a model where short commercials are injected into long content. Viewers will have a choice to either watch or pay a subscription fee to skip the ads. Consumers will have the choice to 1)pay 2)watch commercials or 3)find entertainment elsewhere. Content providers tend to forget about this third option.
AP is no longer the only news source out there. CNN and Reuters will be more than happy to fill the gap if the AP wants to put itself behind higher paywalls and legal barriers to linking.
This would be a good time to sell your stock in AP if you have any, because this kind of backward thinking will lead to the same results as Detroit believing that they could solve their economic problems by making bigger, less fuel efficient vehicles. Companies that want to return to the 1980's are doomed to fail.
It's not just the people. It looks like a lot of other industries finally woke up and say "Hey, this stuff the RIAA/MPAA is pulling is bad for OUR business."
I was wondering how long it would take for other businesses to start putting up some resistance to the recording industry. I really hope this signals the start of a new trend.
Perhaps the RIAA pushed to far on this one and woke up some sleeping giants.
This might work if they took the tax money from video games and applied it to things that really would reduce violent crime.
Of course, things like reducing poverty, increasing literacy, and providing drug treatment for people who want to get off drugs won't get you as many headlines as bashing video games.
You have a flash hard drive in the eee, so I would suggest using an ext2 or other non-journaling file system. Depending on how you use swap files you might also want to reduce the swappiness (I would be more specific, but discussions of swap space always precipitate flame wars).
Wireless is the place you are most likely to run into support problems. The problems are resolvable, but it is still the area you are most likely to have headaches.
My guess is that most national security agencies have already broken Skype. Those national spy agencies probably have not shared that information with their local police. In fact, the spy agencies probably love it when the local police go around complaining that they can't tap Skype calls because it lulls the people they want to listen to into a false sense of security that Skype is safe.
This story will probably go on for a long time. The spy agencies are going to make sure that no law gets passed that requires Skype to open up. There will always be a local police agency that isn't bright enough to figure out what is going on, so they will keep it in the news.
The blogger on the CNET site should do more research than some arm-chair what-if's and watching The Wire. The issues that he raises are nothing new, and they are relatively easy to address if you have the resources of the Presidency at your disposal. Plus with all the publicity I am guessing that RIM is quite willing to ship a crate of new Blackberries to the White House on a weekly basis!
The most bone-headed assumption that the blogger makes is that the President always has the same cell phone or IMEI/IMED. My guess would be that these are swapped out regularly, perhaps multiple times per day. You and I can't do that, but we aren't the President.
Even if people could identify the President's unit it would be a double edged sword. The President's daily schedule is published, so people already think they know where he is most of the time. But suppose the President wants to take an unannounced trip? Well, just give a staffer his phone and let the staffer walk through the President's published schedule while the President himself is off in Iraq or wherever he needs to be.
There is an obvious problem when a boss asks you to do something unethical, but there is something else to consider.
One good way to rise in a business is to work for someone who is "going places" and willing to take people with him or her. At very least, it is good to work for someone likely to get promoted if there is a chance to move into their position.
Frankly this bozo or bozette does not sound like someone who is going to climb the corporate ladder. At best this is a short-term scam, and the boss can only look good for a short time before the wheels start coming off this project. At that point the boss and everyone associated with the project will be tarnished. If the boss owns the business and is running this type of scam, then there is not much future in this business.
The hearings are not about eliminating the termination fees, the proposal is to prorate them.
For consumers a lot would be gained by divorcing the carrier and the instrument. If you figure out what that "free" phone really costs you will go running to the Internet or a phone store. Personally I just go to a big-box store and buy a pay-as-you-go phone and then put my carrier's sim card in it.
They made land-line companies stop bundling the phone and the service years ago. The industry objected saying that people would stop getting phone service because they couldn't afford the cost of buying their phones up front. What happened was just the opposite. We now have a huge variety of telephones to chose from at almost any price you care to pay.
It's easier to just pretend you are a monopoly than it is to come out with a better product. If MS-TV was a better product than YouTube it might have a chance. Instead MS decided to make its IM services worse by blocking YouTube. That drives more people to use other IM's. This is the kind of corporate thinking that brought us Vista and will ultimately be the doom of MicroSoft unless they change their ways.
Computers can make random guesses thousands of times an hour. Some will eventually work by pure luck. Methods like this, or just knowing the general algorithm allow you to shave the odds even further in the hacker's favor.
Google's security consciousness comes not only from being founded on the Internet, but also from the fact that they know that they have to compete.
Microsoft had itself in a monopoly situation before network security became an issue. MS only takes notice of security when it appears to threaten its monopoly status. Our security people would love to see us go to Linux (granted, still security holes, but they are more controllable). However, we can't because users would whine about noting being able to use their MS-only software. In short, MS doesn't care about security because they don't have to.
Mac's don't have the monopoly situation, they just think they do. Another part of the fantasy world the Mac community lives in says that their systems are secure. As long as Apple can keep their loyal core of Mac users happy they don't have to worry about security, either.
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I see no mention of removing all network connectivity, sealing them in a lead box, and encasing the box in a large block of cement. Until those things happen (or their equivalents), any computer is still "hackable." I believe they really mean that they couldn't think of a way to hack them, which is quite different. I am very eager to see a follow up in 6 months and a year out. I hope things go well, but I am afraid that I am still skeptical of the claims, but I do wish them well.
Any attempt to impose censorship will inevitably lead to bizarre and ironic situations. People who want censorship usually think that the world is a simple place with black and white decisions about right and wrong. Reality smacks you in the face when you try to apply what seems like a simple concept to actual situations.
I mainly use my netbook when I travel. I also see a lot of my students using them; they fit well on the arms of school desks, and the students have young enough eyes to tolerate the small screens. I see netbooks being very popular as second computers. Like I said, I use mine for traveling. Most of the students have a full sized desktop or laptop at home. XP fans will be happy because netbooks may force MS to keep it for a while. The biggest problem I see for MS is that a lot of the netbooks are coming out as part of data plans. The telcos are going to want to shave every bit of cost off these systems that they can, and the "MicroSoft tax" is one very obvious source of cost savings.
I am sure Best Buy is getting paid well for this, but ultimately it does hurt their reputation. One reason people go to a store like Best Buy is for information. If they get a reputation for giving out bad information then a lot of the reason for going there disappears. Granted, the typical reader of Slashdot probably doesn't need a lot of advice, and we probably know how to get better prices elsewhere. However, we do talk to a lot of people who are thinking about buying computers. I am thinking at this point it is probably better to go to Wal-mart where people assume the clerks know nothing about the products than it is to go to BestBuy where management is encouraging employees to give out bad information. I know there will be a lot of flames about the clerks at Best Buy being stupid, and people who rely on them are even stupider. However, I do know some Best Buy employees, and some of them are pretty sharp.
There have been a lot of these cases lately. On frequent theme is that the person publishing the schedule is also associated with some type of criticism of the transit authority involved. That suggests that the real reason for the lawsuits is to silence the critic rather than to block publication of the schedules. I haven't seen the proposed agreement in this case, but the license that has been proposed by the other transit authorities usually contains some language that ties access to the schedule data to restrictions on criticism of the transit authority. I wonder if that will happen here.
The thing that interests me is the model they are using. The major players are coming to an agreement on a standard before releasing products. The pattern over the last couple of decades has been for every major player to develop their own proprietary system and then try to force the market to their standard. This more open model is at the root of most successful technologies. Take a look at the TV industry. There was one common standard. Any company with the expertise could build a TV that would work with all commercial TV broadcasts, and broadcasters could send to any manufacturer's TV's. If TV had been invented in the 1990's, I could only watch Sony broadcasts on my Sony TV. The modern PC is another example. The IBM-PC was an inferior design, but it was an open standard; anyone could make parts and software for an IBM-PC. This technology might be boring, environmentally evil, and make us all sterile, but I am still glad to see the way this is being released.
One big difference is that Star Trek is a decent movie and Wolverine was at best mediocre.
For a long time KDE was regarded as the stable businesslike desktop and Gnome was for the experimenters. It is interesting to me that the roles have largely reversed. Gnome is now taking an incremental, evolutionary approach while KDE is the one taking risks and being more revolutionary.
The only real way to answer this question is to give it a try. Slapping a fee on everything could hurt the YouTube brand a lot, so it needs to be done slowly and starting at the fringes. I think they should let content providers charge subscription fees for their channels. Of course, YouTube/Google would get a cut of the revenue. Regular viewers shouldn't complain because this is new content above and beyond what is currently offered. YouTube could assess how users react and everyone could get a feel for how the price structures should be set up. My guess is that the content provides will seriously overprice their content. Content providers have pretty consistently overestimated the value of their content and what consumers will pay. We will probably end up with a model where short commercials are injected into long content. Viewers will have a choice to either watch or pay a subscription fee to skip the ads. Consumers will have the choice to 1)pay 2)watch commercials or 3)find entertainment elsewhere. Content providers tend to forget about this third option.
AP is no longer the only news source out there. CNN and Reuters will be more than happy to fill the gap if the AP wants to put itself behind higher paywalls and legal barriers to linking. This would be a good time to sell your stock in AP if you have any, because this kind of backward thinking will lead to the same results as Detroit believing that they could solve their economic problems by making bigger, less fuel efficient vehicles. Companies that want to return to the 1980's are doomed to fail.
It's not just the people. It looks like a lot of other industries finally woke up and say "Hey, this stuff the RIAA/MPAA is pulling is bad for OUR business." I was wondering how long it would take for other businesses to start putting up some resistance to the recording industry. I really hope this signals the start of a new trend. Perhaps the RIAA pushed to far on this one and woke up some sleeping giants.
This might work if they took the tax money from video games and applied it to things that really would reduce violent crime. Of course, things like reducing poverty, increasing literacy, and providing drug treatment for people who want to get off drugs won't get you as many headlines as bashing video games.
I thought Google had learned from Apple that making your developers mad is a bad idea. I guess they didn't.
You have a flash hard drive in the eee, so I would suggest using an ext2 or other non-journaling file system. Depending on how you use swap files you might also want to reduce the swappiness (I would be more specific, but discussions of swap space always precipitate flame wars). Wireless is the place you are most likely to run into support problems. The problems are resolvable, but it is still the area you are most likely to have headaches.
My guess is that most national security agencies have already broken Skype. Those national spy agencies probably have not shared that information with their local police. In fact, the spy agencies probably love it when the local police go around complaining that they can't tap Skype calls because it lulls the people they want to listen to into a false sense of security that Skype is safe. This story will probably go on for a long time. The spy agencies are going to make sure that no law gets passed that requires Skype to open up. There will always be a local police agency that isn't bright enough to figure out what is going on, so they will keep it in the news.
The blogger on the CNET site should do more research than some arm-chair what-if's and watching The Wire. The issues that he raises are nothing new, and they are relatively easy to address if you have the resources of the Presidency at your disposal. Plus with all the publicity I am guessing that RIM is quite willing to ship a crate of new Blackberries to the White House on a weekly basis! The most bone-headed assumption that the blogger makes is that the President always has the same cell phone or IMEI/IMED. My guess would be that these are swapped out regularly, perhaps multiple times per day. You and I can't do that, but we aren't the President. Even if people could identify the President's unit it would be a double edged sword. The President's daily schedule is published, so people already think they know where he is most of the time. But suppose the President wants to take an unannounced trip? Well, just give a staffer his phone and let the staffer walk through the President's published schedule while the President himself is off in Iraq or wherever he needs to be.
I bet at this point Bill Gates and top execs at MS wish they hadn't given so many campaign contributions to Republicans and conservative causes.
Isn't this just an advertisement for ReCAPTCHA disguised as a news item?
If voters are seeing it, the problem is probably a screen registration issue. This is just one of many problems with touch screen voting systems.
There is an obvious problem when a boss asks you to do something unethical, but there is something else to consider. One good way to rise in a business is to work for someone who is "going places" and willing to take people with him or her. At very least, it is good to work for someone likely to get promoted if there is a chance to move into their position. Frankly this bozo or bozette does not sound like someone who is going to climb the corporate ladder. At best this is a short-term scam, and the boss can only look good for a short time before the wheels start coming off this project. At that point the boss and everyone associated with the project will be tarnished. If the boss owns the business and is running this type of scam, then there is not much future in this business.
The hearings are not about eliminating the termination fees, the proposal is to prorate them. For consumers a lot would be gained by divorcing the carrier and the instrument. If you figure out what that "free" phone really costs you will go running to the Internet or a phone store. Personally I just go to a big-box store and buy a pay-as-you-go phone and then put my carrier's sim card in it. They made land-line companies stop bundling the phone and the service years ago. The industry objected saying that people would stop getting phone service because they couldn't afford the cost of buying their phones up front. What happened was just the opposite. We now have a huge variety of telephones to chose from at almost any price you care to pay.
It's easier to just pretend you are a monopoly than it is to come out with a better product. If MS-TV was a better product than YouTube it might have a chance. Instead MS decided to make its IM services worse by blocking YouTube. That drives more people to use other IM's. This is the kind of corporate thinking that brought us Vista and will ultimately be the doom of MicroSoft unless they change their ways.
By suing the ISP they can anger a customer and a distributor at the same time.
Computers can make random guesses thousands of times an hour. Some will eventually work by pure luck. Methods like this, or just knowing the general algorithm allow you to shave the odds even further in the hacker's favor.
Google's security consciousness comes not only from being founded on the Internet, but also from the fact that they know that they have to compete. Microsoft had itself in a monopoly situation before network security became an issue. MS only takes notice of security when it appears to threaten its monopoly status. Our security people would love to see us go to Linux (granted, still security holes, but they are more controllable). However, we can't because users would whine about noting being able to use their MS-only software. In short, MS doesn't care about security because they don't have to. Mac's don't have the monopoly situation, they just think they do. Another part of the fantasy world the Mac community lives in says that their systems are secure. As long as Apple can keep their loyal core of Mac users happy they don't have to worry about security, either.