All ads are about image, but clearly the Mac ads have a lot more technical content compared to this new MS ad. At least in the Apple ads they talk about their product features, quality and other aspects meant to be compared and contrasted with PC (competitors), presented in a clever, playful way. This MS ad didn't have anything to do with MS products at all. It's just... weird.
In other news, a great, icy landmass just north of the United States, apparently known as Canada, has broken off and is now floating away... Anyway, we return to our coverage of the GOP National Convention...
Sadly true. I hope this winter won't be as freaking cold as last year. If I were liberal then I'd be more prone to push a "stop the forthcoming ice age" agenda rather than the "global warming" agenda they are pushing now.
Your points will probably be repeated many times more, but they are easily parried. Here's how:
1. He destroyed the chance for questioning Obama's experience. Not really, since Palin probably has better experience credentials than Obama himself. She has executive experience as both a mayor and governor. On the other hand, Obama spent most of his Senate term campaigning. If anything, it gives McCain something more to add: Even his VP has more experience than the Democrat presidential nominee.
2. She has an ethical scandal in Alaska. Well, not really. There has been no evidence linking her with the firing of the state employee. No doubt Obama supporters will continue to bring this up as if it were significant, but it just isn't.
3. The social conservatives claim she should be at home. I doubt it. The truth is that the vice presidency position isn't traditionally nearly as time-consuming as president or senator. Interestingly, Joe Biden also continued as a senator rather than raising his boys when their mother was killed; it's not like social conservatives will vote Obama because they may think that Palin should stay home. For social conservatives, there is no doubt that the GOP candidates are a better choice for them.
4. Palin will emphasize McCain's age. Probably. So? Unless McCain was unable to perform all his duties as president because of his age, what does it matter? This meme will continue to be used by the Obama camp, but rational* people will see that voting based on age makes little more sense than voting based on race or gender, unless experience is accounted for in which case McCain would obviously be at an advantage.
* You could argue that most Americans are not rational, and I would probably agree, but this is looking more and more to be an election based on real issues. I think most people will give a higher priority to issues they care about rather than the superficial fluff.
I'm sorry, but your whole post seems pretty ridiculous to me, and I'll take the time to respond since you're modded as Interesting.
First, I don't know where you heard that Palin has difficulties with mainstream conservatives because the opposite is true. Without a doubt she will serve to coax the conservative base of the Republican party who would otherwise stay home or vote independent or Obama. She has a solid conservative record, so I think your facts are just wrong.
Second, I take exception to your claim (which you state as fact) that McCain has almost no chance of winning this election. Or haven't you heard that McCain has been rising in the polls for several months? He surpassed Obama in several polls right before the Democratic National Convention. If anything, it looks like a dead heat like it usually is. See the Gallup Poll which tends to lean toward Obama more than others, and you may change your mind that the GOP has almost no chance.
That all depends on if Palin is only useful to get the woman vote and disgruntled Hillary supporters. That's not the case. She may get some of those, but she is more important on the ticket to coax the Republican base itself (conservatives) which McCain hasn't yet convinced.
Personally, I think a combination of an experienced president with a less experienced VP would be better than the opposite combination.
Besides, I would suggest that Palin has more experience than Obama since her experience has been executive and Obama has spent most of his Senate term campaigning.
No, they don't. They try to use a subversion of copyright law to force licensing on people. If they want licensing, they should do it properly with signed contracts, and etc.
Hmm. Last time I downloaded some GPL software and source code, I don't recall that anyone made me sign any contracts... Sweet! I guess the GPL doesn't apply to me...
The Apple Newton failed because of bad marketing; otherwise it was technically ahead of its time and certainly a great product. Microsoft can't seem to get marketing or their products right.
In terms of performance, C is a lousy language; Fortran is a "faster language" than C.
The only reason C even runs as well as it does is because people have invested 20 years in making compilers squeeze out the last cycle, because C compilers play fast and loose with C semantics at high optimization, and because even CPUs have been tuned to accommodate its semantics.
Huh? You say that C is a lousy language for performance and then commence to list the reasons why it is a good language for performance?
Anyway... it seems C can be optimized better than Fortran. You are probably basing your statements on theory (and I agree that languages running under JIT could potentially be faster under certain, limited conditions), but real-world examples and benchmarks do not agree with you.
Irony is (roughly) when something happens that is the opposite of what expected...
Huh? No, that would be a poor or at least a very shallow definition of irony. If irony were only how you describe it, then you are correct: this situation would not be ironic. But irony includes a lot more than the unexpected.
Look up the irony wikipedia page and check a few dictionaries. I didn't tag this article as ironic, but given the normal definition, it is indeed an example of irony under normal definitions.
The real scary thing is that people are conditioned to think that "valid" CA-signed certificates are safe. In reality, it's not much more difficult or expensive to get a CA-signed from a CA which has a root certificate in your browser already, with no background checks performed. In essence, unless you trust every CA which has a root certificate in your browser (and there's no reason that you should), then their authentication for the site you want to visit is useless, and their certificate is no more "valid" than a self-signed certificate. On the contrary, it would be more dangerous since your browser will accept it automatically and you will go along your merry way providing your personal information to those you know not.
A false sense of security is worse than a known insecurity.
That's true. Unfortunately, CA-signed certificates provide a more dangerous false sense of security/authentication since it is hardly any more trivial or expensive for an attacker to get a CA-signed certificate than self-signing his own.
That's why the actual security of a self-signed certificate is closer to a CA-signed certificate, and it certainly shouldn't be on the other end of regular http connections. People need to start realizing that a CA-signed certificate from a hole-in-the-wall anyone-can-get-one CA doesn't provide any more authentication than a self-signed certificate, yet it is more dangerous since the browser will accept those automatically without a hitch.
Exactly. Spot on. In a way, self-signed certificates are even less susceptible to MITM attacks today because at least browsers will not accept them automatically. You should not be accepting new certificates when browsing on a network you have no reason to trust, just like you should not accept changed certificates on any network until you manually find out why it is changed.
Besides, it's so easy and cheap to get a CA-signed certificate these days that the only thing it provides is a false sense of authentication.
All of this new talk about self-signed certificates is clouding over the real, critical issue which has been around for longer than FF3. It would make more sense for the browser to treat a self-signed certificate like a CA-signed certificate rather than a regular http connection because (and here's the point) authentication in the browser is a myth. Let me walk you through this.
Authentication doesn't exist on the internet because getting a genuine CA-signed certificate from a CA with a root that is already in your browser is hardly any more difficult or expensive than making a self-signed certificate. The tragedy is that the lock icon makes people feel safe when in reality, the authentication of the transaction relies entirely on supposed background checks which may or may not have been done by some CA that you won't know about unless you examine the certificate.
Does anyone else see the problem with this!?
A better idea is for the browser to raise the big warning flags for changed certificates (CA-signed or otherwise) so users can check manually whether it is a man-in-the-middle attempt or an official updated certificate from the site, and treat all https transactions as encrypted and better than a transaction with no encryption (regular http).
A better long-term fix for this problem is to create a system (or use the system we have) to actually ensure authentication on the internet. For this to happen, we need browsers to stop including CA roots from CAs which happily sign certificates with zero or insufficient background checks. Of course this isn't bulletproof, but it would go a long way to providing real authentication on the internet.
In the meantime, people need to stop thinking CA-signed certificates are very much safer than self-signed certificates. A CA-signed certificate from a specific CA that is known to provide good background checks is useful for authentication, but a CA-signed certificate from some random hole-in-the-wall CA that has a root in your browser provides no more authentication than a self-signed certificate does. At least its a step in the right direction for FF3 to show some information about the certificate from the URL bar rather than making users examine the certificate so that we can make our own determination of whether we trust the site based on if we trust the CA or not. Anyway, it's really the changed certificate that you need to worry about, regardless of who signed it, and encryption is also better than no encryption since at least the sniffers won't also get your info.
That's a good point. I see a lot of people say that http is safer than https with an self-signed certificate because people are more likely to transfer personal info over self-signed https than regular http.
The truth is, not even CA-signed certificates can really be trusted to ensure you're talking to who you think you are. It is trivial (and cheap) to get a certificate under a root that is already in your browser (thereby avoiding any scary errors and also giving you the 'lock' icon), even without proving you are who you say you are.
For this reason, I disagree with the notion that encryption is worthless without authentication, since authentication really doesn't exist on the internet we have today. Therefore, any https is better than http because at least it will take more than a casual sniffer to get my info.
Browsers could fix this problem by not including root certificates from any CA that does not meet certain standards for checking identity. Not infallible, but this would go a long way.
how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
YouTube only uses Flash as a client to serve their videos. The videos themselves are streamed separately from the Flash client. In other words, you could pretty much make a "YouTube client" out of anything. Apple just happens to have their own YouTube client that is probably (at least partially) written in Objective-C and using QuickTime.
But... it was disclosed, quite obviously, by the NBC reporters and therein lies the rub. Much ado about nothing, in my opinion. This is the short and long of it.
Apple's store is irrelevant to T-Mobile's ambitions. Apple exists in its own little walled garden.
You are assuming that just because the two stores will operate separately without compatibility that there is no competition. This is obviously false. If Apple's App Store acts, in any capacity, as an agent to draw new customers to Apple/AT&T then there are that many fewer customers going with T-Mobile.
Because of this, T-Mobile's decision to develop an app store for phones on their network was very likely a direct result of Apple's App Store in order to stay competitive. On the other hand, the Nokia Download Store seems much less relevant since T-Mobile obviously found it lacking enough to create their own. So in what way is the App Store irrelevant to T-Mobile?
Some of your points are quite valid and in the end it will be interesting to see if/how Apple executes this idea, but plastic being more durable in terms of scratch resistance? I don't know what plastic you're using, but I've never seen one that scratched less than glass.
The big deal will be Apple's reaction to it. Will they like it, since people might be encouraged to use AOL on iPhones as an alternative to SMS? Or will they kill the AOL client and make iPhone users pay for SMS?
Apple's reaction? You mean AT&T? Why would Apple care since they already approved the app in the first place?
Fortunately, seeing as how there is also a VoIP app approved by Apple which allows calls via wifi, it doesn't look like refusing apps which bypass AT&T's services was part of their agreement, although I'm sure AT&T would like it to be.
In short, yes Apple will like people using the AOL IM client because it's a benefit to those who purchase their product. AT&T may not like it, but who cares?
Slashdot Mirror
All ads are about image, but clearly the Mac ads have a lot more technical content compared to this new MS ad. At least in the Apple ads they talk about their product features, quality and other aspects meant to be compared and contrasted with PC (competitors), presented in a clever, playful way. This MS ad didn't have anything to do with MS products at all. It's just... weird.
In other news, a great, icy landmass just north of the United States, apparently known as Canada, has broken off and is now floating away... Anyway, we return to our coverage of the GOP National Convention...
Sadly true. I hope this winter won't be as freaking cold as last year. If I were liberal then I'd be more prone to push a "stop the forthcoming ice age" agenda rather than the "global warming" agenda they are pushing now.
I don't think Google has enough of my personal information, so this will be just wonderful.
Thanks for the plug. I had no idea ogg existed.
Your points will probably be repeated many times more, but they are easily parried. Here's how:
1. He destroyed the chance for questioning Obama's experience. Not really, since Palin probably has better experience credentials than Obama himself. She has executive experience as both a mayor and governor. On the other hand, Obama spent most of his Senate term campaigning. If anything, it gives McCain something more to add: Even his VP has more experience than the Democrat presidential nominee.
2. She has an ethical scandal in Alaska. Well, not really. There has been no evidence linking her with the firing of the state employee. No doubt Obama supporters will continue to bring this up as if it were significant, but it just isn't.
3. The social conservatives claim she should be at home. I doubt it. The truth is that the vice presidency position isn't traditionally nearly as time-consuming as president or senator. Interestingly, Joe Biden also continued as a senator rather than raising his boys when their mother was killed; it's not like social conservatives will vote Obama because they may think that Palin should stay home. For social conservatives, there is no doubt that the GOP candidates are a better choice for them.
4. Palin will emphasize McCain's age. Probably. So? Unless McCain was unable to perform all his duties as president because of his age, what does it matter? This meme will continue to be used by the Obama camp, but rational* people will see that voting based on age makes little more sense than voting based on race or gender, unless experience is accounted for in which case McCain would obviously be at an advantage.
* You could argue that most Americans are not rational, and I would probably agree, but this is looking more and more to be an election based on real issues. I think most people will give a higher priority to issues they care about rather than the superficial fluff.
I'm sorry, but your whole post seems pretty ridiculous to me, and I'll take the time to respond since you're modded as Interesting.
First, I don't know where you heard that Palin has difficulties with mainstream conservatives because the opposite is true. Without a doubt she will serve to coax the conservative base of the Republican party who would otherwise stay home or vote independent or Obama. She has a solid conservative record, so I think your facts are just wrong.
Second, I take exception to your claim (which you state as fact) that McCain has almost no chance of winning this election. Or haven't you heard that McCain has been rising in the polls for several months? He surpassed Obama in several polls right before the Democratic National Convention. If anything, it looks like a dead heat like it usually is. See the Gallup Poll which tends to lean toward Obama more than others, and you may change your mind that the GOP has almost no chance.
That all depends on if Palin is only useful to get the woman vote and disgruntled Hillary supporters. That's not the case. She may get some of those, but she is more important on the ticket to coax the Republican base itself (conservatives) which McCain hasn't yet convinced.
Personally, I think a combination of an experienced president with a less experienced VP would be better than the opposite combination.
Besides, I would suggest that Palin has more experience than Obama since her experience has been executive and Obama has spent most of his Senate term campaigning.
Apple licenses their IP as they see fit,
No, they don't. They try to use a subversion of copyright law to force licensing on people. If they want licensing, they should do it properly with signed contracts, and etc.
Hmm. Last time I downloaded some GPL software and source code, I don't recall that anyone made me sign any contracts... Sweet! I guess the GPL doesn't apply to me...
The Apple Newton failed because of bad marketing; otherwise it was technically ahead of its time and certainly a great product. Microsoft can't seem to get marketing or their products right.
You're right. Should be tagged badtitle.
In terms of performance, C is a lousy language; Fortran is a "faster language" than C.
The only reason C even runs as well as it does is because people have invested 20 years in making compilers squeeze out the last cycle, because C compilers play fast and loose with C semantics at high optimization, and because even CPUs have been tuned to accommodate its semantics.
Huh? You say that C is a lousy language for performance and then commence to list the reasons why it is a good language for performance?
Anyway... it seems C can be optimized better than Fortran. You are probably basing your statements on theory (and I agree that languages running under JIT could potentially be faster under certain, limited conditions), but real-world examples and benchmarks do not agree with you.
Irony is (roughly) when something happens that is the opposite of what expected...
Huh? No, that would be a poor or at least a very shallow definition of irony. If irony were only how you describe it, then you are correct: this situation would not be ironic. But irony includes a lot more than the unexpected.
Look up the irony wikipedia page and check a few dictionaries. I didn't tag this article as ironic, but given the normal definition, it is indeed an example of irony under normal definitions.
The real scary thing is that people are conditioned to think that "valid" CA-signed certificates are safe. In reality, it's not much more difficult or expensive to get a CA-signed from a CA which has a root certificate in your browser already, with no background checks performed. In essence, unless you trust every CA which has a root certificate in your browser (and there's no reason that you should), then their authentication for the site you want to visit is useless, and their certificate is no more "valid" than a self-signed certificate. On the contrary, it would be more dangerous since your browser will accept it automatically and you will go along your merry way providing your personal information to those you know not.
A false sense of security is worse than a known insecurity.
That's true. Unfortunately, CA-signed certificates provide a more dangerous false sense of security/authentication since it is hardly any more trivial or expensive for an attacker to get a CA-signed certificate than self-signing his own.
That's why the actual security of a self-signed certificate is closer to a CA-signed certificate, and it certainly shouldn't be on the other end of regular http connections. People need to start realizing that a CA-signed certificate from a hole-in-the-wall anyone-can-get-one CA doesn't provide any more authentication than a self-signed certificate, yet it is more dangerous since the browser will accept those automatically without a hitch.
Exactly. Spot on. In a way, self-signed certificates are even less susceptible to MITM attacks today because at least browsers will not accept them automatically. You should not be accepting new certificates when browsing on a network you have no reason to trust, just like you should not accept changed certificates on any network until you manually find out why it is changed.
Besides, it's so easy and cheap to get a CA-signed certificate these days that the only thing it provides is a false sense of authentication.
All of this new talk about self-signed certificates is clouding over the real, critical issue which has been around for longer than FF3. It would make more sense for the browser to treat a self-signed certificate like a CA-signed certificate rather than a regular http connection because (and here's the point) authentication in the browser is a myth. Let me walk you through this.
Authentication doesn't exist on the internet because getting a genuine CA-signed certificate from a CA with a root that is already in your browser is hardly any more difficult or expensive than making a self-signed certificate. The tragedy is that the lock icon makes people feel safe when in reality, the authentication of the transaction relies entirely on supposed background checks which may or may not have been done by some CA that you won't know about unless you examine the certificate.
Does anyone else see the problem with this!?
A better idea is for the browser to raise the big warning flags for changed certificates (CA-signed or otherwise) so users can check manually whether it is a man-in-the-middle attempt or an official updated certificate from the site, and treat all https transactions as encrypted and better than a transaction with no encryption (regular http).
A better long-term fix for this problem is to create a system (or use the system we have) to actually ensure authentication on the internet. For this to happen, we need browsers to stop including CA roots from CAs which happily sign certificates with zero or insufficient background checks. Of course this isn't bulletproof, but it would go a long way to providing real authentication on the internet.
In the meantime, people need to stop thinking CA-signed certificates are very much safer than self-signed certificates. A CA-signed certificate from a specific CA that is known to provide good background checks is useful for authentication, but a CA-signed certificate from some random hole-in-the-wall CA that has a root in your browser provides no more authentication than a self-signed certificate does. At least its a step in the right direction for FF3 to show some information about the certificate from the URL bar rather than making users examine the certificate so that we can make our own determination of whether we trust the site based on if we trust the CA or not. Anyway, it's really the changed certificate that you need to worry about, regardless of who signed it, and encryption is also better than no encryption since at least the sniffers won't also get your info.
That's a good point. I see a lot of people say that http is safer than https with an self-signed certificate because people are more likely to transfer personal info over self-signed https than regular http.
The truth is, not even CA-signed certificates can really be trusted to ensure you're talking to who you think you are. It is trivial (and cheap) to get a certificate under a root that is already in your browser (thereby avoiding any scary errors and also giving you the 'lock' icon), even without proving you are who you say you are.
For this reason, I disagree with the notion that encryption is worthless without authentication, since authentication really doesn't exist on the internet we have today. Therefore, any https is better than http because at least it will take more than a casual sniffer to get my info.
Browsers could fix this problem by not including root certificates from any CA that does not meet certain standards for checking identity. Not infallible, but this would go a long way.
how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
YouTube only uses Flash as a client to serve their videos. The videos themselves are streamed separately from the Flash client. In other words, you could pretty much make a "YouTube client" out of anything. Apple just happens to have their own YouTube client that is probably (at least partially) written in Objective-C and using QuickTime.
But... it was disclosed, quite obviously, by the NBC reporters and therein lies the rub. Much ado about nothing, in my opinion. This is the short and long of it.
Apple's store is irrelevant to T-Mobile's ambitions. Apple exists in its own little walled garden.
You are assuming that just because the two stores will operate separately without compatibility that there is no competition. This is obviously false. If Apple's App Store acts, in any capacity, as an agent to draw new customers to Apple/AT&T then there are that many fewer customers going with T-Mobile.
Because of this, T-Mobile's decision to develop an app store for phones on their network was very likely a direct result of Apple's App Store in order to stay competitive. On the other hand, the Nokia Download Store seems much less relevant since T-Mobile obviously found it lacking enough to create their own. So in what way is the App Store irrelevant to T-Mobile?
Some of your points are quite valid and in the end it will be interesting to see if/how Apple executes this idea, but plastic being more durable in terms of scratch resistance? I don't know what plastic you're using, but I've never seen one that scratched less than glass.
The big deal will be Apple's reaction to it. Will they like it, since people might be encouraged to use AOL on iPhones as an alternative to SMS? Or will they kill the AOL client and make iPhone users pay for SMS?
Apple's reaction? You mean AT&T? Why would Apple care since they already approved the app in the first place?
Fortunately, seeing as how there is also a VoIP app approved by Apple which allows calls via wifi, it doesn't look like refusing apps which bypass AT&T's services was part of their agreement, although I'm sure AT&T would like it to be.
In short, yes Apple will like people using the AOL IM client because it's a benefit to those who purchase their product. AT&T may not like it, but who cares?
Informative; lol.