Here's my "moral" stance: when I load a url, I'm giving the site permission to do whatever they want -- within the bounds of the window. That means annoying overlapping divs are fine, but opening new windows, resizing the current window, playing sound, etc, are all out. If you want to do anything that doesn't fall within the confines of the window I opened the url in, you ask permission. As a simple rule of thumb, anything that doesn't revert simply by clicking the back button definitely crosses the line.
Is breaking that rule malicious, unscrupulous or dishonest? I don't know. I do know that I sure won't feel unscrupulous for enforcing it.
My newspaper refreshes, uh, zero times per second, and still doesn't hurt my eyes. The length of time the things *stay* fresh once refreshed is also relevant...
Piffle yourself. They have 100,000 servers to throw at statistical analysis, they have enough cash floating around to offer sign-on bonuses that even Microsoft can't beat, they have a history of applying PhDs to practical problems, and they have obvious business interests in making machine translation more useful. Google-worship aside, they're certainly a top contender in my book.
Of course, I don't know anything about this specific field, and that article sure was pretty fluffy. I'd be interested in more informed analysiseses...
This point has been made in other replies to you, but I thought I'd expand on it. The claim that god created the universe doesn't answer the question of what came first, it just pushes it back a step. The question becomes, where did god come from?
The possible answers are, "he" appeared out of nowhere, he was always there, or he was created by another god. If he appeared out of nowhere or he was always there, the same explanation could be applied directly to the universe, and there is no logical need for god's existence. If he was created by another god, then we can start over with that one...
I see nothing more or less absurd about the idea that the universe was created by a god, who was created by another god, who was created by a third god, who popped out of nowhere, than that the universe was created by the God you posit. Neither theory explains anything more than does the idea that there were no gods at all. Once more, it comes back to faith.
If they can get "Google Puzzle Championship" stuck in all our heads, it helps preserve their image as the place where all the smartest geeks hang out. That's the kind of advertising money can't buy, at least directly.
Plus, it's fun and they felt like it. That's how the whole Google thing started in the first place, right?
Well, they could compete easily by letting DJs do what they're supposed to -- make it their full-time job to find and play music I wouldn't have discovered on my own, in a pleasing arrangement. There are definitely plenty of times where I'd rather listen to a playlist created by a professional than my own library.
Too late now. I won't be going back to plain old radio even if they do remember why a DJ is better than a top-40 playlist on shuffle. If I was Clear Channel, I'd be looking at getting out of radio and into monopolizing something like billboards or concert venues. Just a thought.
The concept is that vulnerabilities in real life work much like many vulnerabilities in software -- doing one thing, like passing off help:// urls to a help application, is fine, and doing another thing, like running scripts in your help application, is fine, but put them together and it's an exploit. Lots of places could tell you either one of those facts, and once you know both of them you can defend yourself -- the premise is that this engine would be able to bring them together.
So what kind of info might they be attempting to bring together? I must admit I'm not thinking of great examples, but it probably goes something like this -- gas pipelines run in known places, and electric lines run in known places, and internet lines run in known places, and water lines run in known places. Independently, that information doesn't help you much, but put it together and you can discover a few locations where a bomb would cause ten times the damage of anywhere else. You can then make sure that those places receive ten times the protection...
I'm not sure, though there's a demo exploit floiting around. I do know this: on my vanilla Tiger install, when I clicked a 'Download Now' link on Apple's dashboard plugin page, it would download and install without any kind of warning. The steps would be: click link; download appears in safari's download manager; Dashboard widget appears in widget list.
I can understand not worrying too much about this issue if that hasn't happened to you. Having watched it, it definitely set off alarm bells in my head, and I don't understand why no one at Apple caught it. Now I run with open-safe-files off, and all is cool.
The Dashboard behavior they're changing is the rough equivalent in Windows of visiting a web site and having an application (with disk access disabled) appear in your All Programs start menu without warning. If that happened, you can bet that we'd all be bitching about it, and it would be catching an awful lot of users off guard. By now it would be on all the juarez sites as a DDOS client, and probably doing some significant harm to sections of the internet...
I do think Apple handles security better than Microsoft, but in this case they simply were lucky that no one bothered to exploit their hole.
What they are selling you, both in the case of cable and subscription music, is *streaming*. You pay, you get to stream music and listen to it.
If you want, you can buy a third party box that records the tv. If you want, you can run a third party application that records the audio stream to some kind of file. The cable company won't erase your VHS tapes, and the music streaming people won't erase your stream caps.
Forget the metaphors, though. Cable isn't as good as subscription music -- with Rhapsody, I have their entire catalog available for streaming instantly, for $100 a year. That's still a useful service, and it's still one that's reasonable to charge for.
"I paid money every month for my music, then it all went away because they had a crappy business model." Tragic.
"I paid money every month for my electricity, then it all went away..."
"I paid money every month for my water, then it all went away..."
"I paid money every month for my cell phone, then it all went away..."
You aren't paying money every month to buy music, any more than you're paying money every month to buy a cell tower. What you are paying for is the ability to listen to any of the tens of thousands of albums they own, instantly, from your computer. This is not a service that is free to provide, it's not a service that can be replaced by buying CDs, and it's not a service that they don't deserve to make a profit on.
If it's not a service you find useful, fine, but stop treating it like an alternative to buying CDs. It fills a totally different niche, and does it well at a fair price. I'd fund that.
Subscription services aren't really a competitor to buying music. You're not paying to own music, as you point out. You're paying to be able to listen to any of the ~ 50,000 albums they own, instantly, from your computer. The two important points are: 1) this is not a service that would be reasonable to expect for free 2) it is a service that is eminently useful if you spend much time near Windows and like a wide variety of music.
The same point you made comes up every time there's an article about subscription services. I'm not sure how else to say it: you are paying to be able to listen to any of tens of thousands of albums, instantly, from your computer. If that's not attractive to you, fair enough, but stop criticizing it for failing to be something it's not trying to be.
One reason I've heard for limiting the size is that the bigger the disk, the faster the outside edge is moving per RPM. When you're reading the inside edge at a suitable data rate, the outside edge will be shredding itself from the speed. I can't vouch for that being the reason, but it could be.
Another reason I'd just as soon they didn't is that I have tons of ways to store CDs and DVDs, cases and racks and so on, and bigger disks wouldn't work with any of them. I imagine this is a much more serious problem further up the supply chain -- there's tons of ways that having identically-sized media saves money when moving to a new format.
Oh, and I think bigger disks would be considered ugly by consumers, for whatever that's worth.
a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet.
"innocent animals" is a preposterous and naive term. One look in their beady little eyes and any true man knows that *all* animals are guilty of something.
The trick, of course, is to scare them into admitting it. Personally, I like to use armed, semi-autonomous robots. It's important to be firm in these situations.
I know what you mean about the no-feature-shock, but keep in mind that this release seemed to focus almost entirely on changes under the hood. The benefits should come over the next year in terms of new applications, faster OS development, and improved stability.
Whether they actually will or not is another question, of course, but I'm holding off judgment. In the mean time, I too see no particular reason to rush to upgrade.
(Unless you're into real-time video compositing, in which case Quartz Composer is about the coolest thing ever, at least as free bundled applications go...)
I would be careful of the way the article presents Microsoft's situation -- they have to build up the danger, or else there's no drama and no story. If it was like, "Microsoft competes in search arena, other business areas still wildly profitable" then none of us would read it...
That's a fair point for high end systems, that are easy to pop open and mostly for clueful users. For the consumer oriented ones (which still came with 256 last I checked), I think Apple shoots themselves in the foot with this one -- most people aren't even going to consider a RAM upgrade, and will then blame Apple when the computer doesn't perform like it should.
If I was selling computers, I'd pump up the RAM basically at cost -- it'd lose a few high margin sales, but win a whole lot of karma.
Which to me makes Rhapsody a rather expensive radio station.
This promo sounds lame, but don't discount Rhapsody's model. It has nothing to do with radio -- it has to do with listening to any of 50,000 CDs, instantly, from your computer. I understand that you can't keep them afterward and you can't put them on your iPod and it doesn't have every single CD, but still -- you can listen to any of 50,000 CDs, instantly, from your computer. That's all they promise, and it's hard to understand how cool it is until you've tried it.
For me, it also saves time and money. Rhapsody costs me $100 a year. For it *not* to be a good deal, I would have to either a) satisfy my music needs with $100 worth of CDs a year, which isn't even close, or b) be able to illegally download what I want for an entire year in less time than it takes to earn $100, which isn't even close.
Somehow I can't believe I'm the only one that applies to.
it sounds like I should poke around the site more, but I was actually disappointed with the trailer. It basically made it look like another space action movie, with none of the unique characters or plotting or effects or [embarrassing Joss Whedon lust here] that made Firefly stand out so much. I have my fingers crossed that it's just marketing (or that I'm just in a crotchety mood), and the actual movie will be consistent with the show.
In the meantime, I for one would gladly buy a movie ticket just to see the original double-length episode of Firefly in a theater... maybe if Serenity works out they should release that episode as "Serenity: Episode 1".
I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly.
It seems that Apple was working on "an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel" in C++ since *1988*, following System *5.0*. They finally gave up on it in 1996, when they bought NeXT, which had many of the same concepts and was released as part of OS X in 2001...
It's a lot like reading the history of the space program, isn't it? First you've got airplanes that can go into space being ready any day now, and Mars by 1980, and now we're just happy if we can get satellites into orbit...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my "moral" stance: when I load a url, I'm giving the site permission to do whatever they want -- within the bounds of the window. That means annoying overlapping divs are fine, but opening new windows, resizing the current window, playing sound, etc, are all out. If you want to do anything that doesn't fall within the confines of the window I opened the url in, you ask permission. As a simple rule of thumb, anything that doesn't revert simply by clicking the back button definitely crosses the line.
Is breaking that rule malicious, unscrupulous or dishonest? I don't know. I do know that I sure won't feel unscrupulous for enforcing it.
My newspaper refreshes, uh, zero times per second, and still doesn't hurt my eyes. The length of time the things *stay* fresh once refreshed is also relevant ...
Totally off-topic, but I just got my first DVD burner, and I'm loving it. You should check out how cheap they've gotten -- I was surprised.
t egory=10
...
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Category.asp?Ca
The burn-any-format drives are less than $50, and media is $35/100. That's definitely getting down in the why-the-hell-not range, for me
Piffle yourself. They have 100,000 servers to throw at statistical analysis, they have enough cash floating around to offer sign-on bonuses that even Microsoft can't beat, they have a history of applying PhDs to practical problems, and they have obvious business interests in making machine translation more useful. Google-worship aside, they're certainly a top contender in my book.
...
Of course, I don't know anything about this specific field, and that article sure was pretty fluffy. I'd be interested in more informed analysiseses
This point has been made in other replies to you, but I thought I'd expand on it. The claim that god created the universe doesn't answer the question of what came first, it just pushes it back a step. The question becomes, where did god come from?
...
The possible answers are, "he" appeared out of nowhere, he was always there, or he was created by another god. If he appeared out of nowhere or he was always there, the same explanation could be applied directly to the universe, and there is no logical need for god's existence. If he was created by another god, then we can start over with that one
I see nothing more or less absurd about the idea that the universe was created by a god, who was created by another god, who was created by a third god, who popped out of nowhere, than that the universe was created by the God you posit. Neither theory explains anything more than does the idea that there were no gods at all. Once more, it comes back to faith.
If they can get "Google Puzzle Championship" stuck in all our heads, it helps preserve their image as the place where all the smartest geeks hang out. That's the kind of advertising money can't buy, at least directly.
Plus, it's fun and they felt like it. That's how the whole Google thing started in the first place, right?
Well, they could compete easily by letting DJs do what they're supposed to -- make it their full-time job to find and play music I wouldn't have discovered on my own, in a pleasing arrangement. There are definitely plenty of times where I'd rather listen to a playlist created by a professional than my own library.
Too late now. I won't be going back to plain old radio even if they do remember why a DJ is better than a top-40 playlist on shuffle. If I was Clear Channel, I'd be looking at getting out of radio and into monopolizing something like billboards or concert venues. Just a thought.
The concept is that vulnerabilities in real life work much like many vulnerabilities in software -- doing one thing, like passing off help:// urls to a help application, is fine, and doing another thing, like running scripts in your help application, is fine, but put them together and it's an exploit. Lots of places could tell you either one of those facts, and once you know both of them you can defend yourself -- the premise is that this engine would be able to bring them together.
...
So what kind of info might they be attempting to bring together? I must admit I'm not thinking of great examples, but it probably goes something like this -- gas pipelines run in known places, and electric lines run in known places, and internet lines run in known places, and water lines run in known places. Independently, that information doesn't help you much, but put it together and you can discover a few locations where a bomb would cause ten times the damage of anywhere else. You can then make sure that those places receive ten times the protection
I'm not sure, though there's a demo exploit floiting around. I do know this: on my vanilla Tiger install, when I clicked a 'Download Now' link on Apple's dashboard plugin page, it would download and install without any kind of warning. The steps would be: click link; download appears in safari's download manager; Dashboard widget appears in widget list.
I can understand not worrying too much about this issue if that hasn't happened to you. Having watched it, it definitely set off alarm bells in my head, and I don't understand why no one at Apple caught it. Now I run with open-safe-files off, and all is cool.
The Dashboard behavior they're changing is the rough equivalent in Windows of visiting a web site and having an application (with disk access disabled) appear in your All Programs start menu without warning. If that happened, you can bet that we'd all be bitching about it, and it would be catching an awful lot of users off guard. By now it would be on all the juarez sites as a DDOS client, and probably doing some significant harm to sections of the internet ...
I do think Apple handles security better than Microsoft, but in this case they simply were lucky that no one bothered to exploit their hole.
What they are selling you, both in the case of cable and subscription music, is *streaming*. You pay, you get to stream music and listen to it.
If you want, you can buy a third party box that records the tv. If you want, you can run a third party application that records the audio stream to some kind of file. The cable company won't erase your VHS tapes, and the music streaming people won't erase your stream caps.
Forget the metaphors, though. Cable isn't as good as subscription music -- with Rhapsody, I have their entire catalog available for streaming instantly, for $100 a year. That's still a useful service, and it's still one that's reasonable to charge for.
"I paid money every month for my music, then it all went away because they had a crappy business model." Tragic.
..."
..."
..."
"I paid money every month for my electricity, then it all went away
"I paid money every month for my water, then it all went away
"I paid money every month for my cell phone, then it all went away
You aren't paying money every month to buy music, any more than you're paying money every month to buy a cell tower. What you are paying for is the ability to listen to any of the tens of thousands of albums they own, instantly, from your computer. This is not a service that is free to provide, it's not a service that can be replaced by buying CDs, and it's not a service that they don't deserve to make a profit on.
If it's not a service you find useful, fine, but stop treating it like an alternative to buying CDs. It fills a totally different niche, and does it well at a fair price. I'd fund that.
Subscription services aren't really a competitor to buying music. You're not paying to own music, as you point out. You're paying to be able to listen to any of the ~ 50,000 albums they own, instantly, from your computer. The two important points are: 1) this is not a service that would be reasonable to expect for free 2) it is a service that is eminently useful if you spend much time near Windows and like a wide variety of music.
The same point you made comes up every time there's an article about subscription services. I'm not sure how else to say it: you are paying to be able to listen to any of tens of thousands of albums, instantly, from your computer. If that's not attractive to you, fair enough, but stop criticizing it for failing to be something it's not trying to be.
One reason I've heard for limiting the size is that the bigger the disk, the faster the outside edge is moving per RPM. When you're reading the inside edge at a suitable data rate, the outside edge will be shredding itself from the speed. I can't vouch for that being the reason, but it could be.
Another reason I'd just as soon they didn't is that I have tons of ways to store CDs and DVDs, cases and racks and so on, and bigger disks wouldn't work with any of them. I imagine this is a much more serious problem further up the supply chain -- there's tons of ways that having identically-sized media saves money when moving to a new format.
Oh, and I think bigger disks would be considered ugly by consumers, for whatever that's worth.
a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet.
...
Just wait until these guys see apache.org
"innocent animals" is a preposterous and naive term. One look in their beady little eyes and any true man knows that *all* animals are guilty of something.
The trick, of course, is to scare them into admitting it. Personally, I like to use armed, semi-autonomous robots. It's important to be firm in these situations.
I know what you mean about the no-feature-shock, but keep in mind that this release seemed to focus almost entirely on changes under the hood. The benefits should come over the next year in terms of new applications, faster OS development, and improved stability.
...)
Whether they actually will or not is another question, of course, but I'm holding off judgment. In the mean time, I too see no particular reason to rush to upgrade.
(Unless you're into real-time video compositing, in which case Quartz Composer is about the coolest thing ever, at least as free bundled applications go
Not just possible. That is indeed how the google toolbar has always worked. I would assume it works the same way here.
...
This is reason number #4 for never assuming that something publically available but unlinked won't be found on your webserver
I would be careful of the way the article presents Microsoft's situation -- they have to build up the danger, or else there's no drama and no story. If it was like, "Microsoft competes in search arena, other business areas still wildly profitable" then none of us would read it ...
That's a fair point for high end systems, that are easy to pop open and mostly for clueful users. For the consumer oriented ones (which still came with 256 last I checked), I think Apple shoots themselves in the foot with this one -- most people aren't even going to consider a RAM upgrade, and will then blame Apple when the computer doesn't perform like it should.
If I was selling computers, I'd pump up the RAM basically at cost -- it'd lose a few high margin sales, but win a whole lot of karma.
Which to me makes Rhapsody a rather expensive radio station.
This promo sounds lame, but don't discount Rhapsody's model. It has nothing to do with radio -- it has to do with listening to any of 50,000 CDs, instantly, from your computer. I understand that you can't keep them afterward and you can't put them on your iPod and it doesn't have every single CD, but still -- you can listen to any of 50,000 CDs, instantly, from your computer. That's all they promise, and it's hard to understand how cool it is until you've tried it.
For me, it also saves time and money. Rhapsody costs me $100 a year. For it *not* to be a good deal, I would have to either a) satisfy my music needs with $100 worth of CDs a year, which isn't even close, or b) be able to illegally download what I want for an entire year in less time than it takes to earn $100, which isn't even close.
Somehow I can't believe I'm the only one that applies to.
Heh, funny. That kind of came through in the wiki article, but not so explicitly. I'll stand by my space program metaphor. :)
a) yep, they did b) amen.
it sounds like I should poke around the site more, but I was actually disappointed with the trailer. It basically made it look like another space action movie, with none of the unique characters or plotting or effects or [embarrassing Joss Whedon lust here] that made Firefly stand out so much. I have my fingers crossed that it's just marketing (or that I'm just in a crotchety mood), and the actual movie will be consistent with the show.
... maybe if Serenity works out they should release that episode as "Serenity: Episode 1".
In the meantime, I for one would gladly buy a movie ticket just to see the original double-length episode of Firefly in a theater
I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly.
...
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
It seems that Apple was working on "an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel" in C++ since *1988*, following System *5.0*. They finally gave up on it in 1996, when they bought NeXT, which had many of the same concepts and was released as part of OS X in 2001
It's a lot like reading the history of the space program, isn't it? First you've got airplanes that can go into space being ready any day now, and Mars by 1980, and now we're just happy if we can get satellites into orbit