It's not your computer. No common OS allows you to sandbox an app to just one folder, effectively cutting it off from the rest of the file system. Installing someone else's software on your computer effectively make it their computer.
The fact that MS still defaults to creating an admin account by default doesn't help.
Heck, I just downloaded an update to Flash a few days ago, and Adobe installed a download manager as a Firefox extension. If I hadn't manually removed it, it would still be running in the background, doing heaven knows what, slowing down my browser.
He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.
A nice but completely empty example.
I find it hard that someone works at a workplace for 10 years, and then quits when they replace the sofa. Either political bullshit had been eating away at him for some time and the sofa was the last straw, or he was a prima donna. More details would be helpful.
Good GUIs have been around for a while. The problem is that people are constantly looking to re-invent their image so that new products are less common and boring, and companies have an excuse to get people to updated the old stuff that worked perfectly fine.
Remember when Apple got rid of Aqua and moved to brushed metal? Many clear, neatly colored buttons full of common objects were replaced with hard-edged gray symbols. Like most changes in the computer industry, not just on the Macintosh, those changes were made for marketing reasons.
Sometimes, solutions to our problems can be found in 10-year-old products.
Of course, while looking back on world history can teach us much, we all know that old computers are obsolete! We make sure they are free of lead because they are meant to rot in the trash.
Apple eventually decided that nobody needs Java, and that made my Mac less valuable for development after I bought it. In effect, my Mac is now a paperweight.
Stories like this are for people who are being rational, and might be putting off the purchase of a competitor's product, so they can obsess endlessly about how awesome this product is and how it will change everything and how they absolutely must have it RIGHT NOW even thought they don't know what it is or what it does.
2. Force anybody who wishes to implement the scheme, as a condition of licencing the "hook IP" to agree to certain terms and conditions, including "platform robustness" requirements...
...and build it in China!
Thinking it's possible for IP not to leak is like saying DRM actually works in the first place.
That was nice when Amigas ran off of TVs. When multisync monitors started becoming affordable, the constant re-syncing when moving screens around became a MAJOR headache.
I am so glad that Windows now supports 3D hardware and can scale interfaces properly. That was long overdue. The only thing worse than locking people into one resolution is trying to fake multiple resolutions on one display.
I don't work with JavaScript, but... what's all this fuss about new JS engines running 20-40x faster? Isn't the code just going to be slowed down by the browser and AJAX requests and stuff? Why make a big deal about an order of magnitude performance increase in the script code?
My hobby is refactoring PHP code. Note I say hobby, and not job.
After cutting my teeth with C, I moved on to web development with Perl. I was really annoyed at all the quirks in that language, namely, bizarre subroutines instead of functions, and clever regular expressions everywhere. Perl was just a pain, and I still don't like it! So, I decided to give PHP a spin, and I liked it because it was closer to the C code I used to write.
It didn't take long for me to realize there was something seriously wrong with the language. After reading up on its history, I realized the problem: PHP is a crappy template engine that has been "upgraded" into a language over the course of many painful years. Horrible inconsistencies and limitations abound, names of functions make little sense, and it's taken years for even the most basic facilities to be kludged in. References work in reverse? I have to test for automatic quotes at runtime to make sure I don't double-encode input? Some text functions are binary safe and others aren't? Completely different APIs for MySQL 4 and MySQL 5? Yeah, okay... thanks.
I went out of my way to study the language and write code correctly, but I can't blame people for writing bad PHP code. PHP is the Windows of the web development world. Nobody really designed it, it just kind of "grew" out of some little hack project and caught on among the rookies.
The only reason I work with PHP is because I want to make redistributable code that will work on shared servers, where people cannot install a new language on the server. Perl and PHP are your only options for that, and Perl can be a bitch to get running correctly, depending on the server's security policy. I don't care if Python makes a comeback or Ruby catches on, or whatever. I just want... something else to work with.
Remember the 9-2X? It was a re-badged Subaru Impreza. Even by SAAB standards it was a flop. You can't keep a niche brand going with re-brands!
Saturn went out pretty much the same way, and that's why I traded my Saturn SL2 for a Subaru Impreza, rather than a Saturn ION. The Subaru has lots of unique things about it. Saturns became typical, boring, unreliable American cars.
Way to kill all the interesting brands, but keep Buick on life support.
I'm wondering more about reinforcement. Sure, aluminum bodies are expensive, but do the hinges have to be made of plastic, too? As "disposable" as netbooks are, just a plain aluminum hinge can't cost more than than a few cents to make (seeing how everything comes from China, too). At the very least, it's a good selling point for such low cost.
If it makes loud noises when I try to move it, I won't like it. However, that's 99% of everything in the store today, even some of the more expensive laptops.
Then again, TN panel LCDs are the same way. They're everywhere, even though they look like crap next to just about any other panel type. Customer tolerance, I guess. Funny seeing someone buy a $400 video card and mate it to a $150 monitor, even though the monitor will probably be in service for a lot longer.
I was picked on a lot when I was a kid. My teachers told me to ignore it, and the other students would get bored and leave me alone. They didn't.
One day I got fed up, grabbed one of the bullies by his shirt collar and threw him down the hallway. Boy, did I ever get in trouble, but it did have one major benefit: nobody picked on me again. Ever.
Like it or not, we are cave men. Looking back, both the teachers and students taught me more about human nature than academic material.
A downloading tool doesn't need to access cookies. A color picker tool doesn't need a send anything over the Internet, or even receive. A CSS editor doesn't need to read my bookmarks. I'm a web developer, and half of my extensions don't need access to anything other than what's in the page source or "Page Info". Would it be so hard for the browser to show what resources the extension uses, if it actually uses local storage, and if it sends data over the Internet?
Nobody takes security seriously, even after something really goes wrong. Why do we need to when apps are all approved, we have "safe browsing", and companies swear to keep our personal data safe? It's not like inserting a JavaScript-enabled ad into a web pages gives that ad the ability to read all the cookies and all the rest of the script code used by that site. You can trust advertisers to do the right thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not your computer. No common OS allows you to sandbox an app to just one folder, effectively cutting it off from the rest of the file system. Installing someone else's software on your computer effectively make it their computer.
The fact that MS still defaults to creating an admin account by default doesn't help.
Heck, I just downloaded an update to Flash a few days ago, and Adobe installed a download manager as a Firefox extension. If I hadn't manually removed it, it would still be running in the background, doing heaven knows what, slowing down my browser.
He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.
A nice but completely empty example.
I find it hard that someone works at a workplace for 10 years, and then quits when they replace the sofa. Either political bullshit had been eating away at him for some time and the sofa was the last straw, or he was a prima donna. More details would be helpful.
No kidding. Everyone knows the space bar is supposed to drop the brick, not rotate it.
If the keys were remappable (as in every good FPS), it'd be a lot more enjoyable.
My college textbook says otherwise. Everybody knows wings get sucked upwards!
Good GUIs have been around for a while. The problem is that people are constantly looking to re-invent their image so that new products are less common and boring, and companies have an excuse to get people to updated the old stuff that worked perfectly fine.
Remember when Apple got rid of Aqua and moved to brushed metal? Many clear, neatly colored buttons full of common objects were replaced with hard-edged gray symbols. Like most changes in the computer industry, not just on the Macintosh, those changes were made for marketing reasons.
Sometimes, solutions to our problems can be found in 10-year-old products.
Of course, while looking back on world history can teach us much, we all know that old computers are obsolete! We make sure they are free of lead because they are meant to rot in the trash.
Apple eventually decided that nobody needs Java, and that made my Mac less valuable for development after I bought it. In effect, my Mac is now a paperweight.
If only the W3C wasn't so determined to get rid of the target attribute.
Yet another useful thing that was removed just because developers tend to abuse it.
Stories like this are for people who are being rational, and might be putting off the purchase of a competitor's product, so they can obsess endlessly about how awesome this product is and how it will change everything and how they absolutely must have it RIGHT NOW even thought they don't know what it is or what it does.
Only white? I'll pay an extra $150 for black.
Time extended!
*Drives into sunset*
I've seen an eleven year old blow $50 in one glee-filled spree of waste. That's like $500 to an adult!
Did he pay with his own credit card, too?
Didn't we just have a story about spoiled kids and bad behavior in school?
You don't need a second mouse button.
And now... multi-touch!
2. Force anybody who wishes to implement the scheme, as a condition of licencing the "hook IP" to agree to certain terms and conditions, including "platform robustness" requirements...
...and build it in China!
Thinking it's possible for IP not to leak is like saying DRM actually works in the first place.
That was nice when Amigas ran off of TVs. When multisync monitors started becoming affordable, the constant re-syncing when moving screens around became a MAJOR headache.
I am so glad that Windows now supports 3D hardware and can scale interfaces properly. That was long overdue. The only thing worse than locking people into one resolution is trying to fake multiple resolutions on one display.
...coupled with the first viable alternative that was available at the time...Linux.
You do know Amigans were fanatic gamers, right?
Overconfidence, as usual. Heck, I've got a Subaru Impreza with AWD, and I found out pretty quick that snow traction is next to nil without snow tires.
SUV or not, four wheels times zero traction = zero traction.
I guess it depends on your user base. My web site is geared towards artists and utilizes Java applets to let people draw pictures. My stats are:
Biggest surprise is that Opera outnumbers Safari, and always has.
I don't work with JavaScript, but... what's all this fuss about new JS engines running 20-40x faster? Isn't the code just going to be slowed down by the browser and AJAX requests and stuff? Why make a big deal about an order of magnitude performance increase in the script code?
Ever read bad PHP code?
My hobby is refactoring PHP code. Note I say hobby, and not job.
After cutting my teeth with C, I moved on to web development with Perl. I was really annoyed at all the quirks in that language, namely, bizarre subroutines instead of functions, and clever regular expressions everywhere. Perl was just a pain, and I still don't like it! So, I decided to give PHP a spin, and I liked it because it was closer to the C code I used to write.
It didn't take long for me to realize there was something seriously wrong with the language. After reading up on its history, I realized the problem: PHP is a crappy template engine that has been "upgraded" into a language over the course of many painful years. Horrible inconsistencies and limitations abound, names of functions make little sense, and it's taken years for even the most basic facilities to be kludged in. References work in reverse? I have to test for automatic quotes at runtime to make sure I don't double-encode input? Some text functions are binary safe and others aren't? Completely different APIs for MySQL 4 and MySQL 5? Yeah, okay... thanks.
I went out of my way to study the language and write code correctly, but I can't blame people for writing bad PHP code. PHP is the Windows of the web development world. Nobody really designed it, it just kind of "grew" out of some little hack project and caught on among the rookies.
The only reason I work with PHP is because I want to make redistributable code that will work on shared servers, where people cannot install a new language on the server. Perl and PHP are your only options for that, and Perl can be a bitch to get running correctly, depending on the server's security policy. I don't care if Python makes a comeback or Ruby catches on, or whatever. I just want... something else to work with.
Remember the 9-2X? It was a re-badged Subaru Impreza. Even by SAAB standards it was a flop. You can't keep a niche brand going with re-brands!
Saturn went out pretty much the same way, and that's why I traded my Saturn SL2 for a Subaru Impreza, rather than a Saturn ION. The Subaru has lots of unique things about it. Saturns became typical, boring, unreliable American cars.
Way to kill all the interesting brands, but keep Buick on life support.
I'm wondering more about reinforcement. Sure, aluminum bodies are expensive, but do the hinges have to be made of plastic, too? As "disposable" as netbooks are, just a plain aluminum hinge can't cost more than than a few cents to make (seeing how everything comes from China, too). At the very least, it's a good selling point for such low cost.
If it makes loud noises when I try to move it, I won't like it. However, that's 99% of everything in the store today, even some of the more expensive laptops.
Then again, TN panel LCDs are the same way. They're everywhere, even though they look like crap next to just about any other panel type. Customer tolerance, I guess. Funny seeing someone buy a $400 video card and mate it to a $150 monitor, even though the monitor will probably be in service for a lot longer.
I was picked on a lot when I was a kid. My teachers told me to ignore it, and the other students would get bored and leave me alone. They didn't.
One day I got fed up, grabbed one of the bullies by his shirt collar and threw him down the hallway. Boy, did I ever get in trouble, but it did have one major benefit: nobody picked on me again. Ever.
Like it or not, we are cave men. Looking back, both the teachers and students taught me more about human nature than academic material.
"Fixing" that problem would destroy Firefox.
That depends entirely on what the extension does.
A downloading tool doesn't need to access cookies. A color picker tool doesn't need a send anything over the Internet, or even receive. A CSS editor doesn't need to read my bookmarks. I'm a web developer, and half of my extensions don't need access to anything other than what's in the page source or "Page Info". Would it be so hard for the browser to show what resources the extension uses, if it actually uses local storage, and if it sends data over the Internet?
Nobody takes security seriously, even after something really goes wrong. Why do we need to when apps are all approved, we have "safe browsing", and companies swear to keep our personal data safe? It's not like inserting a JavaScript-enabled ad into a web pages gives that ad the ability to read all the cookies and all the rest of the script code used by that site. You can trust advertisers to do the right thing.
Well, at least it tells you if an extension has passed the review process. A lot of extensions are not reviewed.
...clicks on various links, and by mistake (or curiosity) clicks on "Minors having sex".
Yet another reason why I don't like JavaScript-enabled web sites.