The surest sign that a bubble is occurring is that if those inside the bubble are asked if it is a bubble, they respond "no, this time it's different".
Honesty, look down through history, from the gold-rushes, through the 1920's, 1980's, dotcom, sub-prime, and you will see that same phrase come up again and again. Bubbles only pay off for those who know it is a bubble and who hype it - they are a long form legalised ponzi-scheme - and they only make money if the majority of people believe it isn't a bubble - hence this time, clearly, it is different - yeah right.
With the floppy drive they may just have been doing it to save space/appear to be cool, forward looking/grab some press headlines etc. They did lots of random "out of the box" stuff back in the mid to late nineties as a way of trying to get the company some "cool" profile.
I think now though there could be a good case to make that they want to remove (no pun intended) removable media as part of a general push. They are interested in the 30% or whatever it is cut of consumable revenue that they take. It is not in their interests for us to be buying a dvd and putting it in our laptop, they don't get a penny from that - they do get many pennies when we are forced to rent (and the word rent can be underlined) it from itunes - as it is never truly ours, it is always under their control.
Tech savy people will always get around their restrictions, but the great masses can be more easily subjugated.
Granted firefox can offer something close, but not quite. Cookieculler offers finer control, because you can whitelist the *cookies* rather than the domain. So I can (and do) choose to protect my/. cookie, but not anything else that/. place in my browser (hypothetical example, as/. don't place any other cookies).
Bit of a shoutout for the firefox extension cookieculler.
I have never found anything that matches cookieculler for features: it doesn't just purely delete cookies, it operates with a white-list based system (the way everything on the web should work). Cookieculler deletes all cookies each time you close the browser, except the ones you have whitelist "protected", that keep login information etc. as you choose.
Along with noscript, cookieculler is the main reason I stay on firefox.
This might be a little "tinfoil hat", and I doubt very much if it is the main reason why google started charging - but I just wonder if longer term thoughts like project glass might factor into their decision.
Products like Glass are basically just one big world of maps - mapping, satellite, traffic, public transport. Giving that away completely free no-strings-attached forever would just allow others to make products without the overhead that google have to shoulder alone. Something like glass is a long way off, but perhaps there may be a small degree of laying down the norms early on.
For basic mapping openstreetmap is completely fine, but if all of the finer granularity (streetview, satellite, traffic data) is required then that costs a lot of money to acquire/maintain - and fair enough if google want to start asking those that use it to contribute.
the current technology would win... it doesn't need much (if any) electricity
Electricity isn't the major factor - total energy is what matters.
Collecting tonnes of paper and transporting it to recycling centres, pulping, cleaning, processing, re-bleaching (we don't like blue-brown paper, we want white paper) and then transporting the finished paper back to where it is used. Calculate the energy in that.
At work we almost exclusively use reams of recycled paper. Print something on it and then sometime later (occasionally minutes later) it goes into a recycling bin. That bin is emptied once a week and the paper will travel 20 miles to a local depot. Where it is recycled and turned into new paper I don't know - but what I do know is that the reams of recycled paper we buy will come from at least 400 miles away (and will have travelled that via a circuitous route involving suppliers, buyers and distribution warehouses). Taking the same bit of paper and running it through a unprinter for 20 seconds and then reuse. Energy wise I don't think there will be any contest, but the numbers would have to be crunched to prove it.
Sorry - is your comment aimed at me? If so you seem to have gotten confused - the entire point of my post was to point out that js is not needed for google search, while the OP was (erroneously) stating that it is needed.
I can't speak specifically on flickr (any more than you can), but there have been many many many examples of takedowns being erroneously applied and appeals ignored (see post above yours). Not only erroneous, but downright fraudulent in some cases.
So given those facts, one is led to the conclusion that this case is different due to the person who has been slapped with the notice - and his penchant for turning personal experiences (especially in the digital arena) into award winning shows and films - then it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if his name would carry more weight, lest he decide to turn some dcma hell into a film or book.
The real point of this story is not some minutiae of how flickr's back-end is organised wrt take-down notices.
The real point is that this image only went back because it was Dave Gorman - who is a pretty well known person (in the UK at least). These take-downs occur all the time aimed at "normal" people, who have no profile, and thus their protests are ignored. I hope Dave realises this and works out that he should be championing the little guy (which he generally is good at doing).
A great deal of OSS has this problem. And the more it is pointed out the more smug all of the developers get at coming up with ridiculous names.
And before anyone says it is just a bit of fun - it isn't when you are trying to search for support documents and have to letter-by-letter- the release name (not everyone uses the numbers all of the time) or type in silly random names to get things up from the terminal (sudo nautilus - which I have to letter-by-letter every time I want it because it is so unmemorable and tongue tied). "Its complicated deal with it", "it is for people who know tech" - fine - but that isn't supposed to be Ubuntu's *own* raison d'etre.
Anyway, with the absolute 10 mile long car crash that is Unity (a PC interface clearly designed for tablets but needs extensive use of keyboard shortcuts to be usable!) Ubuntu has many bigger problems to worry about. I am on 10.10 and when support ends I will be moving away as well. If they wanted to build a tablet OS then they should have just built it - not tried to pretend to the x86 community that they have an OS for them when they so very clearly don't.
That is the way all of this will ultimately be defeated if it ever becomes a reality. I would be interested in the scaling laws of progress in data storage vs data transmission vs data processing. Unless the power of the last one always scales more than the other two then deluges will always win.
So people generally don't accept it when it is your ISP. They shouldn't (but ATM seem to) accept it with fb. How long that will last only time will tell - MZ will be happy once he has his billions - most things he has been saying of late in a "tech visionary" context are just complete nonsense, so I suspect he isn't in it for the long term.
I shall have a read of the article, but the summary is a mess; it reads like someone talking about something they don't understand.
Last time I checked science isn't failing anyone. The vast majority of problems we have are of our own doing (climate change, obesity, poor health, poverty and deprivation, conflict). Perhaps the editors of slashdot should start editing submissions rather than letting junk summaries get to the front page.
if you entrust anything other than the most banal trivia to Facebook,... you're a first rate idiot.
The most spectacular hacking episodes to date generally involve spear phishing (RSA's SecureID comes to mind). Spear phishing relies and thrives on "banal trivia" because it makes the phish appear completely legitimate.
There are really to many examples to mention - something as simple as a person's full name, their date of birth, mother's maiden name (can be very easy to divine on fb) and their immediate family network - would allow their sphere of privacy to be entirely hollowed out.
The question is not whether you are giving private information to facebook/google/whoever - you are, even if you don't think it - the question is do you trust them with it.
So you'd be against, for example, a vehicle recall?
A vehicle recall is voluntary - ultimately you don't have to take it back if you don't want to. What Amazon did was the equivalent of turning up at your house and using their own set of keys to get in to and drive away your car because it had a fault - all without telling you until they had left.
Possibly/probably. I don't know if this falls within your definition of dubious hack, but the 1st gen transformer is the subject of a drive to get it running ubuntu:
it is still an active and ongoing project, and so-far they have most components working though it is pretty hands-on.
The transformer appeared on my radar precisely because folks were getting ubuntu to run on it natively. And the word natively is important, as any other implementation of linux on an android tablet that I have seen involves lots of pseudo tricks such as running it on top of android and vnc'ing in to it - or variations on that theme. These folks have got ubuntu running as root from the internal ssd rather than an sd card. And hopefully if they can do it for the 1st gen then they will have a go at the 2nd as well.
Not as good as Asus providing support for this - but I get the feeling that a lot of people want to keep us in walled gardens these days - even android ones.
Not suspect I'm afraid, the truth. I click through google reader (I don't know if they count that), and I have noscript and cookieculler extensions installed.
I have never once seen any NYT paywall page - but yet ironically do run into a WP "register to see more" pages every now and then which is killed by clearing cookies (which for me with cookieculler is just closing and reopening the browser).
Either way, as you intimate, NYT are not making it impossible, or even difficult, to see their content for free - and that is what differentiates a rope from a wall.
It isn't a paywall, it is a payrope. You can just wander right over it (without any underhand tactics). I have been a reader before and after (5-10 articles per day) and have not noticed any difference. I don't know what the article cut-off is, but unless you plan to read the thing cover-to-cover every day you aren't going to notice. I suspect a lot of the 300k subscriptions come from ipads and kindles, because I can't see how it would be easy to get value for money from a PC subscription.
Paywalls block all content, and are flawed (and are what the/. crowd say will fail). The NYT payrope is a sensible hybrid model, that finds enough people (willing or stupid depending on your prerogative) to pay, while the rest go free. Now if we get figures on The Times of London's subscriber figures (blanket solid paywall) then I suspect they would be a lot more in-keeping with the/. predictions.
They don't paywall newspapers these days, they shutter them.
The complex web of the phone hacking scandal has many threads to yet unwind. James - Herr Flick - Murdoch was the heir apparent. But when the complete truth is ironed out and he is found to have lied to the UK parliament select committee on what he knew then his corporate career is over. Where that leaves the "empire" given the age of it's king, is anyone's guess - but a family dynasty to control all far into the future is looking increasingly unlikely.
You can't pull up all of the things and say that unless he did them they wouldn't exist. This isn't leftfield scientific discoveries - this is things plenty of people were talking about which he put in a well produced shiny box.
It is interesting that there *needs* to be a grasp for legacy. Not only by fans, but by the people themselves - they need, crave, a legacy that puts them half an inch away from Einstein and Newton. In truth they (Jobs, Gates) take established ideas and bring them all together into a nice consumer package. And that is all it is, commerce, consumerism, selling things to make money. But there is a whole movements that wants to move them from the legacy of door-to-door salesman (with all the negative connotations) to some sort of visionary for the human race who will lead us to the promised land.
I mean it is selling music online FFS, or removing a floppy disk drive. This is drivel on the grand scale of things. It has a small social impact for the here and now, but it is nothing in the grand scheme of things, absolutely nothing.
I guess Apple does not think that hardware innovation is important anymore!
They do - just very iteratively. Why bring out one new product with new features when you can get there via three intermediaries that you can sell on to the "must have" crowd for hundreds of dollars a time.
It is Apple tactic No. 1, and Cook is full square behind it. They haven't become the highest value tech company by being nice! Apple are having their cake and eating it - huge profit margins on products that they can "update" by making tiny changes to it and a significant proportion of their loyal fanbase will go out and buy it all over again.
I also wonder if this was a bit of a dry run for Tim Cook - he can get a feel for the stage walk presenting with a low risk iterative launch - much easier than a high stakes new product launch where he could fluff and cause problems.
"seriously, dude, like, who, like, so, like, whatever, like do that?"
i.e. most college grads I have met, particularly in the last five to ten years, are basically unable to speak, read or write in a coherent and grown-up manner - let alone do a proper days work.
Slashdot Mirror
The surest sign that a bubble is occurring is that if those inside the bubble are asked if it is a bubble, they respond "no, this time it's different".
Honesty, look down through history, from the gold-rushes, through the 1920's, 1980's, dotcom, sub-prime, and you will see that same phrase come up again and again. Bubbles only pay off for those who know it is a bubble and who hype it - they are a long form legalised ponzi-scheme - and they only make money if the majority of people believe it isn't a bubble - hence this time, clearly, it is different - yeah right.
With the floppy drive they may just have been doing it to save space/appear to be cool, forward looking/grab some press headlines etc. They did lots of random "out of the box" stuff back in the mid to late nineties as a way of trying to get the company some "cool" profile.
I think now though there could be a good case to make that they want to remove (no pun intended) removable media as part of a general push. They are interested in the 30% or whatever it is cut of consumable revenue that they take. It is not in their interests for us to be buying a dvd and putting it in our laptop, they don't get a penny from that - they do get many pennies when we are forced to rent (and the word rent can be underlined) it from itunes - as it is never truly ours, it is always under their control.
Tech savy people will always get around their restrictions, but the great masses can be more easily subjugated.
Granted firefox can offer something close, but not quite. Cookieculler offers finer control, because you can whitelist the *cookies* rather than the domain. So I can (and do) choose to protect my /. cookie, but not anything else that /. place in my browser (hypothetical example, as /. don't place any other cookies).
Bit of a shoutout for the firefox extension cookieculler.
I have never found anything that matches cookieculler for features: it doesn't just purely delete cookies, it operates with a white-list based system (the way everything on the web should work). Cookieculler deletes all cookies each time you close the browser, except the ones you have whitelist "protected", that keep login information etc. as you choose.
Along with noscript, cookieculler is the main reason I stay on firefox.
This might be a little "tinfoil hat", and I doubt very much if it is the main reason why google started charging - but I just wonder if longer term thoughts like project glass might factor into their decision.
Products like Glass are basically just one big world of maps - mapping, satellite, traffic, public transport. Giving that away completely free no-strings-attached forever would just allow others to make products without the overhead that google have to shoulder alone. Something like glass is a long way off, but perhaps there may be a small degree of laying down the norms early on.
For basic mapping openstreetmap is completely fine, but if all of the finer granularity (streetview, satellite, traffic data) is required then that costs a lot of money to acquire/maintain - and fair enough if google want to start asking those that use it to contribute.
the current technology would win... it doesn't need much (if any) electricity
Electricity isn't the major factor - total energy is what matters.
Collecting tonnes of paper and transporting it to recycling centres, pulping, cleaning, processing, re-bleaching (we don't like blue-brown paper, we want white paper) and then transporting the finished paper back to where it is used. Calculate the energy in that.
At work we almost exclusively use reams of recycled paper. Print something on it and then sometime later (occasionally minutes later) it goes into a recycling bin. That bin is emptied once a week and the paper will travel 20 miles to a local depot. Where it is recycled and turned into new paper I don't know - but what I do know is that the reams of recycled paper we buy will come from at least 400 miles away (and will have travelled that via a circuitous route involving suppliers, buyers and distribution warehouses). Taking the same bit of paper and running it through a unprinter for 20 seconds and then reuse. Energy wise I don't think there will be any contest, but the numbers would have to be crunched to prove it.
sorry - above post retracted, in the default view the full thread wasn't shown, hence I didn't see the troll posting crap that you were replying to!
Sorry - is your comment aimed at me? If so you seem to have gotten confused - the entire point of my post was to point out that js is not needed for google search, while the OP was (erroneously) stating that it is needed.
As soon as Google started requiring me to use Javascript in order to see my search results I started to use Bing.
Except it doesn't. There seems to be quite a lot of AC "bing is great" comments on this story - astroturfing a little?
I can't speak specifically on flickr (any more than you can), but there have been many many many examples of takedowns being erroneously applied and appeals ignored (see post above yours). Not only erroneous, but downright fraudulent in some cases.
So given those facts, one is led to the conclusion that this case is different due to the person who has been slapped with the notice - and his penchant for turning personal experiences (especially in the digital arena) into award winning shows and films - then it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if his name would carry more weight, lest he decide to turn some dcma hell into a film or book.
The real point of this story is not some minutiae of how flickr's back-end is organised wrt take-down notices.
The real point is that this image only went back because it was Dave Gorman - who is a pretty well known person (in the UK at least). These take-downs occur all the time aimed at "normal" people, who have no profile, and thus their protests are ignored. I hope Dave realises this and works out that he should be championing the little guy (which he generally is good at doing).
A great deal of OSS has this problem. And the more it is pointed out the more smug all of the developers get at coming up with ridiculous names.
And before anyone says it is just a bit of fun - it isn't when you are trying to search for support documents and have to letter-by-letter- the release name (not everyone uses the numbers all of the time) or type in silly random names to get things up from the terminal (sudo nautilus - which I have to letter-by-letter every time I want it because it is so unmemorable and tongue tied). "Its complicated deal with it", "it is for people who know tech" - fine - but that isn't supposed to be Ubuntu's *own* raison d'etre.
Anyway, with the absolute 10 mile long car crash that is Unity (a PC interface clearly designed for tablets but needs extensive use of keyboard shortcuts to be usable!) Ubuntu has many bigger problems to worry about. I am on 10.10 and when support ends I will be moving away as well. If they wanted to build a tablet OS then they should have just built it - not tried to pretend to the x86 community that they have an OS for them when they so very clearly don't.
That is the way all of this will ultimately be defeated if it ever becomes a reality. I would be interested in the scaling laws of progress in data storage vs data transmission vs data processing. Unless the power of the last one always scales more than the other two then deluges will always win.
On the very few (read one in the UK) occasion your analogy is correct there has been a massive public outrage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm#BT_trials
So people generally don't accept it when it is your ISP. They shouldn't (but ATM seem to) accept it with fb. How long that will last only time will tell - MZ will be happy once he has his billions - most things he has been saying of late in a "tech visionary" context are just complete nonsense, so I suspect he isn't in it for the long term.
I shall have a read of the article, but the summary is a mess; it reads like someone talking about something they don't understand.
Last time I checked science isn't failing anyone. The vast majority of problems we have are of our own doing (climate change, obesity, poor health, poverty and deprivation, conflict). Perhaps the editors of slashdot should start editing submissions rather than letting junk summaries get to the front page.
if you entrust anything other than the most banal trivia to Facebook,... you're a first rate idiot.
The most spectacular hacking episodes to date generally involve spear phishing (RSA's SecureID comes to mind). Spear phishing relies and thrives on "banal trivia" because it makes the phish appear completely legitimate.
There are really to many examples to mention - something as simple as a person's full name, their date of birth, mother's maiden name (can be very easy to divine on fb) and their immediate family network - would allow their sphere of privacy to be entirely hollowed out.
The question is not whether you are giving private information to facebook/google/whoever - you are, even if you don't think it - the question is do you trust them with it.
Are Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc?
I don't know whether Lyonnaise de Garantie are crooks, but I do know that they tried to censor the web to remove any association between Lyonnaise de Garantie and crooks, or as the French say, Lyonnaise de Garantie and escroc. Which is interesting. I wonder what Ms Streisand in her lovely beach house has to say about it all.
So you'd be against, for example, a vehicle recall?
A vehicle recall is voluntary - ultimately you don't have to take it back if you don't want to. What Amazon did was the equivalent of turning up at your house and using their own set of keys to get in to and drive away your car because it had a fault - all without telling you until they had left.
Possibly/probably. I don't know if this falls within your definition of dubious hack, but the 1st gen transformer is the subject of a drive to get it running ubuntu:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1191141&page=125
it is still an active and ongoing project, and so-far they have most components working though it is pretty hands-on.
The transformer appeared on my radar precisely because folks were getting ubuntu to run on it natively. And the word natively is important, as any other implementation of linux on an android tablet that I have seen involves lots of pseudo tricks such as running it on top of android and vnc'ing in to it - or variations on that theme. These folks have got ubuntu running as root from the internal ssd rather than an sd card. And hopefully if they can do it for the 1st gen then they will have a go at the 2nd as well.
Not as good as Asus providing support for this - but I get the feeling that a lot of people want to keep us in walled gardens these days - even android ones.
Not suspect I'm afraid, the truth. I click through google reader (I don't know if they count that), and I have noscript and cookieculler extensions installed.
I have never once seen any NYT paywall page - but yet ironically do run into a WP "register to see more" pages every now and then which is killed by clearing cookies (which for me with cookieculler is just closing and reopening the browser).
Either way, as you intimate, NYT are not making it impossible, or even difficult, to see their content for free - and that is what differentiates a rope from a wall.
It isn't a paywall, it is a payrope. You can just wander right over it (without any underhand tactics). I have been a reader before and after (5-10 articles per day) and have not noticed any difference. I don't know what the article cut-off is, but unless you plan to read the thing cover-to-cover every day you aren't going to notice. I suspect a lot of the 300k subscriptions come from ipads and kindles, because I can't see how it would be easy to get value for money from a PC subscription.
/. crowd say will fail). The NYT payrope is a sensible hybrid model, that finds enough people (willing or stupid depending on your prerogative) to pay, while the rest go free. Now if we get figures on The Times of London's subscriber figures (blanket solid paywall) then I suspect they would be a lot more in-keeping with the /. predictions.
Paywalls block all content, and are flawed (and are what the
They don't paywall newspapers these days, they shutter them.
The complex web of the phone hacking scandal has many threads to yet unwind. James - Herr Flick - Murdoch was the heir apparent. But when the complete truth is ironed out and he is found to have lied to the UK parliament select committee on what he knew then his corporate career is over. Where that leaves the "empire" given the age of it's king, is anyone's guess - but a family dynasty to control all far into the future is looking increasingly unlikely.
correlation does not mean causation.
You can't pull up all of the things and say that unless he did them they wouldn't exist. This isn't leftfield scientific discoveries - this is things plenty of people were talking about which he put in a well produced shiny box.
It is interesting that there *needs* to be a grasp for legacy. Not only by fans, but by the people themselves - they need, crave, a legacy that puts them half an inch away from Einstein and Newton. In truth they (Jobs, Gates) take established ideas and bring them all together into a nice consumer package. And that is all it is, commerce, consumerism, selling things to make money. But there is a whole movements that wants to move them from the legacy of door-to-door salesman (with all the negative connotations) to some sort of visionary for the human race who will lead us to the promised land.
I mean it is selling music online FFS, or removing a floppy disk drive. This is drivel on the grand scale of things. It has a small social impact for the here and now, but it is nothing in the grand scheme of things, absolutely nothing.
I guess Apple does not think that hardware innovation is important anymore!
They do - just very iteratively. Why bring out one new product with new features when you can get there via three intermediaries that you can sell on to the "must have" crowd for hundreds of dollars a time.
It is Apple tactic No. 1, and Cook is full square behind it. They haven't become the highest value tech company by being nice! Apple are having their cake and eating it - huge profit margins on products that they can "update" by making tiny changes to it and a significant proportion of their loyal fanbase will go out and buy it all over again.
I also wonder if this was a bit of a dry run for Tim Cook - he can get a feel for the stage walk presenting with a low risk iterative launch - much easier than a high stakes new product launch where he could fluff and cause problems.
Seriously, who would like to do that?
The response of the college grad would rather be:
"seriously, dude, like, who, like, so, like, whatever, like do that?"
i.e. most college grads I have met, particularly in the last five to ten years, are basically unable to speak, read or write in a coherent and grown-up manner - let alone do a proper days work.