I'm always amazed at people who complain because their laptop takes to long to boot up and shut down. A MacBook doesn't take all that long to boot up and shut down. On top of that, I probably don't shut mine down and boot it up more than about once a month. Why are all you people booting so damn often that the bootstone becomes a marketing advantage? You need to consider a new metric when evaluating a platform, I propose we call it the:
howOftenDoINeedToBootThisHunkOfCrapStone.
And your guessing administration will be a snap, eh? Clearly you haven't been around an organization that had thousands of Palm Pilots. Small and lightweight, yes, it simply means that, pound for pound, the Palm devices destroy more systems administration and support resources than anything other than exotic forms of matter, say, a black hole.
I plan to test the iPhone by handing the iPhone to my Mom and asking her to call my brother. I suspect that she'll be able to do it, with no training. If I'm right, then the iPhone will be quite popular. Apple will wind up selling their "smart phone" to people who would never buy any of the "smart phones" on the market today, because they are too difficult to use.
AT&T is deploying their 3G network, but you can expect the iPhone to support it when it's widely available, as EDGE Is today. That might be a pretty long wait. Right now, in those few placees you can get 3G in the U.S., you're probably already in or near a "hot spot" with 802.11 access. AT&T does have serious competition since the CDMA carriers in the U.S. have been investing heavily, so perhaps the wait for the current generation of cell phone network technology won't be as long as it historically has been. Verizon has 2Mb service just about anywhere you can get a cell phone signal these days. T-Mobile and AT&T rolled out EDGE, what, about a year ago? Roughly the same time as Verizon was rolling out 2Mb. The GSM carriers are pretty far behind.
I find it difficult to believe that most users are not bothered by spam. As far as I can tell, legitimate email use has been falling dramatically for the past couple years, as people flee the effects of spam, switching to SMS and IM (Jabber, AIM, etc.) Email use within a single corporation remains popular, but home users seem to be abandoning email outright. Some people have given up ordinary email and only use locked-down email inside of social network sites. Spam seems to be killing email. If that doesn't bother people, it's only because they fled email for IM, SMS, and Myspace. If spam follows them, and they have nowhere else to run, they're going to become pretty irate.
> Hmm. . . maybe I should sue God for making these substandard eyes!
>>Make sure its new testament god (or a non-christian/judaic/islamic god) otherwise you'll be smited!
Oh, don't kid yourself. Those other gods are perfectly capable of smiting, too.
"The main point is that it would allow the users' software to work better. Security software and browser toolbars would essentially have a "white list" to work with."
So, uh... build a white list of valid banks. How hard can that be? What are you going to do with that while list, eh? Block everything that isn't on it? This is clearly an idea they haven't throught through, and they felt a little defensive about it after the thrashing they received from Slashdot. Their defense could use help. Maybe a dose of V1@gr@?
"And to the individual who stated technology cycles every 3 years, I think that's a wonderful ideal. On a practical level, however, especially where smaller places with tighter budgets are concerned, a 4 year cycle makes more sense. Also makes it more worth investing a little extra up front."
It often makes more sense to invest less up front and replace more often. You wind up with a fleet that is on average newer, and thus with fewer hardware failures.
In my experience, most of the people who say this about phones do so because they have difficulty imagining a phone that doesn't suck. Most people want a PDA because they want calendar entries that sync effortlessly from their PC, and they don't want to retype their address book into their phone with their thumb (or thumbs for all you RIM or Palm QWERTY users). Most people want driving/peddling/walking directions at their fingertips. Most people want to be able to look something up on the web *right now* or check their email at lunch, or send a text chat to anyone at any time from anywhere. They just don't realize they want this until they are presented with a way to do it that is easy to learn and also which works easily, reliably, and every time.
It is the same problem with the PC. Most of the non-IT, non-techie types that I know have a PC, but they barely scratch the surface of its capability.l They surf the web and check email. A few of them load pictures from their digital cameras. Very few of them take their laptop to a coffee shop because wireless on the PC is still a pain in the tuccus in 2007. The non-techie Mac users that I know, by contrast, almost universally take their laptops to coffee shops, and not only surf the web and send email but use many other features of the system as well. They know about spotlight and use it, even though most of them don't seem to know what the feature is called.
It would be difficult to design and conduct, but I'd love to see a survey about feature depth utilization of PC and Macintosh systems that explored this. My observations, annecdotal though they may be, seem to indicate that ordinary non-techie users who happen also to be Macintosh users "do more stuff" with their systems, on average. PC users also typically express fear of harming their system, which long time Macintosh users typically don't (some of the recent switchers who haven't yet lost their fear).
bogosity quotient of ISECOM's RAV?
on
Security Metrics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The ISECOM's RAV is currently a 3 page PDF file, nicely formatted and impressive looking with complicated looking formulas that would surely snow a typical manager with too many problems and not enough people or time. Unfortunately, the actual information content in the PDF is close to zero. ISECOM's RAV appears to be a formula based on variables that are not well defined, or which could be "quantified" in basically any way required to improve one's chances of securing a bid or justifying any project, and doesn't appear to offer much guidance for how to approach risk assessment in a more objective manner.
This is the same type of formula that some consulting organizations use to "quantify" things that really are not easily quantifiable. Their purpose in doing so is typically to shut down dissenting voices within a customer's organization (they gamble that the dissenting voices are not given the same budget with which to demonstrate their counter claims, and they are usually right.)
My criticism falls into a category known as the "Barry Commoner" criticism of quantitative Risk Assessment at the Wikipedia page.
This really isn't a battle, as both "sides" of the argument can be more or less correct at the same time.
Vista might be the most problematic upgrade cycle ever in the history of Microsoft, in terms of slow user adoption.
However, the market continues to grow and has grown a lot since the last upgrade cycle, and the vast majority of desktop general purpose computers run Microsoft systems, and the vast majority of new systems will soon or already do ship with Vista pre-loaded. Therefore, Vista will soon be a raging success for Microsoft and within a year or two the majority of Windows systems will be running Vista.
The more interesting question is how successful will the spammers and botmasters be at migrating to the new platform? Will the Vista migration result in a reduction of rootable home user systems on the net? Will the percentage of email which is spam decline, or continue to rise?
Performed for curiousity sake from a test system, re-imaged shortly thereafter.
I wonder how many of the IE hits are from ad-clicking bots pretending to be IE. I think those things do some amount of random ad poking, to hide their tracks.
If 99% of people had zero files quarantined in a year, then the ambient infestation rates measured by various parties (including Earthlink) would be either much higher (near 99% because AV was never working) or much lower (near 1% because AV was almost always working) than the roughly 20% observed for home users. Given the observed ambient infestation rates, we know that at least 20% of home users are managing to get infected (probably more, because most systems seem to get disinfected and stay clean for a while, so somebody else is picking up the slack.) With that many exposed, we would expect to see AV working at least some of the time, leading to a statement more along the lines of "...as 20% of people probably have at least some files quarantined..." in a year.
Was the following statement an accidental troll? It's certainly bogus unless you replace "of people" with "of UNIX users".
"I guess not, as 99% of people probably have zero files quarantined, not counting the false positives (I know I do)."
It's also possible that "consumer" or more precicely, "off the shelf" (either comercial or free open source) might be, on average, more secure and sport fewer bugs than a given bit of custom software. There seems to be a wide variance in quality in all these categories, and overlap. The forces at work in favor of COTS or FOSS vs. Custom Software include a larger pool of users who are more likely to find problems, better funding, and a convergence on a more rational feature set or design that might come from more sources of input and an expected product lifecycle involving many customers over a long period of time. (This may not always lead to better design and higher quality, but probably does sometimes).
I sometimes wonder if stories like this (or the breathless "iPhone is gonna generate more revenue than a patent on oral sex" stories) are intended to briefly move the stock price one way or another. It would be interesting to study the AAPL movements against key announcement, headlines, rumors and actual performance. I supose we wouldn't learn much, only confirm our intuition that headlines and rumors affect the short term and performance affects the long term, but it might be fun.
Reading only the article summary and not the actual patent application, it appears that the patent would cover the Tartus, since clearly the back of this iPod must be bigger than the front. If the front was big enough for the touch screen interface it would be on the front, after all. Putting it on the back doesn't make it bigger unless this is the "iPod Tartus".
Yeah, I was trying to be funny.
Apple has left plenty of room for criticism in its treatment of WebObjects and Java. I am sympathetic to your chief complaint, that Apple doesn't keep up with developments in Java in a timely manner.
Why has Apple not updated to Java 6 when it has been out for a long time?
Because Apple is secretly trying to wean developers off of Java. They secretly hate Java, even though they write and maintain one of the most visible signs that Java even exists (the iTunes Music Store on WebObjects, a pure Java development framework) and probably the largest single revenue generating Java application of all time (especially considering that the iPod phenomenon wouldn't have happened without iTMS).
I will add some more questions but first let me say that I just bought a Mac Pro and am a Java developer. I personally will have no problem removing OSX and installing Windows XP or Ubuntu on it if Apple doesn't address this issue soon.
Good, because Apple secretly hates anybody so reactionary that it wouldn't occur to them to run Linux or Solaris or Windows XP under a virtual environment for a while if they like Mac OS X but want to do some development on the tips of Java 6.
1. Why does Apple not mention Java at all in their programming features of their new OS? They mention Ruby, Objective C and others but not one mention of Java.
Because Apple secretly hates Java. The most super-secrete of the special secret Leopard features is that it will support... no Java! The Java runtime and libraries which take up too much hard disk space will be removed from the distribution so that it will fit on the iPhone.
2. Why are they stuck on build 88 of the developer release (NDA required) of Java 6 for OSX and it hasn't been updated in forever?
Because Apple are trying to drop a few hints to those developers who can carefully read the tea leaves. If you're smart, you'll be migrating your mountain of Pure Java 6 applications to Cocoa to be ready for Leopard. Oh, and ultimately because Apple secretly hates Java.
3. Why is it that Apple appears to tie JVM updates to the OS as opposed to Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris? So, if I want to develop a cool web start application in Java 6 this year and release it after OSX 10.5 is released (and thus Java 6), Macintosh users will be forced to upgrade their entire OS just to run this application. Yet someone running Windows 2k, a 7 year old OS will run it fine. Even a RedHat 7.3 OS would run it!
It seems unlikely to me that anyone running anything on Windows 2k, a 7 year old OS, will run anything "fine" but I guess you're entitled to your opinion. It's because Apple hates Java, and they hate people who run a 7 year old OS, even if it's Mac OS. Parity would require Java 6 support on Mac OS 8, so basically you and the horse you rode in on can go get, uhm, acquainted while you're waiting for parity with absurd design decisions made by Windows developers in the bowels of Sun for reasons that have nothing to do with the Macintosh platform.
Oh, and why do you think this is relevant?
Please before any Apple fanboys start flaming me, remember I just sunk around 4k of my own money on a Macintosh. This is the computer I will be living with for the next 3-5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always amazed at people who complain because their laptop takes to long to boot up and shut down. A MacBook doesn't take all that long to boot up and shut down. On top of that, I probably don't shut mine down and boot it up more than about once a month. Why are all you people booting so damn often that the bootstone becomes a marketing advantage? You need to consider a new metric when evaluating a platform, I propose we call it the:
howOftenDoINeedToBootThisHunkOfCrapStone.
And your guessing administration will be a snap, eh? Clearly you haven't been around an organization that had thousands of Palm Pilots. Small and lightweight, yes, it simply means that, pound for pound, the Palm devices destroy more systems administration and support resources than anything other than exotic forms of matter, say, a black hole.
I plan to test the iPhone by handing the iPhone to my Mom and asking her to call my brother. I suspect that she'll be able to do it, with no training. If I'm right, then the iPhone will be quite popular. Apple will wind up selling their "smart phone" to people who would never buy any of the "smart phones" on the market today, because they are too difficult to use.
AT&T is deploying their 3G network, but you can expect the iPhone to support it when it's widely available, as EDGE Is today. That might be a pretty long wait. Right now, in those few placees you can get 3G in the U.S., you're probably already in or near a "hot spot" with 802.11 access. AT&T does have serious competition since the CDMA carriers in the U.S. have been investing heavily, so perhaps the wait for the current generation of cell phone network technology won't be as long as it historically has been. Verizon has 2Mb service just about anywhere you can get a cell phone signal these days. T-Mobile and AT&T rolled out EDGE, what, about a year ago? Roughly the same time as Verizon was rolling out 2Mb. The GSM carriers are pretty far behind.
And as an alternative there is OpenMoko which, of course, runs Linux and is incomplete, although it is open source, so you can help finish it.
You wrote:
... in 2004
I find it difficult to believe that most users are not bothered by spam. As far as I can tell, legitimate email use has been falling dramatically for the past couple years, as people flee the effects of spam, switching to SMS and IM (Jabber, AIM, etc.) Email use within a single corporation remains popular, but home users seem to be abandoning email outright. Some people have given up ordinary email and only use locked-down email inside of social network sites. Spam seems to be killing email. If that doesn't bother people, it's only because they fled email for IM, SMS, and Myspace. If spam follows them, and they have nowhere else to run, they're going to become pretty irate.
for your clicking convenience...
The human is a blocked tetrachromat
Tetrachromacy
In my experience, most of the people who say this about phones do so because they have difficulty imagining a phone that doesn't suck. Most people want a PDA because they want calendar entries that sync effortlessly from their PC, and they don't want to retype their address book into their phone with their thumb (or thumbs for all you RIM or Palm QWERTY users). Most people want driving/peddling/walking directions at their fingertips. Most people want to be able to look something up on the web *right now* or check their email at lunch, or send a text chat to anyone at any time from anywhere. They just don't realize they want this until they are presented with a way to do it that is easy to learn and also which works easily, reliably, and every time.
It is the same problem with the PC. Most of the non-IT, non-techie types that I know have a PC, but they barely scratch the surface of its capability.l They surf the web and check email. A few of them load pictures from their digital cameras. Very few of them take their laptop to a coffee shop because wireless on the PC is still a pain in the tuccus in 2007. The non-techie Mac users that I know, by contrast, almost universally take their laptops to coffee shops, and not only surf the web and send email but use many other features of the system as well. They know about spotlight and use it, even though most of them don't seem to know what the feature is called.
It would be difficult to design and conduct, but I'd love to see a survey about feature depth utilization of PC and Macintosh systems that explored this. My observations, annecdotal though they may be, seem to indicate that ordinary non-techie users who happen also to be Macintosh users "do more stuff" with their systems, on average. PC users also typically express fear of harming their system, which long time Macintosh users typically don't (some of the recent switchers who haven't yet lost their fear).
The ISECOM's RAV is currently a 3 page PDF file, nicely formatted and impressive looking with complicated looking formulas that would surely snow a typical manager with too many problems and not enough people or time. Unfortunately, the actual information content in the PDF is close to zero. ISECOM's RAV appears to be a formula based on variables that are not well defined, or which could be "quantified" in basically any way required to improve one's chances of securing a bid or justifying any project, and doesn't appear to offer much guidance for how to approach risk assessment in a more objective manner.
This is the same type of formula that some consulting organizations use to "quantify" things that really are not easily quantifiable. Their purpose in doing so is typically to shut down dissenting voices within a customer's organization (they gamble that the dissenting voices are not given the same budget with which to demonstrate their counter claims, and they are usually right.)
My criticism falls into a category known as the "Barry Commoner" criticism of quantitative Risk Assessment at the Wikipedia page.
This really isn't a battle, as both "sides" of the argument can be more or less correct at the same time.
Vista might be the most problematic upgrade cycle ever in the history of Microsoft, in terms of slow user adoption.
However, the market continues to grow and has grown a lot since the last upgrade cycle, and the vast majority of desktop general purpose computers run Microsoft systems, and the vast majority of new systems will soon or already do ship with Vista pre-loaded. Therefore, Vista will soon be a raging success for Microsoft and within a year or two the majority of Windows systems will be running Vista.
The more interesting question is how successful will the spammers and botmasters be at migrating to the new platform? Will the Vista migration result in a reduction of rootable home user systems on the net? Will the percentage of email which is spam decline, or continue to rise?
Performed for curiousity sake from a test system, re-imaged shortly thereafter.
I wonder how many of the IE hits are from ad-clicking bots pretending to be IE. I think those things do some amount of random ad poking, to hide their tracks.
Spammers and botmasters the world over want to know.
Was the following statement an accidental troll? It's certainly bogus unless you replace "of people" with "of UNIX users".
Perhaps, as in the case of SCO, the infringements don't really exist.
It's also possible that "consumer" or more precicely, "off the shelf" (either comercial or free open source) might be, on average, more secure and sport fewer bugs than a given bit of custom software. There seems to be a wide variance in quality in all these categories, and overlap. The forces at work in favor of COTS or FOSS vs. Custom Software include a larger pool of users who are more likely to find problems, better funding, and a convergence on a more rational feature set or design that might come from more sources of input and an expected product lifecycle involving many customers over a long period of time. (This may not always lead to better design and higher quality, but probably does sometimes).
Exploit Chaining means that low risk holes can become high risk hole when combined. Patch them all. Patch them quickly.
I sometimes wonder if stories like this (or the breathless "iPhone is gonna generate more revenue than a patent on oral sex" stories) are intended to briefly move the stock price one way or another. It would be interesting to study the AAPL movements against key announcement, headlines, rumors and actual performance. I supose we wouldn't learn much, only confirm our intuition that headlines and rumors affect the short term and performance affects the long term, but it might be fun.
Reading only the article summary and not the actual patent application, it appears that the patent would cover the Tartus, since clearly the back of this iPod must be bigger than the front. If the front was big enough for the touch screen interface it would be on the front, after all. Putting it on the back doesn't make it bigger unless this is the "iPod Tartus".
Apple has left plenty of room for criticism in its treatment of WebObjects and Java. I am sympathetic to your chief complaint, that Apple doesn't keep up with developments in Java in a timely manner.
Oh, and why do you think this is relevant? No, on second thought, don't answer that.