Kudos on your selection of the term "Intra-Hybrid" (simply being a hybrid is never enough) and an acronym with an "X" in it for marketing your new products. Also, congratulations on having the forsight to not allow these new media to be played on clearly obsolete Blu-Ray players while still selling them as Blu-Ray discs. However, the following concerns me:
Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months.
Don't you realize that publishing specs hurts your bottom line?!?!
What TFA refers to as "custodial data" (customer PII, CC numbers, etc.) *should* be protected by compliance with government and industry-specific regulation. If a company wants to shoot itself in the foot by not protecting intellectual property, trade secrets, sales leads, etc. then let them. CxO's far more likely to be paranoid about security of their precious secrets than with their customer's data anyway, since one is an asset while the other is a burden (security-wise).
Actually its a PADD, not a "pad" (note the extra "D"), which stands for Personal Access Display Device. You didn't really think you could get away with referencing Star Trek technology here without being called out on it, did you?
Security is probably the biggest. Getting rid of Flash drops an attack vector you must worry about and keep updated.
Do you really think that people will start deinstalling Flash plugins from their browsers en masse once they all have flawless support for HTML5? Not very likely. Do you think that attackers will suddenly find themselves being forced to code their exploits using Javascript and the HTML5 DOM when both are still available? As long as there's content out there, Flash will be here to stay. (Heck, my browser (FF3.5) still has support for <blink> and <marquee> tags)
Flash has been around for more than a decade and the sky hasn't fallen. While there have indeed been security issues, I don't think it's unfair to say that Flash is a pretty mature platform. It's backed by a large company that isn't going to disappear or drop support (e.g. stop releasing fixes) any time soon. Most software has flaws but those can be dealt with.
Widespread adoption of HTML 5 means that their product can now be used to create content for even more devices, including several, like the iPhone, from which they have previously been locked out.
They probably won't need HTML5 for that since they've almost solved the problem with the iPhone packager in the upcoming release of Flash CS5. Once Apple sees that people can still get Flash apps on their iPhones without violating the TOS, they might loosen their stance on blocking it from being embedded in web pages viewed with Safari.
Also, browser inconsistencies are plentiful and there's no guarantee that HTML5 API's will ever be rendered/supported exactly the same in all of them. One of the great things about Flash is that you get a consistent experience across all platforms. I highly doubt that Adobe would want to dilute the quality of their brand by providing an "export" tool that gives inconsistent results. Like converting documents from MS Office to/from OO.org -- It should work fine, but in practice you always end up losing some quality.
That sounds good in theory, but I had one too and seriously...it's made for kids and kids are the only ones who could get any real use out of it. The keyboards are too tiny for adult hands and it feels like a toy. The 5-year-old I gave it too was totally stoked though.
I'm sure your professor's solution was quite elegant, but I must point out that this is completely unnecessary in practical applications since most payment gateways support a method of integration where the credit card data is never passed to the merchant. AuthorizeNet's Simple Integration Method (SIM) is one example of this. The customer is either redirected to the payment gateway's website (SSL encrypted) or the site is presented in an IFRAME. The gateway then sends the result back to the merchant.
In a way this is actually more secure than your professor's solution since it does not require the credit card company (read: banks) payment network to be exposed to retailers' systems, but instead, just a handful of companies specializing in card processing who are subject to very strict security standards (the gateways).
I worked as a counselor a computer camp the summer after the Columbine shootings. For the first time in the program's history, we had to make each parent sign a waiver stating whether or not their child was allowed to play violent video games during our regular recreational period. I recall one father who brought his young son in, and was about to select the option requiring us to block access to these games. But, at the last minute, he turned to his son and said "You know what you're allowed to play and what you're not, right?" The child agreed and the father signed the waiver allowing full access to any games, violent or not.
I was more than a little surprised by this but when I mentioned it to another counselor, she said it was no big deal, just a simple matter of being able to trust your kid. I'm not a parent and I don't know what you can do to create this level of trust between yourself and your child, but it's great to know that it's possible and that there are families out there that have this. It seems like the popular conservative and liberal beliefs out there are, respectively, that you need to keep total control of your child, or that they'll find a way to get away with it anyway so just be supportive.
So, for someone with one of these attitudes, you should just point out a cheap software solution that is easily defeatable. If the kid cracks it, chances are that the mom won't find out anyway...but this is a good thing. The mom will feel great knowing that she's being a "good parent", especially since the solution has your "professional" endorsement. Plus the kid will feel great because cracking the protection will make him feel like a l33t hax0r. This is the only win-win situation in a case where simple trust is impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months.
Don't you realize that publishing specs hurts your bottom line?!?!
What TFA refers to as "custodial data" (customer PII, CC numbers, etc.) *should* be protected by compliance with government and industry-specific regulation. If a company wants to shoot itself in the foot by not protecting intellectual property, trade secrets, sales leads, etc. then let them. CxO's far more likely to be paranoid about security of their precious secrets than with their customer's data anyway, since one is an asset while the other is a burden (security-wise).
Actually its a PADD, not a "pad" (note the extra "D"), which stands for Personal Access Display Device. You didn't really think you could get away with referencing Star Trek technology here without being called out on it, did you?
Security is probably the biggest. Getting rid of Flash drops an attack vector you must worry about and keep updated.
Do you really think that people will start deinstalling Flash plugins from their browsers en masse once they all have flawless support for HTML5? Not very likely. Do you think that attackers will suddenly find themselves being forced to code their exploits using Javascript and the HTML5 DOM when both are still available? As long as there's content out there, Flash will be here to stay. (Heck, my browser (FF3.5) still has support for <blink> and <marquee> tags)
Flash has been around for more than a decade and the sky hasn't fallen. While there have indeed been security issues, I don't think it's unfair to say that Flash is a pretty mature platform. It's backed by a large company that isn't going to disappear or drop support (e.g. stop releasing fixes) any time soon. Most software has flaws but those can be dealt with.
Widespread adoption of HTML 5 means that their product can now be used to create content for even more devices, including several, like the iPhone, from which they have previously been locked out.
They probably won't need HTML5 for that since they've almost solved the problem with the iPhone packager in the upcoming release of Flash CS5. Once Apple sees that people can still get Flash apps on their iPhones without violating the TOS, they might loosen their stance on blocking it from being embedded in web pages viewed with Safari.
Also, browser inconsistencies are plentiful and there's no guarantee that HTML5 API's will ever be rendered/supported exactly the same in all of them. One of the great things about Flash is that you get a consistent experience across all platforms. I highly doubt that Adobe would want to dilute the quality of their brand by providing an "export" tool that gives inconsistent results. Like converting documents from MS Office to/from OO.org -- It should work fine, but in practice you always end up losing some quality.
That sounds good in theory, but I had one too and seriously...it's made for kids and kids are the only ones who could get any real use out of it. The keyboards are too tiny for adult hands and it feels like a toy. The 5-year-old I gave it too was totally stoked though.
I'm sure your professor's solution was quite elegant, but I must point out that this is completely unnecessary in practical applications since most payment gateways support a method of integration where the credit card data is never passed to the merchant. AuthorizeNet's Simple Integration Method (SIM) is one example of this. The customer is either redirected to the payment gateway's website (SSL encrypted) or the site is presented in an IFRAME. The gateway then sends the result back to the merchant.
In a way this is actually more secure than your professor's solution since it does not require the credit card company (read: banks) payment network to be exposed to retailers' systems, but instead, just a handful of companies specializing in card processing who are subject to very strict security standards (the gateways).
I worked as a counselor a computer camp the summer after the Columbine shootings. For the first time in the program's history, we had to make each parent sign a waiver stating whether or not their child was allowed to play violent video games during our regular recreational period. I recall one father who brought his young son in, and was about to select the option requiring us to block access to these games. But, at the last minute, he turned to his son and said "You know what you're allowed to play and what you're not, right?" The child agreed and the father signed the waiver allowing full access to any games, violent or not.
I was more than a little surprised by this but when I mentioned it to another counselor, she said it was no big deal, just a simple matter of being able to trust your kid. I'm not a parent and I don't know what you can do to create this level of trust between yourself and your child, but it's great to know that it's possible and that there are families out there that have this. It seems like the popular conservative and liberal beliefs out there are, respectively, that you need to keep total control of your child, or that they'll find a way to get away with it anyway so just be supportive.
So, for someone with one of these attitudes, you should just point out a cheap software solution that is easily defeatable. If the kid cracks it, chances are that the mom won't find out anyway...but this is a good thing. The mom will feel great knowing that she's being a "good parent", especially since the solution has your "professional" endorsement. Plus the kid will feel great because cracking the protection will make him feel like a l33t hax0r. This is the only win-win situation in a case where simple trust is impossible.